The ‘New Atheists’ would have liked us to believe that rationalism can essentially replace religion in the public world, that our collective problems from the cultural to the political can be solved by reasoned, rational discourse and by resort primarily to the epistemology of science, a certain and assured way of knowing that things are true.
Many would at least in principle agree with this proposition, and certainly in an era of prosperity in which overthrowing religious restraint or authority feels like a liberating idea, it becomes an easy thing to believe. However it has aged, and in the decades since the first new atheist publications, we are coming to learn the hard way just how persistent and necessary the religious mind actually is.
The basic problem with such a belief is that most political and cultural questions are corollaries of existential questions, they are questions of identity. Questions about what we value, how we should live, how we should organise ourselves are rooted in questions like ‘who am I?’, ‘how do I relate to others?’, ‘what is the meaning of existence?’, and ‘what is the self?’
These are questions of essence, the nature of which remains inherently mysterious to us. Their elements can be rationalised but their essential question cannot. ‘Who am I?’ can’t really be answered by science, since science can only tell us what it has already decided is there, which us to say nothing but the material, objective substance that composes the sphere of nature we call reality by the lights of science.
Of course it can provide us with other kinds of answers, it can tell us we may have evolved from a few cells in a process of mutation and natural selection, an origin myth which provides us with some heuristic means of self-understanding but even most scientists themselves recognise it is a pretty questionable basis for a moral view of the world.
But when we assume a rational scientific epistemology to be total the subjective questions about the self that remain simply become discarded as arbitrary. Who am I? is a question that science basically answers with ‘nothing really’, clearly an answer upon which neither an individual life nor a society can be based, and so we have to answer the questions ourselves under the belief that any answer is ultimately contrived.
Yet nobody really believes this, identity is so important to everything we do that inevitably ideologies arise that insist identities garnered from pure subjectivity are absolute truth.
Even though this may come with its intellectuals who aim to rationalise such worldviews, the inevitable problem remains of the tension between essentialism and the set of facts and experiences that orbit the central feeling of being a conscious individual.
For a broad part of modern Western society especially among younger generations gender ideology has essentially taken the place of certain aspects of religious self-identification. It is no less than a religious worldview, it has its heresies, deplores defectors and treats those reasoning from a place of unbelief with hostility. The controversy surrounding JK Rowling, someone who to a neutral bystander has made perfectly reasonable defences of the importance of biological females, is a demonstration of the way movements have aligned in opposition to one another, and perhaps feminism and gender theory have become the catholicism and protestantism of our time.
Like theology, both are speaking of the ineffable. The modern age has transferred the transcendent to the individual but identity remains no less mysterious. While in the past ‘who am I?’ was answered by questions of the nature of God, today it is answered by questions of the individual essense of a person, and while we may scoff at ancient theology, to many arguing whether a women is a women or whether a man with a penis can go in women’s changing rooms with the fervor of reformers is no more or less absurd.
Either way we resolve upon metaphors. If a man can be a women then the words are only representations of feelings or orientations towards objects of peripheral culture, culture that the same people claim is arbitrarily conjoined to the sexual organs and hormonal profile they are ironically adjusting in order to align with it.
The question then is not whether we must use symbolic language but whether the symbolic language we use really works. The nature strangely of all enquiries into the self is self-transcendence, something certainly not provided by ideologies that simply name the most suggestable aspects of experience with a gender pronoun and insist everyone verbalise it. Not only do they lack self-transcendence but also redemption more widely, and evidence of post-transition shows little change in the appalling levels of mental health conditions that afflict those drawn to such ideologies.
Yet this is not so with the classic religious experience. We have known from mystics and religious writings to William James’ classic gathering together of the varieties of religious experience up to studies that show Psilocybin-occasioned Mystical Experiences can induce things like smoking cessation (incidentally it is not the dose of the drug, it seems you must actually have what is classified by certain metrics as a mystical experience), that religious experience — self-transcending experience — is profoundly transformative.
So metaphors matter. The problem that has emerged is that with the banishing of religion comes the banishing of self-transcending symbolic language, and suddenly we are in a mire where a gender can be a character from a TV show (Seriously).
One might argue then that “gender” is nothing more than a shallow attempt to rehabilitate the rejected concept of the soul, an identity transcendent of profane reality but somehow entangled in it, partaking in a moral world (by moral I at least mean governed by rules that are not physical), to which it ultimately holds account. It is another way of recognising that the only real question is who am I?
Of course theistic religious have always seen this as inseparable from questions of who God is, and transcendence is ultimately about identification in some form with that which is and with that which is good above all good. It is a recognition that behind all contingent goods is a good, behind all contingent loves is a love. It is the recognition that the very basis of the question of the self reflects the fact that reality is deeply relational, and the soul has in theistic traditions always been our primary revelation of reality’s givenness. Julian of Norwich put it: God is nearer to us than our own soul.
Modern ideologies then form a quagmire, they run on the mind’s linguistic need for religious concepts of identity but circle in on themselves, naming an indefinable centre without ever going beyond its circumference. They do however recognise without acknowledging something we need to recognise more widely, than in regards to essential questions and questions of identity rationality is not enough and symbolic language is inevitable. It is ironic that it is only the most juvenile and iconoclastic of ideologies among the modern secular world that seem to make this obvious.