Treating stuff as sacred interferes with thinking carefully and analytically about it: When we talk about sacred stuff, our minds focus more on style, metaphor, word connotation, and an overall feel, and less on the literal meanings of words and order. And it seems to me that this prediction, together with other known correlates of the sacred, helps to explain some otherwise puzzling phenomena. (Recall that the sacred is more to be intuited than thought, and that we tend to be more emotional about it.) (
Contemporary examples of profundity fall into this trap. Examples from further back in human history may be Chesterton's fences. Far enough back they mostly serve to protect genuine evolved items of ancestral wisdom that human society at the time lacked the ability to rebuild from scratch if lost. The classic examples are how to prepare manioc in a way that prevents chronic poisoning, or how to prepare maize in a way that does not lead to chronic malnutrition. until very recently in human history, anyone who questioned the traditional wisdom of those preparation methods would have been worse than wrong (a kind of inverse of 'not even wrong').
To quote at length the dialog of Socrates and Fat Tony:
<<Fat Tony: You are asking me to define what characteristic makes a difference between pious and nonpious. Do I really need to be able to tell you what it is to be able to conduct a pious action?
Socrates: How can you use a word like ‘piety’ without knowing what it means, while pretending to know what it means?
Fat Tony: Do I actually have to be able to tell you in plain barbarian non-Greek English, or in pure Greek, what it means to prove that I know and understand what it means? I don’t know it in words but I know what it is.
No doubt Fat Tony would have taken Socrates of Athens further down his own road and be the one doing the framing of the question:
Fat Tony: Tell me, old man. Does a child need to define mother’s milk to understand the need to drink it?
Socrates: No, he does not need to.
Fat Tony: (using the same repetitive pattern of Socrates in the Plato dialogues): And my dear Socrates, does a dog need to define what an owner is to be loyal to him?
Socrates: (puzzled to have someone ask him questions): A dog has… instinct. It does not reflect on its life. He doesn’t examine his life. We are not dogs.
Fat Tony: I agree, my dear Socrates, that a dog has instinct and that we are not dogs. But are we humans so fundamentally different as to be completely stripped of instinct leading us to do things we have no clue about? Do we have to limit life to what we can answer in proto-Brooklyn English?
Without waiting for Socrates’ answer (only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):
Fat Tony: Then, my good Socrates, why do you think that we need to fix the meaning of things?
Socrates: My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth knowing.
Fat Tony: The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.
Then, looking at him patronizingly, with a smirk, very calmly:
Fat Tony: My dear Socrates… you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.>>
There's another mechanism at work here in many cases, and that mechanism is straightforward rent-seeking.
A lot of inquiry porn is done in government. Example: I'm from Indianapolis, and the city still has about $300M in "COVID stimulus" money they got from the federal government that they haven't used.
Never mind the potholed streets or waning law enforcement. They haven't used it because they don't know what to do with it. They're going to "conduct a study" to figure it out" at the cost of a few million at least. This sort of thing basically welfare for white-collar government types, and ends up skinning substantial amounts of money away from productive work.
I recently read "Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life" by Dacher Keltner and it is interesting how he approaches the sacred/that which inspires awe differently from you. He makes I think some good points about the psychological benefits of experiencing awe but I don't think he deals with it's potential negative effects nearly as well. The whole time I read it, I thought "I wish there was a Robin Hanson review of this book ", so here is my suggestion...
Contemporary examples of profundity fall into this trap. Examples from further back in human history may be Chesterton's fences. Far enough back they mostly serve to protect genuine evolved items of ancestral wisdom that human society at the time lacked the ability to rebuild from scratch if lost. The classic examples are how to prepare manioc in a way that prevents chronic poisoning, or how to prepare maize in a way that does not lead to chronic malnutrition. until very recently in human history, anyone who questioned the traditional wisdom of those preparation methods would have been worse than wrong (a kind of inverse of 'not even wrong').
To quote at length the dialog of Socrates and Fat Tony:
<<Fat Tony: You are asking me to define what characteristic makes a difference between pious and nonpious. Do I really need to be able to tell you what it is to be able to conduct a pious action?
Socrates: How can you use a word like ‘piety’ without knowing what it means, while pretending to know what it means?
Fat Tony: Do I actually have to be able to tell you in plain barbarian non-Greek English, or in pure Greek, what it means to prove that I know and understand what it means? I don’t know it in words but I know what it is.
No doubt Fat Tony would have taken Socrates of Athens further down his own road and be the one doing the framing of the question:
Fat Tony: Tell me, old man. Does a child need to define mother’s milk to understand the need to drink it?
Socrates: No, he does not need to.
Fat Tony: (using the same repetitive pattern of Socrates in the Plato dialogues): And my dear Socrates, does a dog need to define what an owner is to be loyal to him?
Socrates: (puzzled to have someone ask him questions): A dog has… instinct. It does not reflect on its life. He doesn’t examine his life. We are not dogs.
Fat Tony: I agree, my dear Socrates, that a dog has instinct and that we are not dogs. But are we humans so fundamentally different as to be completely stripped of instinct leading us to do things we have no clue about? Do we have to limit life to what we can answer in proto-Brooklyn English?
Without waiting for Socrates’ answer (only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):
Fat Tony: Then, my good Socrates, why do you think that we need to fix the meaning of things?
Socrates: My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth knowing.
Fat Tony: The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.
Then, looking at him patronizingly, with a smirk, very calmly:
Fat Tony: My dear Socrates… you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.>>
How does study of the Talmud fit this paradigm? My experience is that it thoroughly contradicts it.
Not very profound.
High on cognition, low on feeling, absent of spirituality.
Cold and callous.
There's another mechanism at work here in many cases, and that mechanism is straightforward rent-seeking.
A lot of inquiry porn is done in government. Example: I'm from Indianapolis, and the city still has about $300M in "COVID stimulus" money they got from the federal government that they haven't used.
Never mind the potholed streets or waning law enforcement. They haven't used it because they don't know what to do with it. They're going to "conduct a study" to figure it out" at the cost of a few million at least. This sort of thing basically welfare for white-collar government types, and ends up skinning substantial amounts of money away from productive work.
Daniel Dennett calls these "deepities".
I recently read "Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life" by Dacher Keltner and it is interesting how he approaches the sacred/that which inspires awe differently from you. He makes I think some good points about the psychological benefits of experiencing awe but I don't think he deals with it's potential negative effects nearly as well. The whole time I read it, I thought "I wish there was a Robin Hanson review of this book ", so here is my suggestion...
I like calling it insight porn
https://mindlevelup.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/insight-porn/
It would be interesting to know what percentage of the values people hold as sacred is acquired as an adult vs. as a child.
I liked this post
D.W.
https://dweversole.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-from-an-invisible