Poor substitutes for religion

As religion has declined in the West, other things are moving in to fill the void, and I don’t see them as particularly positive or meaningful replacements. Two that immediately come to mind are astrology and the mental health movement.

Traditional religions are meaningful because they require something from you. There will be times when you need to make difficult ethical decisions, and there’s a deep and complex culture surrounding this difficulty — take Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as a start. Traditional religions have a telos, a community, demand time and energy.

When all that’s taken away, what emerges is often frivolity. I’m surprised by how many young people are taken in by astrology, which seems to be having something of a hey day on social media. But I’ve never heard someone say that reading a horoscope on Instagram led to making an excruciating but important life decision. It’s usually just some banal and self-serving affirmations.

When I talk about the mental health movement, I mean the people who post about their self-diagnosed whatever with hashtags and treat the works of Gabor Maté and other Tedcorians as some sort sacred scriptures. It’s the same self-serving nonsense as astrology. Never once have I heard one of these people come back from a therapy session with the conclusion of “I need to stop being a shallow prick”. Personal transformation is just more self-indulgence.

The toothpaste is out of the tube. We’re not going back to a Christian or generally religious worldview as a society any time soon. But it would do us good to look at the popular religious replacements and how they are affecting both society at large and traditional religions. So much of Western Buddhism has become unmoored from its religious foundation and inundated by the whole mental health movement bit. It’s sad that a beautiful sacred tradition that’s thrived for thousands of years in diverse cultures is being replaced by a pop movement that will last a few decades at most.

Beyond Buddhism, as religion and even philosophy (in the sense of Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life) fade, we’re losing our ability as a society to have difficult conversations, deal with adversity, and make tough decisions. Not everything can be solved by the shallow mix of hedonism and utilitarianism that make up the editorial pages of the New York times.