Irrational optimism works, but Spandrell’s not very good at it, so he has been thinking about how to generate it exogenously:
The main issue people ask is that you can’t just make up a new religion. That’s a good point. It’s also a bummer, given that my shtick for 5 years has been that We Need a New Religion (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). But once you understand what religion is about, what it is for, it’s obvious that you can’t just make one up from thin air. Any coordination mechanism for groups, any set of ideas to generate loyalty is more likely to work if it feeds upon previous ideas which are out there, preferably for a long time. If only to make people not feel inadequate about their past ideological stances. If you want Christians to join your group you should make them feel good about having been a Christian; at least parts of it. Ever read the Quran? The writer was very, very familiar with Christianity and Judaism. Christianity was of course also based on Judaism. And Judaism on ages old tribal traditions of the Hebrew tribes. Hardly any religion has ever been produced ex-nihilo. Japan tried to make a religion out of the (purported) tribal traditions of the Japanese people but they just couldn’t beat up centuries of Buddhist faith.
It follows that the solution would be to come up with a slightly modified version of Christianity. It would make it easier to get our natural allies on the right side of the Christian community to join the institution of a reactionary society. The problem is, as many correctly argue on the comments at Jim’s, that Christianity is a leftist cult. The teachings of Jesus are pure and simple leftist agitation. The rich go to hell. The poor will inherit the earth. Prostitutes are as noble as any of you. If some white guy wrote a Medium long-form post talking on his experiences touching and healing lepers we would all call him a holier-than-thou virtue signaller.
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What made Christianity so successful?
Well first of all Christianity wasn’t successful everywhere. It certainly was in Europe. But not in the Middle East. Islam surely beat it there. And the few Christian communities that remained since antiquity until the 2003 Iraq War weren’t anything to call home about.
It seems to me that Christianity as a mildly leftist, i.e. socialist and feminist cult, it had an important role to play in the ancient and medieval world. Especially the medieval world, where barbarians roamed Europe at will. The world of a barbarian is the complete opposite of a modern one. Barbarians are manly. Very much so. There’s this Jack Donovan guy pulling a Yukio Mishima and translating his gayness into poetry about how cool the barbarian Way of Man is, how awesome are the men it produces. Which it is. We all love Conan. It’s cool. It looks like tons of fun.
It’s still messed up in many ways. In modern parlance, the barbarian world is a world of toxic masculinity. It’s a world where men do whatever the hell they want. In my parlance, it’s a world of bro signalling spirals. Which is a lot of fun for men. But it produces pretty crappy societies. It’s stupidly violent. It despises menial, boring work. It despises family life for the pursuit of vainglory and pussy. It’s nasty, brutish and short. That’s what you get when men do what their feel like.
In that kind of world, having Christian institutions trying to get men to stop hunting for a while and just fucking till the land and feeding their children, is actually a pretty good idea. Shaming a man to sticking with his ugly and nagging wife even though she’s a total bitch is a pretty good idea if you want children to survive and food surplus to get grown. Getting elite men to not shoot each other over stupid slights, to not drink too much and moderate their appetites, to don’t spend their inheritance in women and parties… was pretty much hopeless for the most part. But to the extent it succeeded it had a civilizing effect.
So to speak in modern terms, if you have a society which is, due to its historical background or its technological level, naturally shifted to the right, having a pole of lefty ideas produces a pretty healthy balance, one where men get a bit of what they want, women get a bit of what they want, and we’re all better off thanks to it.
That’s obviously not what we got today. The situation in 2016 is one where feminism is the law of the land, men doing what men do by nature (cf. Trump) is illegal and strictly punished, and every single institution with some power just pushes the same leftist ideas. Women are better, open borders is good, everybody has the right to organize and fight for their selfish interests except white men. In this circumstances if we want to restore some balance, if we want civilization to work, we need the complete opposite of what Christianity was. We need a big fat magnet of rightist ideas, a rightist pole to exert the same influence on our feminized society that Christianity had on the manly society of the Middle Ages.
It seems to me that Christianity can’t possibly be that. What could be? Your guess is as good as mine. If you’ve been reading this blog you probably know one answer. But again I like it as little as you do. For all purposes I’m still for a New Religion.
I recall back in the early “80s someone suggested that nuclear waste sites be constructed along the lines of a temple, guarded by a quasi priesthood, and be infused with taboos about entering, etc.; the premise being that a religion-infused institution would last longer than the scientific society that created the toxic waste. The author took some heat for this idea and its suggestion that science couldn’t hold out against religion, but he was on to something: religion uber alles.
This is the challenge of the Yucca Mountain waste site. Would giant skulls with radiation symbols emblazoned on them just attract the teenagers of the 25th century?
The whole challenge, while interesting, may be totally unnecessary, because there is no such thing as nuclear waste.
Norse or Greek religion. Really.