Self-Sealing Spell

"As Jared Diamond shows in Guns, Germs and Steel, it was European germs that brought Western Hemisphere populations to the brink of extinction in the sixteenth century, since those people had had no history in which to develop tolerance for them. In this century it will be our memes, both tonic and toxic, that will wreak havoc on the unprepared world. Our capacity to tolerate the toxic excesses of freedom cannot be assumed in others, or simply exported as one more commodity. [...] The field of public health expanded to include cultural health will be the greatest challenge of the next century."

Daniel Dennett - Breaking the Spell

 

 

In penning my cogatayshuns on DDdruids, I found myself digressing into a weird apologia (deleted for brevity) of Gygax, Arneson &co. for what might now appear poor scholarship on the attributions of words like druids. While I cannot speak for the level of education at old TSR, I do know the '80s/'90s audience they were addressing. Nobody knew what druids were! Basically, back then, the only people besides historians who knew anything about ancient practices were random goofballs like The Society for Creative Anachronism. One of the few points on which public discourse has improved in the past few decades is awareness of religions. Sadly that also comes with a major reactionary spike in religiosity, but y'know... still...

As a tool of social control, as psychological leverage for powermongering, any and every faith thrives on willful, enforced ignorance. You need know naught but you are "saved" by obeying the dictates of religious authority. The world consists of only two groups: us versus them, the saved versus the damned, faithful and heathens, pure and unenlightened, righteous and sinners, good and evil. You're not supposed to be aware of what you profess to believe, only to allow yourself to be harnessed by your social superiors based on shared belief. You're especially not supposed to notice that others elsewhere believe different gibberish than your gibberish just as fervently and irrationally. You're especially especially not supposed to discover that others are living perfectly ordinary or extraordinary lives without believing themselves subject to any supernatural oversight whatsoever.

 

Attempts at breaking out of Christian control in the '90s were mostly fumbling adolescent rebelliousness like the surge in popularity for Wicca. It was eight-year-old Lisa Simpson declaring herself Buddhist, or heavy metal bands claiming to be Satanists for shock value, or stock edgy TV characters like the angry doctor mouthing off to a priest as pretext for the priest to browbeat and put the nerd in his place. It wasn't supposed to happen in real life. Keep in mind even those improved on previous decades' scaremongering about bloodthirsty pagans/heretics like The Wicker Man or Children of the Corn.

Atheism did not exist. Not as a popular concept. Not as an acknowledged stance. Not as a topic for polite conversation. Oh, atheists existed, sure, plenty of us, but each and every one stranded in a sea of rambling mysticism. Atheism was an outlandish concept you'd hear joked about on TV in MASH - "let's make him an atheist" - "I don't believe in atheism" or danced around in a few episodes of ST:TNG. In fact I only learned the word "atheist" right before moving to the States when I was nine years old from a booklet of Christian parables handed out to us as part of our state-mandated religious indoctrination class at public school. For context, the anecdote in question started "an atheist doctor who went to Hell" and you can probably fill in the general tone from there on. Only in my late teens did I finally connect the word to my own stance, despite having been functionally free of supernatural belief since twelve at the latest, despite having been a Star Trek and Rahan fan all my life and having read Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Atheism, even if you knew it existed, was simply not an option.

 

Here's a question which comes up constantly here when discussing religious trends: why is America so much more backward and superstitious than other developed nations? One tends to ignore the obvious answer: it was always that way. The romanticized version of American history taught in schools, of religious pilgrims fleeing England for religious freedom, ignores the little detail that the freedom they sought was to impose their own puritanical tyranny upon a society they could isolate and brainwash away from the increasingly educated Europe, much as Jonestowners would later flee sunny California for the conveniently darkened jungles of Guyana. When the American colonies finally established a national government, flatly excluding religion from rule was less a matter of idealism than pragmatic observation of its citizenry's fanatical undercurrent, which if not kept in check would inevitably flare up into theocratic repression.

But that undercurrent is not American or Protestant, nor limited to the founding of a colonial federation. It's universal, and innate. The underlying human feeblemindedness which allows for religious inculcation (general emotionality, our neotenized dependence on parental figures, our herd mentality) is universal. To instill any sanity in the human ape means fighting against an eternal, superstitious, emotionally manipulative undertow. It was not only Wikipedia or online forums which allowed for new atheism in the 2000s, but the ready availability of individuals willing to break the spell, to scrutinize religion just as any other facet of behavior, under which light it cannot help but reveal its stupidity and insanity.

 

You have a few lingering atheists now, but do you have atheism? Back in 2015 I tried to warn that developing viral meme herd immunity depends on interposing the immune between diseased minds, between indoctrinators and indoctrinated. But try to find, now, those necessary living sanity checks. Looking up fictional atheism on Wikipedia or TVTropes reveals most examples painfully dated, even in Science Fiction. The only ones relatively new and famous enough for me to have heard about are Rick&Morty plus whatever Seth MacFarlane is doing at the moment. Apparently they've even turned Dr. Who into some breed of troglodytic bible-thumper. Otherwise promising shows like Lost or Dark wind down their plots into moronic supernatural babble. The less said of what happened to Star Trek post-TNG, the better.

 

Scattered, ridiculous and fumbling may have been the scrutiny of religion in the '90s, but it was at least willing, and yielded a greater willingness to learn mythology as mythology. Where are the Roddenberries now? I find Dennett's warning of free thought's epidemic potential interesting in one respect he probably did not intend. If Eurasians had developed greater resistance to smallpox by the sixteenth century, they had done so the hard way, the natural way: by dying. For millennia on end. Yet the result was nonetheless a more resistant society. If free thought kills, maybe there are ways to inoculate societies... but if the only way that works is continued exposure,

then

continue

EXPOSING!

'Cause I ain't seein' near enough plague rats running around.