Gary Dean
Hundreds of millions of people now say they are “spiritual but not religious.” That is not the absence of a dharma. It is the search for one, carried out by people who have lost the old foundations but kept the old need.
There is a kind of person you almost certainly know, and may well be.
She left the religion she was raised in, or was never really given one, and she does not believe in much that she cannot see. But she is not empty, and she is not satisfied. So she has assembled something. A little yoga, for the body and for whatever the body seems to know. A meditation app on her phone, ten minutes most mornings. A book of Stoic sayings on the nightstand, a few wise voices in her headphones on the commute, some hard-won vocabulary from therapy, perhaps a quiet practice of gratitude she would feel slightly embarrassed to describe. She has not joined anything. She has built a private patchwork, stitched together from half a dozen traditions she does not formally belong to, and she lives by it as best she can.
There are now a vast number of these people, more in the Western world every year, and the surveys have a name for them: the “nones,” the religiously unaffiliated, one of the fastest-growing spiritual categories on Earth. The usual way to read them is as a story of decline, the slow draining-away of religion, leaving behind a thin consumer spirituality, a supermarket of the self where lonely people push trolleys past the incense and the self-help. I want to read them differently, and the whole of this essay is the argument for the difference. The “spiritual but not religious” seeker is not the absence of a dharma. She is the search for one, conducted in the hardest possible conditions, by someone who has inherited the deep human need to hold a life together but has lost every one of the old foundations on which a dharma used to be built.
The last essay left us exactly here. The old dharmas, with all their captures and cages, were made for a world that is gone, the world of the village and the empire and the believing crowd. For hundreds of millions of people the gods have fallen silent, and the village has become the internet. So the question this essay has to face is whether a dharma can survive that loss at all. Can you have a real one, a binding one, a transforming one, without the foundations every previous dharma stood on?
Three things a dharma used to get for free
To answer honestly, we have to be specific about what those lost foundations actually did, because “faith” is too vague. A traditional religious dharma got three things, more or less for free, that a secular one has to find some other way to earn.
The first was grounding: a reason its commands were binding and not merely optional, usually a commanding God who made “thou shalt” into a law rather than a preference. The second was installation: the whole apparatus of ritual, sacred ordeal, and tight community, anchored to unfalsifiable belief, that drove the dharma down into people until it ran their lives. And the third was simply a world that cooperated, a slow, face-to-face, information-poor world in which the main obstacle to living well was your own untrained heart. A secular dharma in the twenty-first century has lost all three. It has no divine lawgiver, a frayed and improvised apparatus, and a new world that is not merely indifferent to the holding-together a dharma does but, as we will see, actively engineered against it. Take the three in turn.
Can it bind?
Start with grounding, because it is the objection the believer presses hardest and the question this series planted in its very first essay. Without a God behind it, the challenge runs, a dharma cannot really bind you. “Thou shalt not” needs a lawgiver; remove the divine legislator and all your fine moral language collapses into “I would rather you didn’t.” The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe put the sharp version: the whole vocabulary of moral obligation, of what one ought and must do, is the wreckage of a system that assumed a divine law, and it becomes literally incoherent once the lawgiver is gone, leaving only preferences dressed up as duties.
It is a serious challenge, and the answer comes in two moves, the first of which we already met. Way back in the first essay we looked at Plato’s old trap, the Euthyphro question: is a thing good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? Take the first horn and morality is arbitrary, a divine whim. Take the second and the goodness was already there, independent, for God to recognise, so God is not its source after all. Either way, the divine command was never really doing the grounding work it advertised. The believer who feels she stands on bedrock, and pities the secularist standing on sand, has mistaken the view. She was never on bedrock either.
The second move is harder and more honest, and it cuts against everyone, the believer and the secularist and the scientist alike. There is an old problem, sometimes called the trilemma, about any attempt to justify something all the way down: every chain of “but why?” must end in one of three places, an infinite regress, a circle, or a place where you simply stop and plant your feet. There is no exception. No system of ethics, religious or secular or scientific, has ever reached genuine bedrock, because there is no bedrock to reach; the demand for an ultimate, unanswerable foundation is a demand that nothing in human life can meet. And once you see that, the challenge to the secular dharma quietly loses its force, because it was holding the secularist to a standard the believer never met either. The honest question was never “is it grounded all the way down,” since nothing is. It is “is it grounded well enough to live by, and how?”
And to that question a secular dharma has real answers, just not cosmic ones. It can ground its claim on you in the brute fact that you are the kind of creature to whom things already matter, who cannot, except by damage, stop caring about suffering, your own and others’. It can ground it in what the philosopher Philippa Foot called natural goodness, the thought that for a living thing of a particular kind there is a recognisable shape to flourishing, the way there is for an oak or a wolf, and that cruelty and cowardice are defects in a human life as real as blight in a tree. It can ground it in the moral sentiments we are simply built with, the empathy and the sense of fairness that make another’s pain register in us whether we consent or not. None of these is a thunderbolt from heaven. Each is enough to live by. The binding they produce is real, but it is a different shape of binding than the commandment: it is internal rather than imposed, conditional rather than absolute, a matter of if you would live well with others, then, rather than thou shalt, or else. And here is the surprising turn this series promised long ago. That quieter, conditional, this-worldly binding may be the only kind there ever was. The commandment-shaped certainty the believer mourns was, perhaps, always a story we told about a binding that actually came from the same place the secularist’s does: the fact that we are an animal to whom it matters how we live.
There is more to say about the kind of binding this produces, because its conditional shape is easy to mistake for weakness. To say a dharma binds you only if you would live well is not to say it binds you feebly. Compare the rules of health. They do not thunder at you from the sky; they simply hold, conditionally, for any creature that wants to go on living: if you would not sicken, then eat and move and sleep in roughly these ways. Nobody calls the laws of nutrition flimsy for being conditional on wanting to live. The dharmic “ought” works the same way, and it binds with real force on anyone who has not somehow opted out of caring how their one life goes, which is to say on very nearly everyone alive.
And a dharma can add an answer here that is peculiarly its own. It does not finally rest its authority on an argument you could win or lose in a debate. It rests it on an invitation: come and see. The old Buddhist word is ehipassiko, and it asks not for your belief but for your experiment. Live this way, it says, actually do the practice, and watch what happens to your own suffering and to the suffering of the people around you. The grounding, on this view, is not a proof written above the world but a result discovered inside a life, and that relocates the whole question from the heavens down to lived consequence, which is exactly where a secular age can still test it. It is a humbler foundation than a commandment. It is also one you can actually check.
Can it install?
Grounding, though, is the easier of the two philosophical problems, and the one secular dharmas worry about too much. The harder one is installation, and it is where most of them quietly fail.
Remember what we learned about how a dharma actually gets inside a person. Not by argument, but by drilling: by ritual and repeated practice and tight community, driven below conscious thought until it runs your life. And remember the uncomfortable thing from earlier still: part of what made that drilling stick, historically, was that it was anchored to claims you could never test and so never disprove. A secular dharma throws the unfalsifiable anchor overboard on purpose. The question is whether the apparatus still works once you have done that, and the honest answer is that it sometimes does and often does not, and the difference between the two outcomes is the most practical lesson in this whole field.
We have already met this failure, in the last essay, and you have probably tasted it yourself. Take an ancient practice, lift the one technique out of the demanding ethical and communal whole it grew in, and sell that technique on its own as a tool for feeling better. This is what happened to mindfulness. Pulled out of Buddhism and packaged as an eight-week stress-reduction course, it spread to clinics and corporations and schools, and on its own narrow terms it works: the careful studies find real if modest reductions in anxiety and pain. But it was hollowed out in the lifting, which is why the critic Ronald Purser’s nickname for it, “McMindfulness,” has stuck so hard. Stripped of the ethics that once gave it a direction, mindfulness became a way of helping stressed and exploited people tolerate the conditions that were stressing and exploiting them, a tool for making a worker more productive rather than a person more free, absorbed so completely by the system it was once meant to question that it now serves it. The lesson is brutal and clear: efficacy is not transformation. A practice can be clinically proven to work and have entirely lost the point.
But there is the other outcome, and it is why this is not a counsel of despair. You can strip the metaphysics and keep the whole bundle, the practice and the ethics and the community together, and put something this-worldly in the place the old supernatural anchor used to hold. This is what the former monk Stephen Batchelor calls secular Buddhism, or better, secular dharma. He lets the rebirth and the karma fall away as the cultural packaging of ancient India, and keeps the contemplative practice, but, crucially, he does not keep only the soothing technique. He deliberately puts the ethics back, and widens them, insisting that the practice must turn on racism and injustice in the world as much as on greed and craving in the self, exactly the social dimension that McMindfulness had dropped. Or look at the quiet success story of modern Stoicism, which translated so cleanly into the secular world that it literally became a school of psychotherapy: the founders of cognitive behavioural therapy openly credited Epictetus, whose line “men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them” is the seed of the whole method. The scholar Pierre Hadot reframes the entire project in a way worth holding onto. Ancient philosophy, he showed, was never mainly a set of doctrines; it was a way of life, a body of spiritual exercises you practised daily, and that practical core withered only later, when philosophy hardened into something you merely read and argued about. On Hadot’s reading, secular translation at its best is not a theft from religion at all. It is a recovery, a restoring of the lived, practised, transforming core that the traditions themselves had often buried under doctrine and institution.
And this is not a quirk of Buddhism, which matters, because it suggests secular translation has a transferable structure rather than being one tradition’s lucky accident. The very same operation has been performed inside Christianity. The Anglican theologian Don Cupitt, in a book bravely titled Taking Leave of God, argued that religious language need not point to any supernatural being out there at all, but can instead carry our deepest human and ethical aspirations, sustaining a this-worldly, practised spirituality with the metaphysics quietly set to one side. Strip the supernatural, keep the practice and the ethics, re-ground the whole thing in this life: it is precisely Batchelor’s recipe cooked in a different kitchen, and the two men recognised each other as kin. From the successes and the failures together a clear rule falls out, and it is worth stating plainly. A secular translation keeps its transforming power when it does three things: it preserves the whole bundle of practice, ethics, and community rather than lifting out the technique alone; it supplies some this-worldly replacement for whatever the old metaphysics used to do, the binding and the motivating and the enduring; and it stays a way of life you practise rather than a worldview you merely hold. Do all three and a dharma can survive the loss of its gods. Do only the first, keeping the soothing technique and discarding the rest, and you have simply built another McMindfulness.
There is a third leg of that bundle, though, and it is the one the modern world is least able to supply. A dharma installs through community, through a real and present “we”: the congregation that drills the practice together and holds you to it, the people whose watching eyes make the commitment cost something. And community is exactly what the secular and the digital age have thinned almost to nothing. The self that modern life produces is the unencumbered individual of the philosophers, cut loose from the dense web of relationships that older dharmas simply took for granted, and increasingly that self meets other selves only through a screen. Our seeker with her app and her book is trying to install a dharma essentially alone, which is a little like trying to learn a language with no one to speak it to. She can keep the practice on her own, and even, with effort, the ethics. The “we” is the hardest part to rebuild from scratch, and a dharma without a “we” struggles to get past the surface of one private life. This, more than the missing God, may be the secular dharma’s deepest practical wound.
So can a secular dharma install? The honest verdict is: sometimes, if it keeps the whole bundle and works hard to replace what the gods used to supply, and the experiments are real but young, and we should be suspicious of how readily the people running them, this project among them, declare their own success. The jury is genuinely out. But the failure mode and the success mode are now clear enough to steer by, and that is not nothing.
The New Terrain
Suppose, though, that both problems were solved, that a secular dharma could be both grounded and installed. It would still have to do its work in a world unlike any a dharma has faced before, and this is the part that is genuinely new under the sun.
Every dharma in history, until about twenty years ago, was built for a world of information scarcity, in which wisdom was rare and hard to reach and the main obstacle to living well sat inside your own skull: your own craving, your own distraction, your own untrained mind. The contemplative traditions were, accordingly, technologies for disciplining attention against an inner enemy. That entire assumption has just been turned inside out. The enemy is no longer only inside you. It is outside you, industrialised, and very well funded.
We have built, in a single generation, what its own critics call the attention economy, an enormous apparatus whose business is the capture and resale of human attention. Your gaze is the product; the feed is the bait. And the bait is engineered, with enormous skill and oceans of data, to hijack the very reward systems evolution gave you. The psychologist Mark van Vugt describes social media as a supernormal stimulus, an exaggerated cue that lights up our ancient hunger for connection far more cheaply and intensely than real life ever could, the way junk food hijacks a palate evolved for scarce sugar and fat. We have, he notes bleakly, no natural defences against it. James Williams, who left a career inside Google’s advertising machine to study what it does to us, puts the stakes exactly: these systems are not neutral tools but engines for “redirecting people away from their wills,” from what they actually, reflectively want their lives to be. A dharma’s oldest and deepest job was to hold a human life together, to gather a scattered self around what matters. The attention economy is, almost precisely, a machine built for the opposite purpose: to scatter the self, to fragment attention into sellable fragments, to keep you reactive and outraged and never quite still.
The damage is not only to the private attention but to the shared world we attend to together. The old gatekeepers of information, for all their faults, are gone, and into the gap pours an undifferentiated flood in which the most inflammatory and least true material reliably travels fastest, because outrage is the most engaging product of all. Worse, the very act of publicly broadcasting a conviction tends to harden it, so a medium built for endless broadcasting is also a machine for making everyone more certain and less movable. You can feel here how the failure modes of the last essay are not tamed by the new age but amplified and accelerated by it. The purity spiral that once took a generation to consume a community can now run its course in a weekend, and the lethal fence between “us” and “them” is rebuilt a thousand times a day by systems that have quietly learned that division holds attention better than peace. A dharma for this terrain is not facing the old, slow drift of a wandering mind. It is facing an adversary that gets cleverer every quarter.
This forces something genuinely new on any dharma that means to survive here. The old contemplative move, work on yourself, train your own mind, is necessary but no longer sufficient, because no amount of private inner discipline can hold out indefinitely against a billion-dollar industry engineering your weaknesses in real time. A digital-age dharma has to work not only on the self but on the environment: on the design of the machines, on the rules that govern them, on the shared structures of attention, a political and collective register that no purely contemplative path ever needed. You can hear the new register in the people groping toward it, in the writer Jenny Odell’s call to resist the colonisation of our attention by reattaching it to place and community and the physical world, or in the movements pressing for a more humane technology that would be built to serve our intentions rather than to farm them. And the deepest irony of all closes a loop from earlier in this essay. The single most celebrated secular dharma of our time, mindfulness, has itself been swallowed whole by the attention economy, sold back to us as the very coping tool that lets us endure the machine, so that we meditate in order to stay productive inside the system instead of finding the clarity to question it. The cure has been digested by the disease. Any real dharma for this age has to be more than a better way of putting up with it.
It is worth saying what does not change in all this, because it points to the resource a new dharma has to draw on. The deepest contemplative traditions never treated attention as a neutral spotlight you could aim wherever you pleased. In Buddhism the relevant idea is not “bare attention” but something closer to “appropriate attention,” a noticing already shaped by ethics and intention and woven into the whole question of how to live. The attention economy, by reducing mindfulness to a content-free knack of just-noticing, severed attention from that ethical core, and that severing is exactly what made it so easy to capture and resell. A real digital-age dharma therefore turns out to be partly a recovery, the same move Hadot described: it restores the old truth that what you attend to, and how, is already a moral act, the very fabric of the person you are slowly becoming. And it has begun to grow its own concrete practices. The writer Cal Newport’s “digital minimalism,” with its month-long declutter and its deliberate, almost ruthless pruning of the apps and feeds back down to the few that genuinely serve a chosen value, is recognisably an installation practice in the old sense, a ritual of subtraction meant to re-train a scattered attention until focus becomes, once again, a settled disposition rather than a daily losing fight.
The Shape of the Question Changes
Stand back, now, and see where the whole long argument has brought us, because this is the hinge of the series.
The inherited dharmas are fraying, and most of them were built for a world that no longer exists. The secular replacements can perhaps be grounded, though only in the quieter, conditional way that turns out to be the only grounding there ever was; and they can perhaps be installed, though the apparatus is improvised and the evidence is young; and they must do their work on terrain more hostile to the gathering of a self than anything in human history. That is a daunting tally. But look again at the seeker we started with, the one with the yoga and the app and the book of Stoic sayings, and you will see her differently now. She is not a symptom of decline. She is doing, alone and clumsily and mostly without help, the most ancient human work there is: trying to assemble, out of the materials at hand, a dharma she can live by. The patchwork is not decadence. It is construction, under the worst conditions in which the work has ever been attempted.
And that recognition changes the very shape of the question this series has been asking. For all of human history before now, the question a person faced was: which of the inherited dharmas is the true one, and how do I submit myself to it? You were born onto a path and your task was to walk it. But the seeker cannot ask that question anymore, because the inherited paths are fraying and the foundations they rested on are gone, and she knows it. So the question is mutating, in her hands and in ours, into something no previous age could quite bring itself to ask out loud. Not which dharma do I receive, but: can we build a better one, deliberately, knowing exactly what we are doing, on purpose?
That is a vertiginous question, and it is the one the whole of this series has been walking toward. It is also the most dangerous question there is, because the instant you say out loud that dharmas can be built, you are forced to ask the terrible follow-ups: built by whom, for whom, toward what end, and what gets crushed in the building? And we are being made to ask it at the most demanding moment imaginable, on a planet in crisis that may need some shared ethic to survive at all, and on the eve of building machines that may soon think, into which someone, somewhere, is already preparing to pour an ethic of their own. We have come, at last, to the making of dharmas. That is the final essay.
Sources & Further Reading
This essay is built from the project’s research notes, which carry the full inline citations. Listed here: the notes it draws on, and the key works behind them.
Research notes - 3.3 The Grounding Problem — whether a godless dharma can bind: the Euthyphro reframing, the trilemma of ultimate justification, and the this-worldly anchors. The spine of “Can it bind?” - 6.1 Secular Translation — extraction versus reconstruction; Batchelor, McMindfulness, Stoicism-to-CBT, and Hadot’s “recovery.” The spine of “Can it install?” - 6.2 Digital-Age Dharma — the attention economy as an external, industrial adversary; the supernormal stimulus; and the move from self-cultivation to environment-design. - 3.1 Tension Resolution — the atomised modern self and the community a dharma needs but the secular age has thinned. - 7.2 Cultural Adaptation & Appropriation — dharma-as-consumer-product; the extraction critique that “McMindfulness” sharpens.
Key Works
- On grounding: G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), for the no-lawgiver objection; Plato’s Euthyphro; the Münchhausen trilemma; and Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (2001), on flourishing for a creature of our kind.
- Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism / After Buddhism — reconstruction that keeps the practice, the ethics, and the community; with Ronald Purser, McMindfulness (2019), for the extraction failure mode, and the Goyal et al. (2014) meta-analysis on mindfulness’s modest efficacy.
- Epictetus, Enchiridion, and the Stoicism-to-CBT lineage (Ellis, Beck); with Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995), on ancient philosophy as practised exercise rather than doctrine; and Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (1980), for the same reconstruction performed inside Christianity.
- James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light (2018); Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology; Mark van Vugt on the social-media “supernormal stimulus”; Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019); and Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism (2019).
- On the “nones” / “spiritual but not religious”: Pew Research Center surveys of the religiously unaffiliated as one of the fastest-growing categories in the Western world. (Fresh external sourcing flagged at draft time; not yet captured in a DD research note.)
