Let’s begin another post with our table that maps the levels of being against the exoteric-esoteric aspects of existence:-
| Exoteric | Esoteric |
| Higher esoteric | Higher esoteric |
| Socio-cultural | Socio-cultural |
| Biological | Biological |
In past posts, we have focused on how these categories can be used to analyse our identities as individuals. But no individual is an island unto themselves. We are born into a society, and certainly in the first decades of life, we get our identity from that society. That’s why we can use this same set of categories to define the institutions of culture (the ones which bestow our identity on us). For each level of being, we can ask the question: which institution of society represents this?
For the biological domain, the answer is: the family. The family is concerned with the preparation of meals, the provision of shelter, and most of our other basic biological needs. But the family is also an institution predicated on biological relationships of genetic inheritance. While there can be families where the members are not biologically related (e.g., adoption), this is the exception which proves the rule. This doesn’t mean that the family doesn’t have other functions, including economic, political, and even religious, just that the biological ones are fundamental.
Moving to the socio-cultural level, there are three related institutions at play: the political, the economic, and the military. How formal and distinct such institutions are is usually a function of the size and complexity of the society. The bigger and more complex the society, the more we find that the sub-specialities operate relatively independently of each other. This is in contrast with smaller societies where at least the political and military functions are usually combined (think King Arthur and the knights of the round table).
This leaves the higher esoteric. What institution is responsible for the guardianship and propagation of the highest beliefs of a culture? In most societies, this is a straightforward question to answer, but it has become highly problematic for us in the modern West, and this is a big part of the reason why we now hear things like how science or politics has become religion. Religion, of course, would be the simple answer to the question. But at the same time we’re told that science has become religion, we’re also told that religion is on the decline. Thus, in order to answer the question, we need to dig into the history of religion and the twists and turns it has taken in Western culture.
If we think about this issue anthropologically, a question we might ask at a broad level is, how does a culture initiate members into its primary belief structure? There are two main forms of initiation: rites of passage and myths/stories. While there can be all kinds of rites and stories used in everyday life, every culture has its primary rites and stories that communicate its highest beliefs. A tribal initiate goes through a variety of ceremonies and rites whose purpose is not just to test their skills but to teach them the beliefs of the tribe. Such rites are reinforced by the main stories of the culture, which are almost always about past heroes who went through the same thing.
This may sound rather exotic, and yet it is exactly the same thing we see with the Catholic Church. Every Catholic rite of passage, such as Mass, Communion, Confirmation, etc., has its meaning tightly integrated with the story of Jesus and the Bible more broadly. Consider the rite of the Eucharist, where the initiate receives the body of Christ in the form of bread and wine. The meaning of this is directly related to the Bible passage: “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” (John 6:54). This is in turn related to the idea of salvation and redemption through Christ. The symbolism of the rite of passage and the story that goes along with it are tightly interwoven. That’s the way it is in most cultures.
It follows from this that to find the core beliefs of any culture, you can look for both the main rites of passage and the main myths, especially where these are combined. If we take ancient Rome as an example, we find that one of the main myths was related to the founding brothers, Romulus and Remus, both sons of the god Mars and the virgin Rhea Silvia, and both raised by a she-wolf. The brothers wanted to found a city but couldn’t agree on the location. In the ensuing argument, Romulus killed Remus and chose the site of what is still Rome. That is the mythical aspect.
That myth is then reinforced by the rites of passage, including temples, holidays (holy days), and feasts dedicated to Romulus. In early Rome, religion was quite decentralised and so it wouldn’t have a universal thing to pay homage to Romulus. Later, during the imperial period, things changed. The cult of Caesar had a very similar form to the cult of Romulus, but it was far more widely recognised. Caesar largely wrote his own mythology, claiming descent from Venus. He was deified after his death, and a number of temples were built with various rituals and ceremonies. His birthday was also marked as a holiday.
We can see from this example that the Romans freely mixed religion and politics. However, that is merely our modern Western bias on the matter. The reality is that most cultures make no hard distinction between these domains. This division of ours began in the medieval era when the Catholic Church managed to unite the various barbarian groups of Europe into a unified entity under the Pope in Rome. Right from the beginning, there was a rather weird and also very fuzzy split between the religious and political. The Catholic Church had its origins in Roman culture but with a heavy dose of monastic theology thrown in for good measure. It couldn’t really decide whether it was a political or a religious entity. But that was a question that never would have occurred to the earlier Romans, who recognised no distinction between politics and religion.
In any case, what we see from the medieval period onwards is a kind of separation of church and state via the truce between the church and the kings of Europe known as the divine right of kings. In theory, the church would concern itself with spiritual affairs, and the kings would take care of politics. Julius Caesar could declare himself a god. But the kings of medieval Europe had to make do with having the Pope give them God’s blessing. In practice, the Pope and the kings were often at loggerheads, but the uneasy partnership held firm all the way until the Reformation when the Protestants realised that the church had strayed from what they believed was its purely spiritual mission and demanded that there really should be a separation of the church and state. The kings of Europe saw their opportunity to ride the wave of popular resentment to get what they had always wanted: more power. Eventually, the separation of church and state became a kind of official doctrine in northern Europe, but not until a great deal of blood had been spilled.
But, to say it again, the separation was already there from the start, as can be seen in the fact that there were separate rites of passage and separate myths for the political and religious domains. A peasant swore allegiance to the local lord, and that was their initiation in an economic, political, and military sense. Meanwhile, the religious rites of passage were run through the church. In theory, these were separate, but then things like the crusades or the church’s function as a propagandist on behalf of the kings muddied the waters. Ultimately, the divine right of kings was the unifying concept that linked the political and religious realms together.
Then we get to the Reformation.
Now, the first thing to note here is that the Protestants wanted to all but get rid of the rites of passage as methods of religious initiation. That was related to the idea of deprecating the role of priest, bishop, and pope. All that was, in turn, predicated on the notion that a believer should aim to have a direct connection with the divine. That direct connection was tied with an increased emphasis on the Bible. Since the Bible contains what we are calling the primary myths of the religion, what the Protestants were doing was tilting the focus of initiation towards the mythology and away from the rites of passage.
Closely tied to this was the desire to get rid of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and all its pomp and ceremony. That is what led to much of the violence that followed the Reformation, including the English Civil War. In England, Henry VIII had liquidated the monasteries and established the Church of England. But that was really just his own personal version of the Catholic Church, one that would do whatever he wanted. It was a harbinger of the fact that the kings of Europe were slowly getting the upper hand over the church in Rome.
The Puritan reformers later objected to this, not because the church had become a servant of the state, but because it still had the old Catholic hierarchy with too much of a focus on rites of passage, etc. Cromwell and his men gutted the church only for the Restoration to bring the inevitable backlash. A number of thinkers, such as John Locke, started to wonder out loud whether it wouldn’t be better if politics and religion really should just be kept separate. As with so many of Locke’s ideas, this one was eagerly adopted by the American colonists who added it to their constitution. In Britain, there was more of a pragmatic truce which amounted to the Church of England becoming a kind of moral policeman on behalf of the state. In reality, true religious belief was already waning and being replaced by Enlightenment theories of reason.
The upshot of all this was that religion became a mostly private matter in accordance with the Protestant idea of a direct connection with the divine. By allowing direct access to the Bible and therefore opening up its interpretation, the Reformation eventually gave birth to numerous Protestant denominations, each with a slightly different take on the holy book. Religion had ended up transitioning away from the exoteric world of deeds and actions and into the esoteric world of ideology.
Now, if we think back again to Rome, the Romans were almost the inversion of the Protestants in that they emphasised the rites of passage as the markers of religious identity. Literacy rates in Roman times were in single digit percentages, so reading a holy book was not an option for most people anyway. A Roman solidified their religious identity by carrying out the rites of passage required of them. Romans couldn’t care less what you thought about the rites, only that you did them. Thus, the marker of religious identity in Roman times was exoteric, based on external actions. By contrast, the marker of religious identity in the modern West after the Reformation came to be ideologically based. It mattered not that you carried out the rites of the church but that you believed such and such an interpretation of the Bible, or at least professed to believe it.
And this has come to be true of politics too. Modern political parties are made up of factions of people unified not by any rite of passage or formal criteria but by professed allegiance to a set of ideological positions. The same is true for our economic identities too. When we join a new company as employees, there are some things that might loosely be called rites of passage that take place, but largely our membership is based on the fact that we will contribute to the professed mission of the company.
The initial shift towards esoteric forms of religious identity has now given birth to a world where ideology is main marker of identity more generally. That is true of us as individuals and it is true of the institutions of society. Now we’re ready to join the dots and see why politics and science have become religion. We’ll explore that more in next week’s post.
It seems as though the majority of westerners can’t even live metaphysically without a form of dogma. When you think about it, it really is very mentally servile.
The Reformation may have released people from visible duties, but mentally it didn’t free people at all, in fact we are probably more enslaved now to Dogma than a medieval peasant, who interpreted the Latin Liturgy of the priest how ever way he wanted.
Skip – yeah, even in ancient times, public speaking was not done to inform or debate. It was more of a ceremony in that what was important was not the content of what you said but how you said it. The Greeks put Socrates to death for actually engaging in real argument. Meanwhile, the Puritans wanted to get rid of all ritual aspects and just have a preacher rant and rave for hours on end. In Rome or Greece, such a person would have been considered a madman.
It is kind of funny that the Mass was delivered in Latin for so long. Imagine being a peasant and having to sit in a cold, stone church listening to some guy in a weird costume talking in a different language.
> In Rome or Greece, such a person would have been considered a madman.
This gives an interesting perspective on madness with respect the fact that mass public preaching is now de rigeuer. Initially with the printing press and newspapers, and then put into hyperdrive by radio, and later television and associated media. The openness of the internet, where everything is accessible to everyone adds another dynamic to this.
I’ve long had an intuitive sense that closed, invite-only (or at least signup first) spaces on the internet have a distinctly different character beyond the smaller userbase and implicit protection aided by privacy; but I’ve never had any real understanding as to why that might be. There is an notable sense of oversharing that occurs in public forums which always niggles at me when I post anywhere -I would interpret the Greeks and Romans as understanding that implicitly. Another way to phrase it might be to say that esoteric topics get discussed in hyper-exoteric mediums.
The success of platforms like Discord is often attributed to the fact that is it real-time; however I strongly suspect it is the inherent (albeit lightweight) seclusion that is the magic behind it. Reddit being by default public killed the many private forums that used to exist, so there was a gap left for discord to exist.
Hmmm. I wonder what other online communication modes are possible with an understanding of this dynamic.
Daniel – well, there were a couple of important steps to get to where we are. Firstly, the absolute authority of the church was denied. But the Protestant preachers were not denying authority altogether. They were simply saying that authority rested in the tiny number of people who had a direct connection with the divine. Of course, they all denied that each other had such a connection, so you had people all claiming divine authority for themselves. Over time, this seems to have destroyed the notion of authority as a guiding principle (probably because huge numbers of people were killed fighting over who was right). Then you get the Enlightenment idea that reason and evidence would be the guiding principles. Nice in theory, problematic in practice. So, now we’ve ended up in a world where everything is fractured on ideological lines.
In my experience with semi-closed internet forums, I think the secret sauce is scale. If you have a small group with a good moderator who keeps out the noise, then you can get focused, meaningful conversations. I think it also works best when the participants have some leverage over the moderator. For example, moderator kicks out Person A for bad behaviour. But most people liked Person A even though they had a couple of bad habits. The rest of the group can pressure the moderator to re-admit Person A and the moderator has an incentive to allow that because the moderator doesn’t want other people to leave the channel.
I was thinking of a metaphysical reason rather than an historical one; shouting into the void takes more effort than we consciously realise, and that wasted energy is the critical error of a madman. In that vein, it is not the scale of the audience that I’m referring to, but the scale of the environment.
Writing here; even though implicitly addressed to you, Simon, can be read by practically anyone in the world if they so cared, and I sense that comes with a cost that is both challenging to perceive and probably impossible to quantify, but definitely has a negative influence on communication and understanding. In a sense it is like we’e in an extremely busy cafe, shouting at each other and barely being understood because the background noise level is too high.
I have a draft essay I wrote once trying to figure out the qualitative difference I perceive between a local device, a local lan, intranet, and internet connection. Interacting with a server across all those distances has a distinctly different feel to me that I struggle to characterise. And it is not just latency; there is something ‘grubby’ that gets added with the increasing distance; a similar grubbiness rubs off onto publicly broadcast communication.
Greer once hypothesised that the internet is possessed by demons; which I don’t subscribe to literally but as a metaphorical description is an uncannily accurate way to describe the same phenomenon.
Daniel – I think the historical perspective is important because it is what has set the broader cultural context. One of the interesting parallels is between Protestantism and Islam. Both reject the sacraments of Catholicism. Both focus on sermon and prayer. Both believe in direct connection with the divine. But, especially in Calvinism, the Protestants had an emphasis on how only a select few could be saved, which seems to have created a lot of genuine despair for people who were worried about whether they were selected. Combined with what can only be called a paranoia about “popery” (fairly justified if you consider the Inquisition), this gave Protestantism a quite shrill tone right from the start. I think that shrill tone is what you are referring to as “shouting into the void”. At least when people were going to church there was still a communal aspect to it. So, now we I think we have Protestantism without any of the communal aspects, which is kind of another way to describe “atheism”.
What I’ve noticed amongst the rising nationalist/populist movements of the west is the aesthetic of Gothic Catholicism, expressed a few different ways. Warhammer 40k is big amongst the meme culture at the moment (Trump is often referred to as the God-Emperor, only half jokingly) whose lore is a lovingly satirical take on medieval Christianity and High Catholic dogma, and in particular things like the monastic military orders.
This doesn’t mean people are heading back to Catholicism in terms of the church itself because in most places it has become simply an empty shell (although JD Vance’s conversion is interesting, and Orthodox with its more exoteric ways may continue to gain popularity leading to a syncretic mix), but I think the feral fringe of our culture is reaching out and grasping the exoteric heritage as something to wield against the modern soulless result of the esoteric dominance.
Skip – that strikes me as just more rebellion against the status quo. In the same way, you get the neo-fascists who are really just doing it because they know it will piss off their liberal parents. Liberalism, in turn, was just rebellion against the middle class norms of the mid-20th century.
Another reason why I like the Protestant/Islam comparison is because Islam has seemed to always have had a consensus-based approach, while Protestantism had first to destroy (sometimes literally) the Catholic Church. I think that’s why Protestantism has always had a rebellious and negating aspect to it. Arguably, this has now morphed into a need of Western culture in general. We don’t know how to affirm anything without first negating something else. It’s how our politics works, our legal system, even science is predicated on the idea of disproving an existing theory.