Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Now, I'm not saying God doesn't exist, but...

Researchers say they believe serotonin is at least partly responsible for what people generally term 'spiritual experiences'. Let's pretend for a moment that politicians are all scumbags, and the GOP has calculated that a political coalition based ultimately around serotonin and cheap meat can't fail. What should the Democrats do?

The only answer is to rapidly transform themselves into the party of hot sex and American Football with no TV blackouts.

8 comments:

Tommaso Sciortino said...

Ha. I think the real issue is giving people seratonin without making them feel guilty about it later. That would be hard to do.

But now that I think about it it's probably not a coincidence that hedonism leads to guilt. The guilt was probably created by religions to prevent people from finding satisfaction elsewhere.

If only hedonists could get together to make people feel guilty for needing to rely on religion to feel fulfilled. I don't know if that would make the world a better place, but it'd be interesting to watch.

Paul said...

Until relatively recently, unchecked hedonism was probably a good way to make sure you died young. There might be an evolutionary psychology argument to be made there that would pre-date religion.

Tommaso Sciortino said...

Sure, that's completely right. But hedonism used to be a much larger category that included things like drinking, dancing, and celebrating holidays. Insofar as relatively benign things like that are subject to guilt tripping it's not hard to see that religion was at least partially responsible.

Paul said...

I mean, I agree with you. But I think there's a plausible counter-argument that the arrow of causation goes mostly in the other direction.

Suppose you feel intense regret whenever you indulge yourself, but that you don't have any particular way to engage psychologically with that regret. You might be inclined to create some sort of explanatory structure for your guilt by, say, giving it an external focus and by coming up with various way of assuaging your conscience. Buy-in from lots of other people wouldn't hurt.

I don't know, I'm just rambling. I wouldn't say I've worked out all the details. But I think there's probably an argument buried in there somewhere.

Bret said...

I think guilt is a function of organized religion, and not of raw spiritual energy.

heidi heilig said...

Small children don't appear to feel guilt when they over-indulge. Guilt is a social construct designed to make sure that people don't take more resources than they earn or deserve.

Also, i find it interesting that bipolar disorder can lead both to spiritual experiences (visions of god or angels, etc) and excessive hedonism.

Paul said...

Well, babies also have no reservations about breastfeeding, but it doesn't follow that the lack of desire to breastfeed in adults is nothing more than a social construction. It makes sense, survival-wise, for babies to want different things than adults.

I'm usually a little bit skeptical of any argument to the effect that a particular social institution created, out of nothing, a psychological tendency among humans. (Although, of course, social institutions can mediate our psychological tendencies.) As the otherwise-unimpressive Ayn Rand said, "So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?"

Bret said...

Well, some institutions are capable of twisting basic human urges into something far worse. How could some of the West's worst failings have come to be without currency?

"No, I'm sorry, to get your grain out of the granary, there is a fee of six oats."

I think Guilt is our urge to fit in with the pack. This is fine and normal, but some human institutions tell us very wrong things about what the pack wants.