A painful discovery I made is that there appears to be a degree of idolatry in the Christian and Islamic practices of the Third World that far exceeds what one might expect in these religions in their more textual forms. For example, some Latin American groups not only have patron saints forming a strange pantheon but also create idols or physical objects to establish shrines. It’s very pagan. And Islamic practices in sub-Saharan Africa, I would argue, might horrify quite a few Arabs with the superstitions involved. It is perhaps fair to say that avoiding these pitfalls requires a degree of intelligence and self-discipline. Moreover, secular humanism often fails for the same reason many supposed atheists in the West succumb to the idiocies of astrology and crystals. Crystals! Humans are fundamentally weak, and if any movement becomes large enough to include the general populace, it inevitably opens the door to their carried infections.
You mentioned that you once had faith in this prescription but no longer do. Is it possible that you’ve been too hard on yourself? What I mean is that beliefs percolate downward—much like how first names first emerge among the upper crust of society before trickling down as they spread. What you observe today may simply be the result of a nascent ideology, once embraced by intellectual elites, trendsetters, and tastemakers—the connoisseurs of the avant-garde—becoming so common that it is now both plebeian and passé, exposing the frailties of this larger sample. This, I argue, is the fate of effective altruism. No longer a topic quietly discussed in esoteric circles, it must now conform to the demands of the masses, struggling not just to equate shrimp suffering with diseases affecting human lifespans but also to affirm the equal worth of all humans. Syncretism—much like the idolatrous infection I mentioned at the start—is often the inevitable outcome when ideologies spread without the state capacity required to ensure their purity, doubly so when the written word is not the primary medium of transmission.
The spread of an ideology from the elites to the masses is inevitable, but it will take several generations to see whether it’s beneficial or destructive. I value the time component more today than the novelty component. Over dozens of generations, there are so many challenges and problems. It takes a great deal of time to stabilize an ideology and turn it into something capable of dealing with the full range of real-world challenges. Feminism, for example, which for two or three generations seemed entirely good, is today so detrimental to demographic survival that you wonder whether it’s even sustainable.
A painful discovery I made is that there appears to be a degree of idolatry in the Christian and Islamic practices of the Third World that far exceeds what one might expect in these religions in their more textual forms. For example, some Latin American groups not only have patron saints forming a strange pantheon but also create idols or physical objects to establish shrines. It’s very pagan. And Islamic practices in sub-Saharan Africa, I would argue, might horrify quite a few Arabs with the superstitions involved. It is perhaps fair to say that avoiding these pitfalls requires a degree of intelligence and self-discipline. Moreover, secular humanism often fails for the same reason many supposed atheists in the West succumb to the idiocies of astrology and crystals. Crystals! Humans are fundamentally weak, and if any movement becomes large enough to include the general populace, it inevitably opens the door to their carried infections.
You mentioned that you once had faith in this prescription but no longer do. Is it possible that you’ve been too hard on yourself? What I mean is that beliefs percolate downward—much like how first names first emerge among the upper crust of society before trickling down as they spread. What you observe today may simply be the result of a nascent ideology, once embraced by intellectual elites, trendsetters, and tastemakers—the connoisseurs of the avant-garde—becoming so common that it is now both plebeian and passé, exposing the frailties of this larger sample. This, I argue, is the fate of effective altruism. No longer a topic quietly discussed in esoteric circles, it must now conform to the demands of the masses, struggling not just to equate shrimp suffering with diseases affecting human lifespans but also to affirm the equal worth of all humans. Syncretism—much like the idolatrous infection I mentioned at the start—is often the inevitable outcome when ideologies spread without the state capacity required to ensure their purity, doubly so when the written word is not the primary medium of transmission.
The spread of an ideology from the elites to the masses is inevitable, but it will take several generations to see whether it’s beneficial or destructive. I value the time component more today than the novelty component. Over dozens of generations, there are so many challenges and problems. It takes a great deal of time to stabilize an ideology and turn it into something capable of dealing with the full range of real-world challenges. Feminism, for example, which for two or three generations seemed entirely good, is today so detrimental to demographic survival that you wonder whether it’s even sustainable.