geo wrote:
In the U.S. it seems that we have been coming apart for decades. We are too large and too diverse, both culturally and racially, to sustain a unified political state.
Harari makes the excellent point that a nation is a fiction, an imaginary idea. The USA is held together by its constitution, the myth of the founding fathers and the military. These are excellent imaginative institutions, but their capacity to sustain shared purpose has its limits.
Christianity might serve better as a social glue, with its themes of love, truth and redemption, except that the churches are hypocritical, constrained to adopt a conservative stance by the need to oppose the aggressive secularity of the political left.
Harari’s whole concept of the redeeming power of the idea is like the famous point made by Joseph Conrad in
Heart of Darkness:
Joseph Conrad wrote:“What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea."
The moral force of Kipling’s colonial idea of the white man’s burden as the redeeming spirit of empire has now been destroyed by the observation of its use as a cover for racial prejudice. That idea in large measure sustained the vision of manifest destiny of the USA, but it has been fraying since the Civil War, with its recognition that blacks are more than chattels. Anti-fascism served to rekindle America’s sense of moral superiority in the second world war, but anti-communism dealt it a heavy blow in Vietnam, with the dubious idea that America’s burden involved the prevention of national self-determination.
geo wrote:As you say, religion no longer functions as the glue that holds us together and virtual communities seem a poor substitute, possibly only further polarizing us.
The rise of virtual communities is the fastest evolution of anything anywhen anywhere. The seductive attraction of virtual reality via the internet can usefully be compared to geologically rapid evolution, such as the Cambrian Explosion. A few adaptations come through the pack and survive, but most go extinct. Extinction has already happened to some extent with the creative destruction of computing companies, but the danger in the virtual world is that things that seem to unify may conceal a real fissiparity, breaking people apart at a more fundamental level than the apparent joining together on line.
By contrast, the social unity supplied by religion reflects many generation of mythological evolution, and is therefore more robust against shock – stable, durable and fecund – than the apparent unities of online communities, which could easily prove fragile and superficial. But religion will not become a uniting force until it reconciles with science. Harari's observation that its claims are imaginary but necessary is a great starting point for that, like Jung's claim that God only became conscious through humanity.
geo wrote: Harari's notion that a nation only exists through the shared belief of its citizens is rather startling when you think about it. And, indeed, to understand that humans can and do create imaginary entities is perhaps the single most salient point of this book so far.
Excellent point about imaginary entities and shared belief, like Conrad’s theme of the redeeming power of the idea, undercutting much of the sterile debate over theism. The psychological point from a scientific perspective is that agreed story is central to cultural evolution, so the idea that society could exist without myth is false.
That said, there is a big difference between how God and money are ideas, even though both are major imaginative forces in social mobilisation. Money is our marker for trade, a quantitative counting system to represent the value of real assets. Its fiat status, grounded in economic axioms, involves no false metaphysics of real existence, unlike God.
