Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…ort of entanglement of religion with politics at their root, but Machiavelli doesn’t. Machiavelli is this early foundational “what if we think about government in a box without plugging into religion? What if we just think about government operating by itself and its earthly consequences?” It’s incredibly useful in the 19th century for developing a statecraft for separation of church and state. It’s also useful for Italian nationalism to celebrate and claim, “Hey, we invented separation of church and state. Here’s Machiavelli, the first modern man. He’s our bid at ‘Italian culture invented modernity’ via Machiavelli.” At the same time, England is saying Francis Bacon is the first modern man because he invented the scientific method. At the same time, France is saying René Descartes was the first modern man because he invented logical reasoning and modern principles of logical deduction. There’s a competition in the 19th century, a nationalist one, of different countries that want to claim their cool thinker as the first modern man. Machiavelli becomes one of Italy’s big bids for the first modern man because he came up with separation of church and state. It’s a phrase that Machiavelli would not have recognized if you said it to him, but he would have thought about it for a long time, decided it was cool, and then written letters about it. Can I try out a counter-thesis just so you can dispel my confusion? One reason why Machiavelli might have gained a special significance in the 19th century is that now that you have these republics in the world, there’s a question of how you make sure that they are maintained. That is really the question that at least the first third of the Discourses is obsessed with. But one of the ways it says that you do this is by having a religion that people take into very strong consideration. I think he says at some point early in the Discourses that more significant than Romulus in the founding of Rome was Numa, or whoever it was who was the prophet who gave the Roman gods and the Roman religion some legitimacy. Then it is this legitimacy and the fear of offending virtues, because you believe in some god that will punish you, that motivates people to act in a way that defends the republic. He gives the example of Scipio after the battle in which Hannibal absolutely destroys the Roman armies. The people are about to flee Rome as a result because they think Hannibal’s coming. Scipio himself, with his sword, goes down and says, “Swear to our gods that you will stay and defend our homeland.” Just having them give the oath in that moment is enough to convince them, “Hannibal can’t be worse than the gods, so I have to stay here and defend our republic.” It seems like he thinks that religion is super important to the legitimacy of the state. Agreed. He’s thinking about it in a way parallel to the way late 18th-century, 19th-century figures are also thinking about it. We have to separate the institution of religion from the psychological effect of religion on the populace. The useful example here is Thomas Paine. We all know Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”. Thomas Paine does a lot of thinking about the foundation of the institutions of the US. Thomas Paine is a deist and a radical. He has lots of treatises about how the most destructive force in the world is institutional religion. Whether it’s Catholicism or the Church of England, these institutions are giant, centuries-old or millennia-old conspiracies to control your mind and steal your money, and are incredibly pernicious to everything. However, he says, religion is vital to citizenship because it is what makes people be good and is what makes people fear laws and want to obey the laws. So, says Thomas Paine, every country must have religion, and religious education must be mandatory in schools, but it doesn’t matter which religion. Thomas Paine advocated mandatory religion in total indifference to what religion it is, with the idea that fearing God and posthumous punishment is necessary to make a citizen, in a practical sense, willing to obey law. Notice how that is Paine thinking in a utilitarian way about the psychological effects of religion being there. It’s very different from the older view that the state and a state religion are entangled with each other. The state promotes this state religion because it believes it to be true, and we’re going to have a Christian nationalist or Catholic nationalist or Roman paganism nationalist religion that advances X against others. So Machiavelli is absolutely thinking about the psychological effects of a religion on the people. He has that wonderful analysis in the Discourses of the utility of Roman religion. He talks in one really striking and memorable passage about how Roman religion says that your ghost depends on being remembered. This is out of the Homeric tradition. Your ghost only retains its identity to the degree you are still remembered on Earth. If on Earth your name is forgotten, your ghost forgets its name. This is not a “your ghost is okay forever,” like in Christianity. It is a “your ghost depends on being honored by your descendants on Earth.” When you are forgotten, your soul becomes an empty, mindless, wandering shade. Therefore, you have an incredibly strong incentive to be remembered by doing great deeds, especially sacrificing yourself for your country, because then your name will be honored for as long as your country lasts. Machiavelli says this is one of the big motivators that makes people sacrifice themselves for the state in ancient Rome, because then they’re guaranteeing their good afterlife. While Christianity, he points out, says all that matters for a good afterlife is being pious and then ideally being martyred.…

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