What I like about this is its thoroughly pragmatic treatment of the basis of judgement, and the way it sees through the incoherence of ‘rationality’ as normally described (where the basic point that a logical argument is only ever as good as its premises is so often lost sight of). However, there are a number of problems. These will take a bit of space to even outline. It particularly seems that you know nothing about embodied meaning theory (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) or about integrative and archetypal forms of psychology (Jung and his successors — kindly do not dismiss until you know what I’m talking about), both of which I think could really help to make this radical thesis work better.

The first problem is the reductive nature of the idea of ‘survival value’, even if this involves the survival of groups or species rather than just individuals. Look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: we humans do not only value survival. Survival is good, but also a means to all kinds of other fulfilments, up to what Maslow calls ‘self-actualisation’. But nor is it crudely just the fulfilment of desires that creates normative value, because our desires can be contradictory or inconsistent. To arrive at more fulfilled desires over time we have to reduce conflicts between them — which means we need to integrate them. If you want to develop a more effective form of ‘survival’ that engages with the full subtlety of the range of human experience of value whilst still being thoroughly pragmatic, I think you need to engage with the theory of psychological integration.

There is also a big problem with the way you use the idea of ‘superstition’. The example you offer, of sleeping under a dead tree, does not strike me as superstitious at all, and you do not even explain what is supposed to be superstitious about it. Most superstitions are unhelpful precisely of the kind of pragmatic grounds you want to use here. For example, I shouldn’t give up on a job interview because a black cat crossed my path on the way, or because the interviewer had a wart. Many of the ‘superstitions’ associated with religion are also problematic not only because they don’t work in any sense (even in relation to tail risks over long periods etc), but also because they are absolutised.

That brings me to the claim that beliefs are ‘cheap talk’. Well, that surely depends on how well the belief is rooted in our embodied experience. Those beliefs may be built on meaning that is developed from embodied experience since childhood and embedded into a series of metaphors. ‘My wife is in the next room’ is a belief, but not ‘cheap talk’ because both its meaning and its justification depend on a whole load of rooted associations. Here’s where I highly recommend reading the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. If you want to understand how the model of ‘rationality’ that involves some kind of hypothetical deduction from a metaphysical model of ‘reality’ can be avoided, you have to start with the meaning of the language used, and an appreciation that it is a matter of synaptic links formed under the pressure of active and embodied experience. (In this way of thinking, your assumption that science can be ‘literal’ and somehow exempt itself from the normal — usually metaphor-dependent — conditions of human meaning, also has to go.)

I think a more helpful way of interpreting your idea of ‘cheap talk’ is that some beliefs are merely abstracted. These are the ones built on an assumption that statements can be made about ‘reality’ or its absence that depend for their meaning only on that reality, and can’t be incrementally adjusted. That’s what I call absolute beliefs. You can explain the pragmatic failure of superstitions in those terms — that the way they are held and formulated prevents them from being adjusted. These beliefs also fit your concept of fragility: they are beliefs that hold until they are smashed by unexpected new conditions. Incidentally, they are also used to maintain power relationships, because they are superficially unquestionable.

My final point is about the assumptions around the nature of ‘religion’. Religion does not consist merely of beliefs, superstitious or otherwise, but also myths (narratives), practices, experiences, communities, symbols etc. These all indicate that the way religion helps people address conditions (beyond those of mere ‘survival’) is much more importantly about the sources of meaning they get from it, intimately related to their embodied experience, than it is about the effects of absolute beliefs, which tend to distract from that meaning. This is where Jung’s theory of archetypes can be extremely helpful — in explaining the nature of that meaning and hence its pragmatic value. To make use of it, you don’t have to accept the collective unconscious, synchronicity and other more dubious Jungian constructs.

I could offer links for more details on many of these points, but I’ll wait to hear whether you’re interested first.

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