I think the praise appetite in western civilization is now filled by people like Tom Brady and Lebron James and Lady Gaga. When you go to a National Football League stadium on a fall Sunday afternoon, you see a communal ritual of adoration and submerging of self into group. It is fundamentally not rational.
I do not think rationalists have anything in this dimension. The closest that comes to mind is from Cosmos and Carl Sagan is standing on his star-trek-style set gazing at images of galaxies and whatnot and he has this look on his face of sex- or drug- or rock-and-roll- induced glow. Carl Sagan was a great rationalist and that television series was one of the greatest, but I found and continue to find that image disgusting.
Kind of how I imagine a Philadelphia Eagles fan and dog lover feels about rooting for Michael Vick today.
Voted up, because I'm not sure I indicated well enough that praise has a dark side (and that some people might not find it appealing at all.) You defined it better than I did: "A communal ritual of adoration and submerging of self into group."
This is both compelling to many and repugnant to many. There are whole identities constructed around avoiding rituals of adoration, and instead valuing level-headedness and critical thinking. When democracies were founded, they deliberately avoided these kinds of monarchical displays of praise. I have seen fantasy novels, religion, celebrity culture, and contemporary politics criticized precisely because of the element of praise: some find that kind of worship "disgusting" and slavish.
Personally, I find praise intellectually troubling but emotionally compelling.
Funny, when I read your post I immediately thought about Eliezer's writings, especially HP:MoR. One of the very few things I dislike about his style is that he sometimes goes into this "praise mode" all of a sudden and it feels very jarring. (Maybe I just have atypical tastes. My favorite sentence in MoR so far was "You're annoying. You should die.")
African praise songs were sung not only to kings, gods, and heroes, but to plants and animals, who obviously cannot grant anything to those who praise them.
I'm not denying the powerful psychological effect of praise in these cases, but the animistic religions of a large number of indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures do assert that plants and animals (or, more accurately, their respective spirits) have agency, and that good fortune on future h/g excursions may be ensured by respectful behaviour towards the spirits in question.
I don't find some of your arguments convincing. I agree with this:
I'm not moved by:
I am surprised no one mentioned "Ode to Joy", especially since Schiller's poem is very light on genuine religious sentiment (as opposed to stock imagery) and is very secular in portions:
45 Joyful, as His suns are flying,
46 Across the Firmament's splendid design,
47 Run, brothers, run your race,
48 Joyful, as a hero going to conquest.
49 As truth's fiery reflection
50 It smiles at the scientist.
51 To virtue's steep hill
52 It leads the sufferer on.
53 Atop faith's lofty summit
54 One sees its flags in the wind,
55 Through the cracks of burst-opGood post, but I'm just not seeing why the emotion in question should in any way require a factual statement that something is (unattainably) perfect. Maybe this is just a basic philosophical difference? Certainly when I listen to some of these songs (highly recommended, BTW), I'm pretty sure it's with the same emotion (including the same neural circuits) with which a devout Christian listens to hymns, without any requirement that perfection come into it.
Glory be to Gauss in the Highest!
I think I just found the electrical engineering club their new T-shirt slogan. :)
So the problem is that when I start singing (badly) along to Jauchzet, Frohlocket or something, I might feel vaguely guilty because I'm getting emotionally carried away by music with an irrationalist message.
One of the most helpful of Eliezer's memes to me, has been to ask if State-of-Mind X is "something the truth can kill." Applying that criterion, I find I can easily get swept up in the music and in the posture of praise, but w...
Slava Bogu na višavah in na Zemlji mir ljudem!
I understand where you are coming from, these affects can be powerful, however singing rationalist hymns seems in a very basic way wrong to me. Whenever I get swept up by a hymn it is because I indulge (or so I believe) in accepting the values it really promotes.
A hymn feels to me like rejoicing the object you value of existing. It induces the belief that the very existence of God, the Revolution, the Tsar or some undefined X in itself hold value, and you then after excepting this premise rejoice and give up ...
I don't have a good answer to your question, but I have some choral musical recommendations I've found powerful in the same way that you find Slava! powerful.
I'd recommend the Bach choral works to interested readers. The major ones (St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Mass in B Minor, Christmas Oratorio, Easter Oratorio) are all worth listening to, but there are also a couple hundred of cantatas. Unfortunately, the sheer number of cantatas makes the collection overwhelming and in my opinion there's an issue of uneven quality, but there are some really ...
Can we give high praise to a person who changes their beliefs in a rational fashion and overcomes their emotional connection to said beliefs in the name of rationality? That, to me, is extraordinarily praiseworthy and seems to fall into the category of rationalist images of glory.
I'm here a decade in the future, thinking about how to tag this post. What's interesting is that it's very clear what this post is about ("Praise", specifically, and maybe something like "inspiration" or "just getting to feel some god damn feelings or something" more generally).
The existing tags (some of which I already applied) are either a bit vague ("Motivations") or overly specific and wrong ("ritual"), or just... the negative frame ("dark arts" and "cults").
And... idk, something about it feels a bit sad. I went ahead and created a "Praise" tag because I'm generally optimizing for "go ahead and create weird 1-of tags and then see if they turn out to stick."
What a great post. Of course, I like it because it undermines the very reason most of you are here. Basically people aren't all that rational, they require something to praise, something to devote themselves to. You guys are trying to make "reason" be the object of devotion, but it's not a great fit to the mental slot (and it's been tried before).
One other note: the advantage of having your praise-object be something remote and universal (like God, or the Tsar (pretty remote for most Rus)) is that if your are expressing your allegiance to Lor...
I think this kind of thing may be at least partly driven by the desire for (extra-rational if necessary) unity amongst the praisers.
I find the beliefs raised here to be quite alien to me, so I have a hard time understanding what the actual point is.
For example, I don't understand what this means:
And yet it's really difficult to face living in a world without vast glory.
Or this:
...We want very badly for something to be an unalloyed repository of good. It is not normally credible to conceive oneself as perfect, but we need at least something or someone to be worthy of praise. We want to look upwards, towards goodness and light; we want to be the kind of people who are capable of prai
A great point, which I myself alluded to here.
I have at times felt a desire -- perhaps even "need" is not too strong a word -- to compose a Mass setting. No secular text that I can think of seems to have quite the same level of solemnity (for lack of a better word) required to serve for a worthy successor to the Mass settings of the past. I'm not sure how much of this is due to a lack of imagination on my part, and how much is due to the fact that the perception of the Mass text is the result of cultural factors beyond my individual control, and ...
You mention the technophile/libertarian/atheist/futurist cluster... I remember someone else mentioning the secular/buddhist/scientific cluster in some comment chain, which resonates with me more, and I would guess has an easier time with Praise.
I have to say, I was really, really looking forward to the new insight or solution at the end of your post that would solve this problem, and was rather disappointed that one wasn't there.
Nonetheless, I shared my praise in the form of an upvote. ;-)
SarahC, you've struck a chord with me. You've put my own secret thoughts into plain words, and Emerson is chastising me for it., (". . . to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.")
Amazing how often this blog can do that.
Anyways, on the subject - a little - I've found that Teilhard de Chardin (who worked on the Peking Man dig and talked about the intelligence explosion a year before I.J. Good, but everyone ign...
If certain bounds and constraints are considered to be inescapable, then under that assumption perfection too will abide by those constraints. It may be impossible to create a perfectly efficient engine, so our ideal of a real perfect engine won't be perfectly efficient. It is the difference between defining perfection as "without flaw" or as "best possible".
While this at first seemed to be a historically-recent, rational sort of re-framing, upon reflection it seems to be an ever-present assumption. Boris Godunov may have been seen as ...
I want to begin with a musical example. The link is the Coronation Scene from Mussorsky's opera Boris Godunov, in which Boris is crowned Tsar while courtiers sing his praises. The tune is quoted from an old Russian hymn, "Slava Bogu" or "Glory to God." And, if I can trust the English subtitles, it's an apt choice, because the song in praise of the Tsar is not too far in tone from hymns in praise of God.
There is a mode of human expression that I'll call praise, though it is different from the ordinary sort of praise we give someone for a job well done. It glorifies its object; it piles glory upon glory; its aim is to uplift and exalt. Praise is given with pomp and majesty, with visual and musical and verbal finery. It is oddly circular: nobody is alluding to anything specific that's good about the Tsar, but only words like "supreme" and "glory." Praise, in Hansonian terms, raises the status of the singers by affiliating with the object of praise. But that curt description doesn't seem to capture the whole experience of praise, which is profoundly compelling, and very strange.
There are no more Tsars. I can derive no possible advantage from a song in praise of a long-dead Tsar. And yet I find the Mussorsky piece powerful, not just for the music but for the drama. Praise also seems to attract people to traditional medievalist fantasy, with its rightful kings and oaths of fealty -- Tolkien, perhaps not coincidentally, included a praise song in his happy ending. Readers gain no status from the glorification of imaginary kings. African praise songs were sung not only to kings, gods, and heroes, but to plants and animals, who obviously cannot grant anything to those who praise them.
I would suspect that there is a distinct human need filled by praise. We want very badly for something to be an unalloyed repository of good. It is not normally credible to conceive oneself as perfect, but we need at least something or someone to be worthy of praise. We want to look upwards, towards goodness and light; we want to be the kind of people who are capable of praise, capable of a reverent and appreciative frame of mind. Unappreciativeness is an ugly emotion. And it makes it much cognitively simpler if all the goodness and light is in one place. James Joyce's notes to his play Exiles express something of this idea: "Robert is glad to have in Richard a personality to whom he can pay the tribute of complete admiration, that is to say, one to whom it is not necessary to give always a qualified and half-hearted praise. "
Rationalism would seem to require the end of praise that is anything but qualified. After all, nothing in the empirical world is a perfect repository of all goodness, unless you define goodness in an unusual way. Praise, of the kind offered to Tsar Boris or Shaka Zulu, would seem to have no place in our world. It is irrational, except maybe as a sop to our frailty and sense of beauty. And yet Daniel Dennett, after nearly dying, thanked "goodness" for his recovery: the goodness of medicine, of the efforts and concerns of everyone who helped him. "Goodness," which is found in many places, and in varying degrees, may be worthy of praise and a thing of glory, even if we have no Boris Godunov to praise.
Eliezer wondered why our kind can't cooperate. But "our kind" do collaborate on projects: scientists and programmers do build and experiment together. The technophile/libertarian/atheist/futurist cluster is excellent about sharing information and has no difficulty forming group organizations. We're not bad at collaboration. What we seem to have a problem with is praise. As Eliezer mentioned, we criticize far more than we praise. And, though we sometimes take it to unreasonable extremes, the resistance to praise is not altogether irrational. We recognize praise as dangerous: the impulse to glorify is the same impulse that raises up monarchs and dictators and forms cults. We call it the Dark Arts.
And yet it's really difficult to face living in a world without vast glory. Even if you accept that "goodness" can be decentralized, scattered wherever people are doing good or remarkable things, it's more difficult to conceive of decentralized, abstract goodness than to picture all goodness residing in one visible person or thing. There are distinctly atheist/futurist images of glory: the deepness of space, the march of science, the FOOM of the Singularity. But these are not rationalist images. Science progresses in fits and starts, and is plagued by ordinary fallibility and self-interest; there is no guarantee of a technological paradise ahead; even Space is a metaphor for certain evolution-based emotions, not really a deity. It seems that any form of glory, when examined critically, becomes qualified and limited. If there are rationalist praise songs, they must be humbler. You can praise a heroic doctor (but he's not God), you can sing of the crash of the sea (but the sea is not God), you can hymn science (but science isn't God). I don't know if this means that we need to curb our love of praise, or if we need to put a brighter emotional valence on these limited forms of praise.
We can't sing "Glory be to Gauss in the Highest!" Can we ever be satisfied with merely "Glory be to Gauss!"?
EDIT: In the comments I've seen a few types of responses.
1. "Praise mode" (or, variously, adoration, glorification, worship) is a Bad Thing. It's blind and unrealistic. It's what we're trying to get away from as rationalists. There's no reason to miss its absence, and in fact it's unpleasant.
2. What's wrong with praising actual good things? Nothing says they have to be perfect. [I think this misunderstands the nature of praise mode. Recognizing that apples or kindness are wonderful is not the same as a ritual of adoration. I think this is really a variant of 1.]
3. Praise is attractive and compelling, but probably needs to be kept in check. (Witness the large number of us who like Christian choral music, and also that several of us express discomfort with it and feel guilty about writing or performing it.)
4. Yes, you can go into "praise mode" in a secular or scientific way, and it's wonderful! Hail Sagan!