The following is a video/transcript from Chris Hedge’s substack. The linked title is not the title of the work, but rather taken from the work, and what I would primarily like to discuss.
The appalling criminality of secularity
Most of the interview by Chris, with Roger Hallam, a sociologist and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion in the UK, is standard-issue pointing out that we are destroying ourselves through self-imposed climate change, as well as an argument that neo-liberalism led us to Trump. But toward the end of the interview the following passage caught my eye especially. I broke the transcript into graphs to make it more readable. I have thoughts on this that I will submit later, but for now I wonder what others think.
I think there are a lot of false claims and premises here.
Yeah, well the first thing to establish is orthodoxy, as you called it, is what secularity is imposed upon us. Like the whole idea of religion is a modern concept,
No, it isn't. Religion as a concept is at least a thousand years old, just on the basis of the etymology of the word, as
@GenesisNemesis points out in the first reply to the OP.
Of course, the idea long pre-dates the word. It is an ancient concept, not a modern one.
as I think you know, and many of your listeners may know.
This rhetorical device, of the form "[untrue claim], as you and [all the clever people] know", is a very effective propaganda technique, and immediately gets my hackles up. It's not a certain indication that you are being manipulated into believing untruths, but it's a powerful warning sign.
The word religion didn’t come in until the modern period.
So, no. Simply untrue.
Before the modern period, the notion of religiosity, as you might say, was impregnated in all aspects of life. And what modernity did, what secularity did, what the capitalist regime did, is stick religion as a noun and stuck it as something that happens on Sunday and some weird belief in some concrete other called ‘God’. Right?
Wrong. These are not consequences of seculariity, so much as both secularity and the increasing compartmentalisation of religion were consequences of scientific thinking.
Many people in the medieval period segregated religion and religiosity from their daily lives, as the existence of Church Law that tries to prevent such segregation demonstrates.
This gradual collapse of the older way of thinking, where the Gods were ever present and were to be appeased and accommodated in every aspect of life, is due not to secularity or capitalism, but to monotheism.
The Gods are everywhere. One God, despite being doctrinally omnipresent, really isn't - it is far easier to put Him in his box (or church), and only interact with him on Sunday, or indeed, not at all (until it is made illegal to skip church).
That’s nothing to do with religion. That’s like what secularity has done.
Nope. It's certainly at least partly to do with religion. Scientific analytical thinking has helped, but monotheism was the start of the rot. And seculaity is a consequence, not a cause.
And the tragedy and the appalling criminality of secularity
The entirely unjustified and unsupported assumption that absence of religion is not just bad, but
criminal, is noted.
I reject it wholeheartedly.
is to prevent people engaging in the sense of the transcendent
The transcendent isn't a thing, it's a feeling.
and the enchantment of what life is,
The enchantment of what life is is not in any way rejected by secularity.
I am deeply moved by beauty, both natural and artistic.
Enchantment is a consequence of having an endocrine system. It is only "transcendent" in the sense of being external to the brain; Our brains are aware of something bigger than themselves, more powerful than themselves, awe-inspiring and external to their humdrum existence. But that thing is the rest of the body they inhabit.
It is external to the brain and beyond rational thought, but it's not external to the person.
Endocrinology is hugely influential and wildly complex, even by comparison to the complexity of the brain itself. But it's not God.
because they’re told that’s child’s play and all the rest of it, and it’s some weird belief,
It is, in fact, a weird and childish belief.
Not that there's anything wrong with having weird beliefs, as long as we recognise that they are mere beliefs; And there is absolutely nothing wrong with childishness, which I heartily embrace and recommend to anyone.
as if secularity and modernity isn’t a belief itself, right?
Right. they really aren't, despite the implied sarcasm. They also are two different things, despite the effort to conflate them by the propagandistic use of the singular.
The outlier is modernity. For 99% of the human history, people have believed in transcendent phenomena or the transcendent within the material, and other related ideas. And even in today’s world, for the sake of argument, 80% of the world’s population is aware there’s something other than going out and making money. You see what I mean?
I see what he means, and I reject it for the shallow misinterpretation that it is.
There is more to life than wealth or the pursuit of wealth. But that "more" is emotional, and found in the endocrine system; It transcends the brain, but does not transcend the person.
Like we need to understand there’s history here, just as there’s history in imperialism and there’s history of the oppression of common people, there’s also the history of the stripping of a sense of the transcendent from culture.
There certainly is; But this is a problem with
industrialisation, not a problem with secularism.
And this is the primary reason why we are not resilient, why people burn out because they think they’re just themselves.
No, it's because they think that embracing childishness, freedom of thought, and emotion, are somehow wrong - because that's been beaten into them by the industrial world.
But being just yourself is just some weird cult idea of Newtonian physicists.
No, it's a weird cult idea of C18th and C19th industrialists.
Newtonian physics made it possible to build machines to do work; Industrialism and capitalism made it possible to treat workers as though they themselves were components of a machine, to be discarded and replaced when worn out, but otherwise ignored, and expected to perform their tasks repetitively and repeatably, without either complaint or demand.
It’s obvious that we’re not just on our own. We’re part of some universal thing that’s beyond words.
That is absolutely NOT obvious. Indeed, it's not even true. Our brains are part of some universal thing that's beyond intelligence; We call that thing our "body". It's far more, and far more complex, than most people give it credit for being, and it's not just a life support and transportation device for our all-important brain.
And just because something’s beyond words, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Yeah, it most likely does mean that, though. If you can't explain it, it's far more likely that you are looking in the wrong place, than that it is fundamentally inexplicable or beyond words.
When something is beyond words, we just make some new words.
Just go and read some quantum physics, for God’s sake. You see what I mean?
I have read a fair bit of quantum physics. I do not see what he means.
So, we need to start battling back, and this is a big battlefield, of saying it’s obvious and it’s natural and it’s absolutely needed that we start understanding what it is to be who we are, which is to be part of something greater than what we are, because that’s objectively what we are. It’s not some postmodern whim, it’s a reality. We are objectively part of something bigger, and we always are and always will be.
Sure. But that simething bigger isn't a God or Gods. Replacing one error wth another isn't a great idea.
And once we start engaging with this, and I’ve got great hopes that the younger generation, younger 30s, are ready for this because it’s intolerable to live in a world where there’s just you on your own.
Indeed. We need to re-make society, and infuse it with art, beauty, and an understanding of and fascination with the amazing natural world we inhabit.
Religion isn't the way to achieve that, though. It's at best a blind alley down which we should avoid turning because it will delay our journey to improvement. And at worst a counterproductive force that leads to conflict, misery, and premature death.
So, people will be looking for it. And if we don’t provide a progressive pro-social orientation of what the transcendent is, we know what will happen is the Nietzschean Nazi space will come and gobble everyone up and get everyone to worship death and destruction as some sort of perverted form of transcendence.
That's not Nietzscheanism, nor Nazism.
I do recognise "worship[ing] death and destruction as some sort of perverted form of transcendence", as a description of many forms of Abrahamic monotheism, though.
I have to admit that some of them, on sober reflection, are actually pretty stupid. 