Comment by pfannkuchen
12 days ago
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.
If you don’t have hegemony you just need isolation. Bans on premarital sex still work for the Amish and largely for LDS AFAIK. If the group is large enough the isolation isn’t socially harmful. Humans aren’t made to each personally interact with thousands of people anyway, from an evolutionary perspective.
I think religion just needs an update. We have found out a lot about the world since the legacy ones were authored, and actually much of that discovery occurred on a foundation of those legacy religions. We have just outgrown those particular religions. We need a new one.