Prologue: In Which I Explain Why This is a Long and Abstract Post
I was having thoughts the other day, and decided to lay some of them out. I am fully aware that more intelligent and educated people have elucidated the below into much more coherent and in-depth philosophies. However, these thoughts, though incomplete, seem to be largely born out by observation about what’s happening. Also, I was too lazy to flesh this out into the 5 or 6 posts that would somewhat adequately address the individual points.
Part I: In which we examine the function of Religion and Government
Why does religion exist? There have been many attempts at categorizing the causes of religion as a cultural phenomenon (important to note here, apart from any actual divine revelation per your particular tradition). Most of these efforts focus on cultural responses to environmental stimuli–e.g. explanations for the unknown, a transmission of behaviors that enable the well-being of the group, etc. Some go so far as to call faith a delusion, and others maintain that organized religion is simply a way to pacify the hoi polloi.
Religion, though, has some important characteristics. In general, a religion sets up a belief system that then dictates norms and values and therefore actions for a group of people. This might be referred to as culture, and is generally a response to a set of common conditions that a group of people shared. While religions vary quite a bit in the particulars, this is generally true, and likely evolved as a method of social organization descended from a social ape template.
What else does this?
The state has this effect. You can dig back through social contract theory and all sorts of histories of governance, but generally the state dictates norms and values and therefore actions for a group of people.
To be sure, the social contracts vary a bit, and the coercion methods can differ, although if you look at the Inquisition or Crusades or any other instance where religion has become heavily conflated with governance, the two become virtually indistinguishable.
Since both of these types of entities enforce order, they can be considered essentially two sides of the same coin–different methods of organization and social coherence.
The efficacy of each is predicated on the peoples’ shared set of assumptions, although government/the state has ready access to force to ensure compliance for subversives. Religions often enforce conformity through less blunt methods.
So, if the people shares a common set of cultural assumptions, then a state that is in accord with those assumptions will function well, and a religion that espouses those cultural assumptions will thrive. If there is misalignment, then one or the other (or both) will cause discontent and social strife.
Likewise, if the government and dominant religions are at odds, there will be social strife and conflict between the two because the value systems will be at odds, and the one organizational method will threaten the other with loss of influence. For example, Christianity places heavy weight on the individual for acting correctly to arrive at salvation, and hence is well suited to capitalistic regimes, but is incompatible with a communitarian system such as Communism that demands subjugation of the individual to another higher power–the state. It’s no coincidence that the two are ever at odds.
But in general, religions effect social order through general acceptance of a cultural code that dictates morals, virtues, and actions. Governments and States effect order through laws and coercion. There may be overlap, but if either is misaligned with most of the people, then disorder or loss of influence results.
Part II: In which we examine what happens when one or other other loses importance
Switching gears for a moment, people such as Charles Murray have written about the loss of religiosity in the US, and how it’s rending the social fabric of the nation. Others have written about how welfare and social programs are destroying America’s cultural makeup. Is this true?
Probably. However, there are a cause-and-effect issues to address. Is government hastening the decline of American values, or have those values been abdicated by the other great cultural organizing force (i.e. religion), and government is simply filling in the vacuum?
In the 1930s, government instituted social security. This coincided with (and in fact, followed slightly) a transportation revolution that was making intergenerational family and community support radically different.
In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Acts were passed, following a cultural shift towards desegregation. The government was formalizing a change in social attitudes after the fact.
Also in the 1970s, as the science pushed to decouple sex and procreation and the nuclear family began its disintegration, the government passed major welfare initiatives.
Are these all instances of government’s forcible intrusion into private lives, or are they examples of the government filling a vacuum that the religiously-forged cultural bonds of Americans were not effective in? Is the government expansion a cause, or an effect?
Now, granted, the government typically does a crappy job of fulfilling the functions that individuals and communities used to do on their own, simply by virtue of being a large bureaucracy with a generic moral system.
However, the expansion of the state has arguably been a response to a lack of civic-mindedness of the people, brought about by increased diversity (diversity = friction, hence fewer shared values, hence less adherence to a moral and behavioral code). If that’s the case, then lamentations of conservatives and libertarians need to be directed at the disintegration of the shared value system instead of the proxied reactions of the people through the government.
Part III: In which Historical Inevitability Makes a Cameo
Hari Seldon in the Foundation Trilogy noted that history was essentially a scientific field and that it could be predicted probabilistically. Karl Marx posited a certain historical inevitability that made particular milestones unavoidable.
I wonder whether that’s at least partially true. Our own modern philosophers, for instance in discourse on the misandry bubble, have couched ideas in terms of similar diagnoses and inevitability. The technological revolution in birth control, for instance, couldn’t be bottled up, and even though its social consequences were foreseen. This means that either through inevitability or selfish shortsightedness (or both), humanity lurches along predictable paths that are essentially certain to happen.
If so, then I also wonder whether the apparent encroachment on social organization by the state is avoidable. With the increasing heterogeneity of society (specifically US society), can any shared moral code be effective, or is coercion by a central authority the inevitable way, based on human nature, to organize? Is the expanding police state a simple consequence of who we are? Granted, omnipresent armed drones and logging of all communications are certainly unsettling, but if George Orwell saw this so easily so long ago, then is avoiding it even an option?
The Hayekian in me knows that the more loosely a government’s powers are defined, the more common agreement can be found with which to enforce them. But as shared assumptions disintegrate, then government inserts itself more and more into more and more detailed daily affairs because the basic governing principles necessary to a well-functioning society simply aren’t agreed upon any more. This would suggest that a totalitarian state is in progress and is largely unavoidable the more that religion and other cultural relics become disregarded.
However, there’s some hope. As diversity increases, so, paradoxically, does homogeneity. To go a bit deeper: If the country were quite culturally cloistered, then local government would be highly effective. Shared values would dominate at a low level. As diversity increases on a local level, which it largely has, then those values and assumptions become diluted. At a sufficient level of diversity, however–say a high level of mix–then society effectively becomes homogeneous again, and shared assumptions can predominate, causing the need for central coercive government to recede.
The only issue with this is that governments are loathe to give up power, meaning that there will be a struggle again for liberty as the US becomes again more culturally homogeneous, and what form that takes I can’t speculate on.
Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints 