Is The Intellectual Future Religious?

Between Allegory and History

Tyler Cowen hypothesizes that the most important thinkers of the future will be religious. I agree with Cowen and with his reasoning (full disclosure: I’m a rabbi and “theologian”).

I’m particularly drawn to Cowen’s claims that religious thought is:

1) less constrained by the scientific method than empiricism

2) culturally stickier than academic ideas

3) tracks with innovation insofar as it is a form of intellectual counter-culture

Cowen’s argument seems Straussian: if Athens (reason) has reached a dead-end, perhaps Jerusalem (faith, myth) can offer a way forward. Or as Nassim Taleb might put it, “Religion is Lindy.”

But what is religion? What does it mean to be a religious thinker?

The typical etymology given for religion is re-ligare, to bind (again). Another etymology, which I’ve seen Giorgio Agamben propose, is re-legere, to re-read.

Both etymologies have something to teach.

Religiosity, for me, is not about a traditionless or textless faith, but about re-reading one’s tradition through a contemporary lens and re-reading one’s contemporary life through the lens of past thinkers. Religion is also a binding force not only in the sense that it gives contemporaries a shared language, but because it helps us feel connected to the past—it binds us to the past even when we feel alienated from it.

Historicists and other kinds of “contextualizers” are tasked with showing how phenomenon X is new, unprecedented. Religious thinkers are often tasked with an opposite charge—to show how phenomenon X rhymes with and/or parallels phenomenon Z.

Religious thought done poorly flattens all differences by abstracting them away. It turns every example into (Platonic) allegory or boring repetition. But secular thought done poorly treats everything as sui generis.

If allegory is the fatal flaw of religious thinkers, a labyrinth of unending footnotes is the Inferno of modern scholars.

The challenge for the future religious intellectuals is whether they can navigate the Scylla of allegory and the Charybdis of historicism.

Why am I wrong?

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