From Attentiveness to Distraction: The Transformation of Belief and Disbelief in Western Society
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, we will attempt to delve into the broader phenomenon of declining belief in modern society, encompassing but not limited to religious belief, by tracing the transformation of the fundamental categories of time, self and attention from the sixteenth century to the present. Drawing significant inspiration from Charles Taylor’s analysis of the shift of the religious ‘default’ from belief to unbelief within a given period, we will strive to emphasise the significance of what Steve Bruce terms ‘technological consciousness’ in this process. Furthermore, we will attempt to rethink the causes of the change to ‘default unbelief’ by considering global technological and cultural developments in the twenty-first century, previously unaddressed in Taylor’s analysis. To this end, we will particularly draw on the insights of Zygmunt Bauman and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, among others. The central thesis that we will propose is that the decline in the belief in God in today’s world is not necessarily caused by scientific or technological disenchantment but instead by a profound transformation and fragmentation of perceived time, self, and our attention, which has evolved alongside modernity, coupled with a new kind of secular re-enchantment facilitated by the digital age. We will argue that, in contemporary society, religious belief is not so much intentionally renounced as it is left adrift, without a firm footing in this new, fragmented order of things. Lastly, we will briefly examine religious responses to some of these developments and propose a potential path forward.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".