The Cool Kids

Rationalists are missing something

Once upon a time, in a faraway place called The High Middle Ages, nobody really knew about the evidence against the Bible. Modern scientific findings that undermine Biblical accounts hadn’t been discovered. Copies of the scriptures themselves were rare enough that only dedicated scholars would have any chance of finding out about the internal Biblical contradictions or thorny philosophical conundra that plagued believers since Paul and James debated about faith and works.

So what did intellectual, free-thinking, creative people do?

They went to church.

And Church Was Cool

Stained glass from Amiens Cathedral

I’m not just trying to point out the giant inverted pentagram in the rose window here. Check out all the trefoils and quatrefoils at the corners, and the wickedly curved triangles at the bottom—that’s my favorite motiff. This church does not look like the place where your grandmother and her friends meet up to have conversations about their doilies.

There is a reason for this; and I propose to you that the reason for this is that church was originally where everybody went—educated skeptics, angry teens, wealthy businessmen, even the cosmopolitan jet set who enjoyed good-living, wine, and the company of the opposite sex (i.e. King Phillip II). Sure there were bound to be a handful of the usual atheists, cultists, and political dissidents who refused to take mass, but even cynics hung around the Church, driving pious believers like Martin Luther nuts.

People like to speak as though the Middle Ages was a time of superstition and irrationality, but medievals were largely the same people then as now. Just as astrology, paganism, and speculation about bizarre conspiracies remains popular today, there were also plenty of rationalists wandering around in the Middle Ages. Where do you think they liked to hang out? Well, half the time, they ended up in the Church.

Please don’t act too scandalized; in the thirteenth century Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas gave nine reasons why the contemplative life is superior to the active; reason #1 was because the contemplative life was intellectual. (Coincidentally that was also his reason #2)

This is the way Christianity began. The early Christians weren’t regarded as credulous or superstitious; they rejected Roman religion, trimming the number of gods from many down to just one. Christians are still admonished to be Christ-like, and what was Jesus actually like? He was freethinking enough that we remember him today for his defiance of the religious authorities of his day. He was so passionate about principles that he trashed the temples because the money changers had turned his Father’s house into a “den of robbers.” Matthew 16 has a long passage where Jesus basically berates his disciples for being stupid—he would tell them that they should metaphorically “Be on guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees” and they thought “It’s because we didn’t bring any bread.” After Christ, the movement continued with Paul, James, and other philosophers using rational arguments to try to move forward and figure out what made sense.

This process had its detours and wrong turns, but largely it continued all through the Middle Ages. Previously I mentioned Friar Roger Bacon was an early scientist who (among other things) figured out the formula for gunpowder, and well, he was a friar. Everybody also should know Friar Gregor Mendel was the scientist who worked out basic laws of heredity with pea plants, and some of you may at this point have worked out that he was also a friar. Less well known are other active scientists in the Church, like Bishop Grosseteste or Leo the Mathematician, but the overwhelming majority of people who could be broadly called medieval scientists were men of the cloth.

Even after the Reformation, Christianity continued to provide a motivating Weltanschauung for Western intellectuals. Isaac Newton did more work in theology than physics, and the same principle which modern rationalists venerate as Bayes’ Theorem originates with Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister.

When Christianity Stopped Being Cool

But eventually, once the geologists and biologists exposed the Biblical creation story as myth, the weight of the philosophical problems with Christianity became too much for all the intellectual, free-thinking, creative people to ignore anymore. I don’t think it happened overnight, but gradually, as more and more evidence rolled in, more and more of the best thinkers shook their heads and found better things to talk about. Exactly when this happenned is a matter of debate; scholars like Alec Ryrie have been pushing the timeline of the demise of Christianity back more than a century before the Enlightenment.¹ But whenever the decline began, in the end Christianity finally transformed into the backward institution we know today, home sweet home for the conservative² and unintellectual.³

I know, claiming that science has undermined religion is still vaguely controversial. But I’m going to be frank here and say the reason for this controversy is largely because of believers who want to think that they can be religious and well-informed, and because of dishonest scientists who have been happy to tell believers that they really can be both religious and well-informed, really. What happened is obvious enough that a very brief Internet search immediately turns up a lovely article by Russel Blackford in The Conversation which explains:

If the true religion’s founders had genuinely received knowledge from superior beings such as God or angels, the true religion should have been, in a sense, ahead of science.

There might, accordingly, have been a process through history by which claims about the world made by the true religion (presumably some variety of Christianity) were successively confirmed. The process might, for example, have shown that our planet is only six thousand years old (give or take a little), as implied by the biblical genealogies. It might have identified a global extinction event - just a few thousand years ago - resulting from a worldwide cataclysmic flood. Science could, of course, have added many new details over time, but not anything inconsistent with pre-existing knowledge from religious sources.

Unfortunately for the credibility of religious doctrine, nothing like this turned out to be the case. Instead, as more and more evidence was obtained about the world’s actual structures and causal mechanisms, earlier explanations of the appearances were superseded. As science advances historically, it increasingly reveals religion as premature in its attempts at understanding the world around us.⁴

This is why so many Christians reject geology and biology—both sciences contradict Biblical claims of an Earth created before stars, of terrestrial plants created before life in the ocean, and humans made in the image of God. Psychology is even worse, with its repeated findings of religious subjects scoring below secularists on tests of mental ability.⁵ Christians don’t have to be brilliant to see the obvious: empiricism undermines their beliefs.

In a sense, the fundamentalists who reject science outright are much more honest than moderates like Pope Francis, who tells us “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.” Maybe evolution isn’t inconsistent with creation, but it is inconsistent with the Church being in communication with an omnipotent deity that could have told them:

In the beginning, God created the heavens, not the Earth. Silently He watched for over nine billion years while, on its own, the matter in the heavens formed nebulae, stars, and galaxies spinning majestically in the night.

Now a time arose when matter had arranged itself into a solar system with a planet containing liquid water. Then the Spirit of God stirred in the heavens, saying, “This is the appointed hour.” Deep within the oceans of that blue planet, the Lord God created life. Where before had been only empty waters, life spread throughout the seas, and God saw that it was good. For more than four billion years He watched this life grow and multiply. Then at last, once that life had taken on a hairless bipedality reminiscent of His own divine image, God gave this life the gift of a soul.

—Not Genesis 1:1-26

By the way, today I learned something! I’ve encountered the following idea many times before, but I never realized it was specifically Catholic:

Evolution of the body and nature does not contradict Catholic doctrine… there can never be evolution of the soul because it is created with God as its first cause. Since the soul is immaterial it cannot evolve as things in the material universe evolve. This means the faculties of the soul—intellect and will—do not evolve as the body evolves.⁶

This may be theologically compelling, but the findings of scientific empiricism lie in clear contradiction to such doctrine: intellect and will are heritable traits which vary throughout the human species because of differences in our individual genomes.⁷

Well read, free-thinking intellectuals know this. Like the cool kids who were first to realize that digital pets were no longer any fun, they moved on to other things, leaving everyone else staring at tiny screens and pushing the “decide” button over and over.

All This Has Happened Before

And all this will happen again:

[T]his slow spider which creeps in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and you and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things- must we not all have already existed? And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane—must we not eternally return?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common

Consider the feminist movement. In America, it began with the Suffragettes, who united with the modest goal of addressing a legal inequality in the democratic system. Women were not originally allowed to vote, and it used to be illegal to distribute information on birth control methods. One way or another, there were plenty of cool kids involved in the early days of feminism, including Margaret Sanger, Jeremy Bentham, and if you don’t mind going back a ways, Thomas Paine. With the success of this feminist first wave, by the 1960’s a second wave of feminist activism broadened to include more issues related to employment discrimination, unequal pay, and lingering legal inequalities.

But like anything else, the feminist movement continued to evolve over the decades. Eventually sex workers were stigmatized within the feminist movement in the third wave, and by the fourth wave, feminism had gone sour.

The key problem wasn’t (or wasn’t exactly) that feminism was being disproven. The problem was that modern feminists were running out of new causes to champion. Feminists had already been so successful in the earlier generations, that most of the Western world had become de facto feminist, which left modern feminists three options:

1. Recognize that women are far more oppressed in other countries. Unfortunately this immediately requires feminism to start pushing Western values on other cultures. This is a bit of a problem, because it kind of means modern feminists in America have to force American values on other countries rather than just letting them do their thing, which feels like being totally oppressive and obnoxious on a geopolitical scale.

2. Invent new causes to champion under the pretext that they have something to do with feminism, when in reality they are issues like economic and racial justice which have nothing to do with feminism. If you’re lucky, maybe the Supreme Court will rule that individual American states can criminalize abortion again, and then you’ll have some actual feministing to do.

3. Give up, go home, and find something else to occupy your time.

Most modern feminists have decided to go with option 2, and broadened the scope of feminism from women’s issues, to just… issues. This has been a minor disaster for the movement, because now we have Feminists for Life, who are literally fighting against the core issues of earlier waves of feminism. But trying to keep feminism going has had the more interesting result that all the cool kids are beginning to get annoyed with it:

I heard my own friends say things to the effect of, “Science isn’t really objective, anyway. Who cares what science says?”

Is this what it means to be a feminist? Ignoring evidence if it doesn’t fit your preconceived narrative of victimhood and oppression?

—Brianna da Silva, The Problem With American Feminism

This is a huge problem for any movement. When modern feminists reject science, they are basically rejecting their intellectual core. What rational person wants to be part of a movement associated with scientific illiteracy? No matter how many feminists want to keep going with option 2, the intellectual free-thinkers within the movement will increasingly chose option 3, draining it of its élan, eroding its credibility, and leaving a husk behind. As Brianna da Silva concludes, “I don’t know what comes after feminism. But… I intend to embrace it.”

She’s not the only one; Scott Alexander basically made a name for himself within the rationalist community for his passionate criticism of feminism. In case you’ve never heard of him, Scott is not a conservative criticizing the movement from outside; this is a left-leaning urbanite saying he’s seriously had enough of feminism. The cool kids are losing interest: As with Christianity, rational thinkers are moving on to other things.

And Are The Other Things Really Better?

Well, look back. Did the original things early rationalists loved turn out to be sensible? If so, why did the rationalists leave? If not, if they weren’t sensible to begin with, then why were so many cool kids there? It’s almost as though being a creative, free-thinking intellectual didn’t actually give people much of an epistemological advantage.

For the record, I think rationalism is both useful and very interesting: it gives us the Non-Aggression Principle of libertarianism; it gives us secularism; it gives us moral systems like utilitarianism; it gives us the concept of inalienable rights on which the United States Constitution is based.

But then when you run with these ideas—when you just follow them through rationally, it usually isn’t long before they all end up in strange places. If you don’t believe me here, it’s because you haven’t followed them far enough.

Hard core libertarians argue that parents have no obligation to care for their children; after all, you’re not aggressing against them to leave them by a dumpster at 11:00 at night and walk away! Secularism is a pretty good thing, especially when it encourages scientists to seek explanations for things that don’t devolve into “God did it,” but atheism and utilitarianism do have, well, certain problems. And the idea of inalienable rights may be a good way to prevent governmental overreach, but it does seem strange that supposedly inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can also be taken away—and even taken away legally by a government whose constitution champions inalienable rights, in response to a crime.

I love talking to rationalists pushing these ideas, because even though I think they’re wrong, they’re still thinking. And when I look around at the current crop of rationalists obsessed with Bitcoin, the Singularity, Georgism, Utilitarianism, and Prediction Markets, I’m definitely not bored! But I can’t help but think these rationalists are all really the same people who, in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, were coming up with humoral theory, geocentrism, and God as the Prime Mover. Later on, they were the sorts of folks who came up with mass surveillance, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and Communism.

I can hear all the cool kids objecting already. That wasn’t rationalists! It was somebody else! But if not the cool kids, then who was it who came up with mass surveillance, communism, psychoanalysis, or behaviorism? What kind of people were Bentham, Skinner, Freud, or Marx? These weren’t intellectual, freethinking, creative people?

Just look at Karl Marx; anybody with access to Wikipedia can tell you Marx was a “philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary.” He was clearly an intellectual. Citing Francis Wheen, Wikipedia reports Marx bestowed nicknames and pseudonyms on his friends and family; Engels was “General,” his housekeeper Helene was “Nym,” while his daughter Jennychen, was “Qui Qui, Emperor of China,” so he was creative. And some might just be willing to say that inventing an entire school of thought qualifies him as freethinking. Ultimately Marx was the quintessential rationalist; calling Marxism “dialectical materialism” is just a way of saying how Marx thought we should use arguments based in scientific, rather than spiritual or idealistic grounds, as our method of analysis.

Now I do realize that invoking parallels to Communism is going to make it seem as though I think rationalism is pretty dreadful. Just in case it seems like I’m saying that, well, I’m not saying that. Rationalism isn’t bad. It’s just that it always sounds totally great, until you realize that the universe around us doesn’t care if our ideas make sense to us or not.

What Rationalism is Missing

People say “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged,” and “a liberal is a conservative who’s been to jail.” But I’ve never seen anyone say “an empiricist is a rationalist who realized that he’s been wrong.” Rationalists talk a lot about updating beliefs in the face of countervailing evidence, which is definitely a start. But saying “Oh, I’ll just update on that,” over and over again, every time you’re wrong, means failing to update on the most important thing—after enough updates, you should be seriously updating on your entire ability to know things through rational means.

History is filled with rational thinkers who were ultimately humiliated because they placed too much weight on their reason, and not enough on the evidence. My favorite example comes from the famous exchange with Albert Einstein. Einstein rejected the paradoxical findings of Quantum Mechanics by saying “God doesn’t play dice,” to which Niels Bohr replied, “Don’t tell God what to do!” Einstein is the classic cool kid, doing what the cool kids do, and it wasn’t enough. Indeed, people often speak of Einstein’s remark as a “self-inflicted wound”—a confusion of the rational with the real.⁸

Einstein was accustomed to relying on rationality, just like Karl Marx, and Thomas Acquinas, and all the rationalists today. Rationality is useful, but not without intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is the key. Because if you don’t build enough intellectual humility to realize that even your very best ideas are suspect, rationalism can lead you to some really strange places.

Just ask the Communists; just ask the Aztecs.

Image courtesy of Mauricio Borja

References

1. Ryrie, Alec (2018). “How to Be an Atheist in Medieval Europe.” Gresham College, 27 September 2018. Accessible online.

2. Malka, A., Lelkes, Y., Srivastava, S., Cohen, A. B., & Miller, D. T. (2012). The association of religiosity and political conservatism: The role of political engagement. Political Psychology, 33(2), 275-299.

3. Zuckerman, M., Li, C., Lin, S., & Hall, J. A. (2020). The negative intelligence–religiosity relation: New and confirming evidence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(6), 856-868.

4. Blackford, R. (2018, December 14). Against accommodationism: How science undermines religion. The Conversation. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://theconversation.com/against-accommodationism-how-science-undermines-religion-52660

5. Ibid.

6. Hull, C. (2016, September 21). A brief exploration of the Catholic position on evolution. Catholic Exchange. Retrieved March 31, 2023, from https://catholicexchange.com/brief-exploration-catholic-position-evolution/

7. Krapohl, E., Rimfeld, K., Shakeshaft, N. G., Trzaskowski, M., McMillan, A., Pingault, J. B., ... & Plomin, R. (2014). The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 111(42), 15273-15278.

8. See for example https://quotesexplained.com/stop-telling-god-what-to-do-niels-bohr/