Romantic Love vs. Religious Conversion

A key pillar of modern morality is the sanctity of romantic love.  We reel in horror at the thought of “backward” societies, including our ancestors’, who arrange marriages without intense emotional romantic love.  While they think it nice if arranged partners have such romantic feelings, if that does not happen such partners are not to look for love elsewhere. They think a life without romantic love can be a fine life.

An intense emotional religious conversion is not the same as an intense emotional romantic love, and one is not a substitute for the other.  But the two have much in common.  In fact, one could argue that someone who has lived a life without ever experiencing an intense religious conversion is nearly as emotionally impoverished as someone who had never experienced an intense romantic love.

Yet our modern sensibility does not reel in horror at the thought of a life lived without an intense religious conversion.  In fact, among our cultural elites religious feelings are seen as embarrassing, and low status; they think lives are usually better without such conversions.  Why?

Yes, religious conversion can lead to false and destructive beliefs. But then so can romantic love; it is not at all clear which one is worse by that measure.  An obvious if shallow explanation: in our society religion is low status, while romantic love is high status. Perhaps either a life without romantic love isn’t nearly as bad as we think, or a life without religious conversion is much worse than we think.

Falling in love and an intense emotional religious conversion are both kinds of viewquakes. I’d happily assert that a life lived without experiencing a viewquake is an impoverished life.

I’d also like an evaluable predicate to identify an “elite”.

1) How close are romantic love and religious conversions as substitutes? Are we sure they affect the brain in the same place/way?

2) Evolutionary approach: romantic love is probably a positive (benefits from propogation of the species outweigh the costs in conflict, etc.) whereas a compelling argument could be made for the neutrality or even negativity of religious conversion (sure, religion was the basis of the institutes of higher learnings in the Middle Ages, but holy wars are nasty things).

3) Social pressure approach: you already addressed this.

Overall, I agree with your last point: a life without religious conversion and/or romantic love can be much more enjoyable than many think possible.

I’m guessing that you’ve experience neither. Too bad.

I can see the possible utility of falling in love in an evolutionary biology context (as a randomizer primarily) , but see no analogous utility in spiritual conversion.

Perhaps the latter is a vestigial genetic remnant of defunct cerebral mechanisms, only occasionally (and unfortunately) triggered today in schizophrenia, religious conversion and other disorders. Think of Julian Jaynes “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” wherein the hypothesis that, sometime in our recent history, conscious thought replaced hallucination:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#Jaynes.27_case_for_bicameralism

As the comments make evident, Robin’s guess is correct. The cognitive elite see no “rational” reason to value religion so religious conversion is “low status”. Love or infatuation is high status. Even marriage — of the traditional sort which emphasizes children’s welfare over companionate self-realization — is low status. And there is plenty of evidence that marriage is increasingly about companionship and not economic or social gain.

Not coincidentally we are also in a period of instability, massive divorce, and alpha PUA.

Yes. We are living in the dreamtime.

I’m with Cyan on this one. I think a life without peak experiences would be impoverished—but religious experience is just one of many varieties of peak experience. I’ll take looking at the stars on a summer night over visiting cathedrals for my experience of the wondrous strange.

If one simply expands the umbrella of religious belief to include Marxism and Environmentalism, then it would seem that there no longer exists a shortage of the aforementioned conversion experiences among our cultural elites.

In what sense is religion low-status? How many atheists hold major public office?

Psychohistorian–For the most part, in our society the high-status thing to do is to declare a religious conviction, but treat it with only low to moderate seriousness. Open atheists don’t have a shot at the presidency, but neither did Pat Robertson. See also Thing White People Like #2: Religions That Their Parents Don’t Belong To. (But even among capital-letter White People, it would be low status to pursue a pseudo-Eastern religion to the exclusion of most other White People-approved activities).

Atheism isn’t well thought of among the populace at large, so atheists will often lose at things that involve a straight up popular vote. But at any elite position that doesn’t require a popular vote to get, the highly religious are at a distinct disadvantage.

I do not know how many. But at least one example is Fredrik Reinfelt, prime minister of Sweden and chairman of the largest non-socialistic political party in Sweden (the Moderate coalition party) and leader of the presently governing liberal and conservative non-socialistic coalition (at least for two more weeks to the upcomming elections, but he does very well in the polls right now). (He does not use the word “atheist” but call himself a nonbeliever in any god.)

I don’t think the author’s point is that romantic love and religious conversion are necessarily similar. I think he notes that they are potentially life-enriching experiences, and wonders why the lack of one is considered a tragedy, while a lack of the other is considered to be no loss.

Our society’s highest value is (pseudo-)rational atomic self-realisation. Traditional religion and traditional marriage both mean giving up independence and choosing instead duty and restraint. Hence they are low status. Even traditional romantic love in the sense of an absolute commitment to each other is rather gauche – no-one really means “till death do us part” any more. But modern romantic love – in the sense of a just-as-long-as-it-makes-me-happy, conditional relationship – is high status. As it has been decreed that men and women are identical in every way, the only politically correct basis for romantic love is the physical act of sex** – which has therefore acquired the highest possible status. “A life without romantic love” is euphemism for “a life without good sex.” That is the greatest possible horror. And, of course, even people who don’t hold these values don’t like to argue with them publicly. Saying “I don’t think that good sex is important” is a strong negative signal for several reasons.

**This is also why traditional disapproval of homosexuality strikes modern elites as ludicrous.

Robin,

Most people know that love can make you dumb, but think it’s possible to have love without (too much of?) that. Or, they’ll make a distinction between “love” and “infatuation,” or some such thing. For myself, I know I can at least experience pleasant feelings of mild affection vaguely resembling love without doing anything stupid. But I don’t know of analogous proposals for religious experiences. On the other hand, if anyone does have advice on how to experience a religious conversion without doing or thinking anything too stupid, perhaps it would be something I should pursue.

Probably a status thing, as the elite have something just like a religious conversion, only based on the material world — it’s called “finding yourself,” typically in a foreign land or in a different part of their own country, like living and working among the poor (Teach for America).

Most of them try it during their semester abroad in Florence, or during their year (or five years) off from the real world of college before joining the real world again for grad school.

Something like the Grand Tour that well-to-do Europeans used to do a couple hundred years ago. Doesn’t seem to go back much farther than the point where Europeans began secularizing.