Scientism: Modern Pagan Religion

Traditional religions were holistic, uniting normative and empirical speculations in a mytho-poetic vision of the world. Eastern religious philosophies are still holistic, whereas dualism dominates in the West, and not just because of Descartes’ attempt to reconcile the scientific picture of nature with the intuitive picture of ourselves. Monotheism itself has contributed to Western dualism. By centralizing divine power and elevating God above all conceivable forms, the monotheist effectively kicks God out of the rationally explainable domain, which is the domain of nature or the cosmos, the order of which corresponds to our conceptual grid. The supreme form of rational understanding is the modern scientific kind, but precisely because science is supremely impersonal and objective, its methods don’t provide direct answers to normative or subjective questions.

But ethical and aesthetic values, intuitions, and the subjective appearances of things have been central to the human experience. And so rather than giving them up, despite the lack of forthcoming answers to those questions from science, which reigns supreme only in a limited field of inquiry, religious people externalized those ghostly intangibles along with God. God is supposed to sustain everything, and while scientists have discovered more and more of how the physical world sustains itself, dualistic monotheism saves the subjective, intuitive, value-laden, faith-based appearance of the world, by locating this in the deity’s supernatural domain and in the earthly fragments of that domain, in our so-called immaterial spirits. After all, according to monotheists, God originated our moral perspective, by inspiring prophets to gain insights into divine commandments, and we’re able to think in terms of what ought to be done, instead of slavishly following natural law, because our immaterial spirits are supernaturally free.

Skeptics would contend, though, that the true originators of official moral laws were the human rulers who codified our instinctive sentiments, to hold social groups together, maintaining their elevated position in the pecking order by attributing society’s laws to gods who are just grandiose versions of those human rulers. Far from being supernaturally free, we’re just social animals who are subject to natural control systems, such as the system of monotheism. And of course, the more scientists have been able to explain empirical facts without appealing to God or to the supernatural, the more theism has declined in most informed parts of the world. Many early Western scientists inhabited the halfway house of deism, and most educated people currently living in relatively wealthy countries in Europe and Asia are nontheistic in both word and deed. Even in the US, which is an exception to that rule, nontheism has grown more popular due to the so-called New Atheist movement.

Such is a common way of contrasting traditional Western monotheism with modern secularism. But I want to consider another interpretation, according to which nontheistic naturalism has itself developed into a religion that can be called scientism. Narrowly speaking, scientism is the belief that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, that if a question can’t be answered using scientific methods, the question is meaningless or otherwise illegitimate. In this respect, scientism is just radical empiricism, or positivism, deriving from the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, and David Hume. While positivism has since been mostly rejected in academic philosophy, for being self-refuting and for ignoring studies of how the sciences are actually practiced, most analytic philosophers still subscribe to naturalism. Naturalists assume that even if some legitimate questions can’t be identified with scientific ones, everything that exists depends on things that are scientifically explainable.

That's how scientism has played out in rarified academic circles and it's the meaning I've had in mind in these blog rants, such as when I referred to "scientistic liberals," in Liberalism. But there's also a more popular form of scientism, which has to do with the way technoscientific progress has shaped the capitalistic social order. The main social effects of that progress are anti-philosophical pragmatism and the ideology of materialistic consumerism. In this broader sense of the centrality of science, scientism serves as a religion that we dare not name.

The Capitalistic Reduction of People to Machines

As I point out in Theism, traditional religions have insiders and outsiders, mystics and literalists. Mystics are supposed to have direct, rationally incomprehensible experience of transcendent reality, and for the most part the price of that experience is ascetic withdrawal from secular life. Literalists have no such mystical experience, and their adherence to secular conventions and their submergence in what mystics call the world of illusions (maya, samsara, etc) bring them suffering. In the purportedly secular West, there are also insiders and outsiders: the wealthy or well-connected oligarchs and the poor, weak, misinformed masses of consumers. Whereas the nonrational component of theistic religion is the mode of access to allegedly supernatural reality (faith, intuition, mystical experience), what’s nonrational about scientism, despite the paradigmatic rationality of science itself, is the behaviour of people who have been systematically reduced to machines.

To spell this out, consider that in the British Industrial Revolution, labourers--including children--were dehumanized and treated as mechanical components of a system managed for the owner’s profit. Frederick Taylor streamlined the process, creating the influential field of scientific management, which again turns employees into functional parts of a system while the managers seek ways to cut costs and maximize profits. The goal was simply for businesses to run as efficiently as possible, and since a machine is better at following orders than a human, human labourers compete in the marketplace by becoming more like machines. These workers need to slavishly follow the corporation’s rules, ignoring any compunctions they might have about the dehumanizing effects of a capitalistic economy, and they must work longer hours for as little pay as possible, often with no union to represent their interests. In short, business became operationalized, which is to say that sociopathic theories of exploiting a labour force for maximal profit were applied within corporations, forcing the workers literally to play the role of machines. While on the job, a worker in a systematically managed business environment must perform a certain function, just as a component of a machine has its function as dictated by the machine’s design.

Beginning with Edward Bernays’ work on how the human unconscious can be exploited for government purposes or for profit, by propaganda that links the propagandist’s esoteric objective with the fulfillment of the consumer’s craving, the dehumanization within corporations was extended to people’s private lives in their capitalistic role as consumers. Prior to public relations and the near-perfection of mass propaganda through television, people could leave their offices and resume their personal activities that they defined for themselves. But because human greed is a bottomless pit, the corporate techniques of converting a person into a functional component of an artificial construct had to be extended to those personal activities. Now there is, in theory, no time at which a participant in a capitalistic economy is off the job, since as soon as a person stops being an employee, she becomes a potential consumer and the scope of consumable goods is as wide as the scope of what can be attached to our unconscious desires. Thus, instead of selling only those products that people objectively need, businesses learned to manufacture conscious desires along with their products, by associating the use of the product with the fulfillment of an unconscious wish. And while this science of mass market propaganda hasn’t yet been perfected--after all, a consumer can still watch an ad on TV and choose not to buy the product--the effect of watching so many ads from such a young age is that a person comes to accept the principles of a consumer culture, which are that our ultimate goal in life is to be happy and that this goal is achieved mainly by consuming material products.

The Nonrationality of Consumerism

So to return to the comparison with theistic religion, while the nonrationality of theism is due to its attempt to address normative questions head-on, by nonrational means, the nonrationality of exoteric scientism is a consequence of its reduction of people to machines, by way of indirectly addressing normative questions. What I mean is that scientism is minimally an anti-philosophical philosophy. Scientism’s exoteric message is that there is no progress outside of science, technology, and the free market, and that philosophy and religion are therefore illegitimate in secular society. But scientism’s esoteric agenda is that of erecting, roughly speaking, what Lewis Mumford calls the megamachine and what I’ve been calling in these blog rants an oligarchy, a social order run by a minority that holds ultimate political power over the majority.

How is the stealth oligarchy achieved? By presupposing answers to normative questions, which is to say a philosophy of life, and by turning society into a machine and assigning it the function of applying those answers. The unspoken philosophy of life in a stealth oligarchy like the US is that we’re all mere social animals, not godlike creatures capable of heroically confronting our dire existential predicament of being alienated from nature by our consciousness and reason (see Happiness). Moreover, the ultimate meaning of life for mere social animals depends on our position in the natural dominance hierarchy: the aggressive sociopaths who dominate in the social order earn the right to behave as gods, exercising power over the masses, while those in lower positions ought to be content to live as sheep, preoccupied by consuming as much grass as possible to inflate the minority’s profits (see Conservatism and Oligarchy.) The masses are meant to be happy in a degraded sense, feeling base, ephemeral pleasures that are constantly being undermined due to our existential predicament, while the oligarchs are meant to rule and to enjoy the subtler pleasure of schadenfreude. The meaning of life is thus a nonsexual analogue of the sadomasochistic power dynamic.

With everyone instinctively playing this sadomasochistic game, a capitalistic economy forms to exploit those instincts, and in the vicious competition that sacrifices the weak on the altar of wild, cosmic creativity, the most vicious rise to positions of power. Further corrupted by the hunt for that power, the American oligarchs self-destructively consolidate their control by busting unions and taking control of the government, the economic regulators, the medical establishment (through pharmaceutical and insurance companies), the educational system (by turning universities into businesses to pump out drones, forcing skeptical liberal arts departments to shut down for lack of profit), the legal establishment (by supplying an endless stream of prisons for profit), and the military (by selling arms all round the world, including to potential enemies, and by facilitating wars with mercenaries and cleanup services). By deregulating as much of society as possible, the oligarchs thus forestall democratic challenges to their dominance.

Meanwhile, those who are ruled in such a society are misled into thinking that the ability to vote in a duopoly gives the voters ultimate political power, and that the freedom to choose between a host of fabricated goods is the long sought-after secret of happiness. The consumer is as confused as the literalistic theist, but for a different reason. Theism combines intuitions and speculations to form a holistic, all-encompassing worldview, but the literalist mistakes this worldview for something like an objective, rationally justified theory. The consumer is proud of her secularism and of her hard work, producing tangible results in a capitalistic economy, not playing idly with philosophical ideas or introspection. She’s a pragmatist, not an ideologue, but unbeknownst to her, pragmatism is, at a minimum, a philosophy or rather an ideology in the Marxist sense, meaning a set of ideas that rationalizes an economic order which serves the interests mainly of a small minority of the population. Pragmatism is an excuse to act like a machine, to work hard and to be contented with the consumption of mass-produced items.

And so this kind of secularism is a stunted way of life, leaving the handling of normative questions to the oligarchs who most shape American culture with their billions spent on political, corporate, and Hollywood messages over the decades. Instinctively, the oligarchs understand that the ultimate good in life must be just what a capitalistic economy can deliver: shallow, fleeting moments of security and pleasure for drudges and automatons, where these moments are surrounded by anxieties about blowback from the oligarchy’s concomitant military occupations abroad, and by suspicions that materialistic happy-talk whitewashes our dark existential situation. Another wondrous coincidence: that which can fulfill the scientistic meaning of life is just what empowers the oligarchs to consolidate their control, namely the free market economy that efficiently rewards the vices that take the oligarchs to the top of the pecking order. 

Why Call Modern Worship of Nature “Scientism”?

You might still be wondering what exactly makes consumerism and pragmatism scientistic, or science-centered. After all, one reason Americans are so pragmatic is, as Weber showed, that Protestantism had the unintended consequence that people worked extra hard to prove they were elected by God to enter heaven when they died. But what enabled Protestants to imagine they could read God’s mind is that their Christian religion had been thoroughly secularized for centuries, being a Frankensteinian patchwork of Jewish and Pagan elements. (See Theism.)

No, the underlying factor seems to be that the US was established to empower capitalists, or so-called “special interests,” meaning wealthy and well-connected individuals who fill the power vacuum left behind by the constitutionally divided and conquered government. And capitalism in turn empowers technoscience, which drives innovation and economic growth with scientific discoveries and their applications. The chief connection between modern science and capitalism is mass production, the ability of machines to supply an abundance of products. Science thus indirectly provides the opportunity for immense profit, and whereas in earlier centuries only the aristocracy could take advantage of scientific advances, in the modern world the individual won the right to own the fruits of his or her labour. The abundant supply of sellable products requires an equal amount of demand, which in turn requires capitalistic propaganda, the manufacturing of the consumer’s desires by advertising. The machines, of course, are made possible by advances in scientific understanding, just as effective advertising is the result of advances in the soft sciences, particularly psychology. Lacking the naivety of aristocrats or dictators who deem themselves untouchable and who rely on tradition and counter-productive military oppression to pacify the masses of have-nots, modern titans of industry seek to protect their wealth under the cover of democracy, and as I’ve said, these conflicting interests gave birth to the stealth oligarchy. Like liberals inspired by the furious pace of technoscientific advances, these modern oligarchs use democracy as an instrument, albeit merely for their own progress.

Mesmerized by technoscientific progress, liberals used to trust that there are objective solutions to questions even of social progress, and so they re-engineered the American economy, adding regulations to prevent the catastrophic busts that attended the booms. (See Liberalism.) This fostered a pragmatic, can-do culture, reinforced by the academy’s positivistic and behaviouristic hyping of science and by optimistic science fiction, which celebrated the American military’s clean-up job in WWII and the establishment of something like an American empire. On top of these science-driven causes of consumerism, there was the cultural influence simply of all the technological innovation in the twentieth century, of the frantic pace of technological progress which forced people to keep up or lose their jobs to the machines. They say that if you can’t beat them, you should join them, which is just what workers and consumers do in capitalistic stealth oligarchies: we pass ourselves off as machines so our meddlesome human qualities might go unnoticed. One such quality is our potential awareness that not only is materialistic pleasure not genuinely fulfilling, but there’s a higher, ethical ideal to confront the fact that our happiness is existentially absurd--even if this means sacrificing the possibility of contentment.

So the reason I speak broadly--and somewhat idiosyncratically--of scientism, of a science-centered modern worldview, is that science directly or indirectly causes all the cultural elements that add up to the naturalist’s religion, including technology, capitalism, stealth oligarchy, advertising, consumerism, and pragmatic hostility towards philosophy.

Case Study: Televised US Political “Debates”

An egregious example of that hostility towards philosophy in secular culture, and especially in the US, is that which passes for public political debate. As has been pointed out by many political commentators, television has been mostly detrimental to political discourse. In particular, the first televised debate, between Kennedy and Nixon, showed politicians that on TV image matters more than substance. Nixon sweated and looked less heroic than Kennedy; therefore, Kennedy “won” the debate. That’s what people remember about that debate, not any engagement with ideas. And in his debate with Clinton and Ross Perot, Bush Sr. looked at his watch, revealing his boredom with a question about how the recession affected him. Such issues of personality and of superficial appearances are magnified by the medium of television, and so successful politicians have to project politically correct images. Most of the time, no questioner on television will try to look beyond the façade, because watching TV isn’t like reading a book and TV excels at presenting disjointed representations rather than a logical, coherent model of reality.

For those reasons alone, we should expect that the quality of political debates would decline, but the collapse of American journalism is also to blame. Once upon a time, people trusted journalists, such as Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, believing that they were tough, independent, and looking out for the citizen’s interests, speaking truth to power. Then it became clear that journalism is a business, not a vocation, as more and more news agencies were bought up by fewer and fewer megacorporations. As is evident from a comparison of any American full-time TV news outlet with BBC, for example, American journalists caved to pressures from their electronic medium and corporate managers. Their overriding goal now is to maximize profit for those managers, and that goal can be achieved on TV only by churning out infotainment rather than investigative reporting. News anchors, analysts and pundits therefore put themselves in direct competition with real entertainers, like Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, a competition in which the journalists must sacrifice their intellectual integrity to perform as clowns. As a result, they’ve lost not just their credibility with the viewer, but their leverage on politicians to appear on their programs and submit to the inquisitions they deserve as elected officials. Journalists now need access to politicians more than politicians need to be seen on TV, and so the confrontations between them occur on the politicians’ terms.

Thus, during political campaigns, American politicians engage in numerous televised political “debates” which are not debates at all. A debate requires an interrogation of each opponent, so that the viewer can judge which side has the better arguments on each point that arises in the interaction, and also a deeper concern about ideas than about image or personal advantage, on the part of each speaker. The debaters must be intellectuals in that they must engage with each other’s arguments, trusting that the truth emerges from a Platonic form of dialogue.

None of this happens in televised American political “debates.” In the first place, the ego-tripping journalist replaces the moderator, and instead of merely enforcing the debate’s rules and time limits, the journalist proceeds to ask each “debater” a question, to which the politician gives his or her canned one minute response. The journalist then either moves on to the next question or reframes the first speaker’s answer so that if the second speaker chooses to recite a talking point about it, he or she can at least have the cover of engaging only with the know-nothing journalist. Thus, the interaction between politician and journalist replaces that between politicians, and instead of a debate what we’re shown is just an interview, or a press conference. That’s what politicians prefer; they don’t want to rationally engage with each other’s ideas in a public format, whether because they privately agree on the narrow set of issues that arises for a politician in a stealth oligarchy or because they know that on TV, rational political dialogue actually tarnishes the politician’s image. Viewers expect TV to supply them with entertaining images, like those seen in jumbles of advertisements. They don’t want to attempt to follow complex lines of reasoning while staring at a TV screen, knowing that music and ads will break in at any moment and that it’s harder to go back and forth to check the inferences on TV than it is to track the inferences written on a book’s pages.

So the televised political “debate” in the US has become a complete farce. The problems aren’t just that politicians spin the issues, don’t answer the questions, and anyway are given only seconds to answer since the viewer’s attention span is short and time must be reserved for commercials. To be sure, these factors contribute to the miserable state of affairs. But the primary absurdity is very simply that what the journalists and politicians routinely call a debate isn’t close to being a debate. No political debate has actually been seen on American television in at least several campaign cycles. The closest thing to one recently was the vice presidential debate between Cheney and Joe Lieberman, but of course the civility of their discussion was due to their agreement on most issues. 

The lack of actual public debate between American politicians is absurd for three reasons. First, what are actually just journalistic interviews of politicians are nevertheless always called “debates” by all parties responsible for them. Second, the viewer needn’t be fooled by that misnomer, despite all the false populism and anti-intellectualism in American political culture. This is because most Americans are still familiar with the essence of debate, having viewed dozens of movies featuring the Hollywood stereotype of the courtroom drama, in which a witness is vigorously questioned and cross-examined, yielding the truth in the end. Third, Americans are free to compare their laughable televised "debates" with the much more mature and potentially interactive Canadian ones. The format of televised Canadian political debates isn't as infantile as that of American ones, largely because Canadian journalists who serve as moderators aren't as rich or successful as their American counterparts, and so their egos aren't the size of planets. The Canadian moderators therefore tend to do what obviously should be done and simply get out of the way and let the politicians interact. Unfortunately, the Canadian debaters are uninspiring, because even the conservative Canadian politicians are effectively postmodern liberals, or cynical nihilistic pragmatists, lacking vision, values, or trust that we can improve our civilization so that it resembles something other than a concrete jungle. These debaters, therefore, tend to forgo the opportunity of actually interacting with each other's ideas, to help the voter decide which side can make the better case; instead, the politicians recite talking points, dodge questions, take cheap shots, run out the clock, and so on and so forth.

Here, then, the unintended consequences of television on American politics are the polarization of the citizenry and the infantilization of their discourse. Lacking evidence of rational dialogue between their leaders, American citizens vent their frustration by heading towards the opposite extreme when conversing with each other, resorting to hyperpartisan shout-fests. Demagogues rush to harness the chaos much as militant Islamists exploit the disorder in failed states. Like the medieval peasants who learned the purpose of their society by gazing at the Church’s stained-glass windows, most Americans learn from TV rather than books, and what they learn is that rational political dialogue, which is rumoured to take place at the UN, is cowardly and idle. Again, courtroom dramas provide an opposing stereotype, but the prevailing view seems to be the anti-intellectual one. As Obama has continued rather than “changed” most of Bush’s foreign and economic policies, despite the optimistic rationalism of Obama's campaign speeches, his administration has effectively reinforced the American prejudice against reason in politics.

Americans tend now to be pragmatists who worship strength. But the American citizenry is weakened by its internal divisions and thus the citizens can take no pride in themselves, despite the fact that, theoretically at least, the majority of them indirectly rule as rational, autonomous and informed citizens. Instead, the majority doesn’t actually hold ultimate political power, nor is the majority fit to do so. The citizens’ democratic control was hampered from the outset by their country’s founders who created three separate, equal, and thus hamstrung branches of government. Just as the medieval Church benefited from the masses’ inability to speak Latin, which gave the Church absolute control over the Bible’s interpretation, American oligarchs benefit from a divided, confused, and frustrated populace. These weaknesses restrict the masses to the lower levels of the natural dominance hierarchy, ensuring and even justifying the dominators’ power over them.

Scientism’s Re-enchantment of Nature

The upshot is that American secular society is split into esoteric and exoteric groups, both of which are as opposed to reason as are the insiders (mystics) and outsiders (literalists) of theistic religion. Granted, that similarity isn’t sufficient to make scientism a religion. What we find, though, is that a technoscientific stealth oligarchy like the US caters to religious impulses not with mere lip service to its own theology--although it surely does that too--but by consummating Christianity’s naturalization of monotheism. Christianity reduced God to a mortal man, the esoteric (Gnostic) meaning of which is the Eastern idea that human nature is fully divine and that divinity begins and ends with sentient, intelligent life. Moreover, the theistic God’s presumed interventions in nature have been thoroughly demystified by science, although scientists have also shown that nature is much weirder and scarier than any anthropomorphic projection of ourselves. But we understand now why it rains, why the earth periodically shakes, and how diseases generally work.

What’s seldom said, though, is that this disenchantment is coupled with a secular re-enchantment of nature, as human beings actually replace God in the myths that explain the new wonders for which we alone are responsible. Human monarchs have always been the models for the tyrannical god in heaven, just as their feats of social and architectural engineering have always been the sources for the myth that the universe was intelligently created. The difference is that in the Western imagination, today’s oligarchs and scientific wonderworkers have replaced their supernatural counterparts, because the re-enchantment has been preceded by such a thorough disenchantment by Christianity, the Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment philosophy.

Thus, when corporations build shopping complexes with wall-to-wall products, the experience of consuming them is the only feeling of being in heaven that consumers know, deep down, they can ever enjoy, and when money separates the haves from the have-nots, that is the only divine judgment left that divides the wheat from the chaff, the blessed from the damned. When oligarchs now live in obscene splendour, sitting on golden toilets and moving from one monstrous mansion to another, those living, breathing humans are the demigods, the angels or demons who stand above human law, whereas hitherto people could have clung to the delusion that the myths spoke only of supernatural beings quite removed from our earthly home. When natural selection churns out biological designs and rewards and punishes economies, that is the divine creative force, perhaps the very same one, at a microcosmic scale, that shapes our whole universe as it mindlessly evolves within the multiverse. And when physicists speak in an arcane mathematical tongue, they are literally wizards whose elite knowledge makes possible the actual wonders of modern engineering, wonders that are subjectively as magical to the layperson as any “miracle” of nature must have seemed to the ancient theist.

These are the great ironies of secularism. First, by demolishing the rational basis for theism, technoscience, capitalism, and stealth oligarchy add new dress to the primitive social divisions that served theists as exemplars in the first place, re-creating an ignorant mass of people (workers and consumers) over which a minority of superior beings (oligarchs) has sovereign control. The masses are even designed, after a fashion, by the oligarchs who dictate the acceptable social functions, effectively training people to behave like machines. (See Political Correctness.) Second, those three allegedly secular forces now stand in for what traditionally were conceived of as supernatural ones. After all, theism has always been a coded way of speaking exclusively about nature and human beings, and now that, in the modern world, theistic religion has been intellectually discredited, secularists are free to openly worship the natural powers that in ancient times were mistaken for transcendent ones. 

Scientism in the wider sense is this religion that re-enchants nature--including an elite minority of human beings--by undermining dualistic theism, which diverted attention to what were mistaken to be denizens of an otherworldly realm. Dualism was a relatively clumsy but necessary scheme for monarchs to preserve their power: the ancients were much more ignorant of the workings of nonliving things than they were of themselves, and so they anthropomorphized the causes of natural events. But since those all-powerful persons (gods, angels, demons, fairies) were evidently hidden from view, ancient theists assumed they inhabited a secret, far-removed world. And to secure his right to dominate, the human ruler had to assure the masses that he had the allegiance of those hidden beings. In the modern world, however, when we perhaps know even more about nonliving things than we do about ourselves, there’s no need for the inference that natural events have supernatural causes. We’ve looked under the bed and found no monster. But when we nevertheless behave as monstrously as any imaginary boogeyman, we come to fear ourselves as much as any child was ever terrified to look under the bed. And when power and knowledge are still so unevenly distributed, the internet notwithstanding, theistic myths apply to so-called secular societies--except that the myths openly refer to earthly beings and events.

Clarifications

My point isn’t just that this re-enchantment is a hidden message of secular society. No, the point is that the behaviour of most so-called secularists is best explained by saying that they’re members of a peculiar religion that goes by other names. Naturalistic humanists worship usefulness and efficiency (machines), money and power (oligarchs and cosmic creativity, which in microcosmic terms is the evolutionary force of a minimally-regulated market), cognitive mastery and miracles (modern science and engineering). We secularists won’t speak of ourselves in religious terms, since we’re under the impression that all religions are classically theistic and we foreswear any theistic belief in the supernatural. But so-called secular culture isn’t a hyper-rational alternative to faith-based religion. As social animals, members of a pseudodemocratic, capitalistic society tend to be mostly nonrational, which in our case means deluded, confused, and frustrated. We literally buy into hedonistic and dehumanizing myths that crop up around a stealth oligarchy to keep the money flowing mostly to the top through self-destructive consumption. We’re often aware of our society’s grotesqueness, but we trust in the superiority of our way of life, just as members of one monotheistic religion may be aware of other such religions and can only rationalize their leap of faith.

Nor am I saying just that scientism, including pragmatism and consumerism, is an ideology in a Marxist sense--unless “ideology” is effectively given the same meaning as “religion.” Scientism is at least an ideology in the Marxist sense, but so too is traditional theology. Some belief systems tend to serve economic interests, but that’s not what makes them religious. Am I, then, overstretching “religion” so that the word loses its meaning? Not if by “religion” we mean a set of delusions that binds a social group together, by sidestepping our existential predicament and rationalizing the absurdity of the rituals that are caused by those delusions. Admittedly, that’s a pejorative, only slightly facetious definition, but it covers the traditional religions as well as scientism. For this definition to be meaningful, however, there must be a set of ideas that falls outside its scope. If even naturalistic pragmatists and hedonic consumers are religious, who isn’t? My answer: at a minimum, the mystics whose enlightenment is the esoteric purpose of the traditional religions that outsiders grasp to reconcile their inferior lifestyle with that mystical ideal, and the ascetic, artistic loners who are alienated from materialistic culture. Religions are methods of mass hallucination, so naturally those who--for one reason or another--are antisocial don’t practice religion.