[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

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[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — LessWrong

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Episode 16: Christianity and Agape

Last time we something somewhat pretentious, I hope it was still valuable. We endeavored to discuss the contributions to the notions of meaning and wisdom that were made by the advent of Christianity. In particular we looked at Jesus of Nazareth and the exemplification of this participatory knowing in God's agapic creativity, this forgiving of personhood to others.
John's radical idea that God is in fact this agape that is actually what we've always been talking about when we didn't go talking about God, and then Paul's radical personalization of this and how the metanoia of his own transformation is seen by him as a powerful instance of this gnosis agape, but how that also carried with it a potential dark side in which elements of his identity get projected onto cosmic history and the idea of inner conflict within history / within God as being reflected of and reflected in his own inner conflict between the old Saul and the new Paul, and how much this gnosis / participatory knowing is bound up with an exploration and an understanding of how our agency can be fractured, how we can be at war with ourselves, how we can suffer.

3Vaniver6y

Tillich (I'm still drawing from The Courage to Be) argues that Stoicism, while viable, is fundamentally unpopular because it picks renunciation instead of salvation. [...] That is, sure, if you do the right thing when you're in control, focusing only on the things that you can control is satisfying. But if you do the wrong things when you're in control, well, what then? It seems unsatisfying to say "well, I can't control the past" and just forget about it, or to constantly be resetting your identity, or to not have a story of why this happens and how it could be better. On Less Wrong, we don't focus too much on sin and guilt, but there's a 'clear thinking' analog when it comes to mistakes / confusions. The sort of 'courage to think in spite of myth and falsehood' feels very different from the sort of 'courage to think in spite of fallibility and uncertainty'; I associate (perhaps unfairly) the first with 'skeptics', and the second with a sort of patient focus on smoothing out errors / reflecting on one's own mistakes / operating on the best available knowledge without being stupefied that feels like the steel rationalist to me. [There's an old claim I don't have a link to, where someone who was into the occult and eventually snapped out of it realized that lots of mystics would describe scientists as "unable to deal with uncertainty", but this was projection; the scientific virtue was being able to clearly see and sit with your ignorance, whereas this person's scene couldn't handle ignorance, and so had to immediately paper over any holes with stories, even if those stories were fake.]

Vaniver6y30

Also note the meta point here; if there's one "ideal thinking" state, and people start off in lots of randomly different "worse thinking" states, moving towards ideal thinking will be a different direction for different people, and one of the worries about taking one person's account of their transformation too seriously is typical minding (or, more weirdly, adopting the patterns of their pre-transformation mind so that you can follow the transformations that start from that point!).

7Vaniver6y

A story people sometimes tell is a Garden of Eden sort of story: things were good, then somebody fucked it up, and now things are bad. Who fucked it up and how varies--was it Eve eating the apple, capitalism unleashing human greed, agriculture forcing toil?--but the basic attitude is one of resentment / debt. We have to struggle now to get back to where we 'should' be, if that's even possible. This has basically not been my sense of the world or of history. To me, it seems much more like "first there was nothing, then there was something and it sucked, and then it sucked a little less, over and over until now." I am way wealthier than fictional Adam was, and even more so if you consider the actual historical Adam. When it sucked less, it's normally because of something else fixing it, and giving the fix to you. The basic attitude is something like grateful inheritance. Like, in a basic physical sense, there was a time before the sun existed, and now it exists, and basically all the material components of my life only exist in the form they do because of stars that existed in the past. In a social sense, I'm living in buildings that I didn't build, using a language that I didn't make, using tools that I didn't invent, under a political system that I didn't put into place. "Somebody else built that." And it's not just that I found some abandoned ruins, or whatever; the people who built this wealth (often) wanted me to have it. Some of it I've exchanged for, but the vast majority of 'my wealth' is inherited. If there's a principle behind this sort of saving up for the future / sweating so that progress happens, it seems like agape, and so the love that I have towards civilization is easy to backpropagate towards its source. Now, Adam Smith might point out that it's not the benevolence of the baker that I expect my dinner from, and one of the ways I frame things is capitalism as a way to direct civilization towards generative behavior (by tying it to consumption an

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[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

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[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

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