Harry Potter and the Death Of Meaning
The Biggest Idea We Have Ever Had
I think it is natural for people who have experienced firsthand the allure and power of rational thought as applied to solving problems or maladies they have come across in their own lives or historically to immediately try to generalize its use cases.
Historically, I think this has taken the place of post-enlightenment reactions to "traditional" value systems, which emphasized a strict adherence to orthodoxy built over thousands of years by the conservative process of what might be referred to as the evolution of civilized culture.
Using generalization and analogous thinking has been our single most powerful tool in advancement in thinking, which should say a lot about how hard new thoughts are to come by. When something sufficiently new is discovered or formulated, the immediate next step is to see where else it can be applied.
I think... however, there have been exceedingly mixed results in this pursuit. Neitzsche and other thought-leaders of the post-rational world reacted with an instinctive push-back to the "overgeneralization" of rationality to inform decision making across the board. I'd personally argue that the same underlying mechanism which has spurred material and economic growth, when not guided with value judgements external to rational thought systems, has lead to the greatest atrocities yet to have existed in human history.
| Rational Thought Descendant | Effects |
|---|---|
| Standardized measurement systems (Le Système International d'Unités) | Easier to reason about unit systems which allowed for easier, more effective global collaboration in the scientific community |
| Scientific Revolution | Establishment of underlying epistemological axioms about what can and cannot be trusted, and the process for how to determined which things are fact and which are under dispute. Led to the explosion in human knowledge across almost all domains which we all take for granted today |
| Industrial Revolution | An economic, or engineering response to the Scientific Revolution, the application of new scientific discovery in the form of mechanization to greatly expand production and enhance material conditions for the consumer. (Effects on the producer have yet to be settled.) |
| Medicinal Enhancements | The development of antibiotics, vaccinations, and essentially all other commonly applied forms of medicinal relief which is one of the easiest ways we have today to measure general increases in the quality of human life. |
| Antitheism | A rational response to long-lived systems of thought such as religion, which has taken the form of atheism, cults of science and rationality, and more... |
| Fascism | A natural corollary to evolutionary thinking as applied to human beings. If all existence has been founded upon a fitness function, then to be the fittest is to be the most correct and worthy of living and expansion. |
| Socialism | A natural corollary to economic thinking as applied to governance. If individuals can or will not act rationally for the greater good so as to distribute resources in a correct, optimal fashion, perhaps a top-down structure of enforcement to do such resource distribution is necessary. |
| Game Theory | First principles thinking about logical social thought which has been the foundation of modern negotiation theory and first-principles design of public policy. |
| Consumerist Individualism | A cultural movement formed in the context of growing material wealth and its ability to provide individuals with more of the necessities for asocial life. |
If I wanted to enumerate all results of the enlightenment, I would need a much stronger taxonomic approach and close to all the time left in my life. I hand picked these examples partially to serve my purposes, but also as they represent some of the most important ideas to come out of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. But what I think is clear about these examples is, some of them have been undoubtedly the worst ideas/results I have ever seen, and some have been the best.
Perhaps we can boil down the enlightenment and the subsequent gold rush of generalization to other portions of life to the greatest upheaval in value systems and human capacity for change that has ever taken place, and therefore these results and their mixed nature is a natural extension of that. The enlightenment made BIG things happen, realistically, some would be good and some would be bad. But I think there are patterns in what things are good and what are bad.
Who Has Killed God
The value of a conservative, traditionalist way of life, when described to a self-proclaimed rationalist, I think is as a life informed by the greatest longitudinal study of all time. A conservative lifestyle in the pre-enlightenment world was marked by several key attributes:
- A deference to arbitrary authority only broken in the most extreme cases of incongruity with other authority or personal passion
- A thick haze of super-egotistical pressure to conform enveloping all informed decision making
- Mythically rigid social structures, only breakable by mythological feats of cleverness etc.
- Deep reverence for progenistry - those who came before are innately more informed and capable than those who would come after
This seems only a natural way to start for a set of cultures whose roots reach back into the earliest dredges and bands of humans in a dangerous environment which had neither the security nor inclination to start deliberately playing with the world to see how it ticked for fear at the worst of getting erased and at the least of wasting precious time and resources.
Humans are smart, however, and even before we "discovered" and "popularized" the idea of trying things out systematically and pushing the bounds of understanding, we were observing and explaining and sharing experience. Stories and legends of different peoples found similarities and differences in themes and shallow representation... as more people meet and the world grew more connected, these stories became large enough and common enough to be religions and myths. These stories are informed, shared experience... and a roadmap for how people have navigated the treacherous world. To a "rational" mind, it may be easy to dismiss this as the proto-thinking of scared, barbaric people... but what it actually represents is all the ideas which survived the crucible of thousands of years of application with individuals' lives and civilizations at stake.
Scientific minds operate tirelessly to expand and codify the objective workings of the world around humanity- they do not require that humanity or human experience corroborate or even be involved with the results they produce. Please do not mistake this for a criticism, indeed it is a necessary function of the scientific method to operate in this objective manner, and the results have produced no shortage of benefits for humans involved. But it should be mentioned that even the most-human focused fields of sociology and psychology perform their studies and observations in a way explicitly intended to be removed from the subject which is being studied. Inversely, traditionalist teachings are explicitly non-objective and non-descriptive. They are prescriptive, cultural tenets evolved explicitly through human perception and experience, and they do not by any necessity have any grounding in what the rationalist would refer to as "objective truth." This is not its "goal", and to measure traditionalist teachings by this metric is as absurd as it is common. It can also be folly, similarly to how one might try to ascribe intentions or smaller mechanisms of thought/abstraction taking place within chunks of LLMs, to read into cultural/historical tradition, especially religious, an explicit design or function for each portion. I think it is valuable, especially in the case of historical context regarding the creation of a certain ritual, to criticize the reason for the rules' existence, but the older the tradition, the more often ideas come from cultural negotiations between groups of people over vast timelines.
So then, what would be the point of this distinction? I think enlightenment thinking, or rationality, has its design and uses. The establishment and enhancement of an objective truth about the shape of the universe is exquisitely powerful in allowing us to operate within it... but it does not serve as a solution to the second portion of our problem, what to aim for within that operation. This then, is where we must look to traditional values with scrutiny and negotiate which lessons could apply to us and which are worth disregarding.
The inventions of rationalists which are meant to replace God in my estimation as the informer / driver for our existence have failed to do so... and this can be measured in the crises of humanity and meaning which have been left in their wake. The refinement of humanity as proposed by fascists was a non-starter and rife with deep evil. A vague, all-important general good of the public as proposed by socialists may be better, but lacks definition enough to read as grounds to forcibly sterilize, kill, and indoctrinate. Liberalism, I would argue, has far better alignment than the other two, and still leaves individuals involved to find some means by which to justify their own existences - hedonistic lifestyles coupled with consumerist spins, spiritualist bends capturing aesthetics of much older religious practices, nihilistic interpretations... often resulting in immense tragedy, and more. There is a hole that God... or some old notion like God used to fill which is increasingly apparently not properly fillable by the fruits of rationality. I strongly suspect there is no answer sufficient to replace Him to be derived from the inspection of the objective truths in the larger world.
Traditionalism - Why To Be
A man who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You are a finite being.
You have desires which are arbitrary in size, abstraction, and complexity.
The universe is infinite and serves these desires or buffets your attempts to satiate them seemingly arbitrarily and remorselessly.
There are always desires you have which will not be met, and you are conscious of this.
Therein lies the reason for your suffering.
Rationality is a tool by which we can:
- Drastically expand our finite capacity to fulfill desire
- Alter our desires and shape our aspects of our consciousness to better fit within our finite capacity
- Deduce that all existence is suffering, that suffering is bad, and therefore existence should be expunged
- And more
But it does not fully extinguish the suffering. It cannot. And it does not justify your existence despite the suffering. It cannot.
Our ancestors, which were far more acquainted with the omnipresence of suffering than I hope I ever will be, found it fitting to have children, and to amass more capabilities to support the lives of these children, and to try despite their knowledge of their infallibility, to make a better world for themselves and their progeny. I believe their most lasting legacy, besides our lives themselves, is their roadmap by which to live our lives in meaningful ways that justify our suffering.
I am not prescriptive in how their teachings should be interpreted, though I feel they should not thrown out without second thought.
I think it is extremely helpful, and therefore true in perhaps the most valuable sense of the word, to assume that we are endowed by our Creator with agency to preside over His creation how we see fit to best serve the responsibility he has endowed us with to be Good.
That means to truly love one another, and our children. It means to harmonize with nature without being consumed by it. It means to conquer the forces of the universe without losing respect for them. And it means to not foresake our humanity and our divine purpose for ideas we have invented about how we best fit into the world's equations so we aren't reduced to units of capital, sexual puppets, blades of grass, or ash and bones.
I do not claim that I am intelligent enough to prove, from first principles, why we are not here as fleshy puppets fit to bootstrap greater intelligence, or why we should be good to each other even if it means others might not be good to us, but I have millennia of greater lived experience to back me up at least, and, instead of challenging others to finally prove once and for all, that they can rationally create purpose for us as humans without diminishing our experiences and suffering or causing more than they prevent... I challenge people to embrace a balance in their lives... to challenge their modes of rationalist thinking and allow for a meaningful why to aim and deploy their ever-expanding rationalist how.