The Holiness of Useless Things

Why the world's spiritual traditions exalt what helps us survive least

Maybe the original sin wasn’t the fruit. Maybe it was sex.

So believed the 18th-century millenarian Christians called the Shakers. They were first known as the “Shaking Quakers,” a mocking nickname for the trembling and ecstatic dancing of their worship. So committed were they to avoiding what they deemed sinful that they essentially committed theological suicide.

Nothing if not consistent, they dissolved existing marriages when members joined, the couples living afterward as brothers and sisters. How did they survive past a single generation? Only through conversion and the adoption of orphans. They peaked at around six thousand in the mid-1800s — and yet, remarkably, three adherents remain even today.

Brother Arnold Hadd lives in the last of their communities, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. He has described their celibacy as “a wonderful privilege” and “a dreary, horrible existence all at the same time.” His words hold a strange truth: their belief was so opposed to survival that it consumed the very people who held it — yet they called it the highest good.

The Shakers are the most extreme case, but they are far from the only one. Across many wisdom traditions, the highest echelons are populated by people who do not procreate. Jesus never married, and Roman Catholic clergy follow his example; the Buddha made celibacy foundational to monastic life, where a single lapse means permanent expulsion; Gandhi took a formal vow of brahmacharya in 1906 and kept it for the rest of his life.

Not every tradition points this way — Judaism, Confucianism, and much of Hinduism place marriage and children at the very center of a righteous life. But even most of these keep a renunciant strand: the fast, the vow, the hermit, the season of withdrawal. The arrow shows up almost everywhere, if only in one corner of the map.

And notice what it means, however it arrived — inherited along a shared lineage in some cases, surfacing in cultures with no contact at all in others: each of these traditions took some of its most devoted members and removed them from the gene pool entirely.

You might reasonably object that celibacy was never meant for everyone. And you’d be right. These traditions didn’t ask the masses to renounce marriage and children — most actively directed ordinary people toward exactly that. Celibacy was for the few: the monk, the nun, the priest, the renunciant.

But that concession is the strange part, not the escape from it. Because the few weren’t the marginal or the left-behind. They were the ones held up as having gone furthest — the exemplars, the people a tradition points to and says: this is what the summit looks like. Ordinary life carried on at the base, marrying and reproducing as always. But at the very top, again and again, these cultures placed a life that renounced the drive the base depended on. They kept the many having children, and taught the few that the highest achievement was to want something more than that.

This deepens the question rather than dissolves it. Why would so many traditions — whether they invented the idea or inherited it — keep choosing to place, at the peak of a human life, something the species could never actually follow?

Celibacy is only the sharpest instance of a whole suite of behaviors we might call survival-negative. “Love your enemy” asks you to extend care to the very people who threaten you — the opposite of what any struggle for existence would seem to reward. The command to protect the widow and the orphan — the weakest, least able to repay — strikes us as noble, but is biologically backwards. Even the private disciplines point the same way: fasting, isolation, the deliberate diminishment of the body and its wants. Everywhere you look, the same strange arrow: away from appetite, away from advantage, away from the self and its survival.

So how did so many different traditions come to embrace the same odd set of ideas — ones that biological imperatives should have weeded out? Some of it is surely borrowing; ideas travel, and one culture inherits from another. But borrowing only relocates the question. A costly idea doesn’t spread just because it’s available — plenty of available ideas don’t. Someone, everywhere it traveled, had to keep choosing it and crowning it. And borrowing explains nothing at all in the cultures that had no contact to borrow from.

It could be argued that reciprocal altruism, kin selection, or costly signaling can account for these expensive behaviors — the way a peacock’s absurd tail, costly as it is to grow and drag around, pays for itself by attracting mates. But notice what the peacock gets for his trouble: more offspring. The costly display is repaid in the only currency evolution counts. That is exactly what the deepest religious version refuses.

Celibacy is a signal paid in a coin that can never be returned — you cannot be repaid in descendants by having none. The hidden fast that no one sees earns no status. The love extended to the enemy who will never reciprocate buys no alliance. These behaviors keep pushing past the point where the fitness story works — as if the useful version were never the target.

Perhaps, then, the idea survives at the level of the group: a community bound by costly commitments outlasts a looser one, and the wisdom rides along. But look closely and this concedes the very thing it means to explain. If the teaching endures by making people act against their own biology — for the sake of the community, the institution, the idea itself — then it isn’t an expression of the survival drive at all. It’s something that overrides it. Which is precisely the mystery, not its solution.

It seems to me there are only two ways to explain this. Either the wisdom simply “works” — it happens to be useful, with no deeper meaning behind it — or it’s pointing at something true.

Take the first. If loving your neighbor turns out to be good for survival, wonderful. And if what we call love is, as we’re assured, just chemistry doing its job, then it worked. I find this hard to swallow, but my incredulity isn’t the argument. The argument is that “it works” can’t bear the weight we need it to. Nature, as Tennyson put it, is red in tooth and claw. Rome was brutal yet flourished for a thousand years; plenty of cultures did whatever they pleased in the name of survival and thrived doing it. If that is “working,” it’s a pyrrhic kind — it tells us what persists, not what is good, and certainly not what is true. Cruelty works too. A criterion that can’t tell the saint from the tyrant isn’t explaining the thing we actually wanted explained.

There’s a deeper wonder underneath it all. Why is there an imperative to reproduce in the first place? Natural selection can tell us why the organisms around us are the reproducing kind — the ones that weren’t left no descendants. But that explains which strivers persisted, not why there is any striving in the universe at all. That question was never biology’s to answer; it belongs to philosophy, or to awe. And it’s worth sitting with, because the wisdom traditions turn precisely against that unexplained striving — as if they sensed it was not the last word.

Which leaves the other possibility. What strikes me about so much of spirituality is its decision to step out of the game entirely — to refuse the nasty, brutish, and short terms of physical existence. And notice: the traditions never frame this as choosing nothing. They frame it as an exchange — give up the physical, gain something more real. That is the ground they seem to converge on, whatever their theology: that there is an accessible, non-physical reality, and that through certain transcendent technologies — prayer, fasting, stillness, renunciation — a person can elect to live more there than here.

We tend to think of the renunciants as exotic, people who did something the rest of us never would. But the truth is we do it all the time. We spend lavishly to bury and mourn our dead, pouring resources into people who can never return the favor — who are, in the coldest terms, of no further use to us at all. We give anonymously, to strangers we will never meet and never be thanked by, which is the exact opposite of protecting our own.

When we do these things, we are living as the mystics live: transcendently. We are making the same exchange they made — trading biological selfishness for something more exquisite — participation in a spiritual reality, even while we remain firmly anchored in this one.

Q: When have you given something to someone who could never repay you — and known, without being able to prove it, that it mattered?

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