gemma, this is such a lovely response, and very much in the spirit of the argument. I suppose the question is where do we find this in a secular frame? Is there some intrinsic reason that secular society is having a difficult time creating this kind of vulnerability ?(Maybe AA is an exception—though there is a kind of spiritualism even there?)
Talk about raising the complicated questions! I make no apologies for the length of my response :)
I think there are intrinsic reasons that secular society often struggles with this, yes. Religion can be intensely vulnerable. It’s a bit mind-boggling that it’s even possible to have a relationship with a whole community that engages something so personal: your deepest motivations, your least explainable feelings, your entire engagement with the whole chaos of the world. A community that starts from there has a head start on including the difficult bits.
There are also community organisations that can foster deep ties by starting from something less personal than religion but more personal than baseline. Singing and acting and physical exertion are each vulnerable in their own way. Choirs and theatre groups and sports teams can become very tight-knit as a result.
Still, it’s worth noting that one way to describe a “secular” society is to say that it is one in which tricky contentious religious/metaphysical convictions are understood to be off limits. It’s not just that such things are not explicitly ruled in; they’re often implicitly or explicitly ruled out. There is perhaps already a lack of intimacy implied by this.
This can change if we take “secular” to simply mean “not explicitly including God.” For example, here’s a recent post from Ozy Brennan entitled “I’m running the Bay Area Secular Solstice.” https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/im-running-the-bay-area-secular-solstice The post explains, “Secular Solstice is a yearly holiday tradition in the rationalist community. We sing, we tell stories, we think about our lives and humanity’s past and future, and hopefully we’re inspired to be a little more determined and a little kinder. … My Solstice is about being an ordinary person, which is to say weak and powerless in the face of problems that are much too big for you to do anything about. If you are an ordinary person who feels scared and helpless, I hope my Solstice will have something to say to you.”
If “being a better person” and “dealing with fear and helplessness in the face of what you cannot change” are both included in your festival then this is well into the realm of what would traditionally have been religion. Indeed, I don’t doubt that there are parts of the Bay Area Rationalist community that are more intimate than many churches. So if the question is “Can community intimacy be created in a way that is “secular” in the sense of not including God?” then I think the answer is a clear yes, provided you have a critical mass of people who are “religious” in the sense of being interested in traditionally religious questions and “non-religious” in the sense that they can engage sincerely with them without needing to bring up God (or indeed “non-religious” in the sense of being unable to engage sincerely with such questions if required to bring God into it). It probably also helps if many of the people involved are deeply weird already. Community intimacy outside of religion is weird.
As a long-standing member of the “unable to engage sincerely with such questions if required to bring God into it” category, I have plenty of thoughts about how this happens and how to deal kindly with it. I do wonder if it would be a mistake to focus too narrowly on this in an American context, though, given that most American religious “Nones” are neither atheist nor agnostic. There’s probably a more general tension around whether involvement in religious organisations will create space for spirituality or shut it out by being too narrow. That trade-off between form and freedom cannot simply be addressed by capitulating to one or the other, so the solution isn’t obvious.
I think this is an excellent analysis. Optimization and toxic positivity guide many programs on socialization. Don’t get me wrong, kindness and joy are essential parts of life. But so too, as Kimbriel notes, are the painful affects of life. True connection bonds and supports through both. This piece notes the importance that rituals of grief, etc can play here. And I think we forsake those elements of spiritual traditions to our detriment. Epistemological research shows that all social connection is good, but connection derived through religious affiliations offers an added benefit (ie greater effect size than just club memberships). I don’t think this has anything to do with theological beliefs, but rather as a marker that these social connections also take place in the context of rituals that have connected people through millennia as they faced life’s challenges.
You’ve responded admirably to my challenge, and given us plenty to think about! Including, in my case, this:
In January 2023, the city of Auckland experienced catastrophic flooding. For me and my family, that mostly meant we breathed a sigh of relief that we’d taken our kid home from daycare before the streets went underwater, whereupon we sat tight in our snug apartment building on a hill without much to worry about. In the days afterwards, we knew that many people had lost their homes. The news duly reported that four people had died. One nearby building that was on lower ground had water being pumped out of the basement for a week afterwards. But the damage all felt a bit distant, as it so often does in these situations.
Then I went to Quaker meeting. One woman stood up and told us that her house had been spared, but their shed had been completely flooded. All her neighbours were telling her that she was lucky. Her husband, meanwhile, was heartbroken because that shed held an old printing press that he’d been restoring and caring for over a period of years. It had been, she said, “his spiritual project, of a kind” and now it was ruined, and she didn’t know how to comfort him.
We listened in silence, as we always do. Afterwards, someone gave her a hug. And I thought how grateful I was to be able to participate in her grief by hearing it. I felt like I was part of my city, instead of just a disconnected resident. At work, or in passing, or sometimes even with friends, we conceal our grief and put on a brave face. When disaster strikes, our fellow citizens who are affected by it can seem as if they might as well be on the moon, rather than in the next block over.
People bring their joys and their respectable concerns and their fluffy sentiments to Quaker meeting. They also bring their failings and their grief and sometimes even their despair. The process is slow and not at all flashy, but it runs deep. Outside of religion, it is rare for places that foster that sort of intimacy to be open to everyone who walks in. Instead, we pass each other politely and we do not seek to know for whom the bell tolls, because the bells do not toll at all.
"The Surgeon General tells us that “a culture of connection rests on core values of kindness, respect, service, and commitment to one another."
There is so much to unpack but in case I forget to respond tomorrow I'll pick up on one thing now. Just on this quote, I'm not sure this does rest on politeness as you say, doesn't it go deeper than this? I'll need to read the document but to me it suggests something perhaps a little more than this and arguing for more inclusive and stronger connections.
I agree this may well not deal well with strong emotions such as anger and jealousy, and I am not sure our current secular structures are well built to include such feelings without resorting to shaming those who harbour them, but I do think it goes deeper than perhaps politeness.
Here's a superficial response to something you only mention in passing: the adequacy (or not) of Michael Tomasky's argument that right-wing media won the election for Trump. The argument is not that the Democrats didn't deserve to lose. The argument is that that's not why they lost. A vast closed ecosystem of Fox, talk radio, right-wing websites, and evangelical pulpits engaged in nonstop fantastic exaggeration about the Democrats ("Marxists." "socialists," "communists," "unpatriotic," "baby-killers") and equally important, said not a word about Trump's manifest dishonesty, cruelty, ignorance, and incompetence.
Obviously the Democrats are terrible. But the Republicans are horrible. In their fanatical devotion to plutocracy, they are so much the greater evil that any non-brainwashed person seeking to choose the lesser evil would vote Democratic. But Republican voters were brainwashed. Of course they're free, in theory, to read Times or the Post or the Nation. But in the real world, those are not live cultural options. They believed in Trump because every outlet in their environment told them to.
gemma, this is such a lovely response, and very much in the spirit of the argument. I suppose the question is where do we find this in a secular frame? Is there some intrinsic reason that secular society is having a difficult time creating this kind of vulnerability ?(Maybe AA is an exception—though there is a kind of spiritualism even there?)
Talk about raising the complicated questions! I make no apologies for the length of my response :)
I think there are intrinsic reasons that secular society often struggles with this, yes. Religion can be intensely vulnerable. It’s a bit mind-boggling that it’s even possible to have a relationship with a whole community that engages something so personal: your deepest motivations, your least explainable feelings, your entire engagement with the whole chaos of the world. A community that starts from there has a head start on including the difficult bits.
There are also community organisations that can foster deep ties by starting from something less personal than religion but more personal than baseline. Singing and acting and physical exertion are each vulnerable in their own way. Choirs and theatre groups and sports teams can become very tight-knit as a result.
Still, it’s worth noting that one way to describe a “secular” society is to say that it is one in which tricky contentious religious/metaphysical convictions are understood to be off limits. It’s not just that such things are not explicitly ruled in; they’re often implicitly or explicitly ruled out. There is perhaps already a lack of intimacy implied by this.
This can change if we take “secular” to simply mean “not explicitly including God.” For example, here’s a recent post from Ozy Brennan entitled “I’m running the Bay Area Secular Solstice.” https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/im-running-the-bay-area-secular-solstice The post explains, “Secular Solstice is a yearly holiday tradition in the rationalist community. We sing, we tell stories, we think about our lives and humanity’s past and future, and hopefully we’re inspired to be a little more determined and a little kinder. … My Solstice is about being an ordinary person, which is to say weak and powerless in the face of problems that are much too big for you to do anything about. If you are an ordinary person who feels scared and helpless, I hope my Solstice will have something to say to you.”
If “being a better person” and “dealing with fear and helplessness in the face of what you cannot change” are both included in your festival then this is well into the realm of what would traditionally have been religion. Indeed, I don’t doubt that there are parts of the Bay Area Rationalist community that are more intimate than many churches. So if the question is “Can community intimacy be created in a way that is “secular” in the sense of not including God?” then I think the answer is a clear yes, provided you have a critical mass of people who are “religious” in the sense of being interested in traditionally religious questions and “non-religious” in the sense that they can engage sincerely with them without needing to bring up God (or indeed “non-religious” in the sense of being unable to engage sincerely with such questions if required to bring God into it). It probably also helps if many of the people involved are deeply weird already. Community intimacy outside of religion is weird.
As a long-standing member of the “unable to engage sincerely with such questions if required to bring God into it” category, I have plenty of thoughts about how this happens and how to deal kindly with it. I do wonder if it would be a mistake to focus too narrowly on this in an American context, though, given that most American religious “Nones” are neither atheist nor agnostic. There’s probably a more general tension around whether involvement in religious organisations will create space for spirituality or shut it out by being too narrow. That trade-off between form and freedom cannot simply be addressed by capitulating to one or the other, so the solution isn’t obvious.
I think this is an excellent analysis. Optimization and toxic positivity guide many programs on socialization. Don’t get me wrong, kindness and joy are essential parts of life. But so too, as Kimbriel notes, are the painful affects of life. True connection bonds and supports through both. This piece notes the importance that rituals of grief, etc can play here. And I think we forsake those elements of spiritual traditions to our detriment. Epistemological research shows that all social connection is good, but connection derived through religious affiliations offers an added benefit (ie greater effect size than just club memberships). I don’t think this has anything to do with theological beliefs, but rather as a marker that these social connections also take place in the context of rituals that have connected people through millennia as they faced life’s challenges.
You’ve responded admirably to my challenge, and given us plenty to think about! Including, in my case, this:
In January 2023, the city of Auckland experienced catastrophic flooding. For me and my family, that mostly meant we breathed a sigh of relief that we’d taken our kid home from daycare before the streets went underwater, whereupon we sat tight in our snug apartment building on a hill without much to worry about. In the days afterwards, we knew that many people had lost their homes. The news duly reported that four people had died. One nearby building that was on lower ground had water being pumped out of the basement for a week afterwards. But the damage all felt a bit distant, as it so often does in these situations.
Then I went to Quaker meeting. One woman stood up and told us that her house had been spared, but their shed had been completely flooded. All her neighbours were telling her that she was lucky. Her husband, meanwhile, was heartbroken because that shed held an old printing press that he’d been restoring and caring for over a period of years. It had been, she said, “his spiritual project, of a kind” and now it was ruined, and she didn’t know how to comfort him.
We listened in silence, as we always do. Afterwards, someone gave her a hug. And I thought how grateful I was to be able to participate in her grief by hearing it. I felt like I was part of my city, instead of just a disconnected resident. At work, or in passing, or sometimes even with friends, we conceal our grief and put on a brave face. When disaster strikes, our fellow citizens who are affected by it can seem as if they might as well be on the moon, rather than in the next block over.
People bring their joys and their respectable concerns and their fluffy sentiments to Quaker meeting. They also bring their failings and their grief and sometimes even their despair. The process is slow and not at all flashy, but it runs deep. Outside of religion, it is rare for places that foster that sort of intimacy to be open to everyone who walks in. Instead, we pass each other politely and we do not seek to know for whom the bell tolls, because the bells do not toll at all.
You should listen to LONERISM by Tame Impala
What is social media if not a globe-spanning temple for public rituals of hatred, agony, and occasionally love?
hahaha
"The Surgeon General tells us that “a culture of connection rests on core values of kindness, respect, service, and commitment to one another."
There is so much to unpack but in case I forget to respond tomorrow I'll pick up on one thing now. Just on this quote, I'm not sure this does rest on politeness as you say, doesn't it go deeper than this? I'll need to read the document but to me it suggests something perhaps a little more than this and arguing for more inclusive and stronger connections.
I agree this may well not deal well with strong emotions such as anger and jealousy, and I am not sure our current secular structures are well built to include such feelings without resorting to shaming those who harbour them, but I do think it goes deeper than perhaps politeness.
As always really enjoyed the piece Sam :)
Here's a superficial response to something you only mention in passing: the adequacy (or not) of Michael Tomasky's argument that right-wing media won the election for Trump. The argument is not that the Democrats didn't deserve to lose. The argument is that that's not why they lost. A vast closed ecosystem of Fox, talk radio, right-wing websites, and evangelical pulpits engaged in nonstop fantastic exaggeration about the Democrats ("Marxists." "socialists," "communists," "unpatriotic," "baby-killers") and equally important, said not a word about Trump's manifest dishonesty, cruelty, ignorance, and incompetence.
Obviously the Democrats are terrible. But the Republicans are horrible. In their fanatical devotion to plutocracy, they are so much the greater evil that any non-brainwashed person seeking to choose the lesser evil would vote Democratic. But Republican voters were brainwashed. Of course they're free, in theory, to read Times or the Post or the Nation. But in the real world, those are not live cultural options. They believed in Trump because every outlet in their environment told them to.