On Decline, or The Rationalist’s Conundrum

 (Cross-posted at Medium)

We are starting a period of descent from the exalted heights of peak Western Civilization. Andrew Potter’s On Declinegives a rationalist’s perspective on civilization and decline with a conflicted attitude toward the West’s great civilizing force, Christianity. He wants the kind of civilization made possible only by Christianity, but without the religion itself. I call this conflict the Rationalist’s Conundrum. Voltaire recognized the problem. It’s what animated Nietzsche’s madman, and what made one of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov.

I picked up a copy of Andrew Potter’s book because the title was catchy and a feeling of decline is sort of in the air around us. As Roger Scruton quipped in in Culture Counts (2007), “Announcing its own demise has been … an enduring mark of Western civilization.” Putting aside Spengler, Toynbee, Carrol Quigley, Mancur Olson, and many others, the most recent conversation on decline was kicked off by Tyler Cowen in 2011 with The Great Stagnation, an attempt to concretize this sentiment of 21st century decline and to explain the truth behind it. Of late Cowen has been claiming to be more optimistic, while still sending mixed messages. Ross Douthat added another important take on the issue, The Decadent Society (2020). The word decadent gets us closer to the full picture of decay as a symptom of our own success. The word decadence also opens up a more subjective — almost spiritual or metaphysical — dimension to the analysis. But of course Douthat is a journalist, not an Old Testament prophet (a role in which Toynbee would have excelled), and he pulls his moral punches accordingly. On Decline is an interesting but flawed follow up on the theme that doesn’t live up to the previous two. Potter sees the problem, but he struggles to clearly diagnose the causes and his anti-religious bias gets him tied in knots. The best part of the book is in his final two or three paragraphs in which he lays out his predictions of the future:

“How will things look for our children a hundred years or so from now? The most likely scenario is that the future will follow the trajectory of the relatively recent past. Ongoing economic stagnation will continue to drive the zero-sum thinking that will amplify our polarized and identity-driven politics, which will in turn fuel a further decline in trust in liberal democracy. In social and cultural spheres, we’ll find it increasingly hard to carve out a space for the exercise of System 2-style reasoning as the casino-fication of our physical and informational architecture continues apace. This will make it ever more difficult to resolve the myriad collective action problems that bedevil our domestic and international institutions. A steadily declining population means it will be hard to find the money, the energy, and the risk-taking we need to fix these problems.”

Potter is a full-blooded rationalist. He sees irrationality as a symptom and cause of decline, making it harder to get people past their tribal biases to solve collective action problems together. Part of the solution in his concluding chapter is to further accelerate the trend of secularism to combat irrationality. Tongue-on-cheek, perhaps, but astonishingly nonetheless, Potter references the worst instincts of the French Revolution as an example for us today: “When will we be truly free? Only when, in a phrase incorrectly attributed to Diderot, we have strangled the last king with the entrails of the last priest.”

But as Potter continues discussing civilization and religion, he runs into the Rationalist’s Conundrum. He mentions that internalized religious morality leads people to “police themselves.” “Any attempt at understanding why these useful delusions persist in the present day must take into account the way they helped our ancestors with social cohesion and stability. That is, they helped create the conditions necessary for beneficial collective action.” So according to Potter, our civilization owes its success to religion; but now as religion is in decline and our civilization is following suit, the solution is to double down on secularism?

Potter’s confusion starts earlier in Chapter 1, as he attempts to describe in general what is civilization, which we are trying to save:

“The problem is, tribalism doesn’t scale well. Once you get a society of a certain size, informal enforcement mechanisms and external sanctions lose their effectiveness. The path out of barbarism is what we call civilization. The transition to civilization has a number of distinct features, including the growing division of economic labour, the emergence of hierarchy, the stratification of society into social classes, the weakening of familial or tribal ties, and the replacement of force and moral pressure with bureaucracy, public institutions, and the rule of law.”

He describes the characteristic features of civilization as including the “weakening of familial or tribal ties” and “the replacement of force … with … the rule of law.” This makes it clear that what he is actually describing is Western Civilization specifically, not civilization in general. As Joseph Henrich described in detail in The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), in every civilization but the West tribal dynamics still run strong and social trust outside of the tribe is low. The rule of law is a feature of Western liberalism, but plenty of civilizations outside the West have been ruled by arbitrary might. So when Potter talks of religion as helping to form civilization, he is speaking of Western Civilization specifically, and the Christian religion, though he doesn’t admit it.

As fellow rationalist Voltaire put it, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” Nietzsche’s madman raved:

“Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him — -you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

Though not Christians themselves, it might not be surprising to Nietzsche and Voltaire that civilization is starting to decline toward tribalism and chaos as Christianity is replaced by various forms of secularism. Potter has no answer to Nietzsche’s madman, no solution the the Rationalist’s Conundrum but to feebly and unconvincingly suggest that maybe the conditions that made religion useful in the past no longer apply in the modern world.

How should a rationalist react to the conflict between the reality of the positive outcomes of Christianity in the West and the apparent irrationality of Christian belief? How should we approach the Rationalist’s Conundrum? Should we reject or soften the demands of rationality to allow for supernatural beliefs? Is it actually optimally rational to be somewhat irrational? Do we, like Potter, suppose that past gains from Christianity were temporary, but in the future Christianity can only be a hindrance to progress? Do we seek like Robespierre a secular religion to bring people together, but devoid of any supernatural claims? Do we reject the first premise and claim that we would actually be better off without a history of Christianity? Or do we reject the second premise and decide that Christian truth claims might actually be rational, historical and factual? (That’s where I stand.) Or, like Ivan Karamazov and the world around us, we might simply and directly go stark raving mad.