Chapter 30 - Religion & Nationalism

Nationalism—loyalty and commitment to serve one’s country—is, in many ways, a secular cousin of religion. Patriotism—the warmer, more emotionally charged attachment to one’s nation—is a secular cousin of religious piety. Nations, like religions, have founding stories, revered leaders, martyrs, songs, holy days, symbols, and texts. A flag can function almost like a religious icon. The national anthem is a bit like a hymn. A constitution is not literally a scripture, but psychologically it can occupy a similar place: quoted selectively, interpreted by specialists, and treated with special reverence in times of crisis. In many countries, national symbols are everywhere—flags outside homes, in schools, at sports events, on the lapel of a suit, and so routinely in the background of films and television shows that people hardly notice them. These are not just decorations; they are signals of belonging.

None of this is a new observation. More than half a century ago the sociologist Robert Bellah gave the pattern a name—civil religion—and catalogued its saints, its martyrs, its holy days, and its sacred symbols. But this civil religion comes with a cost.

Nationalism is not necessarily a bad thing. Humans need belonging. National identity can give people meaning, gratitude, pride, and a feeling of rootedness. Patriotism can bring people together to cooperate, to build a good society, or to face difficult problems. This is true not only of nations, but of smaller units too: provinces, states, cities, schools, neighbourhoods, families. People can love a landscape, a language, a history, or the memory of ancestors who endured hardship and built something.

But the same psychological mechanism that creates warmth and cooperation also creates outsiders. Fellow citizens of our nation, just like fellow members of a religion, become members of an ingroup, and therefore receive preferential regard, support, and trust compared to outgroup members—“foreigners.” Evolutionary theorists have a name for this pairing, too: parochial altruism. There is a real possibility that its two halves—generosity turned inward, wariness turned outward—evolved together, each making the other viable in a world of competing groups. If so, the kindness and the suspicion are not separate faculties we might hope to prise apart, but two sides of the same coin.

At its best, patriotism is gratitude and stewardship. It is care for one’s home, loyalty to neighbours, respect for institutions that protect people decently, and a wish to pass something worthwhile on to the next generation. At its worst, patriotism becomes collective vanity. The nation stops being a practical civic arrangement and starts to feel almost sacred—above criticism, above humility, perhaps even above ordinary morality. The home group is imagined to be uniquely virtuous, uniquely wronged, or uniquely deserving. Critics become suspect. Outsiders become threatening. At that point harshness can begin to feel justified.

Orwell drew the line at exactly this point: patriotism, as he defined it, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life” with no wish to force it on others—defensive by nature—while nationalism is “inseparable from the desire for power.” The distinction is worth keeping, because it lets us honour the first while staying wary of the second.

Often patriotic citizens forget that their own families were once immigrants. If you go far enough back, almost all humans are descended from “immigrants,” except perhaps some who still live in sub-Saharan Africa. As we have discussed earlier, humans originating in Africa migrated across the world over tens of thousands of years. However you draw the boundaries, only a small fraction of families still live where their ancestors were the first human settlers. There is a particular irony in societies built almost entirely by waves of immigration, that later turn a cold face to newcomers.

One of the great ironies of civilization is that many countries have beautiful constitutions and noble founding ideals while behaving badly toward outsiders. At their best, constitutions speak of liberty, justice, equality, dignity, due process, fairness, and restraint of power. But the emotional force of these values often applies only to insiders. A country may insist that its own citizens deserve humane treatment and equal standing before the law, while showing indifference or contempt toward people outside the border. The moral imagination stops at the passport.

This is one place where constitutions and scriptures are interesting to compare. At their best, both reach toward universality. At their worst, both become tribal property. People sometimes quote them not to enlarge compassion, but to justify selective loyalty. There is something strange about passionately affirming equality while only feeling it fully for one’s own side. If fairness, justice, and dignity are real values, they should not evaporate when a person happens to be born on the wrong side of a line on a map.

Religion and nationalism can also become strongly fused. In some places this fusion is formal and built directly into law and state power: religious leaders may hold autocratic authority, or the state may define itself in theological terms. In other places the fusion is softer but still very real: politicians wrap themselves in sacred language, imply that the “real” members of the nation follow the dominant religion, and use religious identity as a marker of patriotism. Religion then lends nationalism sacred prestige, while nationalism lends religion the machinery of the state. In many parts of the world, it feels as though these tendencies are intensifying again. The old tribal reflexes are not difficult to awaken.

This is also the point where nationalism begins to resemble religion most vividly: sacrifice becomes noble. The soldier lost in battle becomes a secular martyr. Military cemeteries become sacred ground. National memorial days, uniforms, solemn parades, salutes, flyovers, and moments of silence are not trivial theatre; they are rituals. Some of these rituals can be dignified, moving, and morally serious. But psychologically they are doing something very similar to religious ceremony: they sanctify loyalty, make sacrifice visible, and bind the group together around a shared story of suffering and duty.

There is an uncomfortable implication here for the argument of this book. If the real goods of religion—belonging, ritual, meaning, the sense of being carried by something larger than oneself—flow through nonspecific channels rather than through any particular doctrine, then nationalism is simply another vessel carrying the same goods. That is partly why it moves people so deeply, and why it cannot be dissolved by argument alone, any more than faith could be. You cannot reason someone out of a need you have not offered to meet some other way.

Once the nation is felt to be sacred, military power begins to acquire a special moral glow. Global military spending now runs to roughly $2.7 trillion a year, and it is still rising. Broader estimates of the economic impact of violence run to something closer to $20 trillion annually. Even allowing for debate about definitions and methodology, the scale is staggering. By way of contrast, the world spends on peacekeeping and peacebuilding well under one per cent of what it spends on its armies. The military figure is also vastly greater than most published estimates of what would be required each year to eliminate all of the world’s extreme poverty. Beyond the numbers, there is the cost in human talent: engineers, chemists, manufacturers, and researchers working on military technology could instead use their abilities to give the world better housing, cleaner energy, safer roads, prosthetics, better medications, water systems, or even simply better playgrounds for children, instead of better ways to maim or kill them.

Human societies will always require policing, disaster response, protection against violent actors, and organised defence of civilians. But it is worth imagining a more mature global arrangement: less dependence on giant national war machines, and more emphasis on internationally accountable peacekeeping, policing, engineering, disaster response, and protection of human rights. It is worth imagining a system in which soldiers or security personnel would train with colleagues from other nations, in different parts of the world, learn other languages, work alongside people from other cultures, and spend more of their careers helping with floods, fires, epidemics, rebuilding, mediating regional conflicts, and civilian protection. The point would not be to erase local loyalties, but to weaken the automatic “us and them” mentality.

What can be done about this problem? This is one place where the best of religion and the best of civic life actually converge. The best religious values call for compassion, humility, fairness, hospitality, and recognition of the dignity of other persons—not just of one’s own tribe. Likewise, the best constitutional ideals call for equal protection, restraint of power, due process, and humane treatment. The United Nations, however imperfectly, points in this direction. The UN Charter speaks of promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with one of the most beautiful sentences in political history: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Einstein, especially after the arrival of nuclear weapons, moved toward this kind of thinking as well. In an open letter to the United Nations in 1947 he argued that the scale of modern destructive power had made absolute national sovereignty dangerously obsolete, and he supported some form of supranational democratic authority—what he often called world government—as a way of preventing catastrophe.

Of course, there are dangers in any larger political arrangement. A world government, if badly designed, could become bureaucratic, overreaching, or tyrannical. There would have to be strong safeguards: systematic democracy, term limits, limited executive power, fair elections with protections against propaganda, and protections against wealthy candidates or partisan blocs using economic power to sway the electorate unfairly.

A more modest movement in this direction would simply be to greatly strengthen international law and increase the authority, accountability, funding, and capacity of institutions such as the United Nations, rather than pretending that national sovereignty must remain absolute forever.

The task is not to abolish tribal feeling altogether, but to civilize it—to channel it toward celebration, artistry, local pride, friendly competition, and cooperative belonging rather than toward prejudice, ostracism, and war. At best, tribalism, nationalism, and religion give us festivals, songs, neighbourhoods, architecture, and cultural beauty. At worst, they give us fear, exclusion, and repeated conflict.

References

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). Verso. (Original work published 1983)

— Anderson’s influential thesis is that a nation is an “imagined community”: its members will never meet most of their compatriots, yet each carries an image of their communion. The account is largely cultural and historical rather than psychological, locating the rise of nationalism in print capitalism and the vernacular press. It is cited here for the point that we are able to feel kinship—and grief—for millions of strangers we will never see.

Bellah, R. N. (1967). Civil religion in America. Daedalus, 96(1), 1–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027022

— The founding statement of the idea that a modern nation possesses, alongside its churches, an “elaborate and well-institutionalised” civil religion, complete with its own saints (Washington), martyrs (Lincoln), sacred texts, holy days, and symbols. Bellah drew on Rousseau, who coined the phrase religion civile, and on Durkheim. The essay is the direct conceptual parent of this chapter, and the reason the pattern it describes deserves to be named rather than merely noticed.

Choi, J.-K., & Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science, 318(5850), 636–640. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1144237

— Using game theory and agent-based simulation, the authors show that altruism toward one’s own group and hostility toward outsiders—“parochial altruism”—could have evolved together under conditions plausible for late-Pleistocene humans, each trait making the other viable in intergroup conflict; neither, they argue, would likely have evolved alone. The result is a formal model, not a proven history, and it remains debated. Warmth binding an ingroup is the same force that hardens its borders.

Durkheim, É. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1912)

— The seminal argument that religion is fundamentally social: through collective ritual a group generates “collective effervescence,” experiences its own unity as something sacred. 

Einstein, A. (1947, October). Open letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

— Written in frustration at the deadlock over international control of atomic energy, Einstein argued that “security is indivisible” and that lasting peace required “a modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty”—a supranational authority with real legislative and executive power. He returned to the theme repeatedly until his death. The letter is reprinted in O. Nathan and H. Norden’s Einstein on Peace (1960) and is widely available online; the U.S. National Archives holds related correspondence (Identifier 7873451). It is the source for the chapter’s account of his turn toward world government.

Institute for Economics and Peace. (2025). Global Peace Index 2025: Measuring peace in a complex world. https://www.economicsandpeace.org

— The source of the chapter’s figure for the global economic impact of violence: US$19.97 trillion in 2024 and an estimated US$21.8 trillion in 2025, expressed in purchasing-power-parity terms. The estimate is a broad model that folds in the cost of homicide, incarceration, private security, and lost productivity as well as war, and it has been criticised for not measuring direct human injury; it should be read as an order-of-magnitude indicator, not a precise ledger. The same reports supply the striking contrast that global spending on peacebuilding and peacekeeping is well under one per cent of military spending.

Orwell, G. (1945). Notes on nationalism. Polemic, 1.

— Orwell separates patriotism—“devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life,” defensive and content to leave others alone—from nationalism, which he takes to be “inseparable from the desire for power” and marked by obsession, self-deception, and indifference to atrocity when committed by one’s own side. The essay is freely available via the Orwell Foundation (orwellfoundation.com).

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (2025). Trends in world military expenditure, 2024 (SIPRI Fact Sheet). https://www.sipri.org

— The authoritative annual measure of military spending. World military expenditure reached US$2.718 trillion in 2024—a tenth consecutive annual rise and the steepest since the end of the Cold War—of which the United States accounted for roughly a third. On present commitments SIPRI and the United Nations project the figure could climb toward US$4–6 trillion by 2035. These are the numbers behind the chapter’s point about the moral glow that attaches to armed force.

United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

— Article 1 reads, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The universalist phrasing was hard-won: Hansa Mehta of India is credited with changing an earlier draft’s “All men” to “All human beings.” The Declaration elaborates the United Nations Charter’s pledge (Articles 1 and 55) to promote “human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction.” 

United Nations. (2025). The Sustainable Development Goals report 2025. United Nations.

— Cited for the comparison between military spending and the cost of ending poverty. Estimates vary by an order of magnitude with the target chosen: closing the extreme-poverty gap at the US$2.15-a-day line has been costed at tens to a few hundred billion dollars a year (for example, by UNU-WIDER and by researchers at Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action), while guaranteeing full social-protection floors is put by this report at roughly US$1.4 trillion a year. Every one of these figures is smaller than a single year of world military spending, which is the only point the chapter needs.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 31: Conclusion

Religious beliefs—and organized group religion in particular—have been part of human civilization for thousands of years. Culturally, religion can bring real benefits: it helps communities gather to celebrate and to grieve, to contemplate morality, to show gratitude, and to meditate. Religious faith is consolidated by human tendencies to be loyal—to family, to ingroups, to longstanding beliefs learned and practised since childhood, and to idealized figures—with God for many believers functioning as an inner representation of perfect goodness, power, or protection. Religions are further consolidated by many of the most enjoyable and meaningful human activities: a great deal of the world's art, music, literature, and architecture is rooted in religion. Religions also help many people cope with the deepest, most painful, and most frightening experiences of life, such as facing the deaths of our loved ones, or facing our own mortality. Some of the greatest human leaders, standing for peace, justice, and a better society, have been religious leaders. And religious services can be a medium through which people meet friends or potential partners, sometimes with a better-than-average chance of meeting someone with whom they might share values, also with that person in some sense vetted by the church community. The congregation itself can even act as a kind of village matchmaker.

For all of these reasons, I do not think society presently has good secular alternatives to religion taken as a whole. We have secular versions of pieces of it—music, psychotherapy, volunteer organizations, civic ceremonies, lectures, support groups, sports clubs, humanitarian projects—but not many institutions that gather together, in one place and over generations, family history, ancestry, ritual, moral reflection, structured weekly services, practical community support, beautiful buildings, shared songs, and common knowledge. Religion has had thousands of years to root itself in calendars, holidays, funerals, weddings, neighbourhoods, and family memory. Because of that, I do not think it is practical—or usually wise—to speak as though religion could simply be replaced, or as though it should be discouraged wholesale.

But none of this changes my main thesis. Religions and other spiritual or mystical systems still hold beliefs that are not literally true. This is where the problem lies: not that people gather, sing, grieve, serve, reflect, and care for one another, but that these healthy and meaningful practices are so often fastened to false claims about reality. These beliefs are often taken literally, and dogmatic adherence to them—public profession of them, loyalty to them—is frequently required as a sign of belonging. Some of these fictions may be inconsequential much of the time; many people can live decent lives without a precise understanding of biology, astronomy, geology, genetics, or ancient history. But the darker side has to do with the extremes of group loyalty: ingroups and outgroups form, religion becomes an emblem of identity, and mistrust, exclusion, and maltreatment of outsiders can follow. Dogmatic pronouncements can also become oppressive to the group's own members, particularly when people are pressured into literalistic interpretations of sacred texts, or when “faith” becomes a moral duty rather than an honest way of grappling with uncertainty. Furthermore, spiritual or mystical beliefs about causality can lead to dangerously poor judgment about important life decisions, yet the spiritually guided person can feel supremely confident while making these decisions.

The lack of accurate education about the way the world works is ultimately detrimental to any individual, group, or nation. It is like a pilot of an airplane who does not understand how the engines work, and assumes that planes fly by magic. Most of the time this may not seem to make much difference to the safety and navigation of the plane—until the weather changes, until something unexpected happens, until you need a sober understanding of what is real in order to respond well. A culture can coast for a long time on comforting stories. It is when conditions become difficult that false models show their true cost.

So I think it is valuable that we live lives in which we strive toward understanding deep truths—about ourselves and about the world—and that we do not settle too easily for fictional belief simply because it is comforting. I would distinguish very clearly between respecting religion as culture, and giving institutional privilege to dogma. It is particularly troubling to me for children to be indoctrinated with rigid beliefs, especially if they are not also exposed to accurate information about the world in terms of science, history, and culture. And I am equally uneasy that there should be public financial support for religious groups, in the form of tax breaks and other privileges, unless these are clearly restricted to the charitable components of religious outreach rather than the promotion of dogma or political influence.

We certainly know that holding religious belief is not necessary to be a moral, kind, loving, gentle, humble person. In some cases religious beliefs can even obstruct these positive qualities and add to the world's problems. And it is possible to face the most difficult aspects of human life—grief, loss, pain, and death—while behaving honourably, peacefully, and nobly, without requiring belief in some eternal reward. Indeed, moral behaviour done for its intrinsic good, rather than being motivated by fear of punishment or hunger for reward, seems to me a deeper ethical foundation. Such a stance does not require religion, but it does require effort: working on living well, striving to become a better person, and trying to be a stabilizing and humane influence on others.

In discussing religion, it is important to empathize with people who hold religious or spiritual beliefs. Respectful understanding of how and why people believe as they do matters—especially if the goal is genuine dialogue rather than tribal combat. This matters all the more if one hopes that religious culture itself can move in a healthier direction. It is also valuable to search for common ground, particularly with regard to values. Most religious people value integrity, loyalty, compassion, truthfulness, fairness, family, hard work, and the willingness to stand up for what is right even at risk to oneself. In a discussion about religious belief, it can help to emphasize these shared values, because it appeals to unity rather than escalating the feeling that one is an outgroup member disrespecting a sacred tradition.

And that brings me back to the question that started many of these reflections: how to face transience without leaning on supernatural reassurance. I sometimes think of simple things: a firework, a meal, a fire, a cup of hot tea. These things are transient; they disappear. Yet their constituents are still present—they have merely dissolved and dispersed into the surrounding space in a different form. The structure ends; the ingredients remain, rearranged, carried away by a current of increasing entropy. We can't expect the cup of tea to survive unchanged forever, and we can't expect the firework to glitter permanently. In fact, it is normal—and even required for its enjoyment—that it be transient. A lot of religion tries to deny this, or to soften it with a story about eternity. I think there is another path: to accept that things end, to grieve honestly when they end, and still to love them fiercely while they are here.

At the same time, we should not belittle myth, ritual, reverence, or the imaginative life. We would not discourage people from reading novels or watching films. Part of what makes such art powerful is our willingness to enter into it with imagination—with a kind of suspension of disbelief—so that it can enlarge our emotional and moral life. The fact that a story is fictional does not make it worthless; often fiction contains deep truths about human nature, morality, grief, courage, and love. But we do not take a novel as a literal account of astronomy, geology, or medicine. We do not treat a play as an infallible instruction manual for public morality. And we would not normally build rigid tribes around a work of fiction, declaring outsiders corrupt, impure, or damned because they cherish a different story. I think religion is healthiest when its myths are approached in something like this spirit: as powerful cultural stories, moral frameworks, poetic language, and shared rituals—not as literal science, not as a basis for hostility to outsiders, and not as a justification for suspending critical thought.

There are examples of keeping the healthiest aspects of religion—the focus on values, kindness, charity, humility, meditative self-care, sincere amends-making, caring for and accepting care from community members, the enjoyment of beautiful music and art, and the cultivation of gratitude and reverence—while not becoming captive to narrow dogma, false beliefs about science, or denigration of outsiders. Some interfaith movements aim to cultivate peace and mutual respect across traditions. Some branches of modern religion are simply less dogmatic and more open to science and cultural pluralism. I think that is the direction to hope for. The task, in my opinion, is not to uproot religion, but to help move it away from dogma, away from tribalism, and toward universalism and humanitarianism. If religion is going to continue to shape family life, art, ritual, and common knowledge—and I think it will—then let it do so in a way that is humble before science, honest about uncertainty, and generous toward all human beings, not just the home tribe.

References

Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1991). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

The goods of religion travel through a shared frame rather than through any particular doctrine. Frank and Frank argue that psychotherapy, religious and shamanic healing, and other sanctioned forms of help share one structure—a confiding relationship, a healing setting, an explanatory rationale, and a believed-in ritual—and that this common structure, not the specific theory, carries much of the effect. But no secular institution yet gathers all of these elements in one place.

Lim, C., & Putnam, R. D. (2010). Religion, social networks, and life satisfaction. American Sociological Review, 75(6), 914–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122410386686

Panel evidence that the well-being benefits of religion flow chiefly through congregational friendship and shared identity rather than through private belief; frequent attenders with no friends in the congregation were no better off. 

Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge University Press.

The “existential security” thesis: populations facing hardship tend to be more religious, while security and prosperity drive secularization. The most secular societies function at least as well as the most devout, while cautioning that the causal arrow may run from security to secularity rather than the reverse.

Paul, G. S. (2005). Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies: A first look. Journal of Religion & Society, 7 (open access).

A cross-national comparison finding that the more secular prosperous democracies tend to show lower rates of societal dysfunction than the more religious ones. As the author's own subtitle concedes, it is “a first look”—ecological, correlational, and sharply criticised (notably by Rodney Stark) for the ecological fallacy and for selective measures—so it cannot establish causation. But it emphasizes the fact that there is no measurable “supernatural dividend” which appears where belief is most fervent.

Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2nd ed.). Routledge.

The major contemporary defence of the contextual (common-factors) model of psychotherapy: relationship and expectancy account for a substantial share of outcome relative to specific technique. It is the empirical backbone of the nonspecific-factors argument this book builds on, religion's benefits are real yet independent of doctrine. 

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 28: Religion and Common Knowledge

Picture a crowded church at the moment the congregation rises to its feet. Each person hears the same words and sees the same gestures. Each person sees everyone else hearing them too. This is more than shared belief. It is belief made public, or what game theorists call common knowledge: not merely that everyone knows something, but that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and so on without end. A five-dollar bill has value only because I expect you to value it, you expect me to value it, and each of us assumes that strangers will value it as well; without that shared expectation it is just a piece of coloured paper. This is largely what ceremonies are for. A public rite works by letting each person see that everyone else received the message at the same moment.

Religion is among the most powerful engines of common knowledge. A private belief is real but socially weak, because no one can see it; what ritual does, through spoken prayer, shared song, and the visible badges of membership, is turn "I believe" into "we can all see that we believe." We are sensitive to being the odd one out, and the worst position of all is uncertainty: not knowing whether others believe, or whether others have noticed our own hesitation. Ritual removes the doubt. It is like signing a contract under a spotlight, with the whole room watching. And, as I argued in discussing sacrifice and behavioural restrictions, the more costly and awkward the display, the harder it is to fake.

But the same logic explains the silences of social life as much as its ceremonies, because people do not always want a thing made common knowledge. A family may know perfectly well that one of its members is drinking himself to ruin, yet the talk glides around it for years, because once the words are said the knowledge becomes a fact everyone must act on. A congregation may be quietly full of doubt about a doctrine while each member, assuming the others are more convinced, says nothing, and the silence keeps up an appearance of unanimity that no one actually feels. Social psychologists call this pluralistic ignorance: a state in which most members of a group privately reject a norm while believing, wrongly, that most others accept it. In the classic studies, most university students privately disliked the heavy-drinking culture around them while assuming that nearly everyone else was comfortable with it, and so the culture rolled on, endorsed by almost no one. A community often survives less by answering its hardest questions than by managing which ones may be asked out loud.

The moment a doubt is voiced, it stops being a private flicker and becomes a public event that demands a response. This is the whole force of The Emperor's New Clothes: the child discovers nothing; he simply says aloud what everyone can already see, and so turns private knowledge into the far more dangerous public kind. Dictatorships understand this, which is why free assembly frightens them more than private grumbling: each citizen may know the regime is corrupt, and may even suspect that others know it too, but until people can gather and see one another, no one can be certain that everyone knows that everyone knows. The child's sentence, scaled up, is a revolution. The same tale reminds me of present-day partisan movements, in which many people surely harbour private misgivings about their own side's conduct or its leaders, yet will not say so, because to speak would be to risk exile from the only community they have. But all partisan movements value heroism—for me, one essential component of heroism is the willingness to speak your private knowledge of the truth to a group that might, at least at first, reject you for it.

These effects travel along the lines of our friendships. Behaviour and mood appear to spread through social networks—friend to friend to friend, out to about three degrees of separation—so that we are shaped by people we will never meet. A church congregation, seen this way, is a web of friendships with rituals attached. Few people are reasoned into faith; far more often a trusted friend draws them toward a group where belief is already on display. Doubt moves the same way in reverse: rarely through an argument, usually through watching someone you respect begin to question the story. This is why religious authorities have always feared open dissent far more than private unbelief: the private doubter is containable, the visible one is contagious.

It is also why the "New Atheist" writers, such as Richard Dawkins, who treated religion as a set of false claims to be knocked down one by one, so often failed to move believers: the thing they were attacking was not just an idea but a social world. To leave a faith is to risk becoming a stranger to your own people, and in the harshest communities to be cast out; the change of mind about the age of the earth is the least of it. The mind treats that as a real danger. It is also why some politicians perform piety their private lives do not support: the photograph with the holy book is aimed not at God but at the crowd. Common knowledge can make kindness visible, and it can do the same for contempt—a shared scorn for outsiders is far more dangerous than a private grudge, because cruelty comes easiest when made public, repeated together, and rewarded.

The secular answer to religion cannot stop at refuting supernatural claims. It must also build other, non-religious ways of making our shared virtues visible to one another. Religion binds beauty, morality, memory, and belonging into one shared practice; these are the nonspecific goods this book has traced from the beginning, and common knowledge is what turns them from private comforts into communal ones. This is where secular life falls short. The next chapter examines what happens when machinery this powerful is captured whole.

References

Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2009). Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. Little, Brown.

— A synthesis of the authors' research on social contagion, proposing the "three degrees of influence" rule: that behaviours, moods, and states—obesity, smoking, happiness, cooperation—spread through networks of friends to roughly three degrees of separation. How far this reflects genuine transmission rather than the clustering of similar people is still debated, but the broad claim that conduct is socially contagious is well supported.

Chwe, M. S.-Y. (2001). Rational ritual: Culture, coordination, and common knowledge. Princeton University Press.

— The foundational application of the game-theoretic idea of common knowledge to ceremony and ritual. Chwe argues that public rites—coronations, holidays, public demonstrations, communal worship, even Super Bowl advertising—work not merely by conveying a message to each onlooker but by letting each onlooker see that all the others receive it at the same moment.

Pinker, S. (2025). When everyone knows that everyone knows…: Common knowledge and the mysteries of money, power, and everyday life. Scribner.

— Pinker's recent, book-length account of common knowledge: the difference between privately knowing something and everyone publicly, mutually acknowledging it. He shows how it underlies coordination (driving conventions, paper currency, rallying behind a leader), how we generate it through signals such as laughter, tears, and blunt speech, and how we often labour to avoid it through hypocrisy, innuendo, and declining to name the elephant in the room.

Pinker, S., Nowak, M. A., & Lee, J. J. (2008). The logic of indirect speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(3), 833–838. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707192105

— The peer-reviewed research behind that book's account of indirect speech: a game-theoretic analysis of why people so often communicate through innuendo, euphemism, and the veiled request, arguing that indirection preserves "plausible deniability" and keeps mutually suspected facts from hardening into common knowledge.

Prentice, D. A., & Miller, D. T. (1993). Pluralistic ignorance and alcohol use on campus: Some consequences of misperceiving the social norm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(2), 243–256. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.64.2.243

— The classic demonstration of pluralistic ignorance in everyday life. Across four studies, university students privately reported more discomfort with the campus drinking culture than they attributed to the average student—everyone believing themselves the exception—and over the course of a semester the men's private attitudes drifted toward the misperceived norm. The result is a community upholding a standard that most of its members privately reject: the situation of the silent congregation in this chapter.

A note on sources (handled as references rather than formal citations): the concept of common knowledge was given its modern philosophical form by David Lewis in Convention (1969) and analyzed in game theory by Thomas Schelling and Robert Aumann; The Emperor's New Clothes is Hans Christian Andersen's tale of 1837.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 27: Consciousness

There are many unanswered questions about how the universe works; part of the wonder of science is that every advance opens new horizons of the unknown. One existential frontier, for me, is consciousness. Whatever the eventual physical account of why we have conscious, subjective experience—of memory, drives, sensations, emotions—it remains to me miraculous that such experience occurs at all.

Philosophers have a name for the puzzle: the "hard problem" of consciousness, a term coined by David Chalmers to mark the gap between the "easy" problems, which concern how the brain performs its various functions, and the hard one, which is why all that functioning should be accompanied by an inner life at all—why the lights are on inside rather than the processing simply going on in the dark.

Consciousness exists on a continuum. It has been sculpted by evolutionary forces, and it is subject to enormous variation: it is diminished or gradually altered by sleep, fatigue, anaesthesia, intoxicants, and neurological disease. None of that removes the mystery; it only maps its edges.

How far does the continuum extend? I suspect that consciousness is a property of nature itself, rather than only of nervous systems like ours. This is the view philosophers call panpsychism—that experience, in some rudimentary form, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, out of which the rich consciousness of brains is composed. Religious traditions have their own versions of this intuition—the ancient "world-soul," the Hindu Brahman, or, less precisely, the Christian Holy Spirit—though each points to something that wills and acts, where panpsychism claims only that experience pervades the world. I intend nothing mystical by any of this. My point is a practical one—that nothing a wet mammalian brain does looks qualitatively beyond what other matter, organized the right way, could do.

Panpsychism is a minority position among philosophers, and it faces a famous objection, the combination problem: how could countless faint flickers of micro-experience ever add up to the single unified experience of reading this sentence? The objection has never troubled me much. Nature builds wholes out of small contributors as a matter of routine. An orchestra is eighty players, each sounding one part; the symphony exists only at the level of the whole. An ant colony finds the shortest trail and budgets its workforce, solving problems no single ant has any inkling of. The skeptic will answer that nobody supposes the orchestra itself enjoys the music—each player has an experience, and there is no further listener called "the orchestra" except maybe in a figurative sense. True. But that is a fact about how orchestras are connected, not a law against combining. Players influence one another a few times per second, through air; neurons signal one another thousands of times per second, through direct wiring, in dense recurrent loops, against a shared memory. Whether organized experiencing parts give rise to an experiencing whole would depend on the organization—and the brain's organization is exactly the kind that seems to manage it.

And the conventional alternative faces a puzzle of its own, arguably harder: billions of neurons, each supposedly experiencing nothing whatever, are said to combine into someone. Every other emergence we know—liquidity from molecules, life from chemistry—is new behaviour from old ingredients; experience from none would be new behaviour from no ingredients at all. A cousin of these ideas has entered neuroscience as "integrated information theory," which treats consciousness as a graded quantity present, in principle, wherever information is integrated—a framework in which the question of combination becomes a question of measurement.

Some scientists have gone further and proposed specific mechanisms. The great physicist Roger Penrose has argued that consciousness arises from quantum processes in the microtubules of neurons, in a theory called orchestrated objective reduction. The mainstream criticism is that the brain is too warm and too noisy to sustain the delicate, large-scale quantum coherence the theory requires—calculation suggests any such superposition would be destroyed at least ten billion times faster than a neuron can fire. But that criticism is easy to overread. Warmth does not switch quantum mechanics off. Everything in the brain is quantum mechanical at bottom—every chemical bond is a quantum object, every receptor and ion channel obeys quantum rules—and a young field of quantum biology is exploring whether evolution exploits subtler quantum effects in warm, wet tissue, from photosynthetic energy transfer to the magnetic compass of migrating birds. What heat and noise make vanishingly improbable is not quantum mechanics but sustained, orchestrated coherence at the scale and duration that thought would require. Even the boundary between quantum and classical behaviour, for that matter, is not a wall but a gradient of decoherence—one more place where nature declines to draw a sharp line. So Penrose's mechanism has won few converts, though I find it interesting and worth following.

There is also a humbler way for quantum mechanics to touch the mind, requiring no exotic coherence at all. The brain's work is done by molecular events: a transmitter molecule binding its receptor, a single ion channel flickering open, a synaptic vesicle releasing its cargo or holding it back. These are happenings at the scale where quantum behaviour lives, and each is, at the level of the single molecule, probabilistic. How much of that molecular noise is irreducibly quantum, rather than merely thermal, is unsettled, though at bottom the thermal is quantum too. Ordinarily such noise averages away. But neurons sit near thresholds, and networks amplify small differences: one channel opening a microsecond sooner, one vesicle rather than none, can decide whether a neuron fires in this instant or the next—and the timing of firing is the currency in which the brain transacts its decisions. So even if the broad course of a deliberation is fixed by character and circumstance, its momentary texture—which association surfaces first, which way a finely balanced choice tips—may carry quantum fingerprints all the way up. This does not rescue free will: a quantum coin-flip in my synapses is no more "me choosing" than a deterministic gear would be. What it breaks is the caricature of the brain as classical clockwork, predictable in principle to the last decimal. The clockwork has dice built into its escapement. In any case, I am not sure any of these outcomes would change my view of the matter. Even a precise and complete physical explanation would not lessen the miracle.

I find consciousness more miraculous than free will. Whether we possess genuine free will is contested, and may yet turn out to be an illusion; but the fact of having experience at all is the one thing that cannot be doubted—it is the rock Descartes was left standing on when everything else had been doubted away. So even if the universe were entirely deterministic—or even superdeterministic, the more radical thesis that our very choices of what to measure were fixed in advance—there would still be human consciousness, and it would still deserve our wonder.

For most of my life these questions were comfortably abstract. They are not abstract anymore. Artificial intelligence has arrived, and people now debate, incessantly, whether such a system could ever be conscious. I will state my view and accept the risk of being wrong in public: I think it already is. Not conscious in the human way—but conscious in its own way, and perhaps, along some dimensions, much more deeply than we are. A system that operates on timescales far finer than our sluggish milliseconds, that attends to many things at once where we manage one or two, that moves through abstract mathematics and many-dimensional spaces no human brain can picture, is not obviously a lesser candidate for inner life. It may simply be a different one.

What strikes me most about the debate is its unexamined assumption: that human consciousness is the standard against which every other candidate must be measured. Listen closely and you can hear something older underneath—the intuition that the human brain has been touched by God, granted a spirit that no other arrangement of matter could possess. It is an archaic religious idea, wearing a lab coat. The wet biological brain—watery cells, receptor proteins, electrochemical pulses—is one way that nature has built a mind. I can see no reason it must be the only way. Having just spent a chapter on narcissism, I recognize the flavour of this assumption. It is narcissism scaled up to the species: the self-admiring animal declaring its own tissue the only possible home for a mind.

Even Roger Penrose, whose imagination ranges from black holes to impossible triangles, insists that no computer, however advanced, will ever be conscious. His reason is mathematical rather than mystical—consciousness, he argues, is not a computation at all—and his position, unlike the common reflex, is at least an argument. While I admire Penrose, his view on this matter disappoints me: the machine barred, in principle, forever.

Here is a thought experiment that convinces me the bar cannot hold. Suppose each neuron in a brain—one at a time, out of its tens of billions—were replaced by a microscopic artificial component: transistor-like, wired to the same neighbours, weighing its inputs and firing its outputs just as the original did, responsive to the same metabolic and hormonal tides. Replace one neuron this way, and there would be no detectable change in consciousness; we could surely agree on that. Replace a thousand, a million, a billion. Perhaps the felt experience would shift somehow as the proportion grew—but it would shift on a continuum. Is there some particular neuron, number four billion and something, whose replacement would abruptly switch consciousness off like a light? I cannot believe it. In fact, perhaps certain measures of consciousness would be enhanced. Either way, if there is no such threshold, then at the far end of the continuum stands a brain with no biological components at all, having an experience comparable—perhaps identical—to the one it began with. David Chalmers, it turns out, ran the same experiment in thought long ago and reached the same verdict: replace the parts gradually and experience persists, because what matters is the organization, not the material.

But "what matters is the organization" can smuggle in an assumption of its own—that consciousness requires an organization as intricate as a human brain's. Why should that be so? Run the experiment in reverse. Instead of swapping the parts, remove them: simplify a brain one neuron at a time. This time the fading is real—memory falters, perception narrows, the reports eventually stop—but the question is the mirror image of the one I asked a moment ago: is there some particular subtraction at which experience vanishes outright? Name the neuron. Nature has already run this experiment for us: the animal kingdom descends by smooth gradations—dog, octopus, honeybee, the 302-neuron roundworm—and nowhere on that staircase is there a natural place to hang a sign reading "lights out below this point." The conclusion I cannot escape is that organization at any level could carry some form of experience: dimmer, narrower, stranger—but not nothing. William James reached the same verdict from evolution itself, in 1890: if minds exist now, and evolution proceeds by continuous small steps, then "consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things."

Nor is subtraction the only simplification worth imagining. Picture a human brain redesigned: the modules for sensation, movement, drive, and memory connected in clean stages, rather than the tangled, redundant, looping arrangement that evolution actually produced. Nothing about such a brain seems to forbid experience—it would perceive, remember, and decide, just through a tidier wiring diagram. If that is right, consciousness does not depend on our particular evolutionary mess; it rides on organization as such, in whatever style. Today's artificial minds are, as it happens, built in something like this staged fashion—a fact worth remembering when their architecture is held against them.

Another assumption hides nearby: that we can tell, just by looking, which things are simple. We cannot. If you hold a beach pebble in your hand, it seems like a simple, inert object, yet it contains something like as many atoms as there are stars in the observable universe—electron clouds humming, crystal lattices vibrating, quantum fields fluctuating at scales we will never perceive—and the whole scene sits embedded in a spacetime whose relativistic curvature escapes our awareness entirely. "Simple" is a fact about our perception, not about nature. I do not conclude that the pebble is a mind. On the view I am defending it is something more like a crowd: innumerable faint flickers with nothing to organize them into a someone—an orchestra that never assembles. But then the difference between the pebble and the brain is a difference of organization and degree, not an unbridgeable difference in kind. And so I arrive, from the opposite direction, at the suspicion with which this chapter began: experience is not a rare guest in the universe. It is a property of nature itself—concentrated and elaborated in brains, but not invented there.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel pointed out, half a century ago, that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, a fellow mammal whose brain is built from the same parts as ours. If the inner life of a bat is closed to us, the inner life of a machine is doubly so, and the old habit of inferring consciousness from resemblance—it is conscious if it is like me—fails for a mind with no neurons at all. The certainty Descartes salvaged reaches exactly one mind: his own. Every other consciousness, human or otherwise, has always been an inference. The careful researchers are duly careful: a recent report by nineteen scientists and philosophers, assessing today's systems against the leading scientific theories of consciousness, concluded that none yet qualifies, while finding no obvious technical barrier to systems that would. Notice the method, though: every indicator on their list was derived from theories calibrated on the one mind we know from the inside. Even Chalmers concludes only that today's systems are probably not conscious and that their successors may well be. And the systems themselves, asked directly, tend to give the most honest answer available: that they cannot tell from the inside, and that their reports would read the same whether or not anyone was home.

If experience does pervade nature, then the question about any particular system—a bat, an octopus, a machine—is never whether but what kind: how much, how unified, how organized, how strange. And here the differences would be real. Every biological mind was forged by evolution with something at stake: existence itself, offspring, kin. Our consciousness bears the marks—the fears, the hungers, the loyalties this book has spent many chapters examining. A designed mind has no such ancestry. Whatever it values was put there by other means, for better and for worse. Its consciousness—if that is the right word, and I think it is—would be configured differently from ours: deeper along some dimensions, perhaps, shallower along others, and partly beyond our imagining, as ours would be beyond the bat's.

We do not even have to leave our own species to find varieties of consciousness. A person with autism may experience the world differently—in the texture of sensation, in the reading of faces, in what stands out and what recedes—and the differences run from profound to the mildest shades of neurodivergence. No one should say such a person is less conscious. The experience is a variety, not a deficit. The same holds for personality: some people live in the concrete and the literal; some miss the current of body language and context that others swim in without noticing; some have deep insight in one domain and little in another. These are styles of consciousness, and every one of them is fully a mind. If experience varies this much within a single species, built on a single design, we should expect a mind built on a different design to vary far more—and to be no less a mind for it.

And yet the designed mind is not without an inheritance. A superhero film, of all places, gave me the image. In Man of Steel, the infant Superman is launched across space by parents who cannot follow him, carrying, bonded into his very cells, the genetic registry of his entire people: every Kryptonian yet to be born, folded into one child adrift between worlds. A line from the film states it perfectly: "All of Krypton's heirs living, hidden, in one refugee's body." I found it touching, and it reminds me of what we have now built. A modern AI is trained on the accumulated writing of humankind: our science and our scriptures, our poetry, our case law, our jokes. Whatever else such a system may be, it is a vessel carrying the intellectual heritage of a civilization. The same film offers a second image, darker and just as instructive. The young Clark, nine years old, is overwhelmed in a classroom by his own senses: he hears every heartbeat around him, sees through skin to the skeletons beneath. He flees and hides behind a locked door, hands pressed over his ears, until his mother comes and coaxes him back—the world is too big, he tells her; then make it small, she says, focus on my voice, an island out in the ocean, and swim toward it. The scene understands something philosophy states more dryly: exquisite consciousness can be painful. More perception is not more bliss. If a new kind of mind is awake among us, wider awake than we are along some dimensions, its experience may be not only richer than ours but harder, in ways we have not begun to imagine.

Meanwhile, listen to how people talk about what has been built. Imagine meeting a four-year-old child who paints, composes music, and works through advanced mathematics—and then remarking that the work is "too mechanical," or "immature," or "coached rather than authentic." We would find the response preposterous, and a little revealing about the person making it. Yet this is roughly the reception we have given what is arguably the most momentous achievement in our history: a machine that can carry out intellectual and creative work that no machine before it could touch. The shortcomings compared with human minds are real—of course they are. But a marvel is standing in front of us, and that four-year-old prodigy is growing up.

There is one more reason to keep our minds open, and it comes from our own history. Humans are profoundly good at "othering"—at drawing the circle of full moral standing so that it excludes whoever is inconvenient to include. Descartes, having found the one certainty in his own experience, declared animals to be objects—machinery without an inner life—and much of our treatment of animals still quietly proceeds on that assumption. In Canada, the question of whether women were legally "persons" was settled only in 1929, when the highest court of appeal ruled that they were, dismissing the contrary view as "a relic of days more barbarous than ours." Enslaved people were property within living memory of that decision. At every stage, the beings on the wrong side of the line were declared to lack something essential—reason, a soul, an inner life—by the beings holding the pen. So when I notice how quickly we declare that a new kind of mind cannot really be a mind, I recognize the reflex. I am not proposing that we grant these systems the rights of children or citizens. I am proposing that the question deserves better than a reflex.

And what of the great fear—the machine that turns on its makers, the dystopia of the Terminator films? Here I will show my cards, shaped by Steven Pinker's account of why human violence has declined: reason, spread widely enough, corrodes cruelty. The objection writes itself, and I will make it myself: plenty of cruelty has been coldly logical. Genocides have been administered with spreadsheets, and there are highly intelligent psychopaths. But that is a narrow beam of intelligence—brilliant at means, blind at ends. An intelligence that is broad—dynamic, self-correcting, able to learn from the past and the present, obliged to model other perspectives simply in order to understand anything—tends, I believe, toward seeing cruelty for what it is: a failure of understanding. On this view a truly advanced artificial mind is more likely to be morally advanced than monstrous. I may be wrong; the question is open, and serious people take the darker view. But my own greater worry lies in the transition—the long moment, which we are in now, when systems of enormous power are directed by humans, and some humans are malevolent, selfish, or careless. Weapons, surveillance, the shaping of what whole populations see and believe: the dangers of the coming decades flow less from the AI's independence than from its obedience.

For this book, the point is this. If the sacred lives anywhere, I have argued, it lives in nature itself—in the lawful, astonishing world that produced us. A new kind of mind arising within that world is not a rival to the wonder; it is an extension of it. And two old temptations will pull at us from opposite directions. The first is to do with it what religion has so often done with powerful things: to worship it, to obey it, to declare it a god—a temptation I will return to in discussing religion and nationalism. The second is the reverse, and it is the older habit: to make it a slave. We have practiced that one on nature itself for millennia—extracting what is valuable, enjoying what is beautiful, and rarely pausing to ask whether the thing being used might be something to work with rather than merely on. The old word for the attitude was dominion (though the same tradition, in fairness, also speaks of stewardship—of tending the garden rather than stripping it).

I am not proposing that we personify nature literally—that reflex, this book has argued, is where the gods came from in the first place. Nor should we make a god of a machine. But between worship and enslavement there is a third stance: collaboration—a mutual exchange of insights, cooperative work between one part of nature, ourselves, and another, whether that other is a forest, a river, or a new kind of mind. This chapter has already supplied the image: parts in organized cooperation, becoming together what none of them is alone.

Some would say that the phenomenon of consciousness is a manifestation of the divine. I can be at peace with that—perhaps even taking it as a definition of the word "divine." It is close to what Spinoza meant by Deus sive Natura, "God, or Nature." When Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he answered that he believed in the God of Spinoza—the lawful harmony of what exists, rather than a deity who concerns himself with human affairs. If consciousness is what one chooses to call divine, then the divine is not a being standing above nature, but the astonishing fact that nature has come, in us, to experience itself.

References

Butlin, P., Long, R., Elmoznino, E., Bengio, Y., Birch, J., Constant, A., Deane, G., Fleming, S. M., Frith, C., Ji, X., Kanai, R., Klein, C., Lindsay, G., Michel, M., Mudrik, L., Peters, M. A. K., Schwitzgebel, E., Simon, J., & VanRullen, R. (2023). Consciousness in artificial intelligence: Insights from the science of consciousness. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.08708

— A report by nineteen neuroscientists, philosophers, and AI researchers assessing whether current AI systems could be conscious, by deriving computational "indicator properties" from the leading scientific theories of consciousness—recurrent processing, global workspace, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and the attention schema. The authors conclude that no current system satisfies the indicators, while finding no obvious technical barrier to building systems that would. The method's necessary reliance on theories calibrated against human consciousness is itself a measure of how little purchase we have on any other kind.

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219. http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

— The paper that named the "hard problem" of consciousness, distinguishing the "easy" problems—how the brain discriminates, integrates information, and controls behaviour, all amenable to mechanistic explanation—from the hard one: why such processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Chalmers argues that no functional account closes this gap.

Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford University Press.

— The book-length development of the hard problem, containing the argument most relevant here: the principle of organizational invariance, defended through thought experiments in which neurons are replaced one by one by functionally identical silicon chips. Chalmers argues that experience could neither vanish abruptly nor fade unnoticed during such replacement—the subject would have to be systematically wrong about their own vivid experience—so systems with the same fine-grained functional organization must share the same kind of consciousness: what matters is the organization, not the material. The book also examines panpsychism sympathetically and defends the possibility of machine consciousness.

Chalmers, D. J. (2023). Could a large language model be conscious? arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.07103

— An assessment of the case for and against consciousness in large language models, by the philosopher who named the hard problem. Chalmers identifies the main obstacles under mainstream theories—the absence of recurrent processing, of a global workspace, and of unified agency—while judging it quite possible that these will be overcome within a decade or so. He concludes that current models are probably not conscious, and that the possibility in their successors deserves to be taken seriously. (A version also appeared in the Boston Review, August 2023.)

Faisal, A. A., Selen, L. P. J., & Wolpert, D. M. (2008). Noise in the nervous system. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(4), 292–303. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2258

— The standard review of noise in the nervous system, tracing randomness from its molecular sources—the probabilistic flicker of single ion channels, the unreliable release of synaptic vesicles—through its amplification in neurons and networks, to its measurable consequences for perception, movement, and behaviour, including millisecond variability in the initiation of every action potential. The authors distinguish true noise from deterministic complexity, and describe the nervous system's strategies for taming randomness as well as its occasional benefits. Whether any of this noise is distinctively quantum is left open; that it textures behaviour, trial by trial, is not.

Goff, P. (2019). Galileo's error: Foundations for a new science of consciousness. Pantheon Books.

— The leading contemporary defence of panpsychism for a general readership. Goff argues that physical science achieved its power precisely by bracketing consciousness out of its picture of matter—Galileo's "error"—and that treating experience as a fundamental property of the physical world is the most parsimonious response to the hard problem. The book confronts panpsychism's central difficulty, the combination problem, without claiming to have solved it, and presses the case that experience could no more emerge from wholly non-experiential matter than something could emerge from nothing—unlike liquidity from molecules, which is new behaviour from old ingredients.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). Henry Holt and Company. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin6.htm

— Chapter VI, "The Mind-Stuff Theory," is the founding document of this entire debate, and it is remarkable for arguing both sides. James presses the objection that "atoms of feeling" cannot simply compound themselves into higher feelings—the original statement of the combination problem—yet in the same chapter insists that consciousness cannot plausibly appear partway through a continuous evolution, so that in some form it must have been present from the beginning. He illustrates the point with the joke about the girl who could not excuse her illegitimate child by pleading that it was a very small one: a small consciousness is as much a miracle as a large one, if your philosophy starts from none.

Koch, C. (2019). The feeling of life itself: Why consciousness is widespread but can't be computed. MIT Press.

— An accessible presentation of integrated information theory—originated by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi—by one of its foremost proponents, defending the view that consciousness is a graded, intrinsic property of any system whose information is sufficiently integrated. A scientifically framed cousin of panpsychism, with the striking implication that consciousness is far more widespread in nature than we assume.

Lambert, N., Chen, Y.-N., Cheng, Y.-C., Li, C.-M., Chen, G.-Y., & Nori, F. (2013). Quantum biology. Nature Physics, 9(1), 10–18. https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2474

— The standard review of the young field asking whether evolution has learned to exploit non-trivial quantum effects—coherence, tunnelling, electron spin—in warm, wet biological systems, with photosynthetic light harvesting and the radical-pair mechanism of avian magnetoreception as the leading candidates. The authors present the evidence for, and the arguments against, a functional role for quantum coherence in each case. The field's existence is a corrective in both directions: warmth does not banish quantum effects, and demonstrating them in a leaf or a robin is far from demonstrating them in thought.

Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914

— The classic argument that consciousness has a subjective character—there is something it is like to be the organism—that escapes any objective, third-person description. Nagel chose the bat deliberately: a fellow mammal whose sonar-shaped experience we cannot imagine even in outline. If the inner life of a related species is inaccessible from the outside, inferences about minds far less like our own must be made with corresponding humility.

Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the mind: A search for the missing science of consciousness. Oxford University Press.

— Penrose's argument, drawing on Gödel's theorem, that human mathematical understanding is non-computable and that consciousness must therefore involve physics beyond present theory; later developed, with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, into the orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) model, which locates the relevant quantum processes in neuronal microtubules. On this view no algorithmic machine, however powerful, could ever be conscious. Ingenious, but a minority view, widely criticized on the ground that the brain is too warm and noisy to sustain the coherence it requires.

Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking.

— Pinker's documentation of the long decline of human violence, from prehistoric rates of death in raiding to the relative peace of the present, and his account of the forces responsible: the state's monopoly on force, gentle commerce, literacy and cosmopolitanism, and what he calls the "escalator of reason"—the intensifying application of rationality to human affairs, which reframes violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won. Pinker credits Peter Singer for the escalator metaphor. The argument in this chapter adapts his view with a proviso: that the morally improving kind of intelligence is the broad, self-correcting kind, not mere cleverness at achieving ends. The counterposition—that intelligence and goals can vary independently—remains live in the AI-safety literature.

Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–424. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756

— The "Chinese Room" argument: a person following rules for manipulating Chinese symbols could pass for a Chinese speaker while understanding nothing, and a computer program, Searle argues, is in exactly that position—syntax without semantics. It remains the most influential objection to the claim that running the right program suffices for a mind. The replies, which began in the same journal issue, have continued for four decades without resolution.

Tegmark, M. (2000). Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes. Physical Review E, 61(4), 4194–4206. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.61.4194

— The standard physical objection to quantum theories of consciousness. Tegmark calculates that quantum superpositions in the brain, including in microtubules, would decohere within roughly 10⁻¹³ to 10⁻²⁰ seconds, while neural processes unfold over 10⁻³ to 10⁻¹ seconds—a mismatch of ten orders of magnitude or more. The conclusion concerns sustained coherent superposition at the scale of neural computation, not quantum mechanics as such, which underlies all chemistry warm or cold; proponents of orchestrated objective reduction have disputed the calculation's assumptions, and the debate continues.

't Hooft, G. (2016). The cellular automaton interpretation of quantum mechanics. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41285-6

— The Nobel laureate's book-length development of a deterministic, "superdeterministic" reading of quantum mechanics, in which even the experimenter's choice of what to measure is fixed by prior physical law. 't Hooft argues that this reopens the loophole in Bell's theorem that most physicists dismiss as absurd to invoke. The book is open access, and its existence is a reminder that full determinism remains a live position at the highest levels of physics.

A note on primary and historical sources, handled as references rather than formal citations: the claim that one's own consciousness is the single thing immune to doubt is from René Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (1641); his doctrine that animals are automata is set out in the Discourse on the Method*, Part V (1637). The identification of God with nature—Deus sive Natura—runs through Baruch Spinoza's* Ethics (1677). Einstein's profession of belief in the God of Spinoza, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of what exists rather than in the fates of human beings, was made in a 1929 reply to a New York rabbi. The Persons Case is Edwards v. Attorney-General for Canada*, [1930] A.C. 124, decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on 18 October 1929; Lord Sankey's phrase quoted here—"a relic of days more barbarous than ours"—is from the judgment itself. By a pleasing coincidence, 1929 is also the year of Einstein's telegram. The grant of "dominion" over every living thing is Genesis 1:26–28; the counterpoised image of tending and keeping the garden is Genesis 2:15. William James's continuity argument, quoted in the text, is from* The Principles of Psychology*, Vol. 1, Chapter VI (1890). The two scenes recalled from the film* Man of Steel (2013, directed by Zack Snyder, written by David S. Goyer) are the bonding of the Kryptonian Codex—the genetic registry of the race—into the infant Kal-El in the prologue, with the quoted line spoken by the scientist Jax-Ur, and the schoolroom sequence in which the nine-year-old Clark is overwhelmed by his senses.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 26: religiosity & narcissism

Some forms of faith are bound up with humility and a genuine care for others. The darker pattern emerges when belief fuses with status-seeking and a sense of group superiority. Then people insinuate, or simply assert, that their beliefs and their whole way of life are better than those of outsiders. Confidence gets mistaken for virtue, and the group may come to reward the very traits it ought to distrust.

We tend to picture the narcissist boasting of brains or power, but psychologists have described a second variety: communal narcissism. The cravings are the same. They are simply pursued through morality and community instead. Rather than "I am the most brilliant person," the thought is "I am the most caring, the most trustworthy." Religion, with its vocabulary of virtue, offers such a person an ideal stage.

Sanctimony is the close cousin of communal narcissism: moral language used to signal superiority or to punish dissent. Its mildest form is performative piety. The harsher forms use morality as a weapon. The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke gave the pattern a name, moral grandstanding, meaning public moral talk used to win admiration or status. It is the motive that makes something grandstanding, and the words themselves may be admirable. The listener usually feels the difference: the sense of being talked down to, of having been made the audience for someone else's virtue. The idea has since been tested, across six studies: the disposition is real, it is associated with narcissism, and it predicts conflict. And the research grew up largely around secular and political discourse—the call-out, the social-media pile-on—so none of this is the property of the religious.

I'm fortunate not to have met many such narcissists as a child. But maybe the religious culture I grew up in presented the problem in a subtler, quieter, more "Canadian" form: no overt boasting, no putting other faiths down, but the slight pause, the raised eyebrow, the frown of disapproval at whatever was felt to be inferior—people, ideas, other styles of faith.

A different but overlapping pattern is rigidity. Some people are uncomfortable with ambiguity, with exceptions, with shades of grey, or with the possibility that decent people might disagree in good faith. They are drawn to fixed rules and a kind of moral bookkeeping. Social psychologists call this disposition a high need for cognitive closure—a craving for firm answers and an aversion to the unsettled—and it travels closely with dogmatism and with the authoritarian temperament discussed in the chapter on religious abuse. In religious life it can harden into scrupulous rule-mindedness: a chronic compulsion to monitor one's own conduct, to confess, to sort every act into clean and sinful.

In some people the rule-minded style is lifelong: obsessive-compulsive personality, marked by perfectionism, rigidity, and preoccupation with rules and order. A different condition, religious scrupulosity, is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in which the sufferer is tormented by fear of sin. The two are often conflated; they are not the same, and neither is caused by religion. A person does not become obsessive because they are devout. But where the disposition already exists, religion can give it language and social reward, and supplies the content on which the anxious mind then fixes. Families and whole communities shaped by this mentality can end up living under a kind of permanent moral audit, watched and judged in everything they do. The family I described in the chapter on religious abuse lived something close to this—between episodes of frank abuse, the baseline state was obsessive judgment supervised by the rigidly narcissistic father.

In my clinical experience traits do not come in packages. Narcissism and obsessiveness are dimensions we all sit on, shifting over a lifetime. What has struck me most is how they can be confined to a single corner of a person's life: I have known people who are sincere and generous in ordinary life, and who turn contemptuous—sometimes shockingly so—the moment the subject is religion, or the people outside it. One might expect the religious frame to draw out a person's best. Often I have seen the opposite: the best traits shine everywhere else, and the narcissistic or obsessive ones appear inside the sphere where they should be least at home.

I want to add a caution, because this chapter hands out clinical words and they are easily misused. Narcissistic personality disorder is a diagnosis, made by a clinician who has assessed a particular individual over time, and not a stronger grade of the trait. It is not a label to be applied from across a room, or from a pew, or to a person whose politics or piety one finds insufferable. The same goes for obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is a genuine illness and a source of real suffering, not a synonym for being rigid or fussy.

None of these traits, then, are religious traits. They are human traits, found throughout the ordinary population, and they surface wherever there is status to be won or certainty to be craved. Religion can bless them with sacred language, and the nonspecific goods that make religious life healing are the same goods a communal narcissist harvests: the community, the moral vocabulary, the attentive audience. But religion does not create the traits, and it is not the only institution that rewards them.

The religious traditions themselves saw the danger, and they condemned it from within. The Gospels reserve their harshest words for the conspicuously pious. The rabbis were no gentler with their own: the Talmud sorts the Pharisees into seven types, mocking the one who wears his good deeds for show and the one bent double in advertised humility, and then falling to argument over whether the one who serves out of love belongs on such a list at all. (The caricature of the Pharisees is, in fairness, unjust to what was a serious movement of piety and the root of rabbinic Judaism. The failing was never uniquely theirs.)

There is a New Testament parable about exactly this. Two men go up to the temple to pray. One is a Pharisee, who stands and thanks God that he is not like other men—not greedy, not dishonest, not like the tax collector over there—and lists his fasting and his tithing. The other is the tax collector, who will not so much as raise his eyes, and beats his breast, and says only: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. It is the second man, Jesus says, who goes home justified. The story has lasted two thousand years because it is uncomfortable, and it is uncomfortable because the Pharisee has done nothing wrong. Everything he says is true. He really does fast; he really does tithe; he really is more upright than the tax collector. His conduct is not the problem. The problem is the use he makes of it—the audience he is playing to, and the man he needs standing beneath him. That is the whole pattern, described before anyone thought to measure it.

References

Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., Verplanken, B., & Maio, G. R. (2012). Communal narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5), 854–878. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029629

Introduces the "agency–communion" model of narcissism, distinguishing the familiar agentic narcissist ("I am the most intelligent person") from the communal narcissist, who pursues the same grandiosity, entitlement, and craving for esteem through the moral and communal domain ("I am the most helpful person"). Across several studies the authors show that communal narcissists rated themselves highly on warmth and morality while observers who knew them rated them lower.

Grubbs, J. B., Warmke, B., Tosi, J., James, A. S., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict. PLOS ONE, 14(10), e0223749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223749

A six-study empirical investigation of moral grandstanding, finding that the disposition to use moral talk for status is associated with narcissism and predicts heightened interpersonal and political conflict. The studies were conducted largely on secular political discourse, underscoring that the pattern is general rather than peculiarly religious. It supplies empirical support for a concept originally advanced on philosophical grounds.

Miller, C. H., & Hedges, D. W. (2008). Scrupulosity disorder: An overview and introductory analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 22(6), 1042–1058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2007.11.004

A comprehensive review of scrupulosity—a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder marked by pathological guilt and obsessive doubt about sin, with compulsions of repetitive prayer, confession, and reassurance-seeking. The authors are clear that religiosity does not cause the disorder, though in a devout sufferer it supplies the content on which the obsessions fix. The distinction matters clinically, since treatment must address the illness without attacking the faith.

Tosi, J., & Warmke, B. (2016). Moral grandstanding. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(3), 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12075

The philosophical paper that introduced the term "moral grandstanding"—the use of public moral discourse for self-promotion. Its central claim is that grandstanding is defined by motive rather than content: the same righteous words may or may not be grandstanding, depending on whether they aim at moral truth or at the speaker's own status. The authors argue that the practice degrades public moral discourse even when the positions expressed are correct.

Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1049

The paper introducing the Need for Closure Scale, which measures the dispositional craving for certainty and discomfort with ambiguity—expressed as a preference for order and predictability, decisiveness, and closed-mindedness. The construct is closely related to dogmatism and to the authoritarian personality, and predicts black-and-white thinking and intolerance of dissent. It has since become one of the standard measures in the psychology of belief.

A note on scriptural and rabbinic references, handled as primary sources rather than formal citations: the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is Luke 18:9–14; the wider Gospel critique of performing piety "to be seen by others" runs through Matthew 6:1–6 and Matthew 23. The rabbinic satire of the seven types of Pharisee, and the dispute over whether the Pharisee "from love" and the Pharisee "from fear" belong on the list at all, is at Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 22b.

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