You might. I need friends and family, some community participation is nice, sure, but I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship, which these seem to be tied up with in the text.
> Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial.
This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole.
>This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole
This refutation seems to be as vague and unfounded as the thing it's refuting and doesn't provide much value. It would be beneficial to everyone reading if you can elucidate.
Essentially we are tribal animals, and nothing can really change that. Without a sense of common identity there's little solidarity, and without solidarity you'll eventually have conflict. Failed states with civil wars tend to be those which lack any kind of common identity and ideas, while more successful ones tend to have those.
"Weil herself was Christian, but was scathing about official forms of the faith which had, she said, in most cases lined themselves up with ‘the interests of those who exploit the people.’"
She wrote a letter to the Vichy Minister of Education in 1940, What is a Jew?. She writes 'I myself, who profess no religion and never have, have certainly inherited nothing from the Jewish religion, Mine is the Christian, French, Greek tradition. The Hebraic tradition is alien to me and no statute can make it otherwise.'
You do. It's just that in modern society we've substituted these for more easily digestible, commodified, manufactured replicas. Hollywood celebrities have replaced the pantheon of Greek gods. Consumerism is the new piety. Techno Utopianism and liberalism (in the classical sense) has supplanted the ancient traditions of old. The Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world are our priestly class. We still need these things, but instead of searching for them, communing with others, and engaging with our inherited body of three thousand years of western cultural heritage to find meaning, we purchase it with the press of a button on an app.
"The notion that all deeply felt conviction is sublimated religion is not new. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who served as the prime minister of the Netherlands at the dawn of the 20th century, when the nation was in the early throes of secularization, argued that all strongly held ideologies were effectively faith-based, and that no human being could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty didn’t derive from traditional religion, it would find expression through secular commitments, such as nationalism, socialism, or liberalism. The political theorist Samuel Goldman calls this “the law of the conservation of religion”: In any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed."
So I say again, you may need these things, I don’t.