What Do We Replace Bernays and Skinner With?

Mohammed's "umma" was accepted...in words, explicit conceptual schemes, and ideology as the right vehicle of loyalty and allegiance. But it didn't become the vehicle of such devotion on the neurological and endocrinological levels. Only the kinship group "deserved" that. Which is why Afghanistan, at one extreme, is the graveyard of empires.

In the European dark age (~970) a major part of human relationships were customary, personal, face-to-face, and many of the controls for human activities were internalized within the endocrine and nervous systems. They were not external controls like prices, traffic signals, or legislation). The internal controls were due to socialization in the family and neighborhood, including behavior patterns and religion.

There was a subtle component in the divergence between the fates of Rome in the west and Rome in the east. This rested on the ancient difference between Greek rationalism and Latin pragmatism. You can see it in the more sophisticated Greek idea of the nature of deity as an abstract rational principle of spiritual perfection and the less sophisticated western idea of God as a personal and intimate father figure. You can also find it in the different emphasis in doctrine between the eastern emphasis on abstract theology and the western focus on ethics, or interpersonal behavior. This appeared as the eastern taste for doctrinal disputes and iconoclasm compared to the Latin taste for images, relics, and local saints. The political impact of this difference in outlook appeared in the great shifts in loyalties which had to happen in the third to sixth centuries because the old loyalties collapsed, namely the ones that had sustained the Roman republic and paganism. These older loyalties had been refurbished in the Augustan principate and revived under the Antonine, but collapsed into ruins in the third century. These old loyalties had, at one time, provided the emotional attachment and social solidarity so essential to community life. But, because of the different traditions of east and west, the search for new loyalties and new community emotional expressions went in opposite directions in the two parts of the Roman Empire. In the west they became existential (everyday face-to-face), while in the east they became abstractly symbolic.

Let me elaborate on "existential" since it has turned into a verbal football lately. I mean those emotional satisfactions from moment-to-moment relationships with other people or with nature. Such emotional relationships rest on externalized relationships and are reflected in actions in the spacetime continuum.

Symbolic emotional relationships, on the other hand, are mostly internalized, more likely to be endocrinological than neurological, and are triggered by symbols, often symbols for abstract concepts like the flag, the Cross, or words like "Marx," "Red," or "fascist" (or "patriot" today).

The fact that emotional expressions in the west became more existential than symbolic speeded up the movement toward localism and existential everyday activities. But in the east the attachment of emotional experience to symbols not only provided continued meaning and social solidarity to the groups or communities represented by these symbols but also gave rise to considerable incidents of sporadic and pointless violence from the need to externalize in some way the internal chemical metabolic conditions engendered by the endocrine reactions to social symbols. It also led to controversy over such verbal and symbolic issues as the Monophysite and iconoclastic struggles. For these reasons the eastern empire was able to get through the challenges of the fifth century which disintegrated the empire in the west.

Could Donald Wollheim's classic SF have rallied fans against climate change? Can today's cons do this? I ask this because no religion has so far. "Stewardship" isn't even lukewarm. Seeing how Gee-Whiz Nerdy Zeal has degenerated into Elon Musk, maybe public investment in rocketry ought to have received more political support.