On Rationalism
Jesus said to them, "If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves; and if you pray, you will be condemned; and if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits. When you go into any land and walk about in the districts, if they receive you, eat what they will set before you, and heal the sick among them. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but that which issues from your mouth - it is that which will defile you."
-Gospel of Thomas, Saying 14
I can be a bit of a pedant about religion and scripture, if only because I don’t like when people use it as a cudgel to trick people who know very little about it. I don’t like when bigots in the Southern Baptists Conference or the Pentecostal tradition use scripture to inspire other bigots, for example.
But I also don’t like when humanists use vague religious taxonomies or context-free scripture as a means of sounding smart. “Christian Nationalism” is a good example of this, but so too was the whole New Atheism movement of the early 20th century, primarily founded on smirking, bad faith interpretations of scripture. It only works on people who have convinced themselves they are so smart that they can skip past learning about theology, which is the vehicle that brought humanity to the “modern world.” Maybe that’s why non-believers always seem so confused and scared.
I struggle with humanism at times, particularly as an ideology. As a Unitarian, I covenant to uphold the inherent worth and dignity of all humans every week, thus I affirm the foundational element of humanism. As a worldview it strikes me as unfathomably silly. Humanism provides comfort by emphasizing all the amazing things humanity has accomplished in spite of this immense failure — but it’s still presented against the backdrop of immense human failure. It strikes me as delusional and perhaps borderline idiotic to believe that human rationality can save us from the disastrous results of past human decisions made the same way, all because we have new words for stuff.
The only alternative to humanism is belief in God or the supernatural in some capacity, so I get why people gravitate towards humanism instead. It requires significantly less faith to be a humanist, aside from having faith that the person next you is equally terrified of their own shadow.
Humanism itself is harmless. It’s a celebration of human achievement and rational thought. Much as it’s less than ideal, rationalism is probably the best way human beings have found to live a day to day life and is arguably the main thing we’ve evolved that distinguishes us from other species of animal. We can use it to control our impulses, be nicer to people, build equitable societies. But Western rationalism has also led human beings to embrace things like “the nuclear bomb” and “race science” so it’s not exactly batting 1.000 either. It’s when one adopts a curated dualist humanism — one that only leans into either the Great Men or the Evil Men — that it becomes something akin to dishonesty.
Often, when looking backwards, just about everything we do looks stupid — a dynamic leveraged by the academic class to suit whatever argument is being made. This can benefit the Great Men by making them look remarkable by comparison and it can benefit the Evil Men by giving them the convenience of an “out” for their atrocities. In the case of the nuclear bomb, that atrocity is either justified by strategic apologia (the “it was the only way to stop Japan from fighting to the end” bullshit I got fed in middle school) or accusations of heartless white racism. I know which of those two things sounds more likely, but I also have the complex, detailed histories informing that opinion that were not available to the war hungry speed freaks making decisions in the 1940s.
“Only when thinking becomes quite humble can it set its feet upon the way that leads to knowledge. The more profound a religion is, the more it realizes this fact that what it knows through belief is little compared with what it does not know. The first active deed of thinking is resignation — acquiescence in what happens. Becoming free, inwardly, from what happens, we pass through the gate of resignation on the way to ethics.”
Albert Schweitzer
In the West, those with any passing familiarity of Christianity may not realize they have only been exposed to one very specific strand of thinking re: the Lord and Savior. Specifically, just about everything over on this side of the world is Chalcedonian Christianity, named for the doctrine set forth at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century.
People don’t really care about this shit much nowadays, and that’s a shame because I think it tends to give incomplete but tantalizing hints at how areas of the world developed so differently in philosophy. Chalcedonian Christianity has now fractured into a billion different esoteric beliefs, but at its core is a key dispute regarding Jesus Christ: the leaders of each respective church obviously regarded Him as the Lord and Savior, but they didn’t quite agree on what it is that made Him equal to the Lord.
The Chalcedonians liked the idea of two separate natures within Christ, the human and the divine. Christ was able to ascend because He was able to merge those two natures into one; able to marry the ideal (the divine) with the flawed vessel seeking that ideal (the human). On its face, nothing wrong with that, but contrasted with previous Christological controversies, it’s my opinion that this is where things started to go off the rails a bit for what we now think of as modern Catholicism and the Latin Church movement.
Christological rules can be hard to parse because they’re buried in other dogmatic imagery and decoding it requires something akin to language learning — and language learning where everything is still a probabilistic guess, at that. The icons all have inherent meaning, the words immovable, but the margins between their potential meanings and interpretations utterly massive. In the case of the Chalcedonians, they essentially ruled in favor of giving themselves divine permission to hold their ideals on a pedestal even as the material outcomes of their ideals confound and / or harm people.
Prior popular Christological doctrines — like the Monophysitism of Nestorian Christianity that emphasized no separation between the two natures, or Miaphysitism that refused to acknowledge any separate nature at all — did not provide that holy legal loophole. If bad stuff happened in the world as a result of actions taken on behalf of one’s inner nature, that was bad on paper, too. Full stop. There was no rationalizing it away as unintended consequences of a divine mission, or something so ethically and morally supreme that material harm is a secondary concern.
I’m not quacky enough to believe that a different Christological doctrine would mean that the West could achieve the communal utopia of its dreams. But I think about seeds all the time these days, and tracing the linear development of consciousness backwards to where it sprouted. Any honest intellectual is honest enough to admit that their ideas are not original nor are they stolen but synthesized from a combination of the observable, the past thinking that resonated in the mind, and the concepts one has faith in. As such, the seeds of Belief are important if only as a device for what should be cultivated and what should be left to its natural course.
In the case of the Chalcedonian version of Christ, you can sense a great deal of Paulist apocalyptic thought. The idea that we are blind rats scampering through a wall and chewing the electric wire until we get the necessary (and unavoidable) shock, which forever alters our understanding of the world. I don’t think that’s entirely incorrect, but it’s easy to see how that kind of worldview can create a world without empathy when rats who gain sight forget that they were once blind.
I think about that often in modern America, where the vast majority of our people are Christians descended of Chalcedonian traditions. Some of them, like the Methodists and the Unitarians / Transcendentalists and Black Baptists, even have a material track record of being on the “right” side of history when looking backwards. More broadly, though, mainline Chalcedonian Christian traditions continually say the right things and do very little to combat their own inward chaos caused by a philosophy of constant letdown. Despite these ideals, none of them were ever able to effectively topple the godless Western imperial drive in the material world.
Better luck next time.