Religion and Everything Else Pt 1
To me, maybe one of the most important realisations to my understanding of people and society was that most social institutions contain systems of belief that function essentially like religions. This was important to me for two reasons.
Firstly, I think young people who aren’t religious have a tendency to kind of write religion off as inexplicable and to some extent see it as a weakness of people who are religious, or a lapse in their critical thinking. I would say that this was probably where I was. I think one of the best principles to approach any type of social analysis is to never assume that a heterogeneous group of people do what they do solely because they’re “different” to you in some ineffable way. Applying this principle here and viewing religion in common with other social institutions increased my understanding of both institutions and people.
The second reason works in the opposite direction. There are valid criticisms of religion that people feel comfortable making because they view the beliefs underpinning it as fundamentally untrue, and so systems of power based on those beliefs as illegitimate and exploitative. The same criticisms aren’t applied to other institutions in which they see the underlying beliefs as true; in fact, there might not be much to distinguish those beliefs as any more or less true than religious ones. This doesn’t necessarily make all social institutions illegitimate and exploitative; but it demands a better understanding of what makes them legitimate.
I made this table at one point to think about it:
People identify these characteristics in religion: that many of its believers are fundamentally unable to verify its core factual assertions, that it asks them to make big commitments based on these assertions, often to their disadvantage, that it has a closely defined hierarchy in which most individuals are at or near the bottom, and that authority figures often have too much power and are happy to exploit it.
The essential starting observation is this: people consider believing in science rational and believing in religion irrational even though most people find out about them the same way! People mock religion even though history teaching in schools has essentially the same dynamics as those listed above! As yourself, it is practically impossible to verify, for instance, that smoking causes lung cancer. We would think of “looking at the evidence” as looking up medical journals, but in fact all that is doing is looking at a document prepared by a group of people, i.e. selecting a network of authority figures to put your trust in.
This sounds like I am saying any random bible passage and cigarettes causing cancer are equally valid beliefs, which they are absolutely not. Acknowledging this system of knowledge production isn’t what makes disinformation possible, quite the opposite: some people blithely accept information from authority figures and treat it essentially as fact. Other people, horrified, can’t believe they could fall for such obvious lies, and as evidence to correct them, present some information they have blithely accepted from an authority figure.
Whether the second set of information is true is irrelevant to whether person one’s mind changes, because you’re ultimately presenting two sets of facts this person has no way to compare: all they can compare is the source, and they don’t rank their sources the same way as you. You will, obviously and fairly, say, but a double blind peer reviewed medical paper just isn’t the same as Tucker Carlson, but that doesn’t help the person: Tucker says experts aren’t to be trusted, and experts say they should be. They currently believe Tucker. There is not a viable pathway out.
It’s not to say science is a religion. It’s to say the distinction between science and religion can’t be that one is innately true and one isn’t, because for most people that’s often not a meaningful distinction: they receive science and religion via much the same mechanisms, and both purport to be innately true. It’s to identify why science is capable of producing more reliable information, for example: that it’s less reliant on hierarchy, and ideally rejects authority as a source of truth; that it welcomes challenge and independent verification; that it can modify itself when incorrect, and that most scientists don’t have more to gain from lying than telling the truth. Moreover, identifying all these characteristics means being able to assess when they are broken down, and to identify junk science.
The underlying fact here is that we mistakenly view truth as a conceptually static set of objects which implicitly overrule falsehood when they are in conflict. We conflate reality with truth, but even though real things happen, that doesn’t mean truth is easily accessible and universal. In the first instance much of reality happened in the past, but even what is happening now you predominantly don’t get to witness. Objective reality is simply beyond reach to you in these cases. By its very nature, truth becomes be something which must be constructed, maintained and distributed by communities. For the vast, vast majority of facts you rely on in day to day life, you have no choice but just to believe something someone told you. How do you decide who to believe?
If you’re religious, you believe figures of authority in your religion, and this belief is maintained and fostered by a community of other believers who reward compliance and punish dissent. One aspect of religion as a power system is a knowledge system, a machine for producing and maintaining valid knowledge. It tells you who to trust, it gives you information that you can use and that can inform your worldview. It distributes knowledge to you via authority figures and protects it via social sanctioning. The key point is that this can apply in the same way for any community you’re a part of — a political party, an academic field, a media network, a subreddit, or whatever.
This is exactly how and why disinformation spreads: our first thought is to contrast science and religion, which are at opposite ends of the verifiability to reliance on authority spectrum. However, much of the most important information we receive is in a much greyer area on that spectrum, but receives the least scrutiny from us. This includes all manner of difficult to verify but vitally important types of knowledge that come to us from school, the media or politicians — like whether you get to learn about colonialism at school, whether it is presented as good or bad, why we are told poverty exists and what we can do about it, what activities count as crimes and how to prevent them, and the narratives we learn about our country’s history and present.
So much of this important information is taught to us by the state, in school, at a time when we are almost entirely unable to check it, and is in fact wrong. As a result, national identity is perhaps the most important religious belief most people hold. Imagine for a moment your school exclusively taught religion (or, if you went to a Catholic school, just remember school). You go to school each day, and someone preaches religion to you. It is not only presented as fact, but you are graded, ranked and rewarded or punished based on your belief. In a conflict with the teacher you are de facto incorrect because they are the teacher. In fact, if you aren’t sufficiently able to believe, or dissent too much, your parents might be asked to punish you at home, or you might be treated as deviant, or deficient. Instead of religion, we learn history — but if the history is full of lies, gross omissions, glaring misrepresentations, and genocide apologism, what’s the difference?
We learn facts — incorrect facts — not only about what historically occurred, but about people’s motivations, their moral values, and causal relationships. We also crucially don’t learn vital information, the omission of which might change our views dramatically (like that First Nations Australians had agriculture or Winston Churchill genocided over 2 million allied Indians via manmade famine during WWII). This knowledge machine underpins our values and our acceptance of the way society operates, to the clear benefit of, usually, not us. This is why it becomes problematic to view religious people as different in some way: effectively, nationalism and capitalism in the 21st century fill the exact role religion filled at many other times in history. Arguably, in fact, they are more extreme and universal religions than at any other time, with more far-reaching implications for our lives, but because we define the mythology that supports such a system as factual, most people consider it fine.
We enter this knowledge system without consent, and it is so integrated into our very concept of truth that we are happy to laugh along at religious people without realising we are in our own church, listening to our own priests. That is scary stuff.
