I highly recommend Jacques Ellul's "Les nouveaux possédés." (translated in English as "The New Demons" [1]) an analysis written back in 1973 describing this exact process you're describing, i.e. modern stuff (rock stars among others) trying to fill the hole of the disappearing religion. Ever since I've read the book I cannot attend a big music concert or a crowded football match without thinking about it (before this pandemic started, of course).
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1362676.The_New_Demons
One of the more remarkable experiences of my early adult life was attending a sales conference. I couldn't believe how much that business event felt like a _religious_ event to me. The format, the language, the emotions... I recognized all of these.
I'm no longer religious in the same way, but those experiences have made me particularly sensitive the power of faith and community. Once you know what you're looking for, you start to see it everywhere: in businesses, in politics, in fandom. People want belonging and a sense of being part of something greater than themselves. Belief in the supernatural is not required to engender that feeling.
The expertise in 'marketing' in this environment was incredible, and I've been both surprised and somewhat relieved to find that for the most part nobody 'outside the fold' seems to properly study how it works and apply it to stuff like selling their startup, especially startups that rely on some degree of community... Some do, but it's surprisingly rare to me.
For a brief time I got involved with the School of Life / Church for Atheists stuff in a desire to find some of what I've lost since leaving church, and I was astounded to find that they seemed to mostly try to emulate all the worst parts of what made 'church life' work.
For examples, the Evangelicals/Pentecostals figured out that rock concert-style Sunday services work to get people interested, but the attrition rate is terrible. Instead, to get people to stay and become part of the church, emphasizing the 'small groups' (~12 people meeting weekly) is by far the most effective strategy. Make people spend time in a small subcommunity and eat together, and you got a member!
So what does School of Life do with their 'Sunday Assemblies'? Awkwardly emulate church but neglect the 'small group' aspect, and hoping that somehow this is more successful than, say, the rapidly-dying Catholic/Protestant churches that mostly rely on boring Sunday services.
I agree, but feel like this is a not a bad thing most of the time (even though it can be), and I say this as an atheist in the traditional sense, with iconoclastic tendencies when provoked...
You see faith based reasoning and very strong emotional reactions to things that are not real.
As a Scot I can't help be amused that the greatest rivalry was between the Blues and Greens:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104097.Sailing_to_Sarant...
Also it makes just as much sense like this: 'sports is to sex as pornography is to war.'
By adoption of sports, do you mean universal participation or spectation?
The former I suppose would be a net positive, if you limit the requirement to just making sure everyone does at least some physical activity every day, but if you mean that everyone should be required to play some sport as a significant pastime the negatives start reducing the net positive.
If the latter, I must vehemently disagree. We would probably be better off banning spectator sports entirely rather than making everyone watch.
doesn't seem to fit gp's "people who have done something" crietia.
No i was questioning GP's point. Nothing to do with Ellul. I personally don't care if the author has "done something"
Preserving once sanity while reading him is difficult enough, imagine what you would have to go through while you think through these things for years.
I guess it depends on what one means by "doing something."
— C. S. Lewis
source: https://reasonabletheology.org/cs-lewis-on-reading-old-books...
The thing is books used to be very expensive, yet people managed to read as many as they could get their hands on and even spend crazy money on them. Open any book from say the 17th century and you'll see how they quote as many works as they could. Take the Quixote for instance, there's a famous chapter about the library of Don Quixote, the whole novel is built around satirizing a popular genre that Cervantes as an avid reader also knew well.
The article also appears to be conflating the number of books owned (or more precisely, being depicted as owning) with the number of books read, which is supremely, jaw-droppingly dumb:
> We can pick up the minimalist attitude to reading in early visual depictions of one of the heroes of Christian scholarship, St Jerome – who was by all accounts the supreme intellect of Christendom, who translated the Greek and Hebrew portions of the Bible into Latin, wrote a large number of commentaries on scripture and is now the patron saint of libraries and librarians. But despite all his scholarly efforts, when it came to showing where and how St Jerome worked, a detail stands out: there are almost no books in his famous study. Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old. To follow the depiction by Antonello da Messina, St Jerome appears to be the proud owner of about ten books in all!
How am I supposed to read this but as a claim that Jerome wrote more books than he read, based on a painting made a millennium after his death?
And is reading and writing books not 'doing something'? I don't know exactly what Taleb means by it, but it smacks of plain elitism.
It must be difficult work in itself because even Taleb, when he took a stab at this 'pseudo-philosophy' genre with his book The Bed of Procrustes, managed to produce absolute piffle which would never have been published if Taleb weren't already famous for his popular finance books.
There seems to be an underlying presumption that writing is not real work and so people should be successful in the real world before they should feel entitled to write anything.
You could spend the remainder of your life trying to read every worthwhile book that has already been written and still not finish them all.
And it's mostly limited to fiction, drama, and poetry! It omits almost all math, science (including social science and history), and philosophy that's not of literary significance. Even within those restrictions, it's by no means a comprehensive list of every worthwhile work or author ever (if nothing else, the "Western" qualifier makes that plain).
We're even there for film, and we've only meaningfully had that medium for ~130 years. One may watch thousands of movies without ever leaving the realm of "widely regarded as excellent, meaningful, and/or important". I'd imagine there's far more than enough very, very good recorded music that it's in the same situation. Many lifetimes of top-notch media exist. Reading/hearing/watching anything that's not very good is entirely a choice.
Stimulating, contemporary, convenient. Pick two. It is as much of a choice as home made food over fast food is a choice. But it is not always convenient.
Personally I just cut out the contemporary stuff and there is an abundance of good material. When I find something modern and stimulating, it usually involved a certain amount of luck, a lot of trial and error, or just perseverance scouring wikipedia, magazines, blogs, whatever. Most people don't choose what they're into, it is dictated to them by producers. And there is a widespread fear of b&w / classic definition films, stringed classical instruments and literature.
IMHO, what matters more is what you're hoping to get out of deep reading and/or shallow infotainment. Maybe reading the Odyssey leads you into lateral shallow entertainment regarding different mythological figures. Maybe a Vsauce video leads you down into deep reading about game theory. Who gets to say which of these activities is "wasted" time?
"Alain de Botton [owner of The School of Life], for example, has built an international self-help empire, offering lessons in self-love to CEOs and yummy-mummies (and daddies). But what actually drives him, underneath the bonnet? What dirty fuel keeps him motoring? It's the fact he had a violent tyrannical father [1] who never accepted little Alain or made him feel good enough. All his books, he has said, were an attempt to connect with Pater Horribilis. The School of Life should offer a workshop in Radical Self-Loathing."
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/alain-de-...
Source: https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/the-secret-of-success...
Religion and morality aren't distinct concepts. What's lost in the west is the stability of having an orthodoxy.
How so? They seem pretty orthogonal to me.
(as long as you aren't targeting the Q-Anon or KKK crowd)
So it seems the definition of sacred is simply changing. (luckily)
At the time around '69 it maybe was like nothing was sacred anymore, and everything was being questioned, but i don't think you can apply this anymore. People later settled on some moral progressions, which are now being defended.
Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV. In that way, popular culture is like a barometer for morality of a population.
I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.
I can't really see why this is bad, which is kind of what we're talking about. I can see why full-frontal nudity is a tactical error in some contexts, in that you shouldn't do it because you'll end up in a worse position if you do, but I really don't get the apparent moral revulsion some people have regarding the naked human form.
This is part of what we're talking about because it signals that the traditionalists can't impose their revulsion on the rest of us. The recent successes of the Queer Rights movement also prove this: Same-sex marriage has gone from unthinkable to unremarkable. So has transitioning. The people who are most opposed to those things were utterly incapable of making cogent arguments sufficient to sway the societies in which they lived, so now they're widely accepted.
> Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV.
No. Most people don't want to see that. Most people have a serious aversion to seeing real death and gore and so on, and it isn't feigned "virtue signalling" or similar.
> I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.
Except the arguments against, say, nudity on TV come down to "I don't like it, so it's immoral" and that exact same argument has been used to argue against social equality of all kinds.
Really? As much as nudity in television content has grown, I think showing genitals is still pretty much not done. For example, Narcos didn't do it, as far as I watched it.
This is only true if you define the "Religion" out of religion; that is, shear it of any dogma or faith claims or even the "funny hats social club" cultural aspect, and then say that all of the remaining guidance is the religion. This isn't what religion means to most people, regardless of whether they have one or not.
For example, look at the scandal from some years back in which some European (Spanish?) meat products were found to include horse meat. Everyone agreed that (1) there was no risk of any kind involved in eating the "contaminated" products; (2) you could not taste the difference; (3) a recall was in order; (4) this was and deserved to be a HUGE scandal.
I'm saying that the modern Western prohibition on eating horse is a religious phenomenon, regardless of whether people are comfortable calling it one. If you are using a definition of "religion" that doesn't include things like this, your terms do not carve reality at the joints.
And this is contrary to what people understand as religion, which seems to avoid carving reality at the joints: All of a sudden you can dispute the notion that people can be irreligious by pointing to some social conventions they follow, and demanding that those conventions are religion. That does not seem very respectful to personal self-identity.
It's not. It matches exactly what people understand as religion in any context that doesn't involve themselves.
Compare the Roman Emperor, who was never referred to as a "king" -- by the Romans -- because the concept was taboo. The Greeks went ahead and referred to him as a king. Who was right? What would we gain by excluding imperial Rome from a study of monarchical societies?
Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism. I agree that people should not be reading every new self-help or business book that gets published. The majority of new books are bad. History acts as a great filter, which is why focussing on old books is a strong heuristic to find good books. I also agree with Nassim Taleb, who says that you should try to read the works from people who have actually done something (opposed to modern pseudo-philosophers like Alain de Botton, who is just trying to capitalise on the religion-shaped hole in western morality). I am not a religion apologist, but his videos and lectures are structured exactly the same way as sermons. He even feigns a false pastor modesty. Ugh I am beginning to rant now.
As a civilisation I still believe that we are not reading enough. I can feel my reading habit eroded and tugged by modern media. I feel fulfilled after reading in a way that YouTube or Netflix cannot provide.