Escaping semi-disenchantment

I want to suggest a name for something that keeps cropping up: “semi-disenchantment”.

We semi-disenchant when we use science to mechsplain away some of our values, but not others.

The problem is semi-disenchantment has a bias. Higher more human values tend to get disenchanted away. Lower more “monkey” values tend to get a pass.

Over at Pancake Victim, Christian philosopher Tim Pickavance is considering the poignant situation of Tom Holland. Tom is an atheist who’d like to believe, but his scientific model of reality says Christianity is really just neural configurations:

Reason says this is a chemical reaction, that everything is material, that the human brain is programmed to believe in the supernatural. And this is why, over the course of history, the human brain has generated so many gods.…

To convert, I essentially have to cut myself off from reason. If I’m inhabiting the dimension of reason, then I don’t believe.

This was my Christian pushback to Tom in the comments:

I'd suggest he use his reason to doubt the mechanical model of reality that's captured him:

1. Maybe it's incomplete. The physicalist model can't explain consciousness, which seems like a pretty big problem since we know consciousness exists—and it seems adjacent to religious ideas like conscience, soul, and free will.

2. Maybe Holland should be more intellectually rigorous, not less. He vetoes faith because it's mechanically conditioned, but he doesn't seem to care that all his other values are just as mechanically conditioned. This seems like a reductio ad absurdum, so maybe his model is overly reductionist?

Aren't we less the fool, when we free ourselves from a model that's plainly incomplete and obviously unworkable?

The image in my mind is of someone trying to paint the world with gray paint—Tom’s scientific/materialist model of reality—but they always paint themselves into a corner because their model is too reductionist to cover themselves.

I asked AI to create an image of that. I wasn’t expecting this kind of jarring pathos, but I think it fits. This is semi-disenchantment in all its hopeless neurotic glory.

I think we need a word for it because it’s everywhere. But maybe that picture is worth more than the thousand words I’ll write here.

Semi-disenchantment is where Tom Holland is stuck, as he mechsplains away Christian belief while illogically retaining other values that are just as neurally conditioned.

It’s what C.S. Lewis attacks in Abolition of Man (1943): Gaius and Titius "see through” some values like patriotism and honor to the psychological conditioning behind them. But they illogically exempt their own more academically fashionable values from the same treatment.

Physics equations arriving in the 1600s are what’s trapped us here, I’m afraid. They make us suspect everything is really just tiny bits of matter blindly obeying mathematical laws.

If that’s true, then if we’re going to disenchant at all we should fully disenchant. Admit all human values are just neural configurations. None are written into the fabric of the universe. It’s neural puppet strings all the way down. We have no objectively valid reason to do anything.

But of course we can’t do this. We’re Corner Guy. We can never fully cover ourselves with the gray paint. Some values always stay enchanted.

It’s like we have certain half-conscious disenchantment blockers—that make certain values seem so modest or sensible that we don’t mechsplain them. And these disenchantment blockers are highly biased to lower “monkey” values.

The lower to the ground a value seems, the more likely we are to exempt it from disenchantment. Even in an atomic universe, it seems churlish and pedantic to deny “pleasure is good”, “pain is bad”, “food and sex are good”, etc. Enlightenment utilitarianism aims to create a sort of Monkey Heaven.

Religions like Christianity value pleasure too, but they attempt to add some floors on top of this monkey structure. Pleasure is licit, but subordinate to higher ideas of virtue and sin. Virtue and sin are part of a transcendent moral order that includes an afterlife, Spirit, conscience, soul.

Faced with the mechworld model of reality, we feel we need to be “scientific” and strip away those top floors: admit all those ideas about God and heaven and virtue are just neural configurations in our heads with no objective reality.

Bottom line, we end up trapped in a mickey mouse model of reality too small to cover us, but we feel intellectually dishonest if we don’t make the half-assed attempt.

Unfortunately, the half-assed lobotomy we give ourselves is worse than random. It selectively lobs off the higher bits.

It’s like the equations make us want to poke holes in our neocortex (ideas of God, self-sacrifice etc), while leaving our limbic system intact (food, pleasure, sex).

In theory we should fully disenchant from monk to monads: i.e., see ourselves as just a neutral clump of atoms.

In practice, we stop halfway. We semi-disenchant from monk to monkey. The monk is silenced, the monkey can roar.

It’s like if a value is shared with animals we value it more, because it’s less likely to be a priestly invention. Even though it’s just as neuronally conditioned. Pleasure is the ultimate in conditioning that is fundamentally senseless and blind: mice are conditioned by it to seek food and sex. So why should we disenchant virtue but not pleasure, then? Does this half-assed lobotomy make any sense?

I don’t know if this post would help someone like Tom Holland or not. I hope it might.

As a former agnostic who now believes, I’d say the key is for Tom to see the blatant intellectual inconsistency of semi-disenchantment. He thinks intellectual honesty requires him to reduce Christianity to a neural configuration. But if he’s so intellectually honest, why is he not applying that same standard to all his other values?

The problem is the standard itself. It’s so reductionist it’s practically self-refuting. Nothing that kills all values can possibly make sense; it’s a reductio ad absurdum—especially since it requires us to retain a value judgment in order to apply it. We can safely set it aside.

Good news, then: we don’t need to be Corner Guy! Corner Guy is kind of pitiable. Maybe the picture is worth more than the words here:

Corner Guy thinks he needs to project a mickey mouse model of reality onto himself or he’ll get an F in intellectual rigor—but his attempts are so incomplete they deserve at most a D.

That’s no way to live.

Free yourself, Tom! A wonderful non-reduced world is waiting behind the gray paint.

For more on semi-disenchantment and disenchantment blockers, see this cognitive model of modernity.