Against Designer-Religion
A Response to "Reversing the Fertility Collapse", by Malcolm Collins in Aporia
As I’m fast taking up the role of official scholar of religion to the known universe, I feel it’s my solemn duty to inform and disabuse the adulating masses of wrongheaded notions on this topic - and believe me, they are many and at times farcical.
Even, and perhaps especially, very intelligent people are susceptible to egregious garblings of what religion is, is for, and how it can be expected to function. The chaps over at
published a recent article by Malcolm, of the would-be Arch-Rick&Morticrat power couple the Collinses (who btw are really smart), addressing the serious problem of demographic collapse in the Western World. It called for the “crafting” of “new religions” as the only realistic antidote to this crisis.The couple are themselves semi-infamous “pro-natalists”, on a mission to breed like Catholic rabbits to help secure the future of intelligence - the genetic foundation to all high civilisation, as
frequently notes. A laudable aim, if a bit smug.
This piece manages to at once be extremely insightful and cogent on the problems inhibiting group fertility, recognising the strong religious component in this, while its suggestions and hopes are asinine. I’m actually very grateful to have been given such a juicy example of everything I whinged about in A Living Religion, and will continue to whinge about in the upcoming book on the same topic. In that article I looked at how religion becomes a “neutered accessory to a life otherwise engaged”, and how it is futile to “choose the right religion” as if from a catalogue of options, like some cultural tool for us to edit and arrange. I’m almost speechless at how unironic an espousal of this I’ve found in Prophet Malcolm.
A far cry even from your terminally online, anime watching “Orthodox” convert from Woking in search of the most “based” religion, Collins just comes out and says “well gee, why don’t we just make a 𝖇𝖆𝖘𝖊𝖉 religion?” If nothing else, I respect his Socratic candour in following the logical conclusions of his beliefs, even well into absurdity.
While I’ve been incapacitated with flu the past week, that dastardly extremely readable and insightful swine
has beaten me to responding to this article. I only saw his response after starting to write: I’ll go and read it now and get back to you about whether to bother with mine.Ok, can’t promise to be as engaging, but thank the Lord of Human Progress™ I have some other things to contribute, and I’ll be much less charitable and more scathing of Minister Malcolm to boot. (I’ll try not to be too much of an arse, but I really do think this entire project deserves ruthless mockery.)
Here’s the gist of the dispensation of Nu-Zarathustra:
No one’s having babies and nothing that governments try seems to help, religiousness seems to be the only thing that reliably predicts above replacement group fertility, but only among low-iq, technophobic and insular religious communities. I really rather don’t fancy raising my sprogs among the Amish, so we need to write a new religion fast that says thou shalt get up the duff but also that spaceships and Elon Musk are cool. These “new and fortified religions” are “the only realistic solution” to the baby bust that means we still get to colonise space, which we absolutely need to do, for some reason.
This is why the only groups that seem to show durable resistance to fertility collapse are those that either ban their members from engaging with technology or have social practices that lower the economic potential of their adherents.
“This can be seen clearly in Amish populations where the rate of cell phone use correlates with their fertility rate. Through cultural evolution the technophobic factions will eventually dominate the others (except for iterations that totally culturally and genetically isolate themselves).”
He admits quite readily that technical modernity is the culprit, but would like to hang on to it all the same.
We ought to put Space-Shaman Malcolm’s thoughts into context, you know I wouldn’t want to offend or make fun of the geezer inspiring religious leader.
Unlike the truer spiritual denizens of modernity, who snarl at the most tepid reminders of the immutability of nature, calling them any manner of oppressive “ism”, Collins founds his entire thesis on genetic (that is, natural) realities of the human animal.
He’s also determined to make sure that discussions of human biodiversity and pronatalism do not remain the exclusive domain of reactionaries by no means inclined to uncritical embracement of his scientistic worldview. The vast majority of people who “trust the science” are moral cowards who bolt from controversy like mice, we have to give The Malkster his due, he’s no coward and no hypocrite. Dave Greene was right to recognise in the Collinses the bizarre realisation of a statistical anomaly - they are “West-Coast liberal technocratic types” who care about civilisational issues like the collapse in intelligence and fertility, something that was bound to exist but you never thought you’d see. At the end of the day, though, there’s little contradiction. Their worldview is a quite natural conclusion to a hyperfocus on biology and of science as ideology, combined with an autistic enough temperament to not deny politically incorrect truths about the human race.
I think most people who are so open to following this train of thought, upon realising that those traits of our species that appear superstitious and irrational, like religion, are often examples of “evolutionarily adaptive” Chesterton’s fences1, start to decouple science from the pseudomoralistic status that it holds ambiently in our cultural mind. You’ve come upon science’s limits, because science itself tells you that to be unscientific in your outlook is actually a sounder strategy - even that a society given over to a scientistic, desacralised worldview, is demographically doomed. This ought to cause a kind of revelation, a shock of wonder to a modern mind, some whisper that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, but not to The Prophet Malcolm, to whom the Heavens are just an untapped economic zone.
Malcolm doubles right down on his scientific materialist ontology, grudgingly saying “ugh, FINE, I guess we’ll do a religion” in reaction to data that show its fertility effects. It’s completely downstream from other ideological concerns, which, guess what Brainiac, are your actual “religion”. The one he prescribes for his poor kids is obviously evaluated according to its alignment with something else entirely, but what actually is his superordinate principle? What is his god?
Let’s return to this question at the end.
What “Religion” Means
Regular readers will know I’m bursting to bring up Mircea Eliade and yes he’s on the way, but it’s worth acknowledging that, at least in certain respects, artificial religion is not an impossibility. Perhaps a surprising thing to hear, but one can’t deny that cults exist and can convince large numbers of people. Leaving aside the tiny misstep Malky Boy makes in announcing his fabrication to the world, which I don’t think needs much discussion, there are other things that set his project apart from Scientology and the like.
Scientology is a scam, Collins’ “Clever-People-should-Shag-ism” is a forlornly earnest bid at saving a civilisation from its inevitable collapse, using the same means that got it there to begin with. It, or rather it and the million other religious “hypotheses” that Collins endorses his readership to invent, want to be something on the scale of Christianity, a civilisation-defining moral universe. That has never happened by plain “design”. I don’t want to upset anyone, although I am bullying the Pointifexter a bit, but Mormonism is perhaps the biggest artificial religion and exemplar of what he would want to achieve. After all, they ballooned like it was nobody’s business in the 19th C, not that they played exactly fair with the whole multiple wives lark. In fact, they made right sure it was nobody’s business, carting off to Utah to escape everyone.
Mormonism had at the very least a counterfeit of a hierophany. (For more information on Eliade’s theory of religion read my article The Purifying Chaos) This “appearance of the sacred” in the world is what unites a community around some axis of religious meaning. The inhererently collective nature of religion is key - religion is about man’s desire “to take up his abode in objective reality”2: that is, to inhabit a true reality that transcends subjective appearances, but live in an effective “world” that is bound by a shared experience of the sacred.
Religion is concerned with the given, with that which lies beyond us and beyond our control. It is unsurprising that one who deludes himself that the stars themselves are within his grasp would not understand this. Indeed, Collins’ project is utterly subjective, completely enslaved to an arbitrary set of precepts and values that, as Dave Greene well points out, end in a baseless, self-referential cycle. His “religion” is justified and rooted in his vague aims to extend human biomass across the galaxy. The preoccupation of such people with the void is fitting. The void is traditionally identified with the dissolution of the founded, objective world, the “cosmos” into the “chaos” of the formless, unfounded and subjective. If there’s anything lurking under his materialist pseudoreligion, it certainly isn’t of the former.
To put it briefly, while yes religious traditions have evolved over time, by no coincidence in a more rapid and artificial fashion as we have entered modernity, the seeds of Religion as such, are found in mythopoetic times. Religions proper emerge in the period of human history named La Poesia “Poetry”,3 by Italian counter-enlightenment philosopher Giambattista Vico. The Cartesian ways of thinking that prefigure Collins’ were critiqued by Vico for homogenising man’s experience across time,4 Collins commits the same error in supposing religion to be a manipulable tool like the artefacts and algorithms of the unworld that he inhabits. He reasons that religion has “evolved” as we have and that this is just another phase. Those familiar with my work will know that, while religions still nominally persist in modern, Western life, they are almost entirely neutered into irrelevance. Especially the kind of religion that Collins wants to build is inaccessible to the mass of modern people, who are insulated from the divine.
His worldview rests on a claim to know the universe and its workings in their entirety, and that they are manipulable in all ways. Within this there is no limitation, no founding or objectivity - if an inherently restricted human mind thinks it can know everything, it can think whatever it wants. Indeed, there is no end to the groundless speculation of unworlded thought in our time. This is the arbitrariness that lets Collins think he can start a religion to turn Mars into a carpark.
Vico condemns Collins’ attitude as la boria dei dotti, the “arrogance of the learned”:
[…]ciò ch'essi sanno, vogliono che sia antico quanto che ‘l mondo.5
[…]what they know, they wish was as old as the world.
Their knowledge, Vico cautions, is not la scienza, “science”: the certain understanding of the nature of Creation which belongs only to the one who created it, to God. Men are given only la coscienza “consciousness”, which is “as the surface is to the solid”, wholly incomplete and particular. The Pointifexter displays la boria in spades as he repeats the meme that our race will become like a deity through science and that heaven itself will be a province of our dominion. There is no transforming Kurzgesagt-tier bugman feed into a transcendent mystery - because inherent to the very aims and foundation of that project is the evaporation and intentional displacement of mystery.
Vico’s age of Poesia is also described by him as “barbaric” and “heroic”, the primitive age when myth emerges, enshrining in itself access to a kind of “coscienza” proper to that age.6 Myth is not equivocable to religion, but an organic, revealed mythology is the inherited bedrock to any great religion, not data sheets about falling birthrates, for heaven’s sake. I put it to you that thinking that we can instantiate throughout this blatantly declining civilisation so totalising a belief that it will restore the fertility of our species and eugenically prune us for intelligence while its at it, without earning that belief through a phase of turmoil and visceral contact with nature, and through it supernature, is not only absurd, but gross hubris. The very same technologistic short-circuiting hubris that led to our predicament to begin with.
Hubris and Gelassenheit
[…] modern “religions” are truly arbitrary, as a denatured form of worship for the same reason that any engagements with the remnants of tradition suffer in our age. Their necessity is suspended. It is not that we must choose which traditions to return to, it is not an ideology among other ideologies […] this itself is viewing the extramodern through modern arbitrariness; as a choice among others.7
When I wrote this a couple of years ago I referred only really to the “denatured” vestiges of Christianity that linger in the West, I never thought that it could apply so literally to a “modern religion”. Regardless, Tradition as per Guénon and Evola is no propositional, rationally designed system, but the humble acceptance of a perennial truth that superexists the profane world. It is my contention that the divine is readily received in a context of natural limitation, as I have written about in numerous articles, and that the eventual fall of this civilisation will bring a reappearance of the sacred.
It is for us, or the generation that sees that day, to be open to this new hierophany. Collins is right enough that mass reconversion to Christianity is not coming any time soon and won’t solve these problems, but he thinks that we can all just decide to believe in his neat homemade faith, because it’s so ßⓐѕ𝐄∂!
The Silicon Valley Hierophant is an instantiation of the very problem he wants to address - a problem of technologisation. As we read in Martin Heidegger’s Essay Concerning Technology, in a technologised setting,
[…] a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium,8
This is gestell “enframing”, which transforms the stuff of the world into bestand, “standing reserve”, in the eyes of man. The world itself is revealed as this stockpile of resources, where once it was imbued with soul and meaning. Heidegger’s key example of the damming of the Rhine, a river so full of sacrality in the mythology of the German people, illustrates the spiritual consequences of this process. Perversely, in wanting to claw back the material upshots of a lost spiritual condition, Collins applies gestell directly to spirituality.
In this philosophical discussion, we examine how Abrahamic faiths like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam could be reformed and optimized to be more scientifically and technologically oriented […] The goal is creating a religious framework that can flourish on an interstellar, multi-planet scale across generations.9
Human religion too becomes just a set of manipulable resources and standing reserve to be rallied to the cause of the ascending arrow of progress. It’s sick, but the natural conclusion of Collins’ deadly serious and unflinching application of scientific materialism, in which the human being is himself subject to gestell. We are just a tool in the abstract aim of getting bigger forever, our “productivity”, intelligence, fertility and even our religiousness are assessed as variables on a spreadsheet, a + or - modifier to the maximal expansion of abstracted “humanity”.
Notice that actual human being or religion is wholly absent from this picture of “man”. The hubris of treating nature and reality as problems to be solved leads to us losing our humanity altogether (the point of Frank Herbert’s Dune). No doubt, the Collinses are transhumanists and would double down on this as a good thing. This abolition of everything that makes us human has, unsurprisingly, led to us not wanting to breed. Like Calhoun’s mice, we live in a lapse of natural restraints; at first we expanded rapidly to fit our enclosure. Now, the ache has set in. As Collins readily admits, the lack of any contact with harsh nature leaves a people with no will to prolong itself whatsoever. It’s hardly surprising. If there is no profound mystery to life nor any ultimate meaning, why prolong it?
If the scientific point of view led away from “all that” then be damned to the scientific point of view!10
The Pointifexter has a classically Anglo-Saxon “how do I fix it?” mindset, the tragic outlook of my people that is hard to despise on some level. For what it’s worth, how many people are seriously tackling these kind of problems today? I’m sure my kind of thinking comes across as irrelevant naysaying that won’t solve anything. It’s just a shame that problems this overwhelming: the death of a whole civilisation, are not the kind that can ever be “solved”.
To live authentically to our time is to recognise the lack of control that man has over the global technological system, which is motivated by its own aims: the Technique of Jacques Ellul.11 Any other attitude is deluded.12 This technological civilisation is far, far beyond being directed by anyone, it is steering its own chaotic course into oblivion. It is on us to decide how to react to this.
Gelassenheit, “letting be”, is Heidegger’s call for us to be open to things in their mystery, free from the modern’s expectation that everything can be known in its entirety, or manipulated according to this knowledge. It is to respect Vico’s doctrine of scienza and coscienza, that our knowledge is limited because we are not God, which Collins explicitly does not understand.
God is the ultimate manifestation of human potentiality, and the good is defined by actions that expand human potentiality.13
To recover religion, and human Being at all, it must be understood that there is a fundamental mystery to the universe that is not “solvable”, or to be solved. This attitude will ultimately result in its abolition.
For all its accumulation of stuff, it is anti-Being.
Lumpish Aggregation
They who add years to years in lumpish aggregation, or miles to miles and galaxies to galaxies, shall not come near His greatness.14
Collins would extend the gestell to the entire universe. He seeks, like the character of Edward Weston in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, the endurance and maximal expansion of the human race at all costs, no matter how it changes and passes out of recognition. Seeking to colonise space and desacralise heaven itself. The Prophet Malcolm’s stated aims read like dialogue from a character in That Hideous Strength:
[...] if science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and recondition it: make man a really efficient animal.15
This doctrine hates men and their natural being. It doesn’t matter how entirely our life is transformed or how unrecognisable man becomes, the mere continuation of the species seed is paramount. If it takes religion to bring this about, then sobeit.
It’s reminiscent of the recent practice of fitting factory farmed cattle with VR headsets that simulate a grassy field, which reduces the animal’s anxiety and yields higher quality milk. The human animal, in his artificial enclosure, will not yield what he does in his natural setting, so we must fit him with some simulation of it.
This “optimised” religion is a sham like the grassland on the screen of the headset, placed there to delude the subject that his world has meaning enough to provide what the machine wants of him.
Factory farmed animals are, by any biologically founded measure, an outrageous evolutionary success. 70 billion chickens are raised and killed every year for human consumption. Such a colossal amount of biomass is surely an incredible achievement for any species. According to Collins’ criteria, this is an ideal situation, surely?
His measure of the good is something rooted in the “expansion of human potentiality”, but what does that even mean? What lies under this when we turn it over?
The old ways have failed us. Many bemoan the urban monoculture, whose adherents are known for their censorious “woke” behaviour. As threatening as the urban monoculture may be, when it breaks we will be facing an infinitely more threatening flood of xenophobic, technophobic, religious extremists who will drag our species back to the stone age if given the chance. This flood will come from groups as varied Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists – some of whose adherents maintain a high fertility rate by using culturally induced poverty to simulate pre-industrial environments among their members while maintaining cultural isolation through intense cultural xenophobia.
The pronatalist movement is a beacon for those few humans left who are willing to do what makes us human: innovate, improve, and band together so we can mount a real defense. God willing, once the wave passes, this movement will be the seed that grows into a vast interstellar human empire.16
Only those who insulate themselves from technological life are still breeding. This “threatening flood” of “extremists” lie just on the horizon, they stand to swamp the civilised, enlightened world and destroy all our lovely gadgets. They are to be feared, in other words, for their humanity. These populations, like it or not, are the seed of the new Age of Poetry. They live a more vital, meaningful reality than can ever be found in smearing our genes across the galaxy - unintelligent as they may be, they are in possession of a great wisdom and a great humility - they have held on to their humanity. Malcolm, your scientistic, technologised worldview, is itself a contingent, decadent excess of our hedonistic age. The “barbaric”, “heroic” populations that you fear will inherit the world. Get used to it.
We will never live in space, grow up.
Lilies from the Acorn
My kind of thinking is sometimes accused of being a “cope”: that one can sit out the storm of modernity, as it were, and like how the negarchic classical liberal expects to be left alone and get away with eschewing power politics, my thinking is accused of foolishly hiding from the inevitable necessity of engaging with the modern, technological project, wanting to remain complacently aloof from the age. It’s an entirely fair point of view and was cogently put by
in a recent piece.It is right to point out that we must live in the time that we are placed in and tackle the world as it is, but it is a quite different thing to realise and understand the ultimate futility of trying to “wring lilies from the acorn”17, in our sad modern facsimiles of non-modern outcomes and processes. I would counter that the real cope is to suppose that the use of technological means can result in the dynamic emergence of natural outcomes that they are the antithesis of. This was the focus of my essay Irreconcilable, from a couple years back.
The cope is to pretend that a civilisation-binding religion can be drafted by substackers and propel man into space, rather than emerging amid a cataclysmic period of turmoil when man is again confronted with vivid reality. It’s wanting to have your cake and eat it too - to hold on to the intellectual atmosphere of an autumnal society, decaying under the weight of its own scepticism, while reaping the fruits of its irrational spring. The ecstatic period in man’s history that produces this kind of religiosity is, like the rose, “without why; it blooms because it blooms”.18 It ought not to astound me so much that people would rather humiliate themselves by making suggestions as ridiculous as founding a “religion” of IQ charts rather than just accept that technical modernity is itself the bloody problem.
People ride right up to the edge of confronting this. They may chart every instance of how modernity throttles out the vitality of human life and depresses man into infertility and dejection, and ask how modernity can fix that. They remain utterly unshaken in steadfast belief in the clockwork worldview that succeeds and prefigures this material state. It is this scientistic, deadening worldview that is the root cause of the widespread lack of desire to add to what it renders a lifeless procession of unmeaning. It seems pretty obvious to me that any worldview of that nature, any view that sterilises and shepherds its own adherents out of existence, is wrong.
Yes, a disenchanted human race is a demographically suicidal animal, reenchantment is all that can undo this, but this cannot come from the profane means that disenchanted us in the first place. Contained in this problem is its own answer and the seeds of its solution.
Only true religion, that is a way of being, born out of the irrational “Poesia”, out of the visceral contact of man with the real, with hard nature and through it the revealing of supernature, will give rise to that will-to-life that Cardinal Collins’ own worldview has stamped out.
The drive of my theory of religion, and of my philosophy, is that it is futile to try and engineer through modern means what non modern circumstances give rise to.
Concluding Remarks - What is Collins’ God?
For all of Collins’ “updates” to religion and stabs at creating new values, post Death of God, his project remains a bizarre chimera, completely subject to another god altogether.
Is man his god? Not really. While he says as much in one sense, he wants to see us accelerate our evolution to such a degree and technologise ourselves to the degree that we would be unrecognisable. He doesn’t want us to be human, not really. So what is it?
You can find it in his desire to expand out infinitely into empty space, he will accept no limit, and that which has no limit, in a finite world, has no being. His god is the pursuit of infinity; which is the void, the unfounded; the formless expanses of chaos.
His god is nothing.
G.K. Chesterton’s principle that you should always assume that a fence in the countryside was put there for a reason, even if that isn’t evident to you, you should not destroy it. A metaphor for established, but not understood, tradition.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p28.
Benedetto Croce, La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico, p49.
Benedetto Croce, La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico, p46.
Giambattista Vico, Princìpi di scienza nuova, (1744) § 127.
Cassiano Da Castel del Piano, “Del Mito nel Pensiero di Giambattista Vico”, in Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, Vol. 25, No. 6 (December 1933), p555.
Michael Lindsey, A Living Religion.
Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach Der Technik”, p14-5.
Malcolm Collins, “Tract 1: Building an Abrahamic Faith Optimized for Interstellar Empires”, Based Camp.
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, p276.
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, pxxv.
This argument goes beyond the scope of this essay, for a convincing case on how the expansion of technical civilisation has gone “...far beyond any control through human forces (p13.)”, look into Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought.
Malcolm Collins, “Reversing the Fertility Collapse” in, Aporia.
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, p247.
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, p45.
Malcolm Collins, “Reversing the Fertility Collapse” in, Aporia.
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
Angelus Sibelius, Die Ros. (Quoted by Heidegger in The Principle of Reason.)
I still don't understand why Christianity is inadequate. We don't need to invent a new religion, we already have the right one, and abandoning it in the first place is what led to our current woes.
Your inevitable response was literally my first thought when reading their article initially. Glad you answered the Bat-Signal