Community after it melted into air

19th-century Franciscans; can't find a credit.

What a tedious and tiny-minded creature is Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who reads an extremely wide-ranging conversation between the young Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and the ancient American psychologist Daniel Kahneman—it covers the whole of human existence, which is one of Harari's specialties and the subject of his recent book, Sapiens—and hears only a threat to his own, literally parochial, concern.

The question has to do with what seems like the automatization of the world's work: as robots and productivity improvements minimize the number of people needed to keep us fed and clothed and entertained, a time approaches when most people might be unable to find meaningful work. Nobody will have to starve to death, but their lives will be empty and "worthless", with nothing available to fill them up with except drugs and computer games, or, as Douthat puts it,

bread and circuses (or drugs and video games) and the pull of revolutionary violence 

(Revealing that he's actually not so much worried about the meaninglessness of their lives as about the possibility that they might show up in his neighborhood with pitchforks, or scimitars maybe.) The "old ideas" of sacred texts from the Torah through the Qur'an, Harari thinks, have nothing to offer in this situation, as in the comparable situation of the Industrial Revolution:

You had the Industrial Revolution. You had huge sociopolitical problems all over the world, as a result of industrialization, of modernization. You got lots of people thinking that the answer is in the Bible or in the Qur'an. You had religious movements all over the world.... Eventually, people came up with new ideas, not from the Sharia, and not from the Bible, and not from some vision. People studied industry, they studied coalmines, they studied electricity, they studied steam engines, railroads, they looked at how these developments transformed the economy and society, and they came up with some new ideas. 

What? What? Douthat wonders, the answer wasn't in religious movements? The Monsignor seems to be under the impression that Cardinal Newman in person led the Salvation Army to shut down those dark Satanic mills and bring the proles out into the sunlight singing "Jerusalem":

the reformers who made the biggest differences — the ones who worked in the slums and with the displaced, attacked cruelties and pushed for social reforms, rebuilt community after it melted into air — often blended innovations with very old moral and religious commitments.

That's what I would call a partisan view.

There can be no question that Christians in 19th-century Britain and America did a bunch of good works—especially those of the Low denominations that are the ancestors of our present-day liberal Christianities like Methodists, UCC, Quakers, and Unitarians—and played a huge role in particular in the ending of black slavery and the fight for women's rights (not too many of Ross's friends in that last one especially) as well as Prohibition and Sabbath observance, but that's dodging the issue. The issue is, what did religions do in the 19th century do to provide meaningful lives to the masses alienated by the disruptions of developing capitalism?

Did community really "melt into air" to be reconstituted by religious groups like condensing water vapor on the outside of a pitcher of Kool-Aid? I don't remember reading about that. Does the Roman Catholic church offer any ideas about what to do with the hordes of the unemployed as the Singularity approaches and all the work that needs doing to keep them alive can be done by machine? Yes! But the Monsignor doesn't mention the obvious one: everybody with nothing better to do could be packed into monasteries and consecrated to meditation and prayer. (I somehow doubt it; even in the High Middle Ages in England, in the 13th century, there were probably no more than around 20,000 monks and nuns in the whole country, or about two thirds of 1%—one in 150—of the population.)

What really happened in the 19th century is that it stumbled into the 20th, into two world wars and one global great depression and the collapse of the political order of the Spanish, Turkish, Russian, German and Austrian, and finally British and French and Japanese and Portuguese empires, and the only thing that ever decreased the alienation of industrialization on a massive scale was massive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, liberating people to create their own new kinds of meaningfulness (many of which the Monsignor would find rather vulgar) and setting up a virtuous cycle in which demand created new jobs and jobs created new demand. Many people have certainly continued to rely on religion for a sense of meaning, but only as part of an increasingly varied menu of items ranging from union membership to sports fandom and what kind of stuff you wear, drive, listen to, and make love with. Religion has become a sort of nonprofit commodity like public radio, not at all a bad thing in itself but hardly a panacea for what ails the world. Anything that gets us through the current crisis will be as new as the motion picture and the automobile were a little over a century ago.

And in this context it's not revolutionary violence, as far as Harari is concerned, that we have to fear, but reactionary violence, from those spooked by the growth in personal freedom who want their "old ideas" to be universal—the Da'esh, and other campaigners against pleasure and individual fulfillment, Ross, but it is also bound to fail.