The Collapse of Religion -- The Collapse of Science

What happened to these two pillars of society?

Both religion and science lie lifeless on the ground of the Western Memesphere. What happened that destroyed these two entities that, up until not long ago, we saw as pillars of society?

Emmanuel Todd's recent book, “The Defeat of the West,” is rich in ideas and provides an in-depth examination of the current madness enveloping the world and the West in particular.

One especially interesting point in the book is the importance that Todd gives to the decline of religion, Protestantism in particular. Before reading Todd's book, I already noted the decline of beliefs in God in the US, calling it a "Seneca Collapse" of religion. Todd provides a similar interpretation: religion is declining or collapsing everywhere. The past few decades have seen an acceleration of the collapse that led Western society to its current state, which Todd defines as “Nihilism.”

In this stage, the West has lost all its reference points and moves now completely at random—not even like a zombie, which, at least, has an objective in human brains. Instead, says Todd:

The step-by-step implosion of WASP culture - white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant - since the 1960s has created an empire devoid of center and project, an essentially military organization led by a group without culture (in the anthropological sense) whose fundamental values are power and violence. This group is generally referred to as "neocons".

America no longer has a national ruling class in the classical sense; it no longer even has a well-defined central culture, but it does have a gigantic state and military mechanism, other outcomes are conceivable than the simple retreat of a nation-state.

... Protestantism was indeed the matrix of the West's take-off, but its death today is the cause of its disintegration, and more prosaically, its defeat.

In his book, Todd doesn’t seem overly worried about explaining the deep reasons for religion's collapse. It is just something that happens and that can be used to explain the demographic collapse of the West and its evident disorientation, defeats, and madness.

At the same time, Todd doesn’t explore the trajectory of the “other religion” of the West, the one called Science. Nor does he explore the deep break in Western society created by the COVID-19 pandemic that damaged, perhaps beyond repair, the very fabric of science.

I think we have to go more in-depth into this story. In my previous post, I cited Balaji Srinivasan as stating that “it is not just God that is dead. It is the State that is dying. Because here in the early innings of the 21st century, faith in the State is plummeting.” And let me add that we saw during the Pandemic how deeply the modern state bases itself on Science. The faith in the State is plummeting in parallel with that in Science.

So, why is this happening? I think we need a general definition of the things we are discussing: science, religion, the law system of a state, and some other elements of society we normally take for granted. They are all communication tools. You could define them as “languages.”

A spoken language is not sufficient for significant communication. You may understand what someone is telling you but refuse to act accordingly, say, worshiping Baphomet or shooting unarmed prisoners. Instead, Religion communicates in terms of shared beliefs, even without words. If you see someone making the sign of the cross, you immediately know something about her basic beliefs and view of the world. It is the same for science. Some of its emanations, such as wearing a face mask, are understandable by common people as flags of certain beliefs. More in general, society is a network, and languages are the tool that allows the nodes (people) to communicate with each other. It is communication that keeps the network together. No communication, no network.

So, why did we lose the tool that makes possible the network we call society, its communication system? Whether we think of religion or of science, we see them both lying lifeless on the ground — cadavers from a world that doesn’t exist any longer. To use Tolstoy’s words about Napoleon’s army invading Russia, “what caused this extraordinary occurrence”?

Balaji proposes that Artificial Intelligence has made both the state (including its science) and religion useless. He may be right, although I think he is going too fast. The decline of science and religion began long before AI appeared on the scene. I think there is a more basic explanation that has to do with resources.

Typically, historians and economists seem to think that resources are created by society as needed. In Todd’s vision, Protestantism created an industrial society that then went on to exploit coal and other fossil fuels. Yet, there exists an idea that we call “biophysical economics” that sees things differently: society is created by resources. In other words, Protestantism was created by fossil fuels as a communication tool that allowed us to manage society in such a way as to exploit fossil energy. Without the energy generated by fossil fuels, this society would disappear. And Protestantism, too. This is what’s happening with the demise of fossil fuels. It is caused by the gradual disappearance of those resources that were cheap enough to create the society we know today.

It explains the breakdown of the West and its ongoing defeat. It explains what Todd calls the Washington “blob,” defined as “a group of leaders with no intellectual or ideological ties outside the blob itself.” Communication implies sharing and mutual benefit, but that’s possible only when the available resources are relatively abundant. When they cease to be so, as it is happening now, some sectors of society hoard what’s left for themselves. At this point, the elites have nothing to the rest of society, except in terms of brute force, physical or intellectual. The latter takes the form of the monstrous propaganda machine that the West has created, one would say, with the specific purpose of destroying itself. (Todd often remarks that the West is committing suicide.)

Paraphrasing Martin Luther, “We are here because we can’t avoid being here.” But we are not standing still; we are going somewhere, even though we can’t understand where. A society whose members cannot communicate with each other cannot exist for long. Something new will emerge with a new communication system. Could it be Artificial Intelligence, as Balaji suggests? It may well be, at least if we manage to maintain the huge machine called the Internet. If not, we’ll have to invent something else. A new religion? Or a resurrection of an old one? Or maybe Science could return in a gentler and less hateful way as an entity whose purpose is to help people? The future knows where it is going perfectly well, and we can only follow.

h/t Sys ATI for having pointed to me Todd’s book in a comment and Attila Altan (maybe the same person?) for having provided a copy of the book.