Peter Taylor only half-jokingly suggests that we need yet another space alien cult, because it would be a less harmful outlet for people’s sanctimonious instincts. He offers up an enumerated list of principles; I’ll skip ahead a bit:
7. There is a high degree of substitutability between churches and other organizations, especially political ones. For purposes of understanding the human condition, the supernatural beliefs that are normally associated with religion are not especially important. Coalitional psychology is essentially the same whether we observe it in the form of religion, politics, sports fandom, computer operating system advocacy, or any other social or intellectual fashion, pseudo- or quasi-religion, or within professional societies. As Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it, “Every cause wants to be a cult” (followup). For a classic discussion of the substitutability between religion and politics, see Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.Kurt Vonnegut coined the word, “granfalloon,” in the novel, Cat’s Cradle, to capture the similarity among the manifestations of coalitional psychology across religious, political, and other kinds of organizations. Wikipedia states, “The most common granfalloons are associations and societies based on a shared but ultimately fabricated premise.” Frank’s Paradox reinforces Steven Pinker’s “baloney generator” in making it almost impossible to get useful information about people’s motivations. However, Vonnegut erred in defining a granfalloon as a “proud but meaningless” organization. Pride is the meaning. They are meaningful precisely because they are proud.
As Bryan Caplan wrote in The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,
Political/economic ideology is the religion of modernity.Usually, when an atheist compares politics to religion, what he means is that someone else’s political views resemble a fanatical cult, as opposed to his own, which are perfectly rational. The most obvious error here is usually a lack of introspection, but I want to make a more subtle point: it’s wrong to equate religion with fanaticism. Transubstantiation is a religious doctrine. If I believe in transubstantiation, but I am not a fanatic about it, that doesn’t mean that my version of transubstantiation is scientific. It is still a religious doctrine. Eric Hoffer argued that political fanaticism resembles religious fanaticism, but Caplan’s point is broader. Political moderates also behave like religious moderates.
8. When it becomes too embarrassing for people to engage in a particular kind of moral fraud, they will usually substitute a different kind of moral fraud rather than give up their feelings of moral superiority. Thus, to a first approximation, we have a principle of “Conservation of Irrationality“:
(1) much of the irrational behavior associated with religion is related to people having a craving for ego justification,(2) changing a person’s theological beliefs has little effect on his tendency to crave ego justification, and
(3) politics is the continuation of religion by other eans.
Corollary 1: At least one of my most cherished beliefs is utter nonsense.
Corollary 2: I won’t be able to figure out which of my cherished beliefs is wrong until after I have replaced it with another, roughly equally wrong belief.
Corollary 3: Any church that tries to be welcoming to atheists, such as most UU churches, will tend to be overrun with political kooks unless they find another way for their members to get ego justification that doesn’t involve supernatural beliefs.
9. Organizations that engage in high levels of moral fraud tend to take on much of the flavor of a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. (See Tooby and Cosmedes on Stephen Jay Gould or Lee Harris on Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.) You need “orcs” (scapegoats or boogiemen) and suspension of disbelief (a “dungeonmaster” who can paint a vivid verbal picture of an “orc”). A key difference is that D&D players have a wide selection of boogiemen (the Advanced D&D Monster Manual) and tend to have a relaxed attitude toward their orcs-du-jour. Politico-religious zealots tend to hold their scapegoats in a death-grip. See John McCarthy’s “Ideological Tribalism” points 7, 8, and 9 and his comments about organizational “hysteresis.”
Scapegoats are important. To play this game, you have to have a utopian (romantic) eschatology and a path to get there, with a removable roadblock. Scapegoats or boogiemen give you a removable roadblock.
I will also tend to have an acrimonious relationship with anyone whose narrative conflicts sharply with mine.
10. Organizations that engage in high levels of moral fraud tend to embrace “romantic” as opposed to “classical” views of human nature (see McCarthy). Thomas Sowell describes these in A Conflict of Visions respectively as “unconstrained” and “constrained” views, and elsewhere as “utopian” and “tragic” views.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn takes the classical view:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?J. R. R. Tolkien’s elf, Elrond, takes a classical view of human nature with the statement, “Men are weak,” but the overall plot of The Lord of the Rings illustrates the romantic myth: Evil is largely external to human nature in the form of Sauron and his Ring, but some day soon, Frodo is going to throw the Ring into Mt. Doom, and human society will be radically transformed.
The romantic view allows its holder a greater sense of moral superiority than does the classical view.
11. Political movements tend to get in trouble by having too strong a grip on too small and simple a set of scapegoats. For some examples, see “The Care and Feeding of Scapegoats.” To maximize ones feelings of moral superiority, one needs to avoid moral complexity. (Sophistication and nuance are defensive tools for when one’s allies have been caught misbehaving.) But it’s impossible to diagnose a problem correctly if the actual cause is not a member of the approved boogieman list, and one is committed to only blaming members of the approved list (having “ideological blinders” or what Eric Raymond called “historical baggage“).
Space aliens make excellent scapegoats.