Monotheism to Now

Monotheism has created an obsessive focus for singular explanations. Grand unifying forces. One-ness. A removal of distinctions and thus a removal of thought and judgment. A multiculturalism that is an abdication of definition and drunkenness.

There's something to this. The monotheistic inheritance runs deeper than belief — it's a cognitive style. The hunger for the Theory of Everything, the "root cause," the single variable that explains it all.

Polytheism forced a kind of navigation. Which god do I appeal to here? What domain am I in? That's judgment. That's thinking. You had to hold contradiction without resolving it.

The modern version: everything is equally valid, all perspectives matter the same, who are we to say. But that's not pluralism — it's the monotheistic instinct wearing tolerance as a mask. Still seeking the One, just calling it "everything" instead. The refusal to distinguish is itself a grand unifying gesture.

Real pluralism would mean: these things are different, they conflict, some are better for some purposes, and I have to choose. That takes sobriety.

And education has specialized us. We only distinguish in our professional lives but never at the level of civics, culture, art, interaction.

The expert as idiot savant. Razor-sharp in the silo, a child outside it. We've professionalized judgment itself — only credentialed people get to distinguish, and only within their lane.

So the surgeon goes home and consumes culture like fast food. The economist has no taste in architecture. The physicist defers to vibes on politics. Everyone's a specialist somewhere and a relativist everywhere else.

The old ideal of the educated person was someone who could make distinctions across domains — who had cultivated judgment as a general faculty. Now we've replaced that with "stay in your lane" which sounds humble but is actually just an excuse to stop thinking.

Civics especially suffers. Citizenship used to mean you were competent to judge public matters. Now it means you vote your demographic and let the experts handle it. The drunk again — can't tell one thing from another, so just go with the crowd.

And the eternal focus on global issues. A forgetting of local issues. A thinking that we're from a country but we have less in common with our countrymen than our townsmen. The false memory of a nation state imprinted by education.

The abstraction ladder again. We skip the rungs we can actually stand on.

You could know your town. Walk it, see who's struggling, argue with the selectman, notice when the bridge needs repair. That's citizenship you can touch. But we're taught to care about the nation, the global, the humanity-scale — things too large to perceive, let alone act on.

So we have opinions about distant wars and no idea who lives three doors down. Strong feelings about national policy, never been to a town meeting. The country is an imagined community, and we've been trained to imagine it so vividly that we forgot the unimagined ones — the people we could actually know.

The nation-state needed this. Mass education was always partly about manufacturing nationals out of locals. Teaching the peasant he's French, not Breton. But now we've overshot — we're making globals out of nationals, and nobody belongs anywhere.

There's something honest about "I'm from this town, these are my people, I don't know about the rest." It admits the limits of knowledge and care. The alternative is pretending to care about everyone, which means caring about no one in particular.

The educational system is the most powerful system — to indoctrinate and convert a whole generation in 20 years time. Those who control it control the future, modulo demographic, ecological, technological collapse. The wave of social media crashed with the wave of institutional programming, now where are we? I will, you will, who wills?

The twenty-year coup. Every revolution that lasts figured this out — you don't just seize the state, you seize the schools. The Prussians knew it, the Soviets knew it, the Americans knew it. One generation of curriculum and you've rewritten what counts as obvious.

But then the internet. Suddenly the pipeline leaks. Kids get catechized from 8 to 3, then de-catechized from 3 to midnight. Two formation systems, incompatible, running simultaneously. No wonder they're anxious — they're being pulled apart by competing programs, neither of which they chose.

And now: who wills? The institutions still think they do, but they're broadcasting into static. The algorithms will, but they will nothing — just engagement, just friction, just more. The individual wills, but with what? Fragments of a dozen ideologies, memes half-remembered, vibes.

Maybe that's the interregnum. The old hegemony broken, no new one consolidated. Everyone a bricoleur, assembling a self from scraps. Some people thrive in this — they were always ill-fitted to the program. Others are drowning, looking for a shore that isn't there.

The question isn't who wills now. It's whether willing is even possible without some stable ground to stand on. Or whether we're all just being willed — by the feeds, the nudges, the accumulated weight of defaults we never examined.

Was student debt orchestrated? Planned to put a controlling hook on the next generation? Even if not, it leads to dubious actions and lies to get out of debt. A doctor that bills fake patients or fake visits, a dentist that recommends services that are not needed. A society in free fall from all sides.

Conspiracy or emergence — does it matter? The effect is the same. A generation enters adulthood already in a hole, and holes make people do things.

You don't need a cabal. You just need incentives that compound. Universities want more money, so tuition rises. Government wants more graduates, so loans expand. Employers want credentials, so degrees become mandatory for jobs that never needed them. Nobody planned the trap, but the trap is real.

And then the corruption cascades. The indebted doctor needs volume, so the visits get shorter, the billing gets creative. The dentist has loans from eight years of school, so suddenly everyone needs a crown. The lawyer takes cases they shouldn't. The academic publishes garbage to keep the job that services the debt. Each one a small betrayal, but they add up to a world where you can't trust the professional across from you.

The old professions were supposed to be above this. You paid for their training, they owed you honesty. The debt inverts it — now they owe the bank, and you're just the means of payment.

Free fall is right. When everyone's compromised, trust collapses. And trust is the thing you can't rebuild quickly. It takes generations to accumulate and moments to destroy.

Back to the beginning. Jesus created an individual relationship to the one. This created independence, anarchy, self reliance, self thinking. Some great things. But it also traps in mysticism. An abdication of the worldly life seems like an easy trap. What sayings of Jesus guard against this?

A good turn. The individual soul before God — that's the Protestant engine, the Enlightenment seed. But also the gnostic temptation: this world is fallen, only the spirit matters, check out.

The sayings that push back:

"Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven." The prayer isn't for escape — it's for transformation here. The earth is the site, not the obstacle.

"By their fruits you shall know them." Judgment by worldly effect, not inner purity. You can't hide in contemplation — what did you produce?

"Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." The divine encountered in the concrete neighbor, the sick, the imprisoned. Not in withdrawal but in engagement.

"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's." The worldly has its legitimate domain. You don't get to skip it by pointing skyward.

The parable of the talents. The servant who buries his gift is condemned. You must risk, act, multiply in the world.

"The kingdom of God is among you" — or within you, depending on translation. Either way: not elsewhere, not later. Here.

The incarnation itself is the argument. God doesn't send a message, he enters flesh. The word becomes meat. That's a commitment to the material, the worldly, the embodied. Hard to square with pure mystical escape.

The trap is real though. Easier to pray than to act. Easier to feel spiritual than to be good. The sayings are guardrails, but guardrails don't drive the car.

But does this path of individual relationship lead to an abandonment of community? If we now see ourselves as separate, rather than a communal being with our city, is this not what has wrought where we are today?

The tension is right there from the start. "Leave your father and mother and follow me." The call cuts through the bonds.

The early church tried to hold both — individual salvation but also the body of Christ, the ekklesia, the assembly. You're saved alone but you worship together. The communion is literal: one bread, many members. But which is primary?

History suggests the individual won. The Reformation sharpens it — now it's you and your Bible, no priest required. Then the Enlightenment secularizes it — you and your reason, no church required. Then liberalism — you and your rights, no community required. Each step more atomized.

The polis had the opposite assumption. You were a part before you were a whole. The city wasn't a collection of individuals who chose to associate — it was the prior reality that made you who you are. Aristotle: man is a political animal. Outside the city, you're either a beast or a god.

Christianity dissolved that. If your soul's destiny is vertical — between you and God — then the horizontal bonds become secondary. Optional. Nice to have. The city becomes instrumental, not constitutive.

So yes: the path from Jesus to here runs through this. The individual conscience, so powerful against tyranny, also cuts the threads that bind. We wanted to stand alone before God; we got our wish, and now we stand alone before everything.

The question is whether you can recover the communal without losing what the individual gave us. Or whether the trade was always zero-sum.

The Greeks and polytheism must be the answer. Why on earth did it fade? It created a more reasoned mind that looked for a myriad of explanations, all summing to create the final effect. Rather than reductionist to single items that are never the complete picture. It embraced life and flourishing and understood man is a relational animal above all else, contrary to their thinking of man as a rational animal.

The question burns. What killed it?

Some candidates:

Christianity offered what polytheism couldn't — salvation for everyone, not just the well-born. The slave and the emperor equal before God. That's revolutionary. The Greek gods didn't care about your soul; they barely cared about you at all. When the empire was full of displaced, rootless people, a religion that said "you matter eternally" had appeal.

But also: the philosophers had already wounded it. Plato's Form of the Good, Aristotle's unmoved mover, the Stoic logos — Greek thought was drifting toward unity before Christianity arrived. The educated were already embarrassed by Zeus's affairs. Philosophy prepared the ground for monotheism.

Then: Constantine. Once the state chooses, the game changes. Temples closed, funding redirected, priesthoods disbanded. It's hard to worship when the infrastructure is dismantled.

But maybe deeper: polytheism requires a living culture to sustain it. The gods are tied to places, festivals, seasons, civic life. When the polis dissolves into empire, when people become interchangeable subjects rather than citizens of this city, the gods lose their address. They need locality. Monotheism travels better — one God, anywhere, no temple required.

You're right about the mode of thinking though. Multiple gods meant multiple causes, domains, perspectives. No single explanation could suffice. That's closer to how reality actually works. The reductionist hunger came later, dressed in philosophy, then science, then ideology.

The irony: the Greeks said man was rational, but built a world for relational beings. We say man is a social animal, but build a world for isolated reasoners.