tl;dr - Jump down to the end
OK, I watched a bunch of lectures by Daniel Dennett today and I’m kind of steamed up. Dennett has some of the most astounding insights on the nature of human society, religion and so on but he also has this amazing blind-spot toward his employer, the State.
In one lecture I watched, Dennett speculates on ideas for how atheists might go about replacing religion - or at least the objectionable parts of religion while keeping the good parts - with a credible alternative. At the conclusion of the talk, he holds up the TED conferences as an example of an organization with amazing success in simply spreading truth. My view of the LvMI is every bit as high.
But there’s something missing in the LvMI. Its primary focus is academic - which is great as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. What I believe is needed is an organization that reaches out to the masses in a direct form, in the way that churches do by providing regular instruction and community interaction.
In another talk, Dennett discusses folk tunes and words as “undomesticated memes” - they serve no particular purpose except their own existence and they are indifferent to the ends of individual humans. These are different from memes such as religious beliefs which can induce the bearer of the meme to sacrifice his own ends and serve other purposes, much in the same way that a parasitic virus can drive its host to suicidal actions that serve the reproductive purposes of the virus but are detrimental to the survival of the host.
Curiously, Dennett never mentions the parasite par excellence - the State. Unlike the State, churches do not tax you, and those that do always do so with the assistance and cooperation of the State, essentially making them just another organ of the State. Taxation is obviously parasitic and clearly distinguishable from other forms of transactions in which all parties to the transaction willingly agree to enter into it. (We can nitpick over the gray areas of private monopoly privilege and the extent to which that removes the de facto voluntariness but the core issue of what is really voluntary versus involuntary remains crystal clear).
But these are all purely analytical considerations. Part of my interest has to do not only with how we know what is good for us but how we feel it, as well. One of the roles of religion is to act as what Dennett terms a “moral team” - it’s a group of people who “believe in” a set of values. In this way, one’s value are not only analytically assented to but they are also viscerally felt.
Most people are not moral philosophers, so they do not spend a lot of time reflecting on what constitutes good versus evil. That is, they are not specialists in morality. The decision to belong to any given moral team is largely based on other factors - prior membership of one’s family or friends, good PR, reputable and famous teachers, good slogans, and so on. These are the “packaging” on the product. What’s inside isn’t always what was advertised but the point is that people do not choose their “moral team” on the basis of weighing the product itself so much as the packaging.
Also, I think that we can tend to underestimate the extent to which “gut feeling” is the real determining factor in our choices. Even if you carefully study a menu at a restaurant on one visit, that is no guarantee that you will study it as carefully every time, or that you studied all the menuse of all the available restaurants in the area before making a purchasing decision, and so on. We’re always acting on incomplete information and the “gut instinct” plays a role in providing heuristics in that information vacuum that keep us from making really bad mistakes almost all of the time.
The only correct basis for methodical decision-making is individual self-satisfaction. But what satisfies us is not solely or even mostly a function of internal factors within the self. The state of satisfaction itself is completely subjective but the conditions which bring about satisfaction are not solely or even mostly internal. The conditions of satisfaction may be amenable to conscious influence to a degree but the majority of the conditions for satisfaction lie outside of the self. In fact, they reside mostly within the social order itself.
How we expect people to respond to our own actions (versus how they actually do respond) is the single largest component in determining our state of satisfaction. This can be seen to be true by following the preconditions required to eat your breakfast. At every step of the way, you must interact with someone and you must please them well enough that they will render a service to you in exchange - such as the sale of groceries or the writing of a paycheck.
But feeling what is the correct path to attaining one’s satisfaction is even more difficult than analyzing it. If you spend enough time analyzing the problem, you will probably come out with pretty decent answers. The only trouble is that the majority of your life will be consumed with such analysis, which is a very high cost to avoid mistakes that could probably be avoided much more cheaply.
One of the primary ways that humans learn is by emulation of their peers. Churches definitely provide this sort of instructional environment. You don’t have to study the Bible to get the gist of what kinds of actions are desirable or undesirable for the Christian believer. Even if you were from a culture where there was nothing like organized religion, all you need to do is watch and learn, listen and imitate and you will be up to speed in very short order.
The only problem is that most churches inculcate really bad values - that is to say they inculcate statist value systems. In particular, they teach moral systems that are parasitic memes, moral systems that teach you that your satisfaction is the worst possible basis on which to make decisions - the exact opposite of reality.
Dennett never explicitly identifies the State as a culprit in memetic engineering and I remain perpetually mystified as to why Dennett/Dawkins/etc. lay the blame for wars on religion when it is obvious that the generals and Presidents are the immediate organizers of war.
Another role that these “moral teams” perform is filtration of the wider culture. The vast majority of cultural memes are at best deadweight - they may not be detrimental to you but they are not enhancing to your well-being, either. Organizations like the LvMI help perform this filtration at a scholarly level but we also need filtration of the popular culture and this function is best performed by the laity itself - movies, music, etc. recommendations or un-recommendations.
This is a point that I think a lot of secularists get completely wrong. In their campaign against State censorship, they forget that the vast majority of the media that is produced is deadweight and much of it is toxic and harmful. Ecumenism as a matter of policy is fine but not as a matter of social order. We need a “membrane” that pulls in nutrients and pushes the waste out.
(tl;dr) This brings me to the First Church of Mises. Obviously, the title is facetious but I think a case can be made for an organization which retains some of the attributes of religion - regular moral instruction, singing and community events - and dispenses sound moral instruction. What is sound moral instruction? Basically, the working out of the consequences of Epicurean/Misesean ideas on the only correct basis of decision-making: one’s own satisfaction.
This meme - that one’s own satisfaction is the only correct basis for decision-making - is to the mainstream moral dogmas of self-sacrifice, obedience and subjugation as the body’s T-cells are to a viral infection. That is, it acts as an immune response that confronts and destroys the parasitic memes that drive suicidal (what I term ‘self-treacherous’) actions within their hosts, such as the enthusiastic payment of taxes or zealous obedience to commands from self-appointed authorities.
But academic instruction or even popular media are not sufficient to really inculcate this meme into the public at large. What is needed are flesh-and-blood organizations - communities - that meet face-to-face and reinforce these values through ordinary social mechanisms so that they are felt as well as realized intellectually.
Clayton -
And note that - just like the Austrian School of economics - the Higher Criticism is not dead, it’s just been marginalized for a very long time.