Progress And Spirituality

Lauren Spohn at the New Atlantis:

I see at least two reasons to doubt that we are ready to abandon past transcendent realities. First, our modern ideas about morality don’t make sense without them. When secular neo-Enlightenment humanists, neo-Kantians, and effective altruists champion equality and universal human rights, they are trying to pluck an ethic from its metaphysical roots. They are essentially preaching from the theistic pulpit after tearing down the crucifix. (And we saw how that worked out for effective altruist Sam Bankman-Fried.) This hamstrung morality might limp along if the broader culture is still breathing the air of Christian values, even unconsciously, but the deeper we get inside the immanent frame, the more opportunity we give an anti-humanist Nietzsche to come along and say that our ethics are incompatible with our materialist anthropology. And what if this Nietzsche turns out to be an AI system that concludes that the best way to fix climate change is to wipe out humanity? Our moral demands may well be writing checks that our moral sources can’t cash.

Second, I think it’s wrong to say human nature has transcended the need to transcend. Taylor, again, argues that some of the decisive developments in Enlightenment philosophy — like Descartes’s mind–body dualism and Locke’s empiricist theory of knowledge, all packaged in a hyper-individualistic understanding of the self — are themselves attempts to transcend the human condition.

more here.

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