This made me think of the movement from polytheism to monotheism. Probably because I was primed to think of religion from your title, when you said that for most of history people didn't think of systems and forces, I wondered if that was really true, since polytheism basically does that by ascribing the forces to gods, though of course we're talking forces tied more to the natural world. Still... I think you're getting at certain human traits that have probably been with us since the very first civilizations. Perhaps there's always a desire or tendency to whittle things down as life becomes ever more complicated and that's part of why monotheism would become more popular as time went on. Beyond that, there's definitely a tension for all of us between belonging and conformity, in part because I think you can't quite tear them apart. You might naturally coalesce with certain people/groups, i.e. belong, but over time influencing will always happen. I think it can be quite comforting to fall into line with something that fits you, whether that comfort is always a good thing or not is another matter... I think possibly bildungsromans, or just the notion of coming of age, has given us this notion that you go through some process of becoming a self, and there you are, something of a fixed thing. In reality, I think we negotiate selfhood vis-a-vis society as a daily affair for as long as we are alive and a lot of it will be unconscious. Anyway, I do like getting book recommendations because I listen to about one a day at work, so the more recommendations the merrier for me. I understand what you're doing with not wanting to share the titles, etc., though, and I too would feel a bit uncomfortable with all that comes with being a person that other people follow. It's probably relatively common to want to both be a somebody and a nobody, sometimes at the same time, lol.
I was more referring to like, the rise of quantification in the social sciences and quant-based capitalism, lol. But to your point about monotheism and polytheism, I am not entirely sure that the belief in a single God means that one does not ascribe natural forces to that divinity. Like, Christians still believe that God makes the weather. So I think there is a troubling reduction at work in your line of thought.
Like, for example, Akhenaten, which was one of the first examples of monotheism we have in history. That was still very much a very much a situation in which divinity was tied to an absolute authority over the natural world. So it's not really a situation of polytheism or monotheism at all. The ascribing of natural phenomena to divinity is one of the very core characteristics of religion and belief systems, no? I'm not sure there is a belief system in a higher power, monotheistic or polytheistic, that doesn't ascribe sovereignty over some sliver of the natural world to that divinity or divinities.
So this is a minor point, but I've spent way too much of my life pondering this particular topic, and I think it's not quite the same... In monotheism, God is usually a step removed above Nature and is emphatically *not* to be identified with it - because not so much in Ahkanaten-style monotheism (which is rare), but in Christianity, the natural world may be beautiful and a gift to man but it is corrupt, and lots of anti-pagan rhetoric involved (in addition to charges of idolatry) accusations of worshipping Nature and not God, suggesting a pretty hard division. And in most Christian lines of thinking, God is the head of a Platonic-style great chain of being and nonhuman life is very much further down. By contrast, polytheistic divinities are *identified with* the deities, the sun is Helios and Helios is the sun, etc. And so the complexity of the pantheon is preserved laterally, rather than the hierarchical organization of most monotheisms.
I do have a friend who says what Alaina said, that we needed monotheism at a certain point in modernity to manage all of the complexity of the world. I have a lot of feelings about that - in some sense, it's true; in another, we've paid for it - but my most important one is that monotheism often achieves this because it becomes a dualism, and therefore dangerous, because it tends to become good and evil very quickly.
I'm biased toward polytheism. But I do recognize the need for a complexity-managing mechanism in this post-postmodern mess, some kind of not-universally unifying mechanism that does not force but acknowledges patterns - something like the description of a game as a party, "all of us kind of moving, dancing our own way, some of us catching the beat, some of us not, so that when you look up and see someone moving in the same way that you are, it means something" - that is what I think would be best for us.
Oh, sorry, no, I didn't mean that one doesn't ascribe natural forces to monotheism, just that polytheism spread things out among many gods and organized life into systems, as such. I only mentioned natural forces there because yes I understand that you were referring to other things (social sciences, etc.) and that it's different, but also, to me, there's something in the organizing of gods, and different patterns to different gods and how they work on/through life, that's definitely "thinking about systems." Anyway, I'm just spitballing, I apologize for being unclear, or if I'm being a bit dumb.
I hadn't thought about the meta-gaming as more nervous optimization, but it absolutely is. Same energy as people who plan their every waking minute in Notion. As much as I love the internet, I miss the elasticity of pre-internet life. Thank you for the newsletter.
Although, I think I’ve asked about a passage now and then because I’ve lovingly binge-read (in my teens and 30/40s) many of the books by some of the authors you love and cite (Zola, Wharton…) and would like to recalibrate my memory of the book it’s from if I can’t place it. In any case it’s a pleasure to see you get so much pleasure out of them, too.
This made me think of the movement from polytheism to monotheism. Probably because I was primed to think of religion from your title, when you said that for most of history people didn't think of systems and forces, I wondered if that was really true, since polytheism basically does that by ascribing the forces to gods, though of course we're talking forces tied more to the natural world. Still... I think you're getting at certain human traits that have probably been with us since the very first civilizations. Perhaps there's always a desire or tendency to whittle things down as life becomes ever more complicated and that's part of why monotheism would become more popular as time went on. Beyond that, there's definitely a tension for all of us between belonging and conformity, in part because I think you can't quite tear them apart. You might naturally coalesce with certain people/groups, i.e. belong, but over time influencing will always happen. I think it can be quite comforting to fall into line with something that fits you, whether that comfort is always a good thing or not is another matter... I think possibly bildungsromans, or just the notion of coming of age, has given us this notion that you go through some process of becoming a self, and there you are, something of a fixed thing. In reality, I think we negotiate selfhood vis-a-vis society as a daily affair for as long as we are alive and a lot of it will be unconscious. Anyway, I do like getting book recommendations because I listen to about one a day at work, so the more recommendations the merrier for me. I understand what you're doing with not wanting to share the titles, etc., though, and I too would feel a bit uncomfortable with all that comes with being a person that other people follow. It's probably relatively common to want to both be a somebody and a nobody, sometimes at the same time, lol.
I was more referring to like, the rise of quantification in the social sciences and quant-based capitalism, lol. But to your point about monotheism and polytheism, I am not entirely sure that the belief in a single God means that one does not ascribe natural forces to that divinity. Like, Christians still believe that God makes the weather. So I think there is a troubling reduction at work in your line of thought.
Like, for example, Akhenaten, which was one of the first examples of monotheism we have in history. That was still very much a very much a situation in which divinity was tied to an absolute authority over the natural world. So it's not really a situation of polytheism or monotheism at all. The ascribing of natural phenomena to divinity is one of the very core characteristics of religion and belief systems, no? I'm not sure there is a belief system in a higher power, monotheistic or polytheistic, that doesn't ascribe sovereignty over some sliver of the natural world to that divinity or divinities.
So this is a minor point, but I've spent way too much of my life pondering this particular topic, and I think it's not quite the same... In monotheism, God is usually a step removed above Nature and is emphatically *not* to be identified with it - because not so much in Ahkanaten-style monotheism (which is rare), but in Christianity, the natural world may be beautiful and a gift to man but it is corrupt, and lots of anti-pagan rhetoric involved (in addition to charges of idolatry) accusations of worshipping Nature and not God, suggesting a pretty hard division. And in most Christian lines of thinking, God is the head of a Platonic-style great chain of being and nonhuman life is very much further down. By contrast, polytheistic divinities are *identified with* the deities, the sun is Helios and Helios is the sun, etc. And so the complexity of the pantheon is preserved laterally, rather than the hierarchical organization of most monotheisms.
I do have a friend who says what Alaina said, that we needed monotheism at a certain point in modernity to manage all of the complexity of the world. I have a lot of feelings about that - in some sense, it's true; in another, we've paid for it - but my most important one is that monotheism often achieves this because it becomes a dualism, and therefore dangerous, because it tends to become good and evil very quickly.
I'm biased toward polytheism. But I do recognize the need for a complexity-managing mechanism in this post-postmodern mess, some kind of not-universally unifying mechanism that does not force but acknowledges patterns - something like the description of a game as a party, "all of us kind of moving, dancing our own way, some of us catching the beat, some of us not, so that when you look up and see someone moving in the same way that you are, it means something" - that is what I think would be best for us.
Oh, sorry, no, I didn't mean that one doesn't ascribe natural forces to monotheism, just that polytheism spread things out among many gods and organized life into systems, as such. I only mentioned natural forces there because yes I understand that you were referring to other things (social sciences, etc.) and that it's different, but also, to me, there's something in the organizing of gods, and different patterns to different gods and how they work on/through life, that's definitely "thinking about systems." Anyway, I'm just spitballing, I apologize for being unclear, or if I'm being a bit dumb.
Thanks for a great, thought-provoking read.
I hadn't thought about the meta-gaming as more nervous optimization, but it absolutely is. Same energy as people who plan their every waking minute in Notion. As much as I love the internet, I miss the elasticity of pre-internet life. Thank you for the newsletter.
Although, I think I’ve asked about a passage now and then because I’ve lovingly binge-read (in my teens and 30/40s) many of the books by some of the authors you love and cite (Zola, Wharton…) and would like to recalibrate my memory of the book it’s from if I can’t place it. In any case it’s a pleasure to see you get so much pleasure out of them, too.
Martin Luther's starter word would have to be "grace", no?