We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 3
Being WEIRD sucks, except for all the good parts
Meeting the Zeppelin by Stanislav Portenko, edited and expanded by DALL-E 2
There have been many attempts to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” as one conservative thinker put it. Perhaps the earliest versions of this showed up in what some historians call “the Axial age,” a period from around 700 to 300 BCE. During this time, figures like Siddhartha Gautama, Lao-Tzu, Diogenes, and Israelite prophets rejected some if not all aspects of social change in their times. They all seemed to say, in one way or another, that society has become corrupt, we need to reject it, and return or transcend to some better arrangement.
Their modern counterparts can be found in parts of modern artistic or philosophical movements like Romanticism, religious groups like the Amish or various Christian fundamentalist sects, cultural movements like hippie communes, and today the hipster homesteaders and Burning Man nomads. There are also plenty of examples on a smaller scale of early modern individuals rejecting WEIRD life for an OLD life. The common thread is a recognition that something is wrong about the WEIRD world and we need to return to a state of purity, whether that be nature or some version of godliness.
Who can argue against their diagnoses? From the earliest empire city-states to the present day, technological and economic advances have led to vast inequality and suffering. But they also led to an increase in what I’ll call the three Ds: density (humans living in close proximity to each other), diversity (humans from different communities living close to each other), and dynamism (increased pace of technological and cultural change).
Throughout most of the last 10,000 years, the three Ds came together very sporadically. But for many reasons, they reached a critical velocity in Europe by the 1600s to produce the WEIRD world we live in today. The advances of the last 500 years are obvious but it’s not hard to see that every advance has had a cost. We’ve lost tight-knit communities, the village-based ways of raising kids, the connection to nature, a sense of a divine world, a sense of transcendence, a slower, more natural pace of life, a clear connection between our work and our sustenance, and so on.
What’s fascinating, however, is that as strong as critiques of the WEIRD world might be, they have consistently failed to find broader followings. How many Amish and commune hippies do you know? Sure, you might like to camp and get out into nature, but you, me, and everyone else we know quite likes coming back to our WEIRD lives. Both left- and right-wing critiques of WEIRDness sometimes argue that most people haven’t rejected the WEIRD world because of either top-down imperialist control or a more subtle imperialist brain-washing (called “false consciousness” by leftists in the mid-20th century or rightists today call “mass formation psychosis”).
A more obvious explanation is that the vast majority of people who come into contact with WEIRDness like it and see its obvious benefits. There is something in behavioral economics called “revealed preference” where we can see what people truly want by simply observing their behavior, not what they say. The WEIRD world is inexorable not because of some imperial force or because people have been fooled to act against their best interests; the WEIRD world is here to stay because it’s an improvement on what came before in many ways.
Let’s briefly count the blessings of the WEIRD world. It is unquestionably true that the WEIRD world has led to a substantial:
Thanks to WEIRDness, our lives are unquestionably better than what came before. They are not perfect. We obviously have not reached utopia. And in fact, I want to argue that things are very far from perfect:
We are living in the midst of several environmental catastrophes
Most of the 8 billion people on this planet are not reaping the benefits of WEIRDness
We are experiencing waves of reactionary, anti-democratic movements
Relatedly, we’re seeing waves of viral conspiracy-inspired, paranoid thinking
Despite material abundance, children and adolescents in the WEIRD world are suffering from rising rates of mental and emotional health problems
Human rights are being rolled back in the heart of the WEIRD world
We’re lonelier than ever
The solution to all of these has been technocratic and piecemeal. Don’t get me wrong: we need those solutions! But we also need institutions that can support humans as we make our way through this current phase of WEIRDness. We need institutions that can support a sense of community that is also diverse and flexible; practices of transcendence that are also humble and anti-dogmatic; and most of all, we need frameworks for personal development that increase our internal awareness and autonomy that also increase our sense of interdependence.
These are reasons why the Post-Church Church is not just a wonderful luxury to add to our already amazing lives; it’s something we need if we are to hold on to the gains we’ve made and continue to improve not just our own WEIRD lives but the lives of everyone on the planet.
In the next newsletter, I’m going to dive into the first aspect of a “Post-Church” solution—community—and why churches (or synagogues, mosques, or any other religious institution) can’t deliver on this in a truly WEIRD world.