There is a strange thing that happens, once a culture decides that it has outgrown religion.
It doesn’t stop asking religious questions, per se; it just stops asking them religiously.
Many, maybe most, of the questions remain almost insultingly intact. Where does value come from? What is evil? Why do good people produce cruel systems? Why doesn’t kindness and goodness automatically win? What obligations do the living owe to the unborn? What must be sacrificed for civilisation to endure? What do the fortunate owe to the unlucky? What does success prove? What does suffering mean?
These are not small questions, nor are they the private property of churches, temples, theologians, rabbis, mystics or people with suspiciously large hats. They arise wherever human beings find themselves living inside systems too large to see clearly and too powerful to ignore. A society may abolish religious authority, laugh at miracle stories, turn doctrine into anthropology and God into a psychological projection, but the old problems have a habit of surviving their official explanations.
This is particularly obvious in a certain strand of late-20th- and early-21st-century rationalist writing. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, first published on LessWrong in July 2008, is a striking example: a piece about value, inheritance, evolution and the almost miraculous emergence of love in a universe that didn’t intend it. It’s not religious in any ordinary doctrinal sense. It contains no creator God, no revelation, no commandments from atop the Sinai. Yet it asks a recognisably theological question: how did goodness enter a world that didn’t begin by being good?
Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch, published on Slate Star Codex in July 2014, approaches the same terrain from the other direction. Instead of asking how value arrives, it asks why value is so reliably devoured. Alexander borrows Moloch from Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name, and turns the Carthaginian demon into a dark god of coordination failure: an evil force who presides wherever competition forces people to sacrifice the very things they wanted to protect. In another essay, In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization, Alexander writes more modestly about cultivating decent local communities, but the metaphysical machinery is still there: kindness and honesty become small equilibria struggling against larger forces of malice, dishonesty and collapse.
Then there is Scott Adams, of all people. God’s Debris, published in 2001, is a short philosophical thought experiment by the creator of Dilbert, built around an eccentric cosmology in which God, being perfect, lacks only nonexistence and therefore annihilates himself into the universe. The fragments of creation then struggle, blindly and partially, towards divine reassembly. It is not Lurianic Kabbalah in any serious scholarly sense, but the resemblance is hard to miss. In Lurianic thought, creation involves divine contraction, rupture, scattered sparks and repair; in Adams’ sci-fi theology, God explodes into matter and probability, and the universe becomes the slow work of re-composition.
It would be easy to be smug about all this. There is a cheap essay to be written about clever atheists reinventing deity-worship, just with worse prose and more Bayesian updating. It would not be entirely false. There is plainly something funny about people who think they have escaped religion while filling their moral imagination with demons, apocalypses, salvation through correct alignment, fallen worlds and cosmic repair. One can only admire the efficiency with which an internet subculture supposedly allergic to the old order managed to reinvent half of it before breakfast.
But the better argument is that rationalists have rediscovered theology.
That distinction does quite a lot of work. Religion is not only a set of propositions about supernatural beings. It is also institution, ritual, authority, community, discipline, habit and inheritance. Theology, by contrast, is a structured attempt to think about ultimate questions: value, evil, creation, judgement, human limitation, final ends. One can reject religious belief and still find oneself doing something which is, in essence, theology, because the questions that theology organised don’t politely leave the room when the priest does.
The problem, then, is not that modern secular systems have failed to become secular. The problem is that they have inherited older moral structures unevenly. They keep the angels and demons, but not the confessional.
That is the pattern this essay is trying to name. Modernity often abolishes an older moral order for good reasons. Religion really did produce dogma, coercion, persecution and sanctified authority. In a similar vein, ancien regime aristocracy really did produce inherited domination, deference and grotesque inequality, and empire really did produce extraction, violence and racial hierarchy. There is no serious case for nostalgia here, unless one’s politics are so deeply reactionary as to disavow the liberties of modernity which allow you to be reading this essay.
But older systems were bigger than their injustices. They also contained internal restraints, compensating moral embarrassments, warning lights. Religious traditions often distrusted pride, idolatry, certainty and false prophecy. Aristocratic traditions, however patronisingly, attached duty to privilege. Even empire, in its most hypocritical forms, at least had to lie in the language of civilisation, trusteeship or obligation; this didn’t make it good, but it revealed that domination still felt the need to justify itself as a kind of service.
When the older systems declined, some of their worst features were weakened. This was an achievement. Yet the moral restraints carried within them didn’t always survive the transition. The result can be a cleaner, cleverer, less ashamed version of the old structure: secular theology without confession; anti-aristocratic meritocracy without moral obligation; non-imperial forms of hierarchy without colonial guilt.
The new gods don’t feel guilty.
Part I: Secular theology
The Death of God Was Not a Party
Nietzsche’s madman is not celebrating.
This is worth saying plainly, because the phrase “God is dead” has been flattened by repetition into a slogan of adolescent triumph so trite that one might print it on a t-shirt. In The Gay Science, the madman runs into the marketplace seeking God, only to be laughed at by people who already don’t believe. His announcement is not merely that God is dead, but that we have killed him; what follows is not a victory speech, but a series of horrified questions about what happens after the disappearance of the metaphysical horizon that had oriented European life:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Nietzsche’s parable asks how human beings can live after cutting themselves loose from the sun by which they had steered.
This is why Nietzsche is so often misread. He was not a defender of cosy Christian morality - he despised much of it! But neither was he announcing that secular people could simply continue as before, keeping Christian moral intuitions while discarding Christian metaphysics, as though nothing structural had changed. The disturbing part of the parable is precisely that the non-believers in the marketplace don’t understand what has happened. They think disbelief is the end of the matter. Nietzsche thinks it is the beginning of the problem.
Kierkegaard, from another direction, saw something similar in 19th-century Christendom. His target was not Christianity as such, but the established Danish church of his day: Christianity turned into social membership, cultural respectability and state-backed habit. HIs objection was that Christianity had been domesticated. Faith had become almost automatic, which for Kierkegaard meant that it had ceased to be faith in any serious, demanding, existential sense. One Oxford account of Kierkegaard’s critique puts the point as a rejection of Christianity identifying itself with established political and cultural order; the religious error of Christendom, on this reading, was that it lacked the restlessness of faith.
This is useful because it prevents an overly simple story about modern unbelief. The serious critics of institutional religion were not always trying to liberate humanity into cheerful disbelief. Some were asking what had happened to the terror, difficulty and inwardness of belief once religion became conventional. Others were asking what would replace God once the moral world built around him had been dismantled.
That question is not antiquarian. It returns whenever secular systems inherit religious seriousness without religious form. Yudkowsky’s concern with preserving human value into the far future is, at one level, a technical and philosophical problem in artificial intelligence and moral theory. At another level, it is a recognisably post-Nietzschean problem: if value is not written into the structure of the universe, and if future intelligence could optimise the world according to purposes indifferent to ours, then what prevents love, beauty, kindness and personhood from being cosmic accidents that vanish as easily as they arrived?
The answer cannot simply be: because they are good. That is precisely the question. Good according to whom? Preserved by what mechanism? Protected against which pressures? Carried into the future through what institutions, technologies, norms or systems of alignment?
This is where Yudkowsky’s writing takes on its quasi-religious force. He is not smuggling in the Christian God. He is confronting a problem that Christianity, Judaism and other traditions had long organised through concepts such as creation, providence, divine image, covenant, sin, redemption and judgement. If there is no cosmic guarantor of value, then conscious beings become its fragile carriers. We’re not merely observers of value; we’re its medium of transmission.
That thought is grand, moving and dangerous. It is grand because it gives human life metaphysical weight without requiring supernatural belief. It is moving because it treats love and moral concern as precious precisely because they are contingent. But it is dangerous because it tempts us to imagine that, having identified ourselves as value’s carriers, we’re competent to decide what value must become.
Older religious traditions, for all their failures, were often suspicious of that leap. They had names for the corruption of good purposes by human pride. They had long memories of prophets becoming tyrants, reformers becoming inquisitors, holy images becoming idols. Secular systems often have excellent tools for checking factual error. They are less consistently equipped to check moral possession: the condition of believing that, because one has seen a real good, one therefore possesses the Good.
That is the first lost discipline.
America, or the Great Religious Workshop
The second tradition feeding this strange afterlife of theology is not European existentialism, but American religious improvisation.
The United States didn’t secularise in quite the European manner. It pluralised, recombined and repeatedly reinvented. One can trace a long line of attempts to preserve moral seriousness, cosmic significance and spiritual intensity while loosening the authority of inherited doctrine: Jefferson’s edited Bible, Unitarianism, Quaker inwardness, Transcendentalism, New Thought, Theosophy, Mormonism, Scientology, neopaganism, New Age spirituality, New Atheism, and countless smaller experiments that sit somewhere between philosophy, fandom, therapy, lifestyle branding and revelation.
The point is not that these are all the same. They are plainly not. The point is that American intellectual culture has been unusually hospitable to religious recombination. It is not so much a melting pot as a workshop culture: pull apart the inherited machine, keep the pieces that still seem useful, discard the institutional casing, add electricity, psychology, science fiction, market individualism, a little mysticism, and see whether the thing starts humming.
This is why God’s Debris feels so culturally specific. Adams’ book is not simply a theological argument. It is a very late-1990s and early-2000s nerd object: a thought experiment in which cosmology, probability, consciousness, evolution and God are recombined into a single elegant-sounding theory. Its central conceit, that God destroys himself into the universe and then gradually reassembles through emergent intelligence, has obvious affinities with religious and mystical traditions, but its texture is pure rationalist pop-metaphysics. It is Genesis rewritten by someone who has recently discovered information theory and is being slightly annoying about it.
This is not meant only as an insult. Slightly annoying people sometimes notice real things.
Adams’ system is philosophically naïve in many respects, but it gives vivid form to a question that keeps returning in secular thought: if the universe begins without mind, how does mind become central? In traditional theism, intelligence and value are placed at the beginning. God creates. Goodness precedes us. Mind is not an accident, because the world is made by Mind. In materialist accounts, mind arrives late. Matter organises, life evolves, nervous systems develop, consciousness appears, and eventually some arrangements of matter begin writing essays about why any of this should mean anything.
The religious temptation is to put meaning at the beginning.
The secular temptation is to put meaning at the end.
This is why so many post-religious cosmologies become implicitly eschatological. They may not believe in heaven, but they imagine convergence: the Omega Point, the Singularity, the reassembly of God, the aligned superintelligence, the final coordination equilibrium, the world where Moloch has finally been defeated. History is no longer guided by providence, but it is still asked to provide something providence-shaped.
Again, the problem is not that this is stupid; it isn’t. Some version of the question is unavoidable once we begin thinking seriously about civilisation as a long-term project. Future generations will inherit the effects of our choices. Technologies can preserve, distort or erase human values. Institutions can make cruelty normal or costly. Norms can either widen or narrow the circle of concern. It is not childish to ask what kind of future our present civilisation is preparing.
The weakness lies elsewhere. American religious improvisation is good at invention. It is less reliably good at submission to inherited constraint. Its genius is also its vice: the individual mind, suspicious of authority, confident in its own synthesis, standing before the ruins of older traditions and saying, with touching and terrible confidence, I think I can improve this.
Sometimes it can.
Often it merely removes the parts whose function it didn’t understand.
Why We Keep Inventing Demons
The third tradition is older and more basic: human beings keep personifying systems.
This is not merely because people are foolish. It is because many of the most powerful forces in human life are neither wholly personal nor wholly impersonal. They are emergent structures produced by millions of actions, incentives, constraints, fears, habits and feedback loops. Nobody fully intends them. Nobody fully controls them. Yet they behave, from the viewpoint of ordinary human beings, almost like powers.
We call the state Leviathan. We call market coordination an invisible hand. We call capital vampiric. We call history providential or tragic. We call competition Darwinian. We call bureaucracy Kafkaesque. We call coordination failure Moloch.
The old Moloch was associated, in biblical and later traditions, with child sacrifice; the term has long carried the idea of a power that demands unbearable offerings. The historical and textual questions around Molech or Moloch are more complicated than the inherited popular image, but the symbolic force is clear enough: Moloch is the name of the god who asks for what no decent person should give.
Alexander’s adaptation is powerful because it understands that modern systems rarely ask for sacrifice in archaic language. They ask in the language of necessity. If one firm cuts corners, the others must follow or fail. If one state arms, the others must arm or risk conquest. If one platform optimises for addiction, the others must compete for attention or lose market share. If one political faction treats restraint as weakness, the others are punished for restraint unless some higher norm can be enforced.
Moloch, in this account, is not a supernatural agent. He is what competition feels like when no participant can afford to be first to stop. He is not evil because he hates us. He is evil because he doesn’t care.
This makes the demon useful. To name Moloch is to see that many harms are not caused by unusually wicked individuals, but by systems in which individually comprehensible choices generate collectively disastrous outcomes. That is an important insight, and it is one of the reasons Alexander’s essay has travelled so widely. It gives people a way to describe the experience of being trapped inside a structure that rewards betrayal of one’s own values.
But demons are dangerous explanatory devices. Once personified, a system can become morally too simple. Moloch becomes the enemy; whatever resists him begins to look good; whatever strengthens coordination begins to look salvific. Yet not all coordination is good. Cartels coordinate. Authoritarian states coordinate. Religious persecutions coordinate. The problem with Moloch is not merely that he fragments human action; it is that he forces sacrifice to the wrong purposes. A successful anti-Moloch must still answer the prior question: coordinated around what, governed by whom, checked by which forms of accountability?
Here, again, older religious traditions often knew something that secular descendants forget. They knew that demons were not the only danger. In Christian tradition, the devil was an Angel called Lucifer. Prophets and apostles could lie. Communities of the righteous could become cruel. The worship of a true good could become idolatrous if the human image of it hardened into an absolute.
A post-religious ethics that keeps the demon but loses the warning against idolatry is not yet mature. It has learned to fear the wrong god, but not its own altar.
Part II: From noblesse oblige to meritocracy
The visible scandal of inherited rank
The same pattern appears in our moral language of success.
Aristocracy was unjust in ways so obvious that even its defences had to work around the embarrassment. The aristocrat could claim noble blood, divine order, tradition, stewardship, refinement, military service, ancient title or stabilising authority. What the aristocrat could not plausibly claim, at least not with a straight face, was that he had become Duke because he revised harder.
The injustice was visible. That did not make it harmless; visible injustice is still injustice, but people can tolerate appalling unfairness when it is wrapped in enough ceremony, violence, theology and habit. Still, aristocratic hierarchy carried its own moral awkwardness. It had to admit, in practice if not always in theory, that privilege was not purely earned. Status came through birth. Property came through inheritance. Authority came through lineage. The lucky were lucky, though they naturally preferred grander words.
This is the context in which noblesse oblige emerges. The phrase is usually used to describe the obligation of honourable, generous or responsible behaviour associated with high rank or birth; Merriam-Webster defines it in precisely those terms and notes its wider extension to the responsibilities of those in better positions.
It is important not to sentimentalise this. Noblesse oblige is not just. It is a paternalistic ethic attached to an indefensible hierarchy. It converts structural inequality into personal benevolence. It asks the powerful to be kind, not to surrender power. It offers blankets while keeping the estate.
But it does contain one morally serious thought: privilege creates obligation. In the context, that’s not nothing.
The aristocratic worldview could be cruel, hypocritical, complacent and ridiculous. Yet at its best, or perhaps least bad, it preserved an explicit link between elevated status and greater duty. The lord was not merely rich; he was meant to be responsible for those beneath him. The gentleman was not merely socially superior; he was expected to behave with restraint. The patron was not merely powerful; he owed protection.
This was often self-serving theatre, but of a kind that still revealed a moral pressure. If privilege must present itself as service, then privilege has not yet been fully released from shame.
The meritocratic laundering of hierarchy
Meritocracy changes the moral grammar.
Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958, was not written as a celebration of meritocratic society. It was a satire and a warning. In a later Guardian article, Young emphasised that his book had imagined a Britain in which birth status gave way to achieved status, only for a new elite to harden into a class of its own; he distinguished the sensible practice of appointing people to jobs on merit from the danger of those judged meritorious becoming a closed ruling group.
That distinction has largely been lost. Meritocracy now often functions as a moral deodorant for inequality. It doesn’t abolish hierarchy. It changes the explanation.
Under hereditary aristocracy, the successful person is fortunate, however elaborately the fortune is justified. Under meritocracy, the successful person is ‘deserving’. The loser, by implication, is not merely unlucky, excluded, mistreated or structurally disadvantaged. They have personally failed.
This is the deeper tyranny of merit. Michael Sandel’s recent account is useful here because he identifies the moral psychology of the system: meritocracy produces hubris among winners and harsh judgement towards those left behind, while encouraging a politics less attentive to luck and less hospitable to the common good.
The key point is not that competence should be ignored. Nobody sensible wants surgeons selected by lottery, bridges designed through vibes, or ministers appointed by hereditary right, although British constitutional history has at times explored the latter possibility with unnecessary enthusiasm. Merit is a real consideration in many contexts. Skill, diligence, judgement and knowledge do exist. Societies need ways to identify and reward them.
The problem begins when useful selection becomes total moral anthropology.
A person passes the exam, wins the scholarship, enters the elite university, secures the graduate job, buys the house, accumulates the pension and concludes that the system has simply recognised virtue. Yet every step of that story is mediated by prior conditions: family stability, parental education, inherited wealth, neighbourhood, school quality, cultural confidence, health, accent, social networks, discrimination, geography, and the simple fact of being born into a country rich enough to contain the relevant ladders in the first place.
The mythology of merit doesn’t deny that these things exist. It merely treats them as background details rather than constitutive facts. Success becomes a story told in the first person singular.
I worked hard. I made good choices. I earned this.
All of those statements may be partly true. That is what makes the ideology so resilient. The successful often do work hard. They do make choices. They do show discipline, talent and endurance. The lie is not that effort contributes to success. The lie is that effort explains success sufficiently.
This is where meritocracy becomes more insidious than aristocracy. The old hierarchy insulted the poor by telling them their social inferiority was the natural order of things, ordained by god, or traditional. The new hierarchy insults them by telling them their social inferiority is evidence of their personal inadequacy, because there’s no reason they couldn’t have done better. No underclass in history has ever been left as morally naked as that.
Bootstraps as anti-sacrament
The bootstraps ethic is the sacrament of meritocracy.
Its ritual formula is familiar: one rises by effort, discipline, aspiration, resilience and refusal to complain. Its saints are entrepreneurs, scholarship children, self-made millionaires, founders, strivers, people who built businesses from nothing, and working-class pupils who reached elite universities through improbable force of will. These stories are not fake. Many of them are admirable. Some are extraordinary. That is precisely why they are politically useful.
A prison only needs a small number of escapees to make it look like a test (see, inter alia, Panashe Chigumadzi’s description of South Africa as a “cappuccino society” for a racialised example of this).
The idea of social mobility is a good thing, but it can be used to launder immobility. If a few people climb, then those who remain below can be told that climbing was possible, and they just didn’t try hard enough. The exception becomes evidence against the rule. The ladder becomes an alibi for the wall.
This is why meritocratic societies are so emotionally cruel. They don’t merely distribute unequal rewards. They distribute unequal dignity. The successful receive not only wealth, security and influence, but moral confirmation. The unsuccessful receive not only hardship, insecurity and reduced power, but shame. Failure becomes biographical.
Noblesse oblige was patronising because it assumed hierarchy. Meritocracy is crueller when it denies hierarchy while reproducing it. The aristocrat could say: “I am above you, and therefore I owe you something.” The meritocrat says: “I am above you because I earned it, and therefore what exactly do I owe you?”
That is the moral shift.
We replaced an explicitly unjust system that admitted privilege, with a formally open system that teaches privilege to experience itself as innocence.
There is a reason contemporary elites can be so strangely defensive. If one’s status is understood as luck, inheritance or structural advantage, then criticism of inequality is survivable. It may be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t strike directly at the self. If one’s status is understood as earned moral desert, then criticism of inequality becomes an attack on identity. To say the system is unfair is to say the winners may not be wholly deserving. This is often heard as saying they are frauds.
But the point isn’t that successful people are frauds. That would be a crude inversion of the meritocratic error. The point - veering back toward our earlier theological discussion - is that nobody is the author of their own destiny. A morally serious account of achievement must be able to say three things at once: effort is real; talent is real; and neither effort nor talent generates a clean title deed to social advantage.
Older moral languages had ways of saying this badly. Providence. Fortune. Duty. Sin. Grace. Obligation. Noblesse oblige. They often smuggled hierarchy back in while pretending to restrain it. But the restraint still existed as a pressure within the system.
Meritocracy discards the restraint and keeps the hierarchy.
Part III: What the replacement systems keep, and what they lose
The old forms don’t disappear
Here, then, is the shared structure.
Modernity abolishes an older moral order because the older order is false, unjust, irrational, oppressive or exhausted. This abolition is often necessary. Christianity’s institutional authority did need challenge. Aristocracy did need dismantling. Hereditary privilege did need attack. Deference did need puncturing. Nobody should read this as an argument for returning to altar, throne and estate.
But the older order had carried more than its own corruption. It had also carried disciplines, warnings and moral embarrassments. Once the system falls, those features don’t automatically transfer to its successor. They must be deliberately recovered, translated or replaced.
Often, they are not.
Secular rationalism keeps theology’s scale: the future of humanity, the preservation of value, the defeat of destructive powers, the hope of final alignment between intelligence and goodness. It speaks the language of optimisation, coordination, existential risk and emergent behaviour rather than sin, providence, demons and salvation. But the shape is familiar.
Meritocracy keeps hierarchy’s structure: winners and losers, elite formation, inherited advantage, class reproduction, status markers, moralised distinction. It speaks the language of opportunity, effort, aspiration, competition and talent rather than blood, breeding, estate and rank. But the shape is familiar.
In both cases, the replacement system is not merely different from the old system. It is parasitic on it. It inherits its problem-field while denying continuity. This denial is part of the danger, because a system that believes itself wholly new is unlikely to preserve the cautionary knowledge accumulated by what came before.
The rationalist may think theology is obsolete, and therefore fail to ask which theological safeguards were performing useful work.
The meritocrat may think aristocracy is dead, and therefore fail to notice that elite reproduction has merely changed its costume.
The new order looks cleaner because it has stripped away the obviously embarrassing language. No divine right. No noble blood. No priestly mediation. No feudal duty. No inherited rank. No heavenly mandate.
But the removal of embarrassing language is not the removal of power.
Sometimes embarrassment was the last restraint power had left.
What secular theology forgets
The religious inheritance worth recovering is not dogma. It is self-suspicion.
At their worst, religious traditions sanctify certainty. At their best, they are profoundly suspicious of it. This is the part secular heirs often miss. They remember the crusader and the inquisitor, as they should, but they forget confession, repentance, anti-idolatry, negative theology and the fear of false prophecy.
These were not ornamental. They were technologies of humility.
Confession says your account of yourself is incomplete. Repentance says even sincere action may require reversal. Anti-idolatry says the image you have made of the holy should not become the object you worship. Negative theology says the highest good exceeds your concepts. Warnings against false prophets say moral intensity is not proof of truth.
This is not a plea for piety. It is a plea for translated caution.
A rationalist ethics concerned with preserving value should be especially interested in anti-idolatry, precisely because the danger in value-preservation is that one may preserve the wrong thing too well. A society could encode cruelty as tradition, domination as order, parochial preference as human nature, temporary moral fashion as final truth (indeed, they often have throughout history). To preserve value without a discipline of self-doubt is to risk embalming our current limitations.
Likewise, a politics organised against Moloch requires more than hatred of coordination failure. It needs a theory of corrupt coordination. People can coordinate around mercy, science, public health and peace. They can also coordinate around persecution, censorship, domination and war. Coordination in and of itself is not salvation. Efficiency is not goodness. Alignment is not holiness.
This, again, is where the old religious suspicion of idols becomes intellectually useful. An idol is not merely a false god. It is a partial representation mistaken for the whole. That is a danger in every system of thought that tries to render value legible. Once the Good becomes a target, the target can be optimised. Once optimised, it can be gamed. Once gamed, it can become monstrous while still wearing the face of virtue.
Rationalism has tools for this. Goodhart’s law, for instance, is basically anti-idolatry with a spreadsheet. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure; when an image of the good becomes the object of optimisation, it ceases to be a safe guide to the good. The conceptual resources are there. What is less clear is whether they have been given enough moral and institutional force.
The old traditions built suspicion into repeated practice. Confession returned weekly. Repentance returned seasonally. Warnings against pride saturated scripture, liturgy and preaching. One did not have to wait until a catastrophic failure to be reminded that one’s motives were mixed.
Secular systems tend to prefer crisis review.
What meritocracy forgets
The aristocratic inheritance worth recovering is not rank. It is obligation.
Again, the distinction is crucial. Noblesse oblige is not a model for democratic justice. It is too vertical, too paternal, too flattering to the powerful. A decent society should not depend on the better instincts of people who own most of it. Rights are better than favours. Redistribution is better than condescension. Public goods are better than patronage. Democratic accountability is better than aristocratic character.
Still, the older language preserved one important moral fact: having more creates duties.
Meritocracy weakens that link by recoding advantage as achievement. If I inherited my position, I may feel pressure to justify it through service. If I earned my position, I may feel pressure only to defend the fairness of the competition. That is a profound change in moral psychology.
The problem is particularly acute because meritocratic success is partly real. The winners often are clever, diligent and disciplined. They have often made sacrifices. They may actually have worked harder than many of their peers, or have overcome disadvantages of their own. This makes it harder, not easier, to see the structure. A hereditary lord could be personally lazy and still remain lord; his unearned privilege was visible. A meritocratic winner can point to genuine effort and thereby obscure the surrounding architecture of advantage which has made their expended effort more effortless than somebody else’s.
The moral remedy cannot be to deny achievement. That would be both false and politically hopeless. People know when they have worked hard. They know when they have practised, studied, delayed gratification, taken risks or endured stress. Tell them that none of this counts and they will quite reasonably stop listening.
The better argument is that achievement creates gratitude before entitlement.
A person who succeeds through talent and effort should be able to recognise the social conditions that made talent useful and effort fruitful. The school that taught them. The public infrastructure that carried them. The legal order that protected them. The family or community that stabilised them. The health system that kept them alive. The sheer dumb luck that placed them in one decade rather than another, one country rather than another, one body rather than another. The countless invisible co-operations that made individual striving effective.
This is not a sentimental point. It is a structural one. Individual merit is socially produced even when individually exercised.
A democratic replacement for noblesse oblige would not say: the superior owe charity to the inferior. It would say: advantage is never solitary, and therefore carries public obligation. The more one has benefited from a social order, the more one owes to its repair, extension and democratisation.
That is not aristocracy. It is the anti-aristocratic version of the one thing aristocracy half-understood.
Cleaner, cleverer, less ashamed
The final danger is that modern systems become morally cleaner precisely by becoming less honest.
Religious authority could be challenged as religious authority. Aristocratic privilege could be challenged as inherited privilege. Empire could be challenged as domination. Their defences were often elaborate, but their structures were visible enough to be named.
Secular theology, meritocracy and market power are harder to name because they arrive in disenchanted clothing. They do not claim divine sanction. They claim realism, openness, neutrality, efficiency, evidence, competition, opportunity. These are not empty words. They are often real improvements on what came before. But they can also perform a laundering function.
Theology becomes systems theory and loses its fear of idolatry.
Aristocracy becomes meritocracy and loses its embarrassment about inheritance.
Domination becomes market integration and loses its visible chain of command.
That last case, particularly as part of the history of colonialism and neocolonialism, probably deserves its own essay, but the pattern is too close to ignore entirely here. Formal empire declined in the 20th century for reasons that were morally, politically and historically significant. Colonised peoples fought, organised, governed, negotiated and forced independence into being. That change was real. Yet the end of formal rule did not end the material effects of colonialism: unequal extraction, dependency, debt power, resource control, corporate domination or geopolitical coercion. The older imperial system at least had flags, governors and maps. The newer system often appears as contract, investment, conditionality, supply chain and market discipline.
This is not the same as empire. The distinctions do matter. But the moral structure rhymes: the old form falls, the underlying advantage adapts, and the new form presents itself as cleaner because it no longer uses the old vocabulary.
This is why nostalgia is the wrong response, but so is triumphalism.
The old systems were not better. But they were more visibly guilty.
The task is not to go back. It is to ask what forms of restraint must be rebuilt inside the systems that replaced them. If secular reason is going to do theology, it needs practices of confession, doubt, and anti-idolatry. If meritocracy is going to allocate status, it needs a democratic ethic of obligation. If markets are going to coordinate life, they need institutions capable of naming exploitation even when no single exploiter appears in costume.
The problem with the new gods is not that they are fake. Some of them are terribly real. Moloch is real enough wherever competitive pressure makes decency costly. The Tyranny of Merit is real enough wherever skill and effort genuinely improve human work. The Invisible Hand is real enough wherever dispersed choices generate patterned consequences.
The problem is that these gods don’t feel guilty.
They allocate sacrifice without priesthood, hierarchy without heraldry, judgement without confession, discipline without repentance. They ask for offerings in the language of necessity. They tell the winners they have earned too much to owe more than little. They tell the clever they have understood too much to kneel. They tell the powerful that if nobody intended the harm, perhaps nobody is responsible for repairing it.
Older moral orders were often brutal, hypocritical and false. But they knew, at least intermittently, that power required justification and that human certainty was dangerous. Their successors have learned to speak more cleanly. They have not always learned to judge themselves more severely.
Perhaps, to return to Yudkowsky, that is the gift we actually owe tomorrow: not a final answer, not a perfect system, not a completed theology for people too clever to call it theology, but the recovery of moral embarrassment.
A civilisation without God still needs ways to distrust its idols.
A society without aristocracy still needs ways to bind privilege to duty.
A world without old empires still needs ways to name domination when it no longer wears a crown.
The demons come back under different names. So do the hierarchies. So do the sacrifices. If we’re lucky, if we’re careful, if we’re less impressed with our own cleverness than modern people are trained to be, perhaps the safeguards can come back too.