Is Nothing Sacred?

“is nothing sacred?” is used to express shock when something you think is valuable or important is being changed or harmed (more)

Human groups often unite via agreeing on what to treat as “sacred”. While we don’t all agree on what is how sacred, almost all of us treat some things as pretty sacred way. Sacred things are especially valuable, sharply distinguished, and idealized, so they have less decay, messiness, inhomogeneities, or internal conflicts.

We are not to mix the sacred (S) with the non-sacred (NS), nor to trade S for NS. Thus S should not have clear measures or money prices, and we shouldn’t enforce rules that promote NS at S expense. We are to desire S “for itself”, understand S intuitively not cognitively, and not choose S based on explicit calculation or analysis. We didn’t make S; S made us. We are to trust “priests” of S, give them more self-rule and job tenure, and their differences from us don’t count as “inequality”. Objects, spaces, and times can become S by association.

Treating things as sacred will tend to bias our thinking when such things do not actually have all these features, or when our values regarding them don’t actually justify all these sacred valuing rules. Yes, the benefits we get from uniting into groups might justify paying the costs of this bias. But even so, we might wonder if there are cheaper ways to gain such benefits. In particular, we might wonder if we could change what things we see as sacred, so as to reduce these biases. Asked another way: is there anything that is in fact, naturally sacred, so that treating it as such induces the least bias?

Yes, I think so. And that thing is: math. We do not create math; we find it, and it describes us. Math objects are in fact quite idealized and immortal, mostly lacking internal messy inhomogeneities. Yes, proofs can have messy details, but their assumptions and conclusions are much simpler. Math concepts don’t even suffer from the cultural context-dependence or long-term conceptual drift suffered by most abstract language concepts.

We can draw clear lines distinguishing math vs. non-math objects. Usually no one can own math, avoiding the vulgarity of associated prices. And while we think about math cognitively, the value we put on any piece of math, or on math as a whole, tends to be come intuitively, even reverently, not via calculation.

Compared to other areas, math seems an at extreme of ease of evaluation of abilities and contributions, and thus math can suppress factionalism and corruption in such evaluations. This helps us to use math to judge mental ability, care, and clarity, especially in the young. So we use math tests to sort and assign prestige early in life.

As math is so prestigious and reliable to evaluate, we can more just let math priests tell us who is good at math, and then use that as a way to choose who to hire to do math. We can thus avoid using vulgar outcome-based forms of payment to compensate math workers. It doesn’t work so badly to give math priests self-rule an long job tenures. Furthermore, so many want to be math priests that their market wages are low, making math inequality feel less offensive.

The main thing that doesn’t fit re math as sacred is that today treating math as sacred doesn’t much help us unite some groups in contrast to other groups. Though that did happen long ago (e.g., among ancient Greeks). However, I don’t at all mind this aspect of math today.

The main bias I see is that treating math as sacred induces us to treat it as more valuable than it actually is. Many academic fields, for example, put way too high a priority on math models of their topics. Which distracts from actually learning about what is important. But, hey, at least math does in fact have a lot of uses, such as in engineering and finance. Math was even crucial to great advances in many areas of science.

Yes, many over-estimate math’s contributions. But even so, I can’t think of something else that is in fact more naturally “sacred” than math. If we all in fact have a deep need to treat some things as sacred, this seems a least biased target. If something must be sacred, let it be math.