Article 63: the binding principle in religiosity
Thoughts prompted by: The religious cult of climate catastrophism by Andrew Montford, July 13 2023 published in the Conservative Woman, a website which offers up good quality right-leaning political opinion pieces based in U.K.
First, the review – the whole of it since it is rather short. Trying to find one paragraph didn’t cut the mustard:
“I HAVE been working in climate and energy for nearly 15 years, and it’s fair to say that it’s not often I find something that makes me radically change the way I look at the domain. But a new book, by Andy A West, has done just that.
The Grip of Culture makes the case that climate catastrophism is cultural – akin to religion or one of the extreme political movements that have assailed the world from time to time. This is not an entirely new idea; lots of people have alluded to the possibility that a religion has formed around the belief that we are facing a weather wipeout. You can certainly see lots of behaviour among climate zealots that is identical to that of zealots from other, older religious systems. So opponents are demonised, and waverers are threatened with expulsion to keep them on the straight and narrow. They have a hallowed text that few have tried to read, and fewer can understand. There are prophets and prophetesses, and a dizzying and ever-changing narrative of fear and redemption which is impossible to escape.
Circumstantially then, climate catastrophism looks exactly like a religion. Intriguingly though, West argues that he can prove the point, and at the heart of the book is a set of measurements of public attitudes to global warming from around the world. At first these seem very strange – inexplicable even – with national publics apparently simultaneously greatly concerned by climate change and not at all keen to do anything about it. Bizarrely, the more religious a country is, the more worried the populace is about the issue, and the less inclined to prioritise addressing it.
West shows that these apparently schizophrenic attitudes can be explained as the interaction between traditional religion and a new faith of climate catastrophism. The measurement chapters are really rather remarkable, with extraordinarily strong statistical relationships emerging between national religiosity and climate change attitudes: correlations where questions invite virtue signalling responses (‘How worried are you about climate change’) and equally strong anti-correlations when hard reality gets involved (‘How much are you willing to spend each week to reduce climate change’). Opinion polling on the subject will never be the same again.
It’s deliciously counterintuitive, and very powerful. For example, West shows that you can use the results to predict real-world phenomena such as the spread of renewables across different nations. Remarkably, he gets a better result from using religiosity as a predictor than, say, GDP, political inclination. And if you think sunshine hours should be a great predictor of solar power usage, think again; not only is religiosity far better, but absurdly there turns out to be a much stronger commitment to solar in cloudy (European) nations than in sunny ones!
This is a lot of fun, but there is an extremely serious message to the book. Religions – cultures, that is – are powerful influences on humanity. They bind societies together, and enable us to work towards a common goal. In this way they have been central to the rise of every great civilisation. But they also function subconsciously, and therefore without any reference to rational thought. It’s as though the culture has a mind of its own. So the common goals that end up being pursued are as often self-destructive as they are beneficial. The book outlines appalling stories of societies which have been torn apart and even ruined themselves in this way.
We are therefore warned. If we are truly in the grip of a new culture, then we need to be very worried about where it is taking us, because it could be to the brink of disaster and beyond.”
Now first, I want to stress that although I do have an opinion about the climate change issue that is not the subject of this piece. What interests me about the above and prompted this Article are the remarks about religiosity which have been emboldened. I suppose I could have just included that paragraph but have included it all so as to illustrate how many of the somewhat esoteric ideas contemplated on this blog relate to real-world dynamics even if this is not always readily apparent.
The word ‘religion’ comes from ‘ligare’ which means ‘to bind.’ That which binds people together. Usually, we put the cart before the horse; we tend to describe religions as deriving from their doctrine, that first there is a doctrine and then there are people who gradually coalesce around that doctrine which in turn gradually creates what can later be called a religion. This is probably true as far as the institutional chronology is concerned, but there is a step missed in this description, namely the fundamental tendency, or need, that we humans have to bind together. It has been said that humans are social animals; many animals are socially bound – packs of wolves, flocks of birds, hives of insects, schools of fishes whose ability to move or coordinate together as one borders on the miraculous. (And which bona fide life scientists should study in more depth as a way of unravelling the mind-body problems which plague modern materialist science – but that’s an issue for another day.)
This innate tendency to bind together precludes any particular religious organization or doctrine. So the doctrine per se doesn’t bind us though it provides a welcome means to fulfilling our desire to share a sense of belonging, of being bound together. Organized religions take that inclination and then manipulate it skillfully and deliberately. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though no doubt as with everything else there are degrees of quality, from outright terrible to gloriously sublime. This is true of cooking; of clothing; of cultures; of religions. Yin and Yang as always. ‘Nuff said.
In Chinese Medical Qigong theory there are many different Chis (or Qis). Chi is perhaps equivalent to prana in Sanskrit and is some sort of energetic quality comprising both physical and mental properties. It flows through twelve major meridians; it is exhibited in the way trees shape and manifest; it is in the breezes moving their leaves; there is the chi of sun, of moon, of the garden, of earth, of the heart, of the liver, of blood, of the eyes, of speech, of mountains, of rivers, of cities, of traffic circulation. You name it, there is a chi aspect to it as long as it is part of our shared experiential continuum. One of the chis is called ‘Dzong Chi,’ or ‘Group Chi.’ If you have ever been to a large stadium filled with over fifty thousand people then you feel the powerful ‘electric’ atmosphere it generates. That is Dzong Chi. Scientists may not be able to measure it but all humans can feel it. And at some point, since it is focused on the same object, be it a ball or a player or a cheer that goes up, a sense of group solidarity quickly develops and builds – and also can be steered, manipulated.
This group dynamic is also found in any religion. One doesn’t necessarily have to be in the same stadium since we have other ways in urban societies, especially since the advent of long-distance communication, to feel connected. People commenting anonymously on the same internet forum can develop a sense of being bound together. It may not be as consistent and compelling as members of a church feel who get together every Sunday and learn to speak in tongues or tame snakes or simply contemplate various scriptures soberly and sincerely, but it’s the same binding dynamic.
So that is the point of this Article, simply to point out that as humans we have an innate need or tendency to bind together. This is both a strength and a weakness, so here too – as with everything – there is a yin-yang dynamic. The binding can help us act together in ways which enlighten and uplift us all or it can precipitate our falling into worse states. The group energy creates heightened power and momentum but where it leads is a function of leadership principle within that group.
For that is another element. There is always some sort of leadership principle in any group and again, like anything, there are degrees of quality from very good to very bad. The cheer that goes up in a football stadium serves as a temporary leadership principle as our ears pick up on its arising, our voices join in, and then we get to the end of what is usually a familiar refrain (like Oy Yay, oy yay oy yay oy yay.....) and it’s over, and with it the short-term leadership principle of that particular chant disappears back into the void from whence it came.
But let us say that same crowd gets outraged by a bad call; and then one group of fans starts bad-mouthing another; and then blows are exchanged; and then a small riot ensues; then the police step in; and some attack the police; and then the police shoot someone or bludgeon them apparently to death; and then there is a far larger riot and the whole stadium gets trashed and the army called in and many more die on all sides. In all these phases the group energy acts like a wind or wave picking up strength, purpose and collective emotion – usually a sense of wildness combined with fury-fuelled violence – and all within the group are swept up in this and find themselves impelled to participate seemingly having no choice but to be carried along by this disastrous tsunami of Group Chi.
That would be an example of poor leadership principle in action in the Group Chi context. It is not articulated, not planned, not well managed, rather spontaneous, emotional, driven by events, haphazard, dangerous, fuelled by raw emotion laced with aggression and, ultimately, harmful. The binding factor so enjoyable at first has become, absent good leadership, a one-way ticket to Hell. I guess from this we could also say that the purpose of a bona fide religion is to harness Group Chi into good and virtuous outcomes for all involved.
The piece above reviews a book which purports to demonstrate, with polls and other analysis which have not read, that they can predict much better how a society will vote to adopt certain (in this case climate-related) policies based on its religiosity quotient. If a society evidences what can be called a religious style of binding (i.e. they think more or less together which means they share the same or similar beliefs) then accurate predictions about which policies they favor can be made. One common sense deduction from this phenomenon – and which the author was emphasizing and the reviewer finds fascinating - is that the climate issue comes down to belief much more than it does to science. Any one who has spent any time delving into the topic quickly learns that far from being a ‘97% consensus settled’ affair, in fact there are many different opinions out there well supported by science, such as it is, because the topic is so vast and with so many ever-changing variables from micro to macro cosmic, that there is not nor can there ever be any such thing as a settled scientific conclusion about it. Yes, some people are claiming that and if they have the loudest megaphone many are inclined to believe them, but that involves megaphonics not science. The fact is that most of us are left just picking what we think is the most reasonable opinion mainly based on where we get our information. But this is where the twist comes in: in a religiosity-rich group, we will tend to think with the herd more than societies who are less religiosity-prone.
Those whose work it is to manipulate public opinion are presumably well versed in this dynamic and moreover skilled in manipulating outcomes. But in order to be best able to do so, presumably they also develop ways of presenting issues such that they elicit group-binding behaviors. Once such group mentality or group identity has been established, it then becomes easy to lead people in any desired group direction. And the larger and more well-bound together the group is, the more susceptible it is to leadership - and again, some good, some bad.
A bit of a pickle.....
One last thought: again, the binding quotient in religion is not caused by the religion itself, rather our tendency to want to be bound together in some sort of societal solidarity. On the inner level, this binding principle comes from the fact that we all come from the same mother source and we all yearn to return to that same source, which though it may not be apparent to us as such is nevertheless ever-present. This creates kinship from shared primordial, existential resonance. Of course the notion of a One God in theistic religions relates directly with this principle in the sense that each and every one of us individuals is equally a part of the same overall One, the same continuum, the same God-ness. So we can join together in that faith, in that solidarity. There is nothing necessarily bogus about this; however, again depending upon leadership, where it will all end up in politico-social manifestation over time is anybody’s guess. There are no guarantees. Perhaps we could say that the art and science of creating good societies and civilization depends upon our collective ability to manage Group Chi well.
Again, just to be clear: this article is not for or against any climate change or religious opinion or tradition. Rather, it’s about the underlying binding tendency which, like all things it seems, has yin-yang aspects, meaning it can go either way.
Now with that in mind, enjoy this very short Youtube about the ASCH experiment: