Comment by pfannkuchen
13 days ago
I don’t understand why things like social media are meant to be regulated by the government.
Isn’t religion where we culturally put “not doing things that are bad for you”? And everyone is allowed to have a different version of that?
Maybe instead of regulating social media, we should be looking at where the teeth of religion went even in our separation of church and state society. If everyone thinks their kids shouldn’t do something, enforcing that sounds like exactly what purpose religion is practically useful for.
Well, the more scientific and pluralistic our society becomes the more religion is necessarily sapped of its ability to compel behavior. If you lived in 13th Century France the Catholic Church was a total cultural force and thus could regulate behavior, but the very act of writing freedom of religion into law communicates a certain idea about religion: its so unimportant that you can have whatever form of religion you want.
In any case, one ought to distinguish between "You shouldn't do things which are bad for you," and "You shouldn't do things you know are bad for others." Especially, "Giant corporations with ambiguous structures of responsibility shouldn't be allowed to do things which are bad for others."
13th century France is irrelevant because it was, religiously speaking, a different style of society from America since its founding.
In the past, America, unlike 13th century France, allowed multiple parallel religions who each enforced their own moral codes on top of the secular law using behavioral manipulation tactics including shame.
This seems to have worked up until quite recently. In the early 1900s religion was still massively influential in America. Your view on what freedom of religion means practically is a ret con, because people took it seriously up until universal mass secular schooling and electronic media.
I’m not saying we should return to Jesus or whatever, I’m just saying that there is a receptiveness in the human brain to having behavior enforced in a completely non-violent way where the behavior code is entered into voluntarily and can be abandoned non-violently as well, and hmm wonder if it makes sense to leverage that to solve problems that we are currently leaning for the levers of violence to fix (in the sense that state power enforcement is fundamentally rooted in violence, ie the threat of forced confinement at gunpoint).
On you vs others, I don’t have in mind some kind of religiously enforced corporate regulations, that’s obviously ridiculous. I’m referring to religiously enforced individual abstinence from social media, similar to religiously enforced abstinence from alcohol, or from casual sex, etc, all because they are considered harmful (by the people in the religion) to you, not (primarily) to others. If the abstinence was enforced socially the same way monogamy was in the early 1900s (yes, I know there were some exceptions, blah blah blah, it was basically ironclad relative to today), the social media companies would wither and blow away.
I think that unless we roll back to hegemonic religious values you cannot enforce anything with them. People need to feel an overwhelming social pressure for social pressure to work. As you say, now that things are secularized, I just don't see it happening. That is why the ban on premarital sex doesn't even work within religious communities today: people can see there are other options and (implicitly) they can see that their community is neither inescapable or always right.
I like this state of affairs, frankly, and I genuinely want to see religion swept into the dustbin of history, so I don't find the idea of relying on it to prevent bad outcomes particularly appealing. Maybe a nice secular set of ideas like stoicism could work. I have no objection to the idea of character formation, values, individual responsibility. But I just have no taste at all for enforcing those things with imaginary stories. In fact, its hardly individual character if the behavior is actually socially enforced.
People should not need to be moral paragons, however, to live a good life. If there are systems which are exploiting ordinary human cognitive biases to make profit the state can and should step in.
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> If everyone thinks their kids shouldn’t do something, enforcing that sounds like exactly what purpose religion is practically useful for.
Alternatively, being raised well by their parents and the Community around them.
Religion is not a needed component of that.
Without an explicit religion, the moral code of the group becomes some fuzzy, lowest common denominator Frankenstein.
Note that I’m not advocating for existing religions, just wondering about the use of religion as a tool (since it is baked into our legal code with an ability to use it for exactly this kind of thing).
> Without an explicit religion, the moral code of the group becomes some fuzzy, lowest common denominator Frankenstein.
Hadn't really thought of it that way, and at least the "lowest common denominator" bit doesn't sound correct to me. What makes you think of it that way?
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The Spanish Inquisition has entered the chat.
Are you serious? People don't need religion to be moral. If what I see from religion these days is any indicator, I am extremely happy we kept our kids far far far away from it. From all of it. I will concede that not all religion is bad, but quite a lot of it is grift at best and cleverly disguised totalitarianism at worst. Many religious figures have absolutely no problem talking publicly about their "diety-given" right to dominate and control the lives of others for their own personal gain. I don't see how that fits inside any accepted definition of morality.
I am not referring to existing established religions, I am just talking about the construct of religion in general. We are allowed to invent new ones, you know.