When Ideas Become Gods
How unquestioned abstractions forge the invisible bonds of society
It’s hard to understand exactly how powerful a force religion is, if you don’t subscribe to one. I grew up mostly an agnostic. I didn’t know if a higher power existed or not but I was pretty sure religion was a holdout of superstition. It’s the way a lot of people around me felt too. It was the common opinion in the enlightened, intellectual circles in which I moved.
In my mind, it really was that simple. There are people who are so vulnerable to superstition that they will believe the dumbest little thing to have a sense of control over their lives. I didn’t stop to consider how I was no different, or how complex and powerful this belief was that drove them to shape their lives around it.
Religions are powerful, perhaps the most powerful institutions we have developed as human beings. They depend on the capacity for metaphysical belief. There is an argument to be made that it is this ability—more than our tools, more than our intellect—that separates us from all other known forms of life. We are human, because we believe.
Belief is not simply a set of axioms that go unquestioned, as I used to believe. That is a mathematician’s description of something far more complex. Belief permeates the conscious sheath, it goes deep to the heart of the subconscious. It colors basic perception and interpretation of events. It is a filter through which all of life’s happenings pass. It changes the entire experience of the person who holds it.
Your life is shaped almost entirely by beliefs you cannot prove. Beliefs about who you are. Beliefs about what is good in the world. Beliefs about how you should live your life. Yes, you might be able to articulate them in exquisite detail, but most of the ideas that shape your life can’t be proven definitively in a conversation.
It’s why we talk so much about these things to begin with. We don’t talk about things that can be definitively proven. We don’t debate whether a bicycle is slower than a car. This can be proven. Put them in a race, let everyone observe the results. Proof is a matter of direct observation, the simplest kind of proof. As long as your eyes and your senses of the world are the same as mine, we’ll agree the car is much faster than the bicycle.
Other proofs can be arrived at if we agree on a few basic rules. This is how proofs in math work. There are some operations we agree on, some axioms, some rules of the game. As long as we agree on the rules, we can derive proofs about ideas we can’t directly observe. The sum of any sequence of numbers starting at 1 and going up to N is N(N+1)/2. This is something I can prove to you following the simple rules of addition and multiplication.
The difference between the simple proofs of everyday things that you can touch and feel, and the more complex proofs of intangible ideas, comes from the fact that the latter depends on rules. But where do these rules come from?
The rules come from thin air. There is no meaning for them outside of the fact that both you and I agree on them. And that is their power: social consensus is the basis for a collective worldview. The introduction of religion is really that simple. You and I both believe something we don’t question. In fact, that we can’t question. That we just accept blindly.
This creates a connection between us. This assumption shapes, in its little way, the way we look at the world. And because I know you look at it similarly to me, we can start conversing not in the boring world of everyday things, but in the rarefied air of abstractions.
Abstraction is a fancy word for an idea you can’t touch, taste, see, or hear. It describes an idea that describes tangible things, but in a generalized way. It tells about some generalized property that exists only in the minds of the people who have perceived some actual objects, and then have a form of memory that lets them abstract notions from those memories.
Abstractions don’t exist anywhere outside of the mind, but they create the majority of the most powerful ideas. Even the idea of love is an abstraction. Duty is an abstraction. Government is an abstraction. What is real is the sensation of lips touching in a kiss. A government, in real terms, is a bunch of people running around from talking to each other and shuffling papers for no apparent reason.
To really see the difference, imagine you’re born someone who doesn’t have the capacity for abstractions. All you know, and all you remember, are the specific experiences you’ve had. You don’t remember any notion of generalized commonalities or patterns. You just remember each and every thing. You see everything only by its directly observable details.
What is school then? It is a building where young human beings go, where they sit in chairs, in front of desks, with books, where an adult at the front of the room tells them things.
This sounds like a pretty good definition of school, but note the lack of any abstract descriptions. There’s no mention of “learning.” Because in a purely tangible sense, it doesn’t exist. Where is it? Point to it. Did you point to the books? Does that mean that every time I read a book I’m doing this learning thing, same as the kids in school? Or did you point to the person in the front of the room? Is that teacher? Wherever a person stands at the head of the room and addresses the rest, what is it that makes these specifically “learning” and “teaching,” but not other behaviors that look exactly the same?
The only difference is a concept in our heads of a pattern, a set of details that we apply to situations, to see if they fit. A label at home, reading an encyclopedia is learning, while a kid at school goofing off is not. We know this because we match both to the abstract pattern in our heads called “learning,” and we see which one matches and which one doesn’t.
To be honest, it is almost impossible for us to speak without abstractions. The description I gave earlier of “school” sounds very basic and tangible, but it still uses abstractions. What is a “building”? What is a “go”? What is “sit”? What is an “adult,” and what is a “child”?
Of course, we can keep supplying definitions on definitions for these words, but they will just depend on other words. And therein is our fundamental problem. Words are themselves abstractions. They are just sounds, at the end of the day. The mapping between them and meaning only exists in our heads. It is only an abstraction.
Human beings are animals with the capacity for abstraction. Our biggest defining trait from other species – language – is at its fundamental core, the ability to take raw tangibles, real experience, and abstract them into words. Language is our primary means of abstraction.
It also allows us to communicate these abstractions with one another. It lets us build an entire world on abstraction. Our societies, our governments, our money, our politics, our relationships, and our religions are all built on abstract ideas. These are the things we kill for, we die for, we stress over, we shape our lives around. They’re just ideas, but they make us who we are.
Religion is powerful because it is pure abstraction with no basis in the tangible. With all other things, you can eventually get down to some real, tangible thing that those abstractions come from. You can trace love to two people involved in an act of physical intimacy. You can trace government to the feeling of holding a gun. You can point to a gun, and say “this is what government is about.” It doesn’t get the whole picture across, but you won’t be wrong.
You can’t do that with religion. You can’t point to a book or an idol, or a temple, and say “This is what religion is.” Because they didn’t give rise to the religion. Religion gave rise to them. The unique thing about religion, compared to all those other things, is that in religion the abstract ideas come first. Good, salvation, damnation. You can’t point to any of those, but they are where religion begins. Not in anything tangible, but in abstractions and ideas first.
A collective worldview that begins with abstractions is so powerful, because it can never be disproven. If you and I both believe in democracy as the best form of government, there can still always be another that comes around, and does all those things – all those real, material things – better than democracy, and we would have no choice but to change our beliefs. Because, ultimately, anything that is not a religion is grounded in material things. And if the facts about those things change – if we observe something new that we had not before, such as a better-functioning government than democracy – then the abstractions that are built on them must change too.
Religion is the only thing that is not vulnerable to new material observation. This is why it is so long-lasting. In the last 2000 years, political systems have risen and fallen, wave after wave of art and philosophy and music and theater have crested and flown, but two things have remained largely the same: religion and math. The first, because it is at its core not beholden to material facts. The second, because it is about the most immutable patterns in the universe. Math can still change – for example, if one day we discover that within certain distortions of spacetime 1 + 1 ≠ 2, but 3 – but religion cannot. And that is what makes it such a powerful, stable basis for collective identity.