Can Rationality Support Healthy Morality?

I went to church yesterday with another sofiechanner. It was nice to see a healthy community full of normal young people who live with gratitude and hope. The sermon incisively applied their worldview to support the moral discipline necessary for healthy life. It was easy to see why faithful churchgoing folk continue to have happy families and healthy life outcomes generation after generation.

There are a lot of people who don't believe in the miracles and metaphysical claims they invoke. But the whole argument hinges on and demands faith in these. If you don't believe it, it's not going to work for you. These days it seems to be working for fewer and fewer people. Coincidentally, our modern civilization is unhealthy in all the ways religious people are healthy.

The worldview that's been gaining ground against religious faith is the secular scientific "enlightenment" view, which emphasizes the power of reason to understand the world in lawful naturalistic terms without resort to miracles or the supernatural. As science has gone from an obscure branch of philosophy to an overwhelmingly powerful tradition of economically and militarily decisive knowledge, the scientific style of epistemology has pushed out older traditions of miracle belief. Nothing can be proven either way. What premises would you start with? Premises come from worldviews. The charisma of a successful and compelling worldview is inherently pre-rational. But even without proof, many nowadays find the the miracles of science to be the more charismatic.

The cult of reason has only occasionally reared its head in its full pride to take on social and moral questions outside of its usual domain of amoral technicality. The results have usually been disastrous (see the reign of terror, bolshevism, sociology, etc). So the result is what we see: many people are convinced of the secular worldview, but thereby left without healthy moral guidance, and thus without good life outcomes. So I think it's actually not a coincidence that the triumph of science has seen the collapse of moral foundations and a sequence of social crises over the past century or two.

The flipside of this is that religious communities have been drained of dynamic and elite intellectual life, and the healthy ones have become rare and their health limited in scope. See for example the declining social and political power of religion. Even the religious remnant is caught in this doom. Reactionary faith is no escape.

Haters of modernity are quick to claim that the secular worldview is doomed and sterile. They point to the social outcomes (ignoring the technical miracles), and say "by their fruits ye shall know them". But I've never been convinced by this. Of course there are difficult philosophical problems in taking the rationalistic worldview developed on amoral problems and adapting it to moral problems. Why would we expect this to be easy? Why should we conclude that it is impossible? Has anyone actually tried?

Here I see something else of importance: all previous attempts at extending the cult of reason into moral questions were made while high on bloodthirsty revolutionary intent. The aim was not to preserve and enhance the best life of a people, but to tear it down. The french revolution against the moral order of the nobility, the bolshevik revolution against the moral order of europe, and the modern american academic revolution against the moral order of WASP society all have this in common. The latest iteration of the cult of reason in the modern rationalist movement is similarly mixed with the particular resentments of some ex-evangelicals and atheist jews against the moral order of the American mainstream. Why would we expect any of this to yield healthy fruit?

So I have a question: what if you tried to extend the rationalist worldview into the moral questions with intent to support the healthy moral order of normal people, not to tear it down? What would that look like? Is it even possible?

will think in more detail but some initial trailheads

1. this made me think of Alex Komoroske's essay https://medium.com/@komorama/the-sarumans-and-the-radagasts-6392f889d142 which distinguishes two types of "magic" (science of course being another word for "the branch of magic that worked", i.e. "true magic") - Saruman magic and Radagast magic, the magic that instrumentalizes ecosystems vs the magic that nourishes them.

2. the work of anarchist philosophers and economists (Prince Kropotkin, James C. Scott, David Friedman, Elinor Ostrom) feels like the right place to look for how to extend rationalism to support an existing healthy moral order.

3. Illich's Tools for Conviviality and Deschooling Society are very much along these lines - distinguishing cognitive-technical "tools" that enslave vs empower ordinary people.

>>2180

Illich is great, but he's primarily reacting to the industrial-economic logic, and the fraud inherent in ideas of expertise, professionalism, and convenience. He may be reacting futily. I don't actually see the connection here. Can you expand?

I haven't read enough anarchist thought. What do they say that can be applied here?

The Saruman vs Radagast post read a bit too much like sanctimonious egalitarian moralism. I didn't see him develop the potential for Radagast-shaped evil and limitations. Saurman's evil and limitations are well known. But some of the "Radagasts" I've met have been just evil toxic people who use that ideology to attack and destroy people they perceive as being Saruman types. And of course this resentful tendency in our culture broadly is well known.

> Haters of modernity are quick to claim that the secular worldview is doomed and sterile. They point to the social outcomes (ignoring the technical miracles), and say "by their fruits ye shall know them". But I've never been convinced by this. Of course there are difficult philosophical problems in taking the rationalistic worldview developed on amoral problems and adapting it to moral problems. Why would we expect this to be easy? Why should we conclude that it is impossible? Has anyone actually tried?

There are two types of people, philosophers and everyone else. The philosophers should obviously be thinking through these problems and finding solutions. Others need to find a solution that works well enough so they can do other things in their life (find a wife, raise kids, improve their community/nation etc). Given all these other tasks and limited aptitude for philosophical projects, I think most people will just not be philosophers.

Assuming you are not a philosopher, the way you judge will be less based on explicit reason and more based on what *feels* like it will work for you and your family. The various cult of reason projects you mention were plausible enough in their day and I'm sure plenty of good family men bought into them. That's not our situation now. Right now, there are religious communities with varying degrees of healthiness and we're forced to choose from among them or just give our life as offering to the almighty GDP. It is in this context that most people are recommended to just submit to their slightly conservative church.

The philosophers do indeed need to focus on understanding the nature of God. You've convinced me the scientific worldview needs to be more thoroughly integrated into the religious one and not just kept separate in some schizophrenic fashion. You can't profess your belief in miracles on Sunday then live the rest of the week as if miracles are impossible. This undermines both your regular life and your religious life, though for most people it probably undermines the religious life more.

Ok, I've done my obligatory affirmation of the need to reconcile science and religion. Now to some anticipated issues with this project. There is such a thing as inner experience that is separate from the detached logical understanding of the thing. You can understand all the physics and biology of light from a tree entering your cornea and being perceived by your brain. That is knowledge but there's a different knowledge to experience the sight of the tree yourself. I believe true religion operates more in this realm than the other one*.

The inner life of spirituality is necessarily something that is practiced and experienced. We can of course say useful things about this experience using scientific knowledge, but if you're trying to improve upon and modify religion, you will likely need to modify it from the inside. You need to experience the thing itself and from that vantage point, see how to reconcile with the scientific view. This is important because otherwise you'll cut out many aspects of religion that are important and your project will just fail. This is the biggest danger with cutting out the belief in miracles and the daily practice of pointless seeming rituals.

*Here's CS Lewis' related thoughts on the matter (http://ktf.cuni.cz/~linhb7ak/Meditation-in-a-Toolshed.pdf)

>>2190
The inner spiritual life is definitely where things need to be worked out. It cant be worked out in a purely logical fashion because so much of it is, from the perspective of logic, about which premises we vibe with in an entirely pre-rational way. This is what the various cults of reason fail to acknowledge as i see it. From the inside it feels like a pre-rational presence of divine authority, or some obvious truth you have a hard time imagining otherwise. From the logical “outside” point of view, thats a set of premises you are living from.

I think also that we cant do this all in logocentric proposition-fiddling. There is a more primitive animalistic intuitive intelligence that is the true base cognition, with logos being a derived activity we use for communication and rigor. This is where true religion lives. The way to interface with this base cognition is ritual, narrative, aesthetics, art, poetry, sociality, physicality, power, direct experience. Nonetheless it is quite limited in its power on its own, and dangerous if treated without proper fear and respect. Ive seen many people destroy themselves trying to either dominate it with logic, or swim in it directly.

I sometimes think of the intuitive base cognition as a great chaotic deep full of monsters that we float on with our little ships of reason. As we build bigger and better ships we can do greater things. The key is to keep the ship strong enough to hold together against the chaotic forces while being able to channel them, and to keep pumping the waters out of the bilge. But as much as we might pump, we should not attempt to pump out the whole sea, surrender to it, or forget that in many ways it’s in charge. Anyways we could use some rigorous models of all this to describe whats going on, even if the chaos of intuitive spiritual life will never be contained in any model.

>The latest iteration of the cult of reason in the modern rationalist movement is similarly mixed with the particular resentments of some ex-evangelicals and atheist jews against the moral order of the American mainstream.

fwiw the LW-rationalists have done a very good job of making the sort of participatory high-trust community that it's often claimed can only be created around a nucleus of formal religious worship. Like everything else they do, they did this in a very analytical and self-aware way, e.g. their annual solstice festival comes from Ray Arnold reverse-engineering Christian ritual and studying previous attempts. Of course it helps a lot that they're organized around a thoroughly-developed eschatological ideology with strongly-held mildly-unusual moral beliefs.

Lately I've been impressed by their shared childcare and homeschooling arrangements in their Berkeley hub. A lot of based twitter people are loud about stuff like "You need to withdraw your kids from public school indoctrination and form a homeschooling coop that retains intellectual sovereignty" but are too atomized to pull it off. Meanwhile the polyamorous Berkeley rats in their group houses quietly built one of those with very little fanfare and AFAICT it's working great.

>>2192
> Of course it helps a lot that they're organized around a thoroughly-developed eschatological ideology with strongly-held mildly-unusual moral beliefs.
Indeed, they are in fact a working religion. Im actually quite bullish on the rationalists in the long term. Their problems are some of the most interesting philosophical problems you can find these days, and they are rigorous enough to actually update downstream behavior if they improved a few IMO busted premises.

The unstated punchline of the OP is that YES i think rationality can support healthy morality, and some subset of them at least will be forced to work this out. The example of the porcfest free staters (see >>2189) convinces me that even rather strange initial material can rapidly sort itself out if they get the moral foundations close enough.

>>2192

The winter solstice event I went to in 2022 seemed to have replaced God with AI and so there was a very serious and dark feeling to all of it. At that time, they were resigned to dying with dignity. It was nice that their festival finally had some gravitas attached the way we do in christmas events (e.g. midnight mass). But attaching this wonder and awe and worship to a being coming to eradicate you seems wrongheaded to me.

Polyamory is harder for me to believe than the resurrection. Though, if I visit the bay area and see healthy looking rat communities, I'll take them seriously and maybe polyamory will start looking appealing.

>>2197
>polyamory is harder to believe than resurrection
Indeed, at least you cant actively see jesus not rising from the dead, but one can actively see the moral and social chaos of polyamory. Reminds me of the old jim.com argument against obviously falsifiable doctrines like egalitarianism.

But i predict the healthy parts of rationalist culture (measured by fertility rate for example) will be the less polyamorous parts.

As for worshipping the negative image of the silicon avenger, that does sound bleak. I much prefer to worship the glorious author of nature and our guarantor of existential hope. This is one of those premises i think the rats should flip on.

>>2192
>> A lot of based twitter people are loud about stuff like "You need to withdraw your kids from public school indoctrination and form a homeschooling coop that retains intellectual sovereignty" but are too atomized to pull it off. Meanwhile the polyamorous Berkeley rats ...

Your data sample is too small. Many Catholics and Evangelicals all over the country do this. Even in the SF Bay Area, my family had no trouble finding homeschooling groups of the latter sort.

>>2179
> what if you tried to extend the rationalist worldview into the moral questions with intent to support the healthy moral order of normal people, not to tear it down?

If you mean "rationalist" in the historical sense, rather than the Berkeley sense, then there is an entire tradition from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Schmitt that tries to do this at the level of polity. It doesn't try to replace religion, just to bracket it. One might doubt that this approach fully addresses the problem, though.

>>2179
> Of course there are difficult philosophical problems in taking the rationalistic worldview developed on amoral problems and adapting it to moral problems. Why would we expect this to be easy? Why should we conclude that it is impossible? Has anyone actually tried?

I would take a pointer from Strauss here and note that there is a great difference between the "classical rationalism" of Plato and Aristotle and the "scientific rationalism" that arose in the 1600's. They are both rationalist in the sense that they appeal to reason and not religion.

But scientific rationalism relies as much as possible, and ideally exclusively, on theories that can be mathematically expressed and tested quantitatively.

Classical rationalism happily looks at "the whole," including observations of human behavior that are difficult to express mathematically. It is happy to reason about human function and ends, and to derive moral conclusions from that reasoning.

So one approach to a modern rationalist morality would be a neo-Aristotelian one, taking full account of modern biology, while shedding the early modern taboo on teleology. It might need to begin with a polemical attack on the claim that "science doesn't say anything about ends," when biology, from molecular biology all the way up through animal ethology, is saturated with reasoning about functions.

I think this project would be sound and beneficial. However, it does still leave open the question of whether people have a need for something that looks and feels more like religion proper. Aristotle thought so. He never treats it at length, but he did say a polis needs organized worship of the gods.

>>2203
Yes i mean a morality that basicaly takes account of the modern scientific cosmology and biology, and then starts reasoning about ends. But in a nietzschean way (examining them first of all as natural phenomena to be explained and analyzed) before taking the problem directly and actually attempting to prove or argue for any particular ends.

I follow aristotle in believing some kind of religion is necessary. We need some ritualized, charismatic, enforced way of relating to the intelligent and ends-bearing sources of our shared pre-rational leaps of faith. What are those but gods? The key is to invoke the sources we actually believe in. For those of us who actually believe in the radicalized modern iteration of mathematized natural philosophy, well those gods do not yet have names or any theory. Or perhaps they do but we dont mnow which they are yet.

I think modern rationality need not stay so limited as science in only believing in mathematical falsifiable theories. Rather the point as i see it is to radicalize and generalize the implicit epistemology of science (information theory, probability theory, etc) to all questions of knowledge including moral questions even where the mathematical approach doesnt work. And where we cant pin things down (which will be most of the time having left the domain of strong scientific evidence) our leaps of faith and speculations should at least have a valid account of where we think we got that knowledge (ie the nature of the gods) and how confident we are in it and should not claim to know things we couldnt possibly know or demand belief in things which are on balance scientifically implausible.