Essay Club: Religion, Heuristics, and Intergenerational Risk Management by Rupert Read & Nassim Taleb

"The sacred is not open to rationalization."

New Atheism dominated the popular intellectual space in the early 2000s. As a newly de-Christianised teenager I took great pleasure in debating my Christian friends over the truth and morality of religion, and I was aided in my anti-crusade by figures like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris. A quarter of a century on, two of the so-called Four Horsemen have passed on (so to speak)—but what has become of the others?

Dawkins recently came out as a ‘cultural Christian’. Harris has become a keen meditator, and seems to practice a kind of secularised Buddhism. Another famous atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—sometimes called the ‘fifth Horseman’—published a widely read piece in 2023 detailing her conversion to Christianity. Apparently even amongst the most strident critics of religion, faith is back in fashion. Something changed between 2005 and 2025, and I think Rupert Read and Nassim Taleb’s (R&T’s) essay, Religion, Heuristics, and Intergenerational Risk Management can help us to understand what happened.

Rupert Read and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Religion, Heuristics, and Intergenerational Risk Management (2014)

Summary

In this essay, R&T offer a rational defence of traditional religion. It’s the kind of argument that homo economicus can get behind: “religion has traditionally performed a powerful risk-management function” through the transmission of “heuristics of risk control across generations”. To put this more plainly, one of the benefits of religion is that it offers clear rules to help people avoid unpredictable, once-in-a-generation disasters.

R&T highlight the 2008 financial crash as a recent example. One of the leading causes of this crisis was debt accumulation; if there had been stronger measures in place to limit the amount of debt that could be accrued by any one individual, the Great Recession might only have been a mild one, or might not have occurred at all. This was not the first time a recession had occurred, so we have to ask: why weren’t stronger measures introduced after previous similar events, or in response to a rational risk calculation? R&T suggest that the rarity of these events causes them to be forgotten, or dismissed as historical anomalies. There is also a financial incentive; many individuals profit from offering or taking out high interest loans in the short-term, so the longer-term risks to society tend to get ignored. The end result is that secular governments lack the motivation to restrict these practices.

Religions work differently. The Abrahamic religions in particular have rules that explicitly prohibit high interest lending (usury) under certain circumstances, and these restrictions are motivated not by reason, but by tradition and moral sentiment. R&T believe that rules such as these are the product of generations of accumulated wisdom—they evolved because the communities that followed them outlasted those that did not. They were then maintained by a belief in the “moral symmetry between lender and borrower” rather than by rational argumentation, which is more vulnerable to critique. “The sacred is not open to ‘rationalization’.”

R&T are essentially arguing that tradition is smarter than you are. Because humans are naturally hubristic, and we “underestimate risks of unimagined rare events and overestimate our knowledge about the future”, we need a set of simple rules-of-thumb that can keep us afloat when the sturdy raft of reason fails us. Religion offers us this. It’s not about blindly following outdated rules; it’s about trusting in the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors, because “what we don’t understand is not necessarily irrational, and it might have reasons that can be probed only across generations of experience and experimentation.”

Commentary

I usually pick these Essay Club essays because I think they have something important and useful to teach us. I’m not interested in spending hours commenting on something with which I fundamentally disagree—life’s too short for that. It should come as no surprise, then, that I think R&T provide a rather compelling argument for adhering to traditional religious teachings and practices. They’ve used an economic example, but I think this same argument could be made for things like Christian sexual ethics and the rejection of retaliatory violence, the Jewish Sabbath, Buddhist meditation rituals, and other practices. These things have largely been abandoned by us in the West, and this is a tragedy.

One of the difficulties with religion, though, is that some of the prohibitions are incredibly hard to follow. In some cases they even seem immoral. “Do not resist an evil person”—who among us, if we had the strength to do so, would refuse to stop a murder? By what morality could we justify this? Reason surely has its limits, but I think we still need to think hard about how best to act on these kinds of teachings. Do we simply leave it up to God to pass the final judgement on a murderer’s soul? Is there no place for worldly justice?

Another problem: Many religious prohibitions place heavy demands on individuals, presumably for the betterment of the group. How far should we take this? Many religious people believe that the normalisation of homosexuality, transsexualism, ‘free love’, and other nontraditional lifestyles is having a negative impact on society. Is it right to restrict a few for the benefit of the many? R&T suggest that “what matters is the survival of the populations that have such ideas”, and in the abstract this makes a lot of sense, but in practice it’s a hefty price to pay for many people.

One more nitpick: That a particular teaching or practice is practically beneficial tells us nothing about whether the associated truth claims are, in fact, true. Prayer may have psychological benefits, but there’s no way to empirically prove that a person is actually talking to God when they pray. For many of us, then, reaping the benefits of a particular practice may require a suspension of disbelief. I’m not so sure that this is possible—it seems to me that, for any of this to work, it’s important to actually believe your religion’s metaphysical claims. I can choose to follow the teachings of a particular tradition for pragmatic reasons, but when things get difficult, only a genuine belief in the existence of God (or the Devil, or karma, or whatever) is going to keep me on track. This is the part that R&T were unwilling or unable to comment on—are their respective religions’ spiritual teachings actually true?

I can’t answer this for them (or for you). The fruits of religion are undeniable—beautiful music, art, and literature, safe and stable nations, unprecedented compassion for the poor and vulnerable—and these fruits have won many former atheists over. This is a fine thing, but in the long run, only certainty in the existence of God will keep them there. In the final analysis it comes down to a leap of faith, and I have to wonder: can they do it?

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Housekeeping

Thanks for reading! As always, I hope you enjoyed this one, and welcome you to share your own thoughts and questions in the comments below. Discussion of great essays is what Essay Club is all about, so, you know—discuss!

Of course, if you really want to join the conversation…

In January I hosted the first live Essay Club discussion via freeconferencecall.com. It was a great conversation, and I’d love to see more of you at the next one. It will take place tomorrow, Sunday 16th of February at 7:30am, Australian Eastern Standard Time. RESCHEDULED to Sunday 23rd of Feb at 7:30am, Australian Eastern Standard Time. CANCELLED—sorry everyone!

You can access the conversation via freeconferencecall.com. You may need to create an account and/or download the app (computer or smartphone) to access the call, so play around with this beforehand. Use the meeting ID mindandmythos in the app, no password needed.

You can also use this link: https://join.freeconferencecall.com/mindandmythos

Next Month’s Essay Club

Next month we’ll be discussing an essay by Roger’s Bacon, another Substack local. This essay—Ideas are Alive and You are Dead (2021)—is interesting not just for its content, but for its structure. I’ll say more about this next month, so watch your inboxes on the 15th of March to read all about it.