Although religion has fallen out of fashion, I do not think that religiosity itself has. There is a hardwire in the human mind that draws us to faith-based beliefs, and even though we like to tell ourselves that our judgements are based on facts and reason, more often than not we simply accept the world around us on faith. Ask a Westerner why they believe in atoms, evolution, or gravity. Odds are, they cannot run the equations, but they feel these ideas are truer than any story involving angels, djinns, or the supernatural. That feeling is not evidence of superior logic but demonstrates that even our modern culture that was shaped by the Enlightenment still clings to religious characteristics, complete with sacred symbols (the white lab coat), high priests (Nobel laureates and Harvard professors), and heretics (anti-vaxxers, conservatives, and the traditionally religious).
We certainly have outgrown ancient superstitions, but this does not mean we started to live in a world without holy relics. Our religious spirits did not disappear; they just put on a lab coat and called themselves “Science”. The rituals changed, but the need for shared meaning, for something to believe in, did not. Sometimes this leads to the absurd being defended in the name of “science.” Are there truly 77 genders? Can men get pregnant? Are differences in muscle mass and bone density between men and women only a “social construct”? According to the gender departments at elite universities they are, but they are not beholden to science as we would like to understand it, but to science as an ersatz-religion, and if Jesus can turn water into wine, the postmodernists can turn men into women and vice versa.
Scratch the surface of any political theory, and you’ll find the same old question: What is human nature? Are we rational calculators, or are we bundles of emotion and instinct? Is our behaviour hardwired by genes, or shaped by experience and culture?
The answer, as always, is: It’s complicated. Four poles define the debate:
- Nature: Our genetic code, the animal within.
- Nurture: The sum of our experiences, the stories we’re told.
- Individualism: The myth of the isolated rational actor.
- Collectivism: The reality that we’re social animals, wired for belonging.
Every society, every ideology, tries to resolve this tension. Some lean hard on biology, others on culture. But history shows that picking one side—reducing humans to either pure instinct or pure socialisation—leads to disaster. The Nazis worshipped blood; the Soviets worshipped the perfectibility of man. Both ended in horror.
The Enlightenment gave us the dream of a “science of man”—the hope that, if we just applied enough reason, we could decode the mechanics of human behaviour and build a perfect society. Jeremy Bentham wanted to be “the Newton of the Moral World”. Economists still chase this fantasy, reducing people to utility-maximizing robots. But reality keeps intruding. Neuroscience shows that humans stripped of emotion can barely function socially. The philosophes didn’t switch emotion off; they just sanctified new feelings—loyalty to “Reason,” awe before “Progress,” disgust at “Superstition.” We traded one set of sacred values for another.
Utilitarianism says humans chase utility the way water follows gravity. Nice theory—until a Tunisian fruit vendor sets himself on fire, toppling governments from Tripoli to Damascus. Economists call such moments “exogenous shocks.” Anthropologists call them culture.
“Trust is an externality,” Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow warned. Translation: you can’t buy social glue at Walmart, yet society collapses without it. When everything becomes a cost-benefit calculation—marriage, organ donations, even friendship—trust erodes. You need ever-bigger police states (or compliance algorithms) to keep the game going.
Adam Smith wrote two books, yet we only teach one at universities. We canonised Wealth of Nations and ignored Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he insists market exchange rests on innate sympathy. Strip morality away and you get perfect markets—and perfect sociopaths. Economists love the idea of the isolated individual, stripped of all social relations and historical baggage—a blank slate, ready to be moulded by reason or experience. But such an individual does not exist. Humans are born into networks of meaning, into families, tribes, and nations. Even the most radical individualist is shaped by the culture they reject. The real challenge is that we are neither hedgehogs (solitary) nor ants (purely collective). We are both, and neither. The tension between individual and collective is the engine of history—and the source of our deepest conflicts.
The more we learn about human nature, the less deterministic it becomes. Genetics, culture, experience—all play a role, but none can predict the future. We are hardwired to organise collectively around moral guidelines, but what those guidelines are is up for grabs. The danger is in thinking we can engineer society by logic alone. Every attempt to do so—whether by race, class, or algorithm—ends in disaster. The only way forward is to embrace the mess: to recognise that culture, emotion, and story are not bugs in the system, but features. Until we confront the emotional undercurrents pulsing beneath “rational” societies, we’ll keep mistaking cultural earthquakes for statistical noise—and wonder why the ground keeps giving way.
International law had its era, but for now it seems over