Some more abstract, intellectual topics for today.
- As the rise of ‘nones’ increases, what will society look like in a hundred years?
- How people are instinctively nice, more often than religions give them credit;
- An idea from S.I. Hayakawa about a ‘ladder of abstraction’ for communication skills.
OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 14 Aug 2024: From secular society to secular civilization, subtitled “In a hundred years, the Nones will likely be a majority of the US population. What will that secular society be like?”
OnlySky is back, but only publishing one new item every day or two. My initial reaction to this piece, at least the subtitle, is that in a hundred years, so much will have changed that the proportion of nones to the rest of society will be a long forgotten issue. (Maybe like the proportions of buggy drivers to car drivers.) On the one hand, I think the steady drop of active believers will eventually hit a tipping point, and then dwindle drastically, until it becomes déclassé to reveal that one is a devout believer, much in the same way it’s become déclassé to reveal that one smokes. –On the other there is the sunk cost issue. The world is full of churches, of actual buildings, some built at enormous expense over centuries, and all of those things will still mean something to many people.
But let’s see what Ledewitz says. He discusses statistics, of course. And how there are in the 21st century no religious leaders of prominence the way Billy Graham was. And here would be the key point:
The major reason for the decline of religion can be summed up as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did in 1882—the death of God. Overwhelmingly, the religions of humanity contain important supernatural elements that are incompatible with any kind of scientific outlook. Unless that changes—and I don’t see how it can—religion will remain intellectually irrelevant. People will still turn to it for many reasons, but supernatural religion cannot any longer be the foundation of society. Secularization will therefore probably continue both here and in the world generally.
This is what so few people are willing to admit, except implicitly. Few say it out loud. The world has turned out to be quite different from the fantasies of the ancients. The supernatural claims of the religions have been discredited.
Yet the writer goes on,
Secularism—the worldview of nonreligion—has failed to develop. The movement to a secular society simply happened as a sociological fact.
He worries that a secular society would leave people unhappy. Without a secular civilization, he says:
First, unless there is movement toward secular civilization, the decline of religion will be very bad for people. It already is. Young people in America struggle with meaning and purpose. That will only get worse as secularization spreads. This recognition should lead secularists to regard the creation of secular civilization as the most important task facing us.
Second, the first step to the creation of secular civilization will be the working out of a secular worldview. Secularism today confronts the same problem that the Church did in the 4th century. At that time, the nature of Christ and his relationship to God were contested. The Church needed a settled theology. That was achieved at the Council of Nicaea.
Secularism needs something similar. People are fond of saying that religion is more than beliefs. That is true. But all religions begin with belief systems. Secularism must do the same.
This, of course, is the struggle between the worldview of primitive humans, with their intuitive perceptions about agency and meaning, and the modern worldview of science, that often stands apart from human intuition.
And of course the writer has published a book on this broad topic: The Universe Is on Our Side: Restoring Faith in American Public Life, back in 2021.
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Here’s another piece about evidence that people are nice, and helpful to their neighbors, more often than not, especially in catastrophes. Despite religion’s premise that people are selfish and evil and need religion to save them.
Washington Post, Amanda Ripley, 14 Aug 2024: Opinion | Here’s what I’ve learned about disasters: Your neighbor is your savior, subtitled “Disasters happen. When they do, it is normal, everyday people who are the heroes.”
This, too, relates to a book: The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes–and Why, just published.
I’ve interviewed dozens of survivors of all kinds of catastrophes, from tsunamis to plane crashes, and I can tell you that they know extraordinary things, lessons rarely discussed in official homeland security briefings. I ended up writing a book about these ordinary people — and what they wanted the rest of us to know. Because it was not just helpful; it was hopeful.
Disasters don’t always turn into the exact nightmare you expect. And you have more power in those moments than you think.
The trouble is, authority figures do not respect the potential of regular people. Instead, they underestimate them. They don’t include them in their emergency plans. They don’t help them prepare and train for these moments. They don’t level with them about the risks they face. So, regular people have very little idea what to expect.
I think there’s a parallel here between the news media, who always highlight bad news over good, and fiction of all kinds, which also derives power from portraying powerful and alarming situations, even if they are unrealistic. We’ve seen this before: dramas like Twilight Zone’s “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” to the novel Lord of the Flies, writers depict people in desperate situations taking advantage of their neighbors, of their fellow survivors. It makes for good drama. Over and over, real-life examples turn out differently.
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Big Think, Kevin Dickinson, 14 Aug 2024: Boost your communication skills with the “ladder of abstraction”, subtitled “A simple semantic device — invented by a forgotten senator — can help us break ‘the curse of knowledge.'”
S.I. Hayakawa! I remember the name, which was prominent for a while; I think he’s been mostly forgotten. (He was an intellectual who became a United States Senator!)
• Sometimes we can talk or write ad nauseam yet still not get our point across. • The “ladder of abstraction” reveals why people communicating about the same thing may be doing so at different levels. • By considering our ideas from both the abstract and concrete levels, we not only get our idea across more clearly, we also learn more about our own thinking.
All the great rhetorical thinkers and speakers have had their tricks. Here’s an example:
A brilliant example of such rhetorical balance comes from Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: “We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools.”
Notice how Diamond starts with abstract concepts like history and different peoples. These concepts seem simple enough, but to clarify his meaning, he takes a few steps down the ladder. To history, he adds the characterization of “the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age.” Different peoples is elaborated on to include “literate industrial societies,” “nonliterate farming societies,” and “hunter-gatherers.”
The rest of Diamond’s introduction to his book continues in this vein. He uses concrete details to show how more abstract concepts connect to the real world; meanwhile, the abstract gives meaning to the facts and details.
Concluding:
Studying accomplished writers, presenters, and orators is one way to learn to navigate the ladder of abstraction. Other strategies will depend on your personal style.
- If you’re the kind of communicator who enjoys ideas from a bird’s eye view, try asking yourself “how” questions. These will often lead to the data, examples, and stories needed to clarify your meaning.
- If you prefer your feet on the ground, try asking “why” questions. These help you discover the patterns, lessons, and generalizations that tie your facts together.
Of course, there will always be people who won’t connect with your ideas, no matter how well you articulate them. That’s the risk of any act of communication. But by considering our ideas from all levels of the ladder of abstraction, we not only learn how to help our audience understand them. We learn more about them ourselves.
I guess my rhetorical strategy, such as it is, is to take the biggest possible picture, and consider how the details of any particular example fit into it. It’s not about politics, it’s not about science fiction; it’s about humanity’s place in the universe, to what extent we understand it, and to what extend our understanding and survival protocols conflict. Except — this isn’t a rhetorical strategy. It’s just the way I think.
