Adapted from a lightning pitch I gave at the MIT Media Lab’s 2021 Festival of Learning, where talks had to be titled “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we …”
Religion occupies an intellectual space, explaining phenomenon we believe to be true. It occupies a moral space, directing us towards what we believe to be good behavior. It occupies a social space, bringing together what may otherwise be a diverse set of people under a shared purpose.
The entire idea of religion might be killed for the non-religious if any one of these occupations seems incongruent. But it’s well documented that religiosity is associated with better physical and mental health. If we can, shouldn’t we aim to rebind the intellectual, moral, and social activities to a set of secular principles?
My premise is two-fold:
- The world needs to be religious.
- We can invent a religion for the non-religious.
I’ll lay out three problems with one solution.
Problem #1: Can our leaders lead?
The membership of the 116th US Congress (2019–2021) has an average age of 60, a youngest age of 40, 212 business degrees, 27 farmers, 3 pro football players, 1 chemist, and 1 physicist.
Is this the right cohort to lead us? Are they equipped to lead us through pandemics, foreign propaganda campaigns, economic tail events, and complex climate system failures?
Can they think rigorously about modern problems?
In early 2020, this was a real debate:
…whether or not a virus would exhibit viral behavior! The correct way of evaluating risk came from a gambler.
We should hedge against the tails. Instead, our leaders told us not to wear cloth masks, an explicit anti-hedge against the tails. The logic goes: the downside of wearing a mask is minimal, the anecdotal evidence from a decade of Asian countries responding to SARS is high, and there was an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence of the effectiveness of masks. To make the correct call, you would need to be willing to violate social norms and intuitively understand tail risk, neither of which are character traits found in abundance outside of science and technology.
Problem #2: Is the reporter local?
From 2008 to 2019, newsrooms lost 27,000 jobs, a 51% drop in employment.
— Pew Research
Newsrooms have consolidated over the last few decades in response to a toughening business market. If you’re lucky, you might have a local newspaper, but chances are it runs through a chain of operations like:
- The Lexington Minuteman is run by Wicked Local with headquarters 30 miles away
- Wicked Local is owned by GateHouse Media New England, a subsidiary of GateHouse Media
- GateHouse Media is owned by Gannett
- Gannett is headquartered in McLean, VA
Why is this important? Pew and Report for America find people trust local news more. Communities care: is the reporter a local boy?
…the quality of your journalism will increasingly depend on the strength of your relationship with the people who recognize, and value your work. Optimizing for trust is a name for the shift in imagination required if news organizations are to recognize this new balance of power.
— Jay Rosen
Researchers find that a loss of local papers causally accounts for an increase in a city’s borrowing costs, likely due to lack of accountability. If the fourth estate exists, it works.
Problem #3: A people divorced from community
People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.
— Robert Putnam
Since the 60’s, the US has seen a decline in community engagement across all aspects of society, famously documented in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Tim Carney, AEI Fellow and Washington Examiner columnist, points out that socially active religious communities such as the Mormons were against Trump in 2016. In contrast, those who identified as religious but did not attend service were more likely to be pro-Trump.
Growing up in a [zone] with more social capital … improves children’s outcomes significantly. This causal component accounts for virtually all of the correlation between social capital and permanent residents’ outcomes observed…
— Raj Chetty et al.
The lack of local social capital and strong networks has deep implications for equity (yes, even for white folks), and what’s more, the economic mobility of the American Dream.
What is to be done? We should create a religion that binds people together through critical discourse on community concerns. In creating this religion, we would:
- Teach future policy makers and policy checkers how to think
- Fill the local information void
- Create a meaningful shared experience like the Peace Corps or military
What are the beliefs? You might recognize these as the Mertonian norms:
Communism — common ownership of knowledge and collective collaboration (not related to the political system)
Universalism — truth is independent of the personal attributes of its participants
Disinterestedness — act for the benefit of the common good
Organized Skepticism — claims should be exposed to critical scrutiny.
The Mertonian norms are a generalization of western scientific culture. You might ask, why is this a religion? Isn’t this just science?
The scientific method is one process design that fits the Mertonian norms with its own idiosyncratic values such as falsification and consilience. There may exist designs for other processes that are Mertonian but with different goals and social structures.
Also, these particular norms aren’t unilaterally accepted by all. As an example, it’s not clear, that knowledge should be commonly owned. In fact, we embed knowledge in protective legal structures such as copyright and patent law to break information’s “want” to be free.
The disinterestedness principle also butts up against the capitalist tendency to act for the benefit of the self or firm. Capitalism is undoubtedly the driving force behind both the exploitation and the lifting out of poverty of the largest number of people in all the world’s history. You might think disinterestedness is good, or you may think greed is good, but whatever the choice it would be a personal one.
This religion should establish a fellowship that selects 10% of the top 10% of high school students, roughly 35k people per year. These people would be assigned to report on the area in which they group up, and form pods for peer support and mentorship.
In the first year, the fellows would report on local news, learn the Mertonian norms, and run through a critical thinking curriculum. An example in this space is Minerva Schools, which weaves critical thinking requirements throughout the subject curriculum.
In the second year, fellows would continue reporting while mentoring the incoming junior class. Practice and teaching are the most effective ways of learning and fully embodying material. The practice and education of critical thinking is the only way we should expect a transition of those skills from a classroom curiosity into a habit of mind.
The fellows would be overseen by regional parishes which could employ trusted Mertonian clergy to continue developing the system and connect with other parishes.
What are some open problems?
- How do we optimize for trust? The journalism community has been grappling with this problem for some time, but tends to center the thought around “showing work” or increased transparency. Laudable efforts, but there needs to be more experimentation.
- What status structure incentivizes the behavior we want? We want fellows to report information, not polemics. The attention seeking economy which funnels reputation from institutions to unchecked individuals is not a priori healthier than a gatekeeping system. However, we’re rapidly approaching the days where the reputation the New York Times has enjoyed for decades begins to erode, and the elimination of local competition sets up the major news organizations to be honeypots for abuse and corruption if transparent institutional cultures weaken. A world without nutritionists studying what is healthy is a world full of junk food.
- How do we improve quality of thought? How do we reduce belief in misinformation? Fellows need to make decisions in ambiguous environments, both in Mertonian life and out. A successful Christian church teaches members to use lessons from the Bible in the outside world. Catholic casuistry is a particular method of ethical reasoning applicable throughout one’s life. Mertonian principles could similarly provide this guidance.
This fellowship establishes a fundamental base of intellectual inquiry and argument that should extend into the world from all angles. Politicians should inquire with journalists who should inquire with business people who should inquire with artists, tradespeople, farmers, teachers, students, caretakers, elders, and yes the scientists too.
Let’s preach the ideas of intellectual inquiry, bind the practice to community service, and train the next generation of leaders.
