Culture, Uncurled

Human nature, science, and Christianity

Welcome to Culture, Uncurled. This newsletter covers what science tells us about culture and psychology — that is, about human nature — and the implications these findings have for faith, meaning, and our postmodern society. My aim will be to help us better understand why contemporary liberal societies are such challenging places to live, psychologically and spiritually, what this has to do with religion and faith, and what we ought to do about it.

Let me situate this. I’m an evolutionary social scientist by training — my PhD focused on the empirical psychology and anthropology of ritual — but I’m also an adult convert to sacramental Christianity. I’ve spent the past decade exploring religion and culture from both the inside and outside. For most of that decade, I blogged at Patheos, where I covered research  bearing on religion, psychology, culture and — increasingly — social and political issues.

I’m writing this newsletter because I think today’s human sciences — psychology, cognitive science, comparative anthropology, and others — are producing findings that profoundly challenge liberal-modern conceptions of human nature. Writers from John Lukacs to Jacques Barzun have argued that the 500-year-long experiment in anthropological individualism we’ve called “modernity” is drawing to a close, but nobody seems to know what comes next. I don’t pretend to be an exception to this, but I do think that the halting scientific rediscovery of many pre-liberal truths about human nature — the most basic being that we’re ineluctably social, wired from the get-go to soak up cultural conventions and rituals, which in turn are critical for our well-being — is something we just can’t ignore if we want to respond adaptively to current challenges.

I’m writing for the widest possible readership. However, I’m especially interested in reaching three groups. The first is intellectual Christians of any variety who are dissatisfied both with shallow American religion and with the utopian excesses of 21st-century secularism, and who would appreciate objective insights into what makes individuals and religious communities tick. The second is skeptical social thinkers with an engineer’s disposition — people who crave clear definitions and crisp causal analysis, who like to see social problems and solutions laid out schematically, regardless of their ideology or beliefs. And the third is literate readers of all stripes who feel that something isn’t quite right with our (post)modern world, who crave something that better matches our human nature but aren’t sure where to look, or even whether such a thing is possible.

Many readers of the third type might be those who, like me, are intimately familiar with the mental health crises facing our Western societies — especially America. Maybe you’ve looked around at the ragged, dead-end threads of your family and hometown and thought My God, what happened? Maybe you know someone who’s succumbed to mental illness, addiction, or some other form of self-destruction. Actually, you probably do. Adding up all suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol abuse fatalities, just shy of two hundred thousand people a year now seem to be dying in the United States from so-called “deaths of despair,” and this number keeps growing. Adolescents and young adults are suffering from previously unimaginable levels of mental illness. The Covid pandemic accelerated these problems, of course, but they were already well advanced before the first domestic cases of Covid blighted Seattle nursing homes.

The Curse of Anomie

More than a century ago, the sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that suicide and self-destruction go along with crises of meaning. If a society can’t offer a coherent framework for life, one that gives people a purpose and imbues human existence with meaning, anomie — literally, “lawlessness,” lack of coherent social norms or direction — results. People go cracked, then they start giving up.

Research from the subsequent century, including research that’s emerging right now, basically confirms Durkheim’s thesis. When a society isn’t working, when its rules and norms aren’t clear or legitimate, the human organism starts breaking down. We’re fundamentally adapted to, and for, life within what Durkheim called moral communities: organized, integrated social groupings that are “general purpose systems:” adaptive units whose core objective is their own, and their members’, survival, defense, and self-reproduction. Moral communities can be as small as a hunter-gatherer tribe or, in some tellings, as large as midcentury imperial America. (Note that “moral” here doesn’t mean “ethically right or good,” but instead “concerned with regulating behavior in a coordinated way toward shared values.”)

Regardless of their scale, moral communities always place demands on our time and resources, requiring sacrifice from us and setting down rules for how to behave. In turn, they provide us with social belonging, protection, roles, education, opportunities for meeting and marrying mates, and, in most cases, an organized symbolic cosmos.

You might have noticed that I specifically cited “midcentury” America as an example of a national moral community. This isn’t out of particular nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s just an acknowledgement that the United States today very much isn’t a moral community. It imposes no credible, binding worldview on its inhabitants; it doesn’t demand many, if any, painful sacrifices from most of its inhabitants; its rituals seem to be breaking down.

At the same time (and not coincidentally), other sources of moral community are also coming apart. Organized religion is the most notable example, but neighborhoods and friendship groups are also thinning out. As many others have pointed out, this collapse of moral community in North America is probably a key driver of our recent cultural obsession with identity. Without actual communities, churches, or extended families to define us and give us a warm, familiar place in the universe, we fumble around for abstract, categorical identities, such as political affiliations, to fill the gap.

Unfortunately, these abstract categories can’t do the work we’re asking them to do. Actual moral communities, which are always local to some degree, respond to our behavior and contributions, slowly corralling our behavior to align with their interests and standards, teaching us self-control and delayed gratification along the way. They’re feedback systems. But abstract identities, which by definition aren’t local, don’t deal in feedback. Unable to respond to individuals, they can’t provide the meaning, sense of belonging, or self-regulation that define Durkheimian moral communities. We’re becoming obsessive about identities that are actually the antitheses of community.

And so the hole gets deeper. Moral community erodes, which makes people more prone to dysregulation and despair. Dysregulated, anomic people don’t make for good social partners, so community gets still weaker, which further dissolves meaning and structure, making individuals even less reliable contributors to actual community, and so on. And on. And on.

Raising Your Animal Right

We’re not built for this. Humans are extremely adaptable, as far as animals go. But we’re not this adaptable. Today’s crises of meaning and sicknesses of despair are simply what happens when human beings are pushed beyond their livable parameters.

Let me use an analogy. If you’ve ever had a sheep dog as a pet — a border collie, say — you know that you can’t just walk it around the block once a day and call it quits. It’ll go crazy and take you with it. Sheep dogs are literally bred for physical activity and challenge: they need space, interesting tasks, and lots of exercise. It’s non-negotiable. If you can move to the country and get a paddock with a couple of sheep for them to bark at, great. If not, then you can try training to direct the dog’s herding instincts toward non-destructive ends. But no amount of training will change its underlying need for copious amounts of stimulation and exercise. Sheep dogs are genetically adapted for a certain kind of life. Fail to give them that kind of life, or a reasonable proxy for it, and you’ll both suffer.

Of course, humans aren’t sheep dogs. But we are equally constrained by our own, distinct biological inheritance. We simply can’t — and don’t — thrive if certain conditions aren’t met.

Specifically (to repeat myself), we’re adapted for life in symbolic, ritualized, moral communities. It’s no coincidence that the societies that suffer most from anomie — Western European countries and their colonial descendants, especially in greater Anglo-America — tend to be more atomized and individualistic than virtually all others. Our national cultures in these countries are so individualistic that they effectively no longer function as cultures in Durkheim’s sense. They regulate economies but cannot regulate our lives.

Utopianism in the Liberal World

As a matter of historical contingency, these modern Western societies are also overwhelmingly officially committed to utopian ideologies that see human nature as limitlessly changeable, or even non-existent. Anthropologically materialistic and reductionistic, these ideologies set the tone for our governments, economies, and universities. They uphold personal autonomy, acquisition of stuff, and physical health as the summum bonum of human existence.

Why does this matter? All modern utopians, whether liberal-capitalist, communist, or transhumanist, ultimately reject the idea that moral community is necessary for human wellbeing. In fact, they usually see real moral communities as roots of tribalism and backwardness, blaming them (rather than, say, human nature) for the persistence of evils such as war, prejudice, and bad taste in art. All too often, moral community then becomes something to be sacrificed, even eradicated, to realize humankind’s capacities and freedom, in what Dostoevsky called the “principle of universal destruction for the sake of good final goals.”

In order to live well, then, we probably need to find or build sub-communities that can offer the meaning, feedback, and regulation that we need, because our larger societies aren’t going to fit the bill. This was arguably the original intent of the American Founders, anyway: the liberal state would provide the neutral level ground for carrying on business and trade, leaving the question of meaning up to families and religious communities. But as many 21st-century critics of liberalism have argued, the liberal vision hasn’t actually remained neutral. Postliberals such as Patrick Deneen see liberalism as, in fact, a positive worldview with its own metaphysics, which actively competes against other worldviews. In the West, this means especially Christianity.

With the vast machinery of the state and educational apparatus on its side, the liberal worldview has been pretty good at winning this competition, especially in the past decade as Christianity has collapsed across the West. So the quest for a livable human-scaled community faces an uphill struggle. To succeed, we’ll need to be armed with knowledge, wisdom, and a healthy dose of luck, or grace.

I don’t know about wisdom, luck, or grace. But I think I can help with the knowledge part.

Scientific Postliberalism

I suppose I’m reluctantly part of the postliberal movement. I say “reluctant” because I happen to appreciate many things about liberalism, particularly Star Trek. (Also freedom of speech.) I don’t especially want to see liberalism go. But I think Deneen and other critics are correct that its internal contradictions are irresolvable. This is becoming more apparent as liberalism achieves hegemony. It’s hard to ignore, for instance, that peak liberalism is simply becoming much less, well, liberal: we’re much, much less free to say what we think than we were ten years ago. Even Star Trek’s latest versions conspicuously lack the dogmatic, liberal-humanist optimism that used to cheerfully define the franchise.

Many others are much better qualified than I am to write effective cultural criticism on these problems. I’m not an historian or a (credentialed) philosopher. But my PhD and postdoc work in the evolutionary social/cognitive sciences equips me to offer what I think is a unique contribution: synthesized coverage of the ways in which the data of the human sciences simply do not support liberal (that is, rational individualist/contractual) views of human nature. Full stop. Eventually, this fact will have to be assimilated into our worldviews and, inevitably, our political and social thinking. I think that will take decades, maybe longer.

But now is the time to begin.

Faith and Science in Blogging

It’s poetic justice, then, that I’ll also be talking about faith and Christianity here. Previously, when I still put my faith in the liberal order, I felt that such things were (mostly) better confined to the personal domain. I copped to being a Christian in my blog at Patheos, but I didn’t explore it in much depth until recently. Now I see no reason not to delve into the sticky relationships between personal conviction and theoretical insight. My own experiences of participating in a religious community contributed to my research perspectives, after all, and vice-versa. Let’s not be dishonest about where our ideas come from.

A quick summary of where I’ll be going with this: I think that Christianity, when done right, offers moral community that doesn’t drag people down into dead-end ethnic or national identities. As I’ve said, we desperately need moral communities for our wellbeing, but most moral communities ultimately point right back down to the dead: they’re machines for survival, nothing else.

Contrary to popular belief, Christianity asserts the intrinsic goodness of life. This means that, if humans seem to be biologically designed to require things like rituals and symbolic meaning and cultural guardrails, this requirement isn’t something we should try to evolve out of or suppress, red-faced, but something to be gladly accepted as a necessary contributor to a fulfilled and rightly ordered life. We’re meant to have life “and have it abundantly, ” after all. But like all things that God created us to need — food, sex, self-respect, rest, Legos — moral community on its own becomes a dead weight, a trap, when we don’t put it under the right hierarchy of transcendent priorities. Hence the countless evils that moral communities, from tribes to nations (our own very much included) have visited on the world.

You don’t have to agree with me on this. I’m just letting you know where I’ll be going in this newsletter as I write from both an externally informed and a personal point of view. That is, there will be human stories here as well as analysis, the first person as well as the third. Those who are familiar with my former blog at Patheos, Science On Religion, will know a bit about how I try to bring off this balance.

I hope you’ll join me for these explorations of human nature. Even if you’re not a scientist or a Christian, there will be something here for you. In our age of uncertainty and weirdness, there’s no better time to learn about who and what we homo sapiens — social animals, technologists, ritualist, members of moral community, bearers of the image of God — really are.