Religion and Civilizations

Every civilization is centered around some kind of religion. It is the glue that produces social and cultural cohesion. The Roman empire was based around Roman paganism. The Arab caliphates and the Ottoman empire were based around Islam. Western civilization is based around Christianity. An ideology can also work, as in the case of the USSR, but it tends not to last as long, since ideologies are less comprehensive and persuasive than religions.

When the Romans gave up Paganism and took up Christianity, the empire was already in decline. The Christian monks preserved and maintained the scientific and cultural knowledge of the Roman empire.

Now the Christian west is in decline, and we see social justice being compared to a religion. The “monks”of social justice live in universities. Social justice has pervaded every level of academia, even the hard sciences. However, the hard sciences are beginning to view the humanities, arts, and softer sciences as bullshit. If you’ve seen people ranking college majors, you’ve already seen this in action. STEM, medicine, and law are seen as admirable goals. Women’s studies and racial grievance studies are seen as a waste of time. I’ve heard biologists refer to sociology as “not science”. We already have people studying “blackness” under the guise of anthropology and sociology. Soon enough, even the harder sciences will be under duress with scientists trying to prove that ancestry DNA tests are racist, and that there are more than two genders. When even hard science is politicized, people will either lose faith in science or create a pseudo-religion around the ideology that politicizes it. Conservatives have already lost faith in science. The replication crisis and publication bias are only additional nails in the coffin.

While the ideology that is coming to replace Christianity, social justice, has an admirable end goal of a world without prejudice and bigotry, I believe that such a goal is naive and will be overcome by Islam or even simple tribalism. We already see liberals embracing Islam, despite its contrary positions on womens’ rights and gay rights.

The Future

The US (and Western Civilization) faces numerous challenges in the future, some avoidable, some unavoidable:

The unavoidable:

• The rest of the world is competitive economically (and, increasingly, militarily). China in particular has tons of room for growth, if they can manage it properly. They have institutional problems, such as copying and cheating, but they are increasingly self-reliant.
• Low-hanging economic fruit have been picked. Cheap oil is a thing of the past. Science and technology are increasingly convoluted and difficult, as evidenced by the increasing number of authors. Physics breakthroughs now require billions of dollars. The flying cars envisioned in the 50’s haven’t come.
• Demographic trends indicate a shrinking workforce, which means entitlement programs and infinite stock dividend growth are unsustainable. The obvious solution is to increase immigration, but that creates even more problems.

The avoidable largely centers around institutional problems ripe for reform:

• Big banks have a perverse incentive to take on risk, given that they’re such a threat to the economy that the government will bail them out. This can be fixed either by refusing to bail out banks (disastrous consequences), or by breaking up big banks (politically difficult).
• The government’s allegiances are divided between corporate donors and everyday voters. This can be alleviated by lobbying reform, and a constitutional amendment (politically difficult).
• The media is incentivized by ad money. They’re also influenced by their editors and owners. It’s also true that the mainstream media media is overwhelmingly left-leaning. Finally, as I’ve pointed out, success in the media is largely defined by their relationships with politicians, and the tight-lipped nature of politicians means those relationships tend to be sycophantic. This can be alleviated by establishing fairness requirements (at least for large media companies), and by breaking up big media companies. It would also be wise to increase protections for whistleblowers, increase government transparency requirements, and penalize government employees who evade those requirements.
• Scientists have a perverse incentive to p-hack, massage data, and publish unlikely and interesting results. That means boring results that confirm existing beliefs aren’t published. This could be alleviated by increasing funding for replication studies. In addition, some journals are already fixing this problem themselves.
• The government is trillions of dollars in debt, sustaining itself by military/cultural hegemony. While entitlement programs such as Social Security are solvent now, they will be insolvent by the end of the century. While politically unpopular and economically dangerous in the short run, ending or reducing entitlement programs is necessary for future solvency.

In my opinion, there are a few entirely partisan policies that should be reversed immediately:

• DACA and DAPA
• Limitations on deportations of illegal immigrants
• Limitations on voter ID laws
• Sanctuary cities
• HUD expanding metro zones beyond exurbs (Chicago zone expanded out to Dubuque, Iowa, over three hours away)
• Common core

However, the existing government has a vested interest in the opposition to these reforms, and always will. While there are many challenges we cannot overcome for demographic and economic reasons, these reforms can render our institutions morally and economically solvent. In doing so, we may mitigate our demographic and economic shortcomings for decades, if not centuries. Or, we may blow away the cloud of fumes we’re running on.