People Mistake the Emotion a Topic Provokes for the Topic's Depth

Here is a confusion I keep encountering, and once you notice it you find it everywhere: subjects that generate strong feeling get treated as intellectually deep.

The inference runs: I feel strongly about this, therefore it must be profound. It does not hold, and a surprising amount of what passes for depth is this substitution.

Death

The clearest case. People are intensely emotional about death — they have watched relatives die, they anticipate their own — and death is accordingly treated as a fathomless subject, the province of the greatest philosophers and the deepest literature.

But death is not complicated. An organism stops functioning and the processes constituting it cease. There is no evidence of anything continuing, the phenomenon is universal across living things, and the biology is well understood.

What is enormous is our emotional relationship to it. That relationship is genuinely worth understanding — it shapes our behaviour, our institutions, and most of our religions. But the emotional weight belongs to us, not to the subject. We have been treating a fact about the observer as a property of the thing observed.

Religion

The same structure, and here the confusion does real work.

Theologians and apologists analyse scripture as though it held unplumbable depths — layers of meaning requiring decades of study to approach, subtleties that a casual reader could not hope to grasp.

Read the Old Testament as a book. It is a compilation of tribal history, law codes, poetry, and folklore from a particular region and period, containing an ordinary quantity of the wisdom and cruelty of its era. It is not especially deep. The concept of God it presents — a powerful person with strong opinions who intervenes in human affairs — is not conceptually subtle either. A child grasps it immediately, which is why it is taught to children.

What is large is the investment. People have staked their identities, their communities, and their sense of what their lives mean on these texts. That produces enormous emotional pressure, and the pressure gets read as profundity.

The apparatus of theological subtlety exists partly to justify that reading: if the text were as straightforward as it appears, the investment would be hard to explain.

Why the Confusion Persists

Two reasons, I think.

First, emotional intensity and intellectual difficulty feel similar from the inside. Both produce a sense of struggling with something larger than yourself. Distinguishing them requires deliberate effort, and there is rarely any pressure to make it.

Second, the confusion is socially useful. Treating an emotionally charged subject as intellectually deep protects it from examination — you cannot dismiss the analysis without seeming to dismiss the feeling, and dismissing the feeling is rude. The claim of depth functions as a shield.

The Test

The diagnostic I use is simple: separate how much the subject matters to people from how complicated it is.

Grief is enormously important and psychologically intricate. Death itself is simple. Both facts can be held at once, and holding them at once is what lets you think about either.

Religion matters enormously to billions of people and its social dynamics are genuinely complex — worth serious study, and I have spent a lot of time on it. Its core claims are simple and poorly supported. Again, both at once.

This is a general-purpose instrument. It applies anywhere passion is being read as evidence of subtlety, which includes a good deal of politics, most discussion of art, and nearly every conversation about national identity. In each case the same question: is this hard to understand, or merely hard to discuss calmly?