The Gods Of The Public Square

On Martin Gurri, and an unexpected Rosetta Stone for the culture war

Photo by Andrii Leonov on Unsplash

Martin Gurri’s latest in Discourse Magazine hit me like a bolt from above. I think he’s come up with the Rosetta Stone to ending the culture war.

In it, he writes:

Because we are symbolic as well as biological animals, we find truth’s imperfections difficult to accept. It goes against logic. A proposition that is partial and is soon to be overthrown feels like an error. Truth—complete accordance with reality—must be one and eternal. This craving for wholeness in human experience eventually inspires a desperate maneuver: Truth is removed from earth to a higher sphere. For Plato, the world of objects was a flitting shadow on a cave wall; reality could be found only in the realm of perfect and unchanging forms. The great world religions, like Christianity, have made a similar move. Truth abides in heaven while doubt torments earthly life. The result is a curious but all-too-human inversion, whereby the attainment of truth now demands an act of faith. [Emphasis mine—J.R.]

…

“Post-truth” is the inevitable consequence of information overabundance. For every fact, there is a counter-fact. For every assertion, there is a refutation. A desolate information landscape is shaken by billions of screaming voices, as the human need for recognition turns against itself and nullifies itself. Steve Fuller considers “post-truth conditions” to be more democratic and market-like than the elite-controlled system of the last century. Fuller is right in one respect: The guardian class is in panicked retreat and its monopoly hold over the narrative has been lost forever. But what is left behind looks less like a democratic assembly than a void, a nothingness, in the shadow of which obscure oracles and barbaric war-bands have sought to dominate.

In other words, there is so much information available that we’re all going crazy. Humans are animals. We have a hard limit on the number of stable social relationships available to us; Dunbar’s Number, or ~150-250. That’s a neurobiological maximum, and unless your brain has some kind of mutation that allows for a higher limit, you can’t have more personal social ties than that.

Our disputes are no longer about the interpretation of reality but about the very frameworks of interpretation. Every attribute, even “democratic” and “market-like,” is framework-dependent—and how are we to judge between competing frameworks? Decisions of that kind, Kuhn informs us, can only be made on faith. And how are we investing the wonderful human capacity for belief? The antifa believe that the United States is a new version of Nazi Germany. The disciples of QAnon believe that the federal government is controlled by a ring of pederasts. Black Lives Matter activists believe that slavery and Jim Crow never ended. It is, quite literally, impossible to judge, but let me offer my opinion that these professions aren’t acts of faith but of anti-faith, of nihilism—a surrender to nothingness and the void.

And here is where Gurri and I part company, because he’s come up with the answer, but he’s holding the piece of paper it’s written on upside down.

Humans are the most innovative creatures ever to exist. We invented networked telecommunications, with which we send one another cat pictures. But we can’t all get together at once, because our brains literally can’t handle it, which is what’s behind the second most popular use of the internet: destroying one another’s lives.

However, we came up with a workaround to the problem of Dunbar’s Number millennia ago: Religion.

“But Rollins!” you say, leaping to your feet and waving your hands in the air excitedly, “Tribal religious conflicts have been the source of the overwhelming majority of genocides in human history! How could a religious conceptualization of the problem possibly help?”

Well, because unlike most places, America has absolutely been through this before, and there’s generally been a minimum of actual bloodshed. The cognitive framework required to understand the world and not go crazy is that we’re in the midst of a religious revival of (if you’ll pardon the Dad Joke) Biblical proportions, in the finest American tradition.

Consider the Rollins High School Theory of Social Dynamics, and recall that the first thing you do in order to understand a complicated social situation is to reduce it like you would a fraction. But you have to reduce only as far as is useful—if you go all the way from 144/108 to 4/3, rather than stopping at 12/9…I’m sure there’s some useful mathematical shit you aren’t able to do, something to do with multiples or divisors or something. (Yes, I’m borderline innumerate. Leave me alone.)

In all seriousness, think of this in terms of the American religious revivals of the early decades of the twentieth century rather than the Protestant Reformation. A whole lot less people died in the first than in the second, for one thing, and optimism is adaptive, but more importantly, most of us reading these interminable thinkpieces are in English-speaking countries, mostly America. It’s more accurate to map this phenomenon onto American religious revivals than to the Reformation.

As such, if, instead of thinking of BLM supporters as irredeemably crazy/undeniably righteous, you step back and consider them, as literally and sincerely as you can, Worshipers of Saint Floyd, in the context of a modern American revival, a couple of really neat things happen.

First of all, you stop taking what they have to say about subjects related to their creed personally. Reframing them as members of a religion means that when they say things about defunding the police or demanding apologies and reparations from white people, it becomes analogous to having a family of Mennonites living down the block. On one level, it’s kind of weird when they roll up in bonnets and long dresses, but if you studiously avoid certain topics that might cause controversy, they’re for the most part inoffensive. I have no idea what Mennonites are into politically, and they may believe that people like me need to be tarred and feathered, so I don’t talk politics with them, and I vote my conscience rather than the Mennonite platform, and I don’t really socialize with them. But I don’t think they’re insane, either. They have their take on the world, and I believe they believe it.

(If you’re not a believer, and it’s a social as opposed to a work-related situation, keep in mind Rollins’s Razor, which states: “Members of unfamiliar sects should be assumed to be sincere in their religious beliefs unless compelling evidence is presented to the contrary.”)

Second, you start examining your own beliefs. You start to think “Gee, what ideological prisms do I see the world through?”

Third, once you get used to seeing the world in these terms, you get ahold of a big picture that is far, far weirder than most people have yet grasped:

The word “egregore” has been floating through the collective unconscious (as exemplified by Substack) of late. To those late to the party, an egregore, or “thought-form” is, to use the most stripped-down possible definition, a myth with a point of view. Egregores you’re undoubtedly familiar with include the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy, and the founding of the United States.

There are competing egregores about all of these topics, different points of view that explain the (mostly) uncontroversial facts from different points of view. John Carter has put forth the provocative theory that Jesus Christ was actually Julius Caesar. The official government line is that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in pre-trial detention. And the 1619 Project posits that the purpose of the founding of the United States was the continuation and expansion of the exploitation of People of Color.

If, rather than thinking of people who believe any of these stories, these points of view about events that, one way or another, actually happened, as conspiracy nuts, delusional crazies, or malicious subversives, you instead think of them as using Gurri’s religious frameworks of interpretation to stay sane in the face of an overwhelming torrent of information, you get something back that disappeared so gradually many of us couldn’t even point to the precise moment we lost it: Your faith in your fellow man.

These people, your neighbors and colleagues, believe implicitly or explicitly in gods with which you are personally unfamiliar. In many, if not most cases, they themselves do not see these emergent intelligences working through them for what they are: a newly imagined pantheon, created at a moment of impossible cultural stress, leading followers of the civic gods of which it is comprised to act, on a subconscious level, like a murmuration of starlings. From a certain point of view, it’s staggeringly amazing to watch humans act simultaneously as individual agents and members of an indivisible collective whole. We as a species haven’t done this in a little while, and we’ve never done it all at once, on a global scale.

Look. I don’t think it’s okay that competing religious sects are trying to get each other fired from their jobs, or removed from the public square, and for the most part, I’m pretty transparently on the side of the sects that are Red-coded. But I have a slightly different picture than anyone who is not themselves a member of a niche microreligion. I had a survival-level religious experience in which I was visited by a fucking Wolf-god, okay? And there are a lot of ways you can frame that, some to do with potent psychotropic drugs and nigh-unimaginable pain, but others to do with ineffability and the elegant way the universe can come to your rescue when you’re lost. As such, I see this from both the point of view of an insider who belongs to a number of tribes—Jews, college graduates, men, Americans—and a total outsider with a personal god in whom I have absolute faith.

That conceptualization of our interrelated identities, which originated in a concept called intersectionality, most prominently promoted by Blue Tribe, might be useful for getting out of this mess. It requires that we think about the culture war in those terms, which takes a little getting used to, but it is absolutely an option that results in everyone for the most part holstering their guns and being, at minimum, civil.

I’ll close with a video The Man doesn’t want you to see. It’s Jimmy Dore interviewing a Boogaloo Boi. The bit that I find most interesting is where the Boog Boi in question points out that he’s marched with armed African American groups as well as with white ones. You might give it a look.