Religion and the Green Lumber Fallacy
Common Sense and Basic Decency are Underrated by Intellectuals
I love defending religion and do it often. I don’t think all religious forms of life are good, but I believe that we should not throw the baby (religion) out with the bathwater (critical thinking). As a religious person surrounded by an intellectual culture that regards religion with some combination of hostility, confusion, and superiority, I find myself wanting to make the case for religion—not all religions—but for the possibility of good religion. I agree with Tara Isabella Burton that in the absence of institutional religion, what we get is not less religion but more fragmented New Age cults, be it in the form of woke campus activism on the left or deadlifting Nietzschean vitalism on the right, or lifestyle and wellness consumerism amongst the haute bourgeois (e.g., Goop, SoulCycle). I believe these to be impoverished substitutes and so my argument is often practical. If New Atheism leads to New Age, maybe we should rethink our priors. Not that we should think God is real, but that perhaps the teaching of religion has less to do with theological first principles than with a way of life. Allow me, then, to make the case.
The Green Lumber Fallacy
Theology is to religious life what Finance is to investing. You can be terrible at the former and great at the latter. You can also be great at the former and terrible at the latter. Systematicity is not a reliable source of alpha.
This is the core insight of religious existentialism (Kierkegaard, Tillich, Rosenzweig, Buber), and more broadly of existentialism (Nietzsche, Heidegger).
If you accept that religious sense can bypass metaphysical theory then you are no longer beholden to rationalistic arguments for or against the existence of God or the “truth” of your religion.
Just as one can be a great race-car driver, yet “not a car girl,” one can be a devout person without being a “god girl,” so to speak.
F1 racing driver "I'm not a car girl..👀😂
This is not the same as being “spiritual but not religious” but is more like being “religious but not metaphysical” or “religious but not theological.”
We can look at some very devout souls whose theologies, if they are even explicit, are either unsophisticated or contradictory and affirm that they don’t need PhDs. To say otherwise is to fall prey to the green lumber fallacy.
None of this answers the question “Why be religious” but it does put to rest the challenge from rationality that religion is insufficiently rigorous or scientific.
From a trading point of view, it doesn’t matter if the lumber is green or not; what matters is the price action. Similarly, a person who offers a sincere, heartfelt and efficacious prayer needn't know anything about the ontology of prayer. It’s irrelevant, when praying.
The Case of the College Presidents
I’ve been thinking about the green lumber fallacy of late, watching the embarrassing congressional testimony of three Ivy League presidents. All that academic training, yet in the critical moment they squirmed and hid behind legalese rather than denouncing calls for genocide.
They missed the low-hanging fruit in favor of selective nuance. They focused on whether the lumber is green (is a call for genocide technically “Bullying and harassment”) while ignoring the price action. It’s obviously wrong and unacceptable.
The Green lumber fallacy seems to be a particular challenge for the well schooled. Meanwhile, to borrow another character popularized by Nassim Taleb, “Fat Tony” (the folk hero who lives a long happy life despite an apparently unhealthy and crude lifestyle) is not distracted by jargon and sophistication.
The question raised by the college presidents’ performance is whether one must choose between being a Fat Tony and being an IYI (“intellectual yet idiot”).
Can you pursue a deep education, even one that involves the exploration of ontology and metaphysics, without losing the kind of practical clarity possessed by the un-schooled and pre-schooled? This is a variation on Yeats’s famous quip that “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I believe so, and yet it’s rare.
I think you can. I believe the history of philosophy, culminating in existentialism, is a kind of ouroboros, whereby theory comes to appreciate its own limits.
Kant already admitted as much. He writes “There is a limit where the intellect fails and breaks down, and this limit is where the questions concerning God and freewill and immortality arise.”
Wittgenstein describes the aim of philosophy as “show[ing] the fly the way out of the fly bottle.”
Heidegger says that the God of philosophers is not a God to whom one could “pray,” “bring sacrifices,” “play music,” “dance,” or before whom one could “fall on one’s knees in awe. And that’s a problem!
Because we should be singing and dancing; we should be in awe.
Existentialism is Necessary, But Insufficient: Antisemitism as a Case Study
On the flip-side, though, existentialists rightfully get accused of moral relativism. Thus, how do you prevent an existentialist from committing practically to antisemitism, while bypassing rational argument? Overturning theory for “praxis” guarantees nothing.
Antisemites hated Jews before the pragmatic turn in philosophy and will find ways to hate us afterwards. In pre-modern times, Jews were hated for not accepting the truth of Christ or Allah. In modern times, for both assimilating and not assimilating enough.
Learn from this “case study” that the formal rejection of theory in favor of the practical is certainly not enough. But in some ways the antisemitism of Fat Tony may be preferable to the high-minded antisemitism of the IYI.
One reason is that with the overt, irrational antisemite you know what you are dealing with. The enmity is obvious. But in the case of the DEI bureaucrat for whom Jews are an inconvenient edge case, there’s a certain plausible deniability.
I’m only writing about antisemitism because it’s top of mind, but my point is more broadly about intellectualism as a trap if it isn’t accompanied by, for lack of better terms, common sense.
Common Sense: Avoid Wipe-Out
Of course, common sense can be wrong, too. But we shouldn’t assume it to be wrong off the bat. I believe the skeptical tradition from Abraham to Sextus Empiricus to Maimonides to Hume to Charlie Munger can help us here. It’s most important to avoid big mistakes. While it’s difficult to be right, it’s possible to be less wrong.
Common sense won’t generate alpha; it won’t help you find the contrarian thesis that is right; but it will protect you from making big errors, the kind that lead to wipe-out.
Whenever we see antisemitism on the rise, we see the warning signs of a society that is on the verge of wiping out. Jew-hatred is a leading indicator of societal collapse. By not aiding and abetting antisemitism you can avoid a big mistake.
As Niall Ferguson recently wrote, many German academics were enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich. We don’t, on the whole, remember them for their “contributions to the field,” but rather for their stunning moral failure. Rationality and irrationality are perfectly compatible in a downside scenario.
This is Hannah Arendt’s critique of Heidegger in a nutshell: he was too focused on being contrarian he forgot to hedge himself against barbarism. This is a common error, even if Heidegger is an extreme case. The longer I live the more respect I have for human decency (“derekh eretz”) as an underrated civilizational value. One way to think about religion is as a hedge against the erosion of decency. Does religion produce its share of violence, brutality, cruelty, uncompromising fanaticism? Of course. Perhaps a Catholic, unphilosophically trained Heidegger would have been just as antisemitic as the one who ditched the scholastic Duns Scotus for the romantic-pagan Hölderlin. But then we should evaluate religious forms of life against their ability to hedge us against wipe-out. On the whole, the great atrocities of the 20th century were committed by believers in new religions, e.g., Communism and Nazism. And unsurprisingly, both new religions were deeply antisemitic.
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Individual freedom is a Jewish idea. It is one of the functions of Christianity to make it universal. Jews do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, but too utopian, too hopeful, and too unrealistic a turn. Christians must be Jews. Not a conversion, closer to practice as run from an understanding. The truth of what Christians believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant. The path of Atonement [at-One-ment] is internal and personal. A tendency of human is to throw out the baby with the bath water. One strike, and you are out, gone, and forbidden re-entry. I worked for a good friend who lived by the rule one awe-shit erases a thousand attaboys. He never handed out attaboys but could find mistakes per second. I lived in four towns and eight houses and attended three grade schools and three jr/sr high schools by the time I was 17. Then I joined the Navy. There was always a pecking order. I began and stayed at the bottom rung until the second town. New kids start at the bottom. Basic decency and common sense are both oxymorons. Each rung of the ladder has a different perspective of right and wrong. What is the essence of antisemitism? Hitler wrote the First Reich ended when Moses brought down the Ten Commandments. His Third Reich is to return the world to the First. We are in the middle of the Third. Islam denies the Ten Commandments. Read the Koran to verify if you dare. Integrity and commitment are weapons of the ego. I recommend dissolving the ego, and everything else will resolve itself.