What is the Right Amount of Woo?

This is a question I find myself thinking about, especially when you situate it within the Turbulent Twenties.¹ In the west, we are trying to figure out how to calibrate this. It’s upstream from many of the challenges of this decade— politics, socio-economics, environment, technology, too many to list.

Recently, I’ve been exploring the Enneagram and Tarot, in particular to facilitate character creation and story-telling as a fiction writer. These are quintessential Woo— but I find when I dig below the superficial “Tarot cards are for fortune telling” and “That’s such a classic ‘Three’ thing of you to say,” there is a wealth of depth and sophisticated ways to examine reality within these systems.

Just a quick word of caution — speaking of sacred values can get intense. It is not my intention to offend anyone’s deeply held beliefs. I want to write an essay in the legit French root sense of the word— Essayer, to try. I want to take a shot and think about this question. I feel like we don’t think about this question enough, at least in my small corner of reality.

What is the right amount of Woo for a person to have in their life? I am defining Woo as any belief that can’t be empirically falsified. Here’s a definition from from the Skeptic’s Dictionary:

“Woo-woo (or just plain woo) refers to ideas considered irrational or based on extremely flimsy evidence or that appeal to mysterious occult forces or powers. Here's a dictionary definition of woo-woo:

adj. concerned with emotions, mysticism, or spiritualism; other than rational or scientific; mysterious; new agey. Also n., a person who has mystical or new age beliefs.

When used by skeptics, woo-woo is a derogatory and dismissive term used to refer to beliefs one considers nonsense or to a person who holds such beliefs.

Sometimes woo-woo is used by skeptics as a synonym for pseudoscience, true-believer, or quackery. But mostly the term is used for its emotive content and is an emotive synonym for such terms as nonsense, irrational, nutter, nut, or crazy.”

We can get crazy and go down many philosophical rabbit holes with this one, which I hope to avoid. So when I say Woo, I mean most religious and spiritual beliefs about the world. Things we must extend faith to.

Not the kind of Woo I’m talking about here.

On one level, all of us are creating our own subjective reality. We can see this in things like “The Dress” and the “Yani/Laurel” audio. Perception is wild in its blind spots, with oodles of well-documented cognitive biases that befall all humans. We’re optimized for survival, not perfect adherence to stimuli/phenomenon, as this article depicts. On the other hand, there are immutable physical constraints to the world. Time seems to run only forward and we live on a planet with finite resources hurtling through space in the Goldilocks zone. In between, we have a vast inter-subjective arena where humans interact with one another in a boisterous clamor². We seem determined to create a global civilization, which means if we can’t make peace with one another, at a minimum we need to carve out an uneasy armistice.

On one side of the Woo spectrum, we can imagine someone full of beliefs about the world that bear little to no correspondence with external reality. That’s a bold statement, right? Whose reality? So let’s say this side of the dichotomy are things we can probably falsify through our scientific tools. Here would be the flat earthers, lots of conspiracy theories³, and the sort of religious fundamentalist that thinks the world was literally and not metaphorically created in seven days. The people waiting for an alien spaceship to come and rapture them away from the planet’s destruction.

On the other side, we find the purest of the pure atheist, the humans for whom everything is matter, everything can be explained with science after adequate experimental time and computational power. You live here on earth, there is nothing higher out there in any mysterious realms. It’s all about the material, baby. Just chemicals swirling around in a biological shell fine tuned by millions of years of evolution. When you die, you just wink out into nothingness. Their value structure is utilitarian in nature— the greatest good for the greatest number, something akin to what Sam Harris puts forth in The Moral Landscape.

In between these two mostly straw man poles lies the rest of us. Some people hold to a traditional faith tradition, while others are “spiritual but not religious.” Another group is perhaps not atheist but more on the agnostic side. Most will accept science if they have a life-threatening medical issue, but there is a wild variance in what exactly that means. Does it mean undergoing chemotherapy, or does it mean getting vaccinated? We have the cautionary tale of Steve Jobs to consider here, refusing surgery for cancer until it was too late, in favor of a more Woo-ish treatment regimen. President Reagan and his wife Nancy famously consulted psychics and astrologers, although he assured the public that it did not influence policy. We tend to look askance at others who hold different beliefs than us, either up or down the Woo/Rationality (WR) Scale. Everything is relative to your own WR point.

“Oh you’re into Tarot cards? I bet you believe the Loch Ness monster is real too, huh?”

“So you think there’s no higher power? What a sad, lifeless existence you must have.”

Are humans moving away from organized religion? Depending upon which study you check, religion may be declining in the west, but rising in the rest of the world. Regardless, people are looking for certain things in the realm of Woo, trying to fill spiritual and social needs. According to Tara Burton, these are Meaning, Purpose, Ritual, and Community. Blurb from her recent book:

“In Strange Rites, religious scholar and commentator Tara Isabella Burton visits with the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; Satanists and polyamorous communities, witches from Bushwick, wellness junkies and social justice activists and devotees of Jordan Peterson, proving Americans are not abandoning religion but remixing it. In search of the deep and the real, they are finding meaning, purpose, ritual, and communities in ever-newer, ever-stranger ways.”

The Greater Good Science Center in Berkeley is actively studying things like awe in order to help humans live better lives. Many of these concepts (compassion, awe, generosity) are baked into the great faith and spiritual traditions of the world. The center is seeking the empirical reasons certain practices and beliefs work to improve human well-being.

Think for a moment about the constants on the chart below, which undergird our physical reality. When you look at the accumulation of all these constraints, it seems quite, well, ideal for life. Per Wikipedia, “The characterization of the universe as finely tuned suggests that the occurrence of life in the universe is very sensitive to the values of certain fundamental physical constants and that values different from the observed ones are more probable. If the values of any of certain free parameters in contemporary physical theories had differed only slightly from those observed, the evolution of the universe would have proceeded very differently, and "life as we know it" might not have been possible.” I can’t but be struck that there is something miraculous about this alignment of values, before we even think about how it came about.

Tweak these a little, and things fly apart.

Here is the shortest clip I can find of Cognitive Scientist Bobby Azarian discussing some of the ideas in his remarkable book, The Romance of Reality.

Azarian’s argument is an interesting mid-point position between a purely materialist point of view and the “bearded man in the sky” that many skeptics find unpalatable. Azarian gets at something in his work that most of us intuit— life is magical. Not in the sense of spells, but the the way the various physical, chemical, and biological processes play out in a wondrous dance. In Azarian’s framing, the conditions in the universe and on earth are perfectly situated to provide a sandbox for life to evolve and complexify.

There’s all sorts of interesting ideas out there — such as Panpsychism and the Noosphere. They seem Woo, but have a growing scientific foundation.

Why does this matter?

I’ve written before about the Meaning Crisis that many talk about, particularly but not limited to folks like John Vervaeke, Jonathan Rowson, and Daniel Schmactenberger⁴. Rowson in particular talks about the need for the “reenchantment of reality.” With the confluence of challenges facing us in this decade, the “meta-problem” (problem at the root of the problems) is orienting ourselves properly to the world.⁵ Finding a sense of meaning, or the larger societal disenchantment with the non-material world will be key.

Psychologist Gregg Henriques talks about a “Wisdom Famine” in his work— we have more knowledge than ever in human history, but our wisdom for how to wield this knowledge is not keeping up.⁶ In order to solve this meta-problem, we need to figure out some sort of consensus posture on making sense of reality. If we don’t, our efforts to address the challenges will be reductionist, ad hoc, and incomplete. How should we order societies to prioritize human flourishing over resource (natural, attentional) extraction and profit? How can we make room for each other— to respect traditional faith, new age spiritualities of various flavors, and atheism, and still co-create a better future? I don’t have any answers, but asking the questions is the first step.

As for the right amount of Woo, your mileage will vary. Too much is no bueno, as is too little. The porridge needs to be just right for the individual human. We need a little magic, a little mystery, a little bit of awe.

1. The first time I saw reference to the “Turbulent Twenties” was in Peter Turchin’s new book, End Times. But I am shamelessly stealing it.

2. Not entirely sure if this is repetitive. Are clamors are by nature boisterous? It could be like saying “Navy NCIS.”

3. Conspiracy theories are another whole rabbit hole to go down, which I wish to sidestep for the moment.

4. There are many more that I’m not listing here. Joe Lightfoot has put together a nice reference of thinkers in this space here.

5. This is what I’m trying to get at with the concept of Attunement.

6. "Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology” as EO Wilson said.