This was a fantastic read -- enjoyable (if not, exactly, uplifting), from beginning to end. Your writing, and this is a compliment, reminds me a lot of Scott Alexander's. You might be quickly becoming one of my favorite essayists.
What I find interesting is how much the Cathars had in common with the Brothers and Sisters of Red Death, a Russian sect (not related to the Soviets in any way) some seven hundred years later.
Have you read Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation? It maps onto your examples and understanding of Gnosticism well. He has a great substack, interviews, and books.
I’m in my sixties, Catholic, and saw the emergence of “control culture” manifested in abortion “rights.” This right to kill in order to completely control natural healthy biological processes redefined pregnancy as a pathological process complete with redefining offspring as “invaders” then the redefinitions continued with “political correctness” which emerged in full force in academia of the 1980s. “You must control your speech to not offend my ears.” The resulting fragility (finger snapping because applause is violence) among young people paved the way for Covid hysteria to become dogmatic.
It’s tragic, but no one sees it as such because nobody remembers what tragedy is.
The finger-snapping thing is so utterly obnoxious that every time I come across it, my eyes seem to involuntarily roll back into my head. Is that not violence? Will someone, anyone, *please* think of the poor Tytonidaens, and go 👏 back 👏 to 👏 clapping? 👏
(Ever notice how the same people don't think clapping after every word, like that, is violent? ...hmm.)
I’m not sure if this is about Gnosticism specifically so much as it is about ideology in general. “The world is not as it seems – there is a deeper, realer, world that is awaiting you if you just look” is the elevator pitch for pretty much every ideology. All ideologies have Gnosis – that is what makes them ideologies.
The only thing that is consistent within Gnosticism and seems to meaningfully differentiate it from other ideologies is its fairly aggressive dualism. But if the article was mainly about opposing dualism, then I would expect it to at least mention either monism or non-dualism. Given that the article does not seem to be about dualism and non-dualism, it seems to boil down to the observation that a very common pattern in history is dueling ideologies each claiming they have access to the true reality, and that the other ideology is blind or misguided.
There doesn’t appear to be a clear alternative to this state of affairs. “Return to reality” sounds good, but he that is without ideology among you, let him first cast a stone.
note: I came here from the author's article on the Virtuals-vs-Physicals and the Candian truckers' protest
re: Axial vs WEIRD* vs meta-rationalism
(how to get past postmodern relativism and neomarxism?)
I had the same reaction as I read the article. Lots of stuff correctly described as (arguably) "bad", but no clear sense of what a better "reality" actually is! Catholicism? There are whole libraries full of books about what is wrong with it, or more generally the pro-state elements in early Christianity that twisted the religion to the purposes of the Roman State. (I have relatives in Spain that are actual Opus Dei, who are respectable intellectuals, so I'm familiar with their thinking, which Raimon Panikkar grew out of by the way.)
side question: how is Gnosticism different than the embodied spirituality (nature worship, paganism, shamanism, "magic") of humans for 100,000s of years?
Catholicism, or Christianity in general is one of many "Axial" religions (as defined by Karl Jaspers, more or less following Max Weber) that seem to be evolutionary adaptations to the rise of social chaos after the Bronze Age collapse.
The older embodied traditions, shamanism and "magic", could not longer satisfy the needs of people in a changing world of mass war between nomads and settled agrarian culture, and mass war between agrarian kings/empires.
So, contemplative (Axial) religion and philosophy emerged, eventually leading to the idea of a transcendent, monotheistic God.
A "unifying" God of the Kosmos (accompanied by purity myth about evil, sin, spiritual uncleanliness of pagans/unbelievers) required that social order also be imposed and tribal loyalty be transcended.
My guess is that N.S. Lyons is calling for a return to Axial contemplation and social order, or some kind of revival of "classical liberalism" and Axial contemplation.
?????
The problem with that of course is history: the Enlightenment was correctly criticized by Romanticists (who were wrong about a lot of other stuff) for ignoring the human need for beauty, the Sacred, meaning and purpose, and modern rationalism exposed all sorts of factual absurdities and contradictions in the literal text of mythic religion.
The social disruptions of the industrial revolution blew the remaining vestiges of mythic social order apart at the seams, horrifying a lot of people, including Nietzsche, who realized that "God is dead.... and we killed Him".
Axial-mythic culture (Alter and Crown) simply isn't sustainable in the face of WEIRD* culture and Enlightenment reason as a coherent, logical intellectual position.
What WEIRD "classical liberalism" offers, Axial myth can't:
- nuclear family, delayed childbirth, better survival of offspring in "outbred" bourgeois classes vs "inbred" (cousin marrying, clannish) peasant classes
- education: literacy and numeracy dramatically increase in expanding urban population at the end of the medieval era
- industrialization, scientific and technological advances
- increase in wealth in the middle and some of the peasant classes
- representative institutions, "democracy", peasants' rights spread via the Clunic Abbeys, "democracy", "liberal philosophy" (see Leonard Liggio)
Even an attempt to revive WEIRDness (classical liberalism) in its original form, before the rise of Absolutism and empire (1492), is similarly problematic, it will continue to be fragile to cultural evolution and disruption, as it was 100s of years ago.
From what I can tell, the best strategy for getting beyond postmodern relativism and neomarxism is construct-aware meta-rationalism.
This piece focused some of my thinking about the superimposition of a manufactured reality that I always rant about as a 'psyop' created as a direct assault on human dignity and the American Constitution. My suspicion and anger rises from the the active suppression of free speech/thought and the willingness of 'woke' to randomly destroy the lives and future of designated wrong thinkers. My feeling is that the shadowland evil that directly invests in and supports this persecution and cultural disintegration isn't ideological but simply motivated by power hungry avaricious totalitarian greed.
I tend to see ideology in the context of cultural evolution/development (as described by "stage theory"), and how it has a feedback loop with power politics. Sometimes power dynamics are prevalent, other times ideological, usually some kind of mix.
Since different ethnic-tribal-nationalist gene pools are at different developmental stages/levels, and ethnic groups have generally tended to be hostile to each other though human history (with some exceptions), that is usually another element of the complex of feedback loops.
A heterodox sociologist (anarcho-libertarian more or less) explains it this way:
("totalitarianism humanism" is his term for cultural marxism)
excerpt:
Every ideological superstructure has a materialist base and class base (which in the case of totalitarian humanism would be digital capital, the tech revolution, “financialization” of the kind that has emerged from neoliberalism, the expanded technocratic class which is the product of the wider degree of specialization and the division of labor rooted in increased technological sophistication).
Additionally, “wokeness” is rooted in the wider infrastructure of statecraft which can be traced, at the irreducible minimum, to the collusion between the Frankfurt School and the OSS during WW2, followed by the CIA’s creation of the Congress of Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. While elements of the ideological framework of totalitarian humanism may have their roots in the cultural revolution of the 1960s/1970s, in its present form “wokeness” represents a co-optation of those cultural patterns by the liberal wing of the capitalist class ( a specific strategy that was devised by Fred Dutton as far back as 1970).
You fail to mention that this rationalist WEIRD worldview came about built upon the back of Axial mythic structure, which allowed the social cohesion to create markets and rule of law et cetera.
It's not clear to me that WEIRD rationalistic culture is sustainable on it's own in the long term. In fact it seems that once the worship of rationalism inevitably eats away at it's own founding myths which it relied upon, the project will collapse in on itself.
Science is an excellent servant and a terrible master. I'd argue we need to return to a culture where Axial myth like Christianity is the highest value in our hierarchy, and we use the intellect as a tool but never let it become our master again.
... all the talk of a new spirituality in America is largely a waste of time unless those two central dialogues are engaged and answered. Unless spirituality can pass through the gate of science, then of liberalism, it will never be a significant force in the modern world, but will remain merely as the organizing power for the prerational levels of development around the world.
---end excerpt---
note: I don't completely agree with Wilber on the non-dualism stuff, he has been criticized by actual traditional Buddhist masters for inaccuracy, but the rest of what he is saying holds.
another, longer excerpt from the above article/link:
...
There are not two camps here: liberalism versus mythic religion. There are three: mythic religion, rational liberalism, and transrational spirituality.
The main strength of liberalism is its emphasis on individual human rights. The major weakness is its rabid fear of Spirit. Modern liberalism came into being, during the Enlightenment, largely as a counterforce to mythic religion, which was fine. But liberalism committed a classic pre/trans fallacy: it thought that all spirituality was nothing but prerational myth, and thus it tossed any and all transrational spirituality as well, which was absolutely catastrophic.
...
Liberalism attempted to kill God and replace transpersonal Spirit with egoic humanism, and as much as I am a liberal in many of my social values, that is its sorry downside, this horror of all things Divine. Liberalism can be rightfully distrustful of prerational myth, and yet still open itself to transrational awareness. Its objections to mythic forms do not apply to formless awareness, and thus liberalism and authentic spirituality can walk hand in hand into a greater tomorrow. If this can be demonstrated to them using terms they find acceptable, then we would have, I believe for the first time, the possibility of a postliberal spirituality, which combines the strengths of conservatism and liberalism but moves beyond both in a
[->] transrational, transpersonal integration.
The trick is to take the best of both, individual rights plus a spiritual orientation, and to do so by finding liberal humanistic values plugged into a transrational, not prerational, Spirit. This spirituality is
[->] transliberal, evolutionary and progressive, not preliberal, reactionary and regressive.
It is also political, in the very broadest sense, in that its single major motivation, compassion, is pressed into social action. However, a postconservative, postliberal spirituality is not pressed into service as public policy, transrational spirituality preserves the rational separation of church and state, as well as the liberal demand that the state will neither protect nor promote a favorite version of the good life.
I had a similar thought to you about ideology in general. Not naming the religious quality of today’s as Gnosticism in particular still yields fairly similar results in terms of redefining the nature of reality. Helpful comment on a brilliant article - thanks.
Did you learn all this stuff in college, or what? And how come nobody else knows it? I haven't thought about the gnostics since that Elaine Pagels book.
Hilarious! Escape the demiurge by liking and commenting, thus feeding it!
Bloggers proclaiming a return to bronze-age life, online! Hit the like button if you want to escape Clown World! That IS Clown World!
As soon as some fucking snake convinces you that a garden is a prison, it's Game Over. Nature always bats last, and the longer she waits, the bigger her bat gets. Pow. Out of the stadium.
Another brilliant piece. My 30 yr. old son touched on many of these same revelations today at lunch, instead of Clown World he calls it The System and warns the mere act of defining our revulsion and revelations will lead us back to The System (Gnostic resorting) as it did with BAP, apparently.
Has to do with not over-reacting to the Clown World by creating a counter Clown World (as Breitbart did by also creating Huffington Post). It’s like creating an opposing gear that helps keep that Clown World running. As the article indicates, don’t heap more new slime on in response, instead peel back the layers of slime to get back to/expose again the once and always existing real world that never went away. Stay fixed on that so as not to create new gnostic-like Clown Worlds.
Gasping from this explosion of erudition ... I love the modesty of not citing Sartre´s Huis Clos.
But then, what remains? For someone not using Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.? Is all this stuff real?
Would it make equal sense that the Culture War is merely a conflict between competing Judaeo-Greek-Christian values like liberty, caring, rights and obligations, in conjunction with primordial desires such as needs for freedom and protection?
I feel like a country bumpkin and reformed paleo-Marxist thinking: All these crazy fools have too much money from the state. If they had to earn their living in a free economy without state subsidy - our tax money - they would turn sober quickly. With an overall tax rate below 10% and privatisation of all state tasks back to where the West was in the Gilded Age, the state mainly legislating without much budget to spend, any Gnostic would spread his word solely by Freedom of Speech. Without state authority subjecting others to his gnostic beliefs, normal people wouldn`t care as long as he respects their basic liberties. Compared to the Deep State, is gnosticism a real problem?
Is that "based"? Old school? Simplistic and unintelligent?
Maybe, but most idiocies of the last 100 years come from state-subsidized "intellectuals" of the university. Let them live on incomes in a free market, and 95% of modern nonsense is gone.
I think I have gone off track. Is the Deep State an expression of gnosticism? Compared to the Deep State, gnosticism is less important because the Deep State is about real power over everyone´s life whereas gnosticism in comparison smells of kids from bad schools having too much time and money for their own good.
Of course, the phenomenon of the Cathars refutes me. But then, the Other World mattered more to our predecessors than it does to us. And there was more upheaval (sic) then, with up to 4 popes, Canossa, wars of forming nations all over Europe, the rising bourgeoisie building all those splendid High Gothic catehedrals, and an intermediate warming (more children surviving on that small lot of land, needing to wander off?). I lack the knowledge to put Albigenses into perspective, unfortunately.
As powerful as this article is: Maybe gnosticism as a spiritual and intellectual global tendency hasn´t really had that much power as an historical force, therefore could be put into perspective?
I am grateful for this article, and the comments. In deep appreciation of each article of this author, I hesitate to follow the suggestion that gnosticism be a major force. Pythagoras and Plato show that gnosticism is a spiritual "logical possibility", but hardly ever fully describes the character and work of an individual.
Thinking about nature and climate is natural to man, but only the extremist ignores all other aspects of man and universe and becomes a climate extremist. Is the gnostic just one more extremist? Is then extremism the issue? The un-willingness to keep different concepts floating?
Mind, soul, reason, and body have their beauties and truths, which often conflict with each other. Gnosticism points to the fact (fact?) that man longs for transcendency, the wandering star or the eternal God, and gets lost in this world without his personal beacon to concepts outside of him, beings other than himself. When gnosticism is not extremism, it may be that which reminds us of this longing; this understanding that This World is not enough without that Other World.
Could one argue that gnosticism is one step forward from manichaeanism?
Is QAnon in all its crudity somewhere in the middle of all this?
Doesn´t this fit nicely with Wang Huning´s book on America?
Would a tillerman after harvest, a framer after finishing the house, an entrepreneur after work ever come home to wife and kids with such ideas? Are we psychologically, emotionally, even physically made for the world the advanced West has created? Are we up- or un-rooted?
Whoever criticizes Marxism mostly doesn´t condemn the human desires for security or to provide for others. He only criticizes the extremism of subjecting all other human values, aptly described in the Scriptures and elsewhere, to security only, provided by an authoritarian state (that then solely decides what providing for others is and is not).
A horrible counter-idea: Those that are not suitable for hard labor, will sew conflict to survive, as they are hunter-gatherers, not pastoralists nor farmers. It might be tied to biological temperaments and theories of class/caste. If that is true, then those that "touch grass" will try to "eat a**" immediately after (the aphorism of nature is originally referring to the birds and the bees!) and all civility goes out the window.
Kojève was right—we want to be seen. We must, in the parlance of the moment, be represented, acknowledged, given a platform. With Christ we are seen (and loved) and incorporated into a meaningful whole. With Man we are seen, separated and discarded into obscurity (or a furnace).
Interesting that you did not mention Eric Voegelin, who wrote about the gnostic nature of modern mass political movements back in the 1950s. If you are not aware of him, he is a writer you might like.
There is so much to say, alas the comments are not the place. You are right that some modern ideas are Gnostic but only because the traditional religions (taken broadly to include Marxism, etc) are more Gnostic that we (others) suspect and progressive religion is the direct heir.
Wonderful article! I wonder if you've heard of Prof. WOLFGANG SMITH? He's written about extensively about the Neo-Gnosticism of our age:
" [T]he fact is that in the hallowed name of Science we have fallen prey en masse to an ideology. It behooves us then, in the wake of this recognition, to take the next step: to investigate, namely, that underlying ideology itself. There is in fact no other way of attaining authentic discernment in regard to that sovereign worldview which seems nowadays to impose itself on just about everyone, from heads of church and state to college freshmen. . . ."
A challenge example against "there was a time with pure reality": Peterson's 10% feminine problem, where no matter one measure by personality tests or by brain scans or even anthropometrics, about 10% of males will be "misclassed" as female in a consistent manner (and vice versa). We went from the fundamentalist "there are only black-and-white genders", which aided the formation of the system today, to the post-modern "there are no such thing as sex", which is equally dethatched from biological reality.
I find the whole situation both tragic and hilarious. Gnosticism, re: 'Blame Shifting', is as self-defeating in its posits as that old chestnut- "There is no such thing as Objective Truth." (Except of course, for that one statement.)
It's interesting to me as well, since I have been online far more than the vast majority of the world (Online since 1995, full-time as a job since 1997), have drunk deep of the Interzone's Polluted waters, and come away with a resounding, 'Meh'. The truth is, Humans in general are simply not mature enough to deal with the abstract, specifically with people at a distance.
Prior to the Internet, this was most visible on its physical analogue, Roads. 'Road Rage' is a thing because people lack the empathy to treat anyone else they are not in *direct* physical proximity to, as a real being. That, and the fact that when we think there will be no real consequences for our actions, we reveal what Shitheaps we all really are. Alcohol can at times & with certain people, reveal this truth as well.
Of course the Gnostics just blame the Evil Demiurge for putting us in this Inherently Evil Material World. Sadly I have never met a Gnostic who could reflect well enough to realize that if the Demiurge is Evil, then how can 'spirit' be inherently Good? Oops.
Not sure any Gnostics said exactly that, but Zoroastrians for instance think that there is good spirit and bad spirit (which shows up in the physical world as good or bad).
Buddhism tries to solve the problem with non-dualism:
I am so sorry I forgot about this. I had intended to reply, but I got sidetracked with ongoing health problems.
I don't have the energy now for a full comment, but if you will charitably understand I am not being snarky, in regards to 'Non-Dualism' I say this- There is either the Bus, or Me, not Both.
The bigger issue is the difficulty that humans have in dealing with the limitations of human thought, as it evolved as a pattern matching machine, to deal with survival in primeval times.
This was a fantastic read -- enjoyable (if not, exactly, uplifting), from beginning to end. Your writing, and this is a compliment, reminds me a lot of Scott Alexander's. You might be quickly becoming one of my favorite essayists.
What I find interesting is how much the Cathars had in common with the Brothers and Sisters of Red Death, a Russian sect (not related to the Soviets in any way) some seven hundred years later.
As I said, Gnostics never die.
PS: Email me some more about your theory of sociopaths and systems (empires) sometime, this is interesting.
Have you read Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation? It maps onto your examples and understanding of Gnosticism well. He has a great substack, interviews, and books.
I take it that you read what I wrote on TAC earlier today?
You'll notice their theme on reincarnation of those stuck here, so it should not surprise you the same story is being told over and over again by the same reincarnated entities. And as far as if they are correct or not; here is the U.S. Government admitting that they are; https://medium.com/accessible-foia/analysis-assesment-gateway-process-army-cia-foia-1983-human-consciousness-d7fa332ef404
Very interesting indeed.
I’m in my sixties, Catholic, and saw the emergence of “control culture” manifested in abortion “rights.” This right to kill in order to completely control natural healthy biological processes redefined pregnancy as a pathological process complete with redefining offspring as “invaders” then the redefinitions continued with “political correctness” which emerged in full force in academia of the 1980s. “You must control your speech to not offend my ears.” The resulting fragility (finger snapping because applause is violence) among young people paved the way for Covid hysteria to become dogmatic.
It’s tragic, but no one sees it as such because nobody remembers what tragedy is.
The finger-snapping thing is so utterly obnoxious that every time I come across it, my eyes seem to involuntarily roll back into my head. Is that not violence? Will someone, anyone, *please* think of the poor Tytonidaens, and go 👏 back 👏 to 👏 clapping? 👏
(Ever notice how the same people don't think clapping after every word, like that, is violent? ...hmm.)
Brilliant.
So... perhaps a study group for St Irenaeus? But more seriously -- Catholic or Orthodox?
I’m not sure if this is about Gnosticism specifically so much as it is about ideology in general. “The world is not as it seems – there is a deeper, realer, world that is awaiting you if you just look” is the elevator pitch for pretty much every ideology. All ideologies have Gnosis – that is what makes them ideologies.
The only thing that is consistent within Gnosticism and seems to meaningfully differentiate it from other ideologies is its fairly aggressive dualism. But if the article was mainly about opposing dualism, then I would expect it to at least mention either monism or non-dualism. Given that the article does not seem to be about dualism and non-dualism, it seems to boil down to the observation that a very common pattern in history is dueling ideologies each claiming they have access to the true reality, and that the other ideology is blind or misguided.
There doesn’t appear to be a clear alternative to this state of affairs. “Return to reality” sounds good, but he that is without ideology among you, let him first cast a stone.
re:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-reality-war/comment/3853016
---
note: I came here from the author's article on the Virtuals-vs-Physicals and the Candian truckers' protest
re: Axial vs WEIRD* vs meta-rationalism
(how to get past postmodern relativism and neomarxism?)
I had the same reaction as I read the article. Lots of stuff correctly described as (arguably) "bad", but no clear sense of what a better "reality" actually is! Catholicism? There are whole libraries full of books about what is wrong with it, or more generally the pro-state elements in early Christianity that twisted the religion to the purposes of the Roman State. (I have relatives in Spain that are actual Opus Dei, who are respectable intellectuals, so I'm familiar with their thinking, which Raimon Panikkar grew out of by the way.)
side question: how is Gnosticism different than the embodied spirituality (nature worship, paganism, shamanism, "magic") of humans for 100,000s of years?
Catholicism, or Christianity in general is one of many "Axial" religions (as defined by Karl Jaspers, more or less following Max Weber) that seem to be evolutionary adaptations to the rise of social chaos after the Bronze Age collapse.
The older embodied traditions, shamanism and "magic", could not longer satisfy the needs of people in a changing world of mass war between nomads and settled agrarian culture, and mass war between agrarian kings/empires.
So, contemplative (Axial) religion and philosophy emerged, eventually leading to the idea of a transcendent, monotheistic God.
A "unifying" God of the Kosmos (accompanied by purity myth about evil, sin, spiritual uncleanliness of pagans/unbelievers) required that social order also be imposed and tribal loyalty be transcended.
My guess is that N.S. Lyons is calling for a return to Axial contemplation and social order, or some kind of revival of "classical liberalism" and Axial contemplation.
?????
The problem with that of course is history: the Enlightenment was correctly criticized by Romanticists (who were wrong about a lot of other stuff) for ignoring the human need for beauty, the Sacred, meaning and purpose, and modern rationalism exposed all sorts of factual absurdities and contradictions in the literal text of mythic religion.
The social disruptions of the industrial revolution blew the remaining vestiges of mythic social order apart at the seams, horrifying a lot of people, including Nietzsche, who realized that "God is dead.... and we killed Him".
Axial-mythic culture (Alter and Crown) simply isn't sustainable in the face of WEIRD* culture and Enlightenment reason as a coherent, logical intellectual position.
What WEIRD "classical liberalism" offers, Axial myth can't:
- high-social-trust institutions, Constitutional law, market economics
- nuclear family, delayed childbirth, better survival of offspring in "outbred" bourgeois classes vs "inbred" (cousin marrying, clannish) peasant classes
- education: literacy and numeracy dramatically increase in expanding urban population at the end of the medieval era
- industrialization, scientific and technological advances
- increase in wealth in the middle and some of the peasant classes
- representative institutions, "democracy", peasants' rights spread via the Clunic Abbeys, "democracy", "liberal philosophy" (see Leonard Liggio)
Even an attempt to revive WEIRDness (classical liberalism) in its original form, before the rise of Absolutism and empire (1492), is similarly problematic, it will continue to be fragile to cultural evolution and disruption, as it was 100s of years ago.
From what I can tell, the best strategy for getting beyond postmodern relativism and neomarxism is construct-aware meta-rationalism.
-----
* https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/
This piece focused some of my thinking about the superimposition of a manufactured reality that I always rant about as a 'psyop' created as a direct assault on human dignity and the American Constitution. My suspicion and anger rises from the the active suppression of free speech/thought and the willingness of 'woke' to randomly destroy the lives and future of designated wrong thinkers. My feeling is that the shadowland evil that directly invests in and supports this persecution and cultural disintegration isn't ideological but simply motivated by power hungry avaricious totalitarian greed.
As always, thanks for the links.
I tend to see ideology in the context of cultural evolution/development (as described by "stage theory"), and how it has a feedback loop with power politics. Sometimes power dynamics are prevalent, other times ideological, usually some kind of mix.
Since different ethnic-tribal-nationalist gene pools are at different developmental stages/levels, and ethnic groups have generally tended to be hostile to each other though human history (with some exceptions), that is usually another element of the complex of feedback loops.
A heterodox sociologist (anarcho-libertarian more or less) explains it this way:
("totalitarianism humanism" is his term for cultural marxism)
excerpt:
Every ideological superstructure has a materialist base and class base (which in the case of totalitarian humanism would be digital capital, the tech revolution, “financialization” of the kind that has emerged from neoliberalism, the expanded technocratic class which is the product of the wider degree of specialization and the division of labor rooted in increased technological sophistication).
Additionally, “wokeness” is rooted in the wider infrastructure of statecraft which can be traced, at the irreducible minimum, to the collusion between the Frankfurt School and the OSS during WW2, followed by the CIA’s creation of the Congress of Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. While elements of the ideological framework of totalitarian humanism may have their roots in the cultural revolution of the 1960s/1970s, in its present form “wokeness” represents a co-optation of those cultural patterns by the liberal wing of the capitalist class ( a specific strategy that was devised by Fred Dutton as far back as 1970).
...
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/12/06/curtis-yarvin-mencius-moldbug-on-tucker-carlson-today-09-08-21/
You fail to mention that this rationalist WEIRD worldview came about built upon the back of Axial mythic structure, which allowed the social cohesion to create markets and rule of law et cetera.
It's not clear to me that WEIRD rationalistic culture is sustainable on it's own in the long term. In fact it seems that once the worship of rationalism inevitably eats away at it's own founding myths which it relied upon, the project will collapse in on itself.
Science is an excellent servant and a terrible master. I'd argue we need to return to a culture where Axial myth like Christianity is the highest value in our hierarchy, and we use the intellect as a tool but never let it become our master again.
Quoting myself, Feb 27, 2022
"From what I can tell, the best strategy for getting beyond postmodern relativism and neomarxism is construct-aware meta-rationalism."
---
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
metarationality. com /stem-fluidity-bridge
Also see:
web search: "ken wilber liberalism we should talk"
https://www.lionsroar.com/liberalism-and-religion-we-should-talk/
... all the talk of a new spirituality in America is largely a waste of time unless those two central dialogues are engaged and answered. Unless spirituality can pass through the gate of science, then of liberalism, it will never be a significant force in the modern world, but will remain merely as the organizing power for the prerational levels of development around the world.
---end excerpt---
note: I don't completely agree with Wilber on the non-dualism stuff, he has been criticized by actual traditional Buddhist masters for inaccuracy, but the rest of what he is saying holds.
another, longer excerpt from the above article/link:
...
There are not two camps here: liberalism versus mythic religion. There are three: mythic religion, rational liberalism, and transrational spirituality.
The main strength of liberalism is its emphasis on individual human rights. The major weakness is its rabid fear of Spirit. Modern liberalism came into being, during the Enlightenment, largely as a counterforce to mythic religion, which was fine. But liberalism committed a classic pre/trans fallacy: it thought that all spirituality was nothing but prerational myth, and thus it tossed any and all transrational spirituality as well, which was absolutely catastrophic.
...
Liberalism attempted to kill God and replace transpersonal Spirit with egoic humanism, and as much as I am a liberal in many of my social values, that is its sorry downside, this horror of all things Divine. Liberalism can be rightfully distrustful of prerational myth, and yet still open itself to transrational awareness. Its objections to mythic forms do not apply to formless awareness, and thus liberalism and authentic spirituality can walk hand in hand into a greater tomorrow. If this can be demonstrated to them using terms they find acceptable, then we would have, I believe for the first time, the possibility of a postliberal spirituality, which combines the strengths of conservatism and liberalism but moves beyond both in a
[->] transrational, transpersonal integration.
The trick is to take the best of both, individual rights plus a spiritual orientation, and to do so by finding liberal humanistic values plugged into a transrational, not prerational, Spirit. This spirituality is
[->] transliberal, evolutionary and progressive, not preliberal, reactionary and regressive.
It is also political, in the very broadest sense, in that its single major motivation, compassion, is pressed into social action. However, a postconservative, postliberal spirituality is not pressed into service as public policy, transrational spirituality preserves the rational separation of church and state, as well as the liberal demand that the state will neither protect nor promote a favorite version of the good life.
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Incorrect on too many points to respond to. Why are you replying over a year and a half after the discussion???
Heh, I guess I thought I had something to say. I just read it for the first time today.
I had a similar thought to you about ideology in general. Not naming the religious quality of today’s as Gnosticism in particular still yields fairly similar results in terms of redefining the nature of reality. Helpful comment on a brilliant article - thanks.
Did you learn all this stuff in college, or what? And how come nobody else knows it? I haven't thought about the gnostics since that Elaine Pagels book.
I possess The Knowledge.
I have been looking for a good history of the Cathar movement. Any suggestions?
Does Marcuse in general & 'One-Dimensional Man' in particular, rate at all, in your - exceptionally erudite - wéltanschauung ??
I'm going to Vespers today. It feels like my only center anymore in a world gone mad.
Hilarious! Escape the demiurge by liking and commenting, thus feeding it!
Bloggers proclaiming a return to bronze-age life, online! Hit the like button if you want to escape Clown World! That IS Clown World!
As soon as some fucking snake convinces you that a garden is a prison, it's Game Over. Nature always bats last, and the longer she waits, the bigger her bat gets. Pow. Out of the stadium.
That would be the joke.
I think this is why Cal Newport doesn't have any social media even to advertise outside his blog and says to not even like a post on Facebook.
Regarding your first two paragraphs -- yes, but real-space-conversation is pretty much illegal.
Another brilliant piece. My 30 yr. old son touched on many of these same revelations today at lunch, instead of Clown World he calls it The System and warns the mere act of defining our revulsion and revelations will lead us back to The System (Gnostic resorting) as it did with BAP, apparently.
Please explain.
Has to do with not over-reacting to the Clown World by creating a counter Clown World (as Breitbart did by also creating Huffington Post). It’s like creating an opposing gear that helps keep that Clown World running. As the article indicates, don’t heap more new slime on in response, instead peel back the layers of slime to get back to/expose again the once and always existing real world that never went away. Stay fixed on that so as not to create new gnostic-like Clown Worlds.
Gasping from this explosion of erudition ... I love the modesty of not citing Sartre´s Huis Clos.
But then, what remains? For someone not using Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.? Is all this stuff real?
Would it make equal sense that the Culture War is merely a conflict between competing Judaeo-Greek-Christian values like liberty, caring, rights and obligations, in conjunction with primordial desires such as needs for freedom and protection?
I feel like a country bumpkin and reformed paleo-Marxist thinking: All these crazy fools have too much money from the state. If they had to earn their living in a free economy without state subsidy - our tax money - they would turn sober quickly. With an overall tax rate below 10% and privatisation of all state tasks back to where the West was in the Gilded Age, the state mainly legislating without much budget to spend, any Gnostic would spread his word solely by Freedom of Speech. Without state authority subjecting others to his gnostic beliefs, normal people wouldn`t care as long as he respects their basic liberties. Compared to the Deep State, is gnosticism a real problem?
Is that "based"? Old school? Simplistic and unintelligent?
Maybe, but most idiocies of the last 100 years come from state-subsidized "intellectuals" of the university. Let them live on incomes in a free market, and 95% of modern nonsense is gone.
I think I have gone off track. Is the Deep State an expression of gnosticism? Compared to the Deep State, gnosticism is less important because the Deep State is about real power over everyone´s life whereas gnosticism in comparison smells of kids from bad schools having too much time and money for their own good.
Of course, the phenomenon of the Cathars refutes me. But then, the Other World mattered more to our predecessors than it does to us. And there was more upheaval (sic) then, with up to 4 popes, Canossa, wars of forming nations all over Europe, the rising bourgeoisie building all those splendid High Gothic catehedrals, and an intermediate warming (more children surviving on that small lot of land, needing to wander off?). I lack the knowledge to put Albigenses into perspective, unfortunately.
As powerful as this article is: Maybe gnosticism as a spiritual and intellectual global tendency hasn´t really had that much power as an historical force, therefore could be put into perspective?
I am grateful for this article, and the comments. In deep appreciation of each article of this author, I hesitate to follow the suggestion that gnosticism be a major force. Pythagoras and Plato show that gnosticism is a spiritual "logical possibility", but hardly ever fully describes the character and work of an individual.
Thinking about nature and climate is natural to man, but only the extremist ignores all other aspects of man and universe and becomes a climate extremist. Is the gnostic just one more extremist? Is then extremism the issue? The un-willingness to keep different concepts floating?
Mind, soul, reason, and body have their beauties and truths, which often conflict with each other. Gnosticism points to the fact (fact?) that man longs for transcendency, the wandering star or the eternal God, and gets lost in this world without his personal beacon to concepts outside of him, beings other than himself. When gnosticism is not extremism, it may be that which reminds us of this longing; this understanding that This World is not enough without that Other World.
Could one argue that gnosticism is one step forward from manichaeanism?
Is QAnon in all its crudity somewhere in the middle of all this?
Doesn´t this fit nicely with Wang Huning´s book on America?
Would a tillerman after harvest, a framer after finishing the house, an entrepreneur after work ever come home to wife and kids with such ideas? Are we psychologically, emotionally, even physically made for the world the advanced West has created? Are we up- or un-rooted?
Whoever criticizes Marxism mostly doesn´t condemn the human desires for security or to provide for others. He only criticizes the extremism of subjecting all other human values, aptly described in the Scriptures and elsewhere, to security only, provided by an authoritarian state (that then solely decides what providing for others is and is not).
Thank you very much. Inspiring as ever.
A horrible counter-idea: Those that are not suitable for hard labor, will sew conflict to survive, as they are hunter-gatherers, not pastoralists nor farmers. It might be tied to biological temperaments and theories of class/caste. If that is true, then those that "touch grass" will try to "eat a**" immediately after (the aphorism of nature is originally referring to the birds and the bees!) and all civility goes out the window.
Kojève was right—we want to be seen. We must, in the parlance of the moment, be represented, acknowledged, given a platform. With Christ we are seen (and loved) and incorporated into a meaningful whole. With Man we are seen, separated and discarded into obscurity (or a furnace).
Interesting that you did not mention Eric Voegelin, who wrote about the gnostic nature of modern mass political movements back in the 1950s. If you are not aware of him, he is a writer you might like.
There is so much to say, alas the comments are not the place. You are right that some modern ideas are Gnostic but only because the traditional religions (taken broadly to include Marxism, etc) are more Gnostic that we (others) suspect and progressive religion is the direct heir.
Wonderful article! I wonder if you've heard of Prof. WOLFGANG SMITH? He's written about extensively about the Neo-Gnosticism of our age:
" [T]he fact is that in the hallowed name of Science we have fallen prey en masse to an ideology. It behooves us then, in the wake of this recognition, to take the next step: to investigate, namely, that underlying ideology itself. There is in fact no other way of attaining authentic discernment in regard to that sovereign worldview which seems nowadays to impose itself on just about everyone, from heads of church and state to college freshmen. . . ."
https://philos-sophia.org/gnosticism-today/
https://philos-sophia.org/reconquest-interview/
When the Gnostics are self-reflective, like how Zizek was a symbol of reason for "the left". Everyone needs to get their act together.
A challenge example against "there was a time with pure reality": Peterson's 10% feminine problem, where no matter one measure by personality tests or by brain scans or even anthropometrics, about 10% of males will be "misclassed" as female in a consistent manner (and vice versa). We went from the fundamentalist "there are only black-and-white genders", which aided the formation of the system today, to the post-modern "there are no such thing as sex", which is equally dethatched from biological reality.
I find the whole situation both tragic and hilarious. Gnosticism, re: 'Blame Shifting', is as self-defeating in its posits as that old chestnut- "There is no such thing as Objective Truth." (Except of course, for that one statement.)
It's interesting to me as well, since I have been online far more than the vast majority of the world (Online since 1995, full-time as a job since 1997), have drunk deep of the Interzone's Polluted waters, and come away with a resounding, 'Meh'. The truth is, Humans in general are simply not mature enough to deal with the abstract, specifically with people at a distance.
Prior to the Internet, this was most visible on its physical analogue, Roads. 'Road Rage' is a thing because people lack the empathy to treat anyone else they are not in *direct* physical proximity to, as a real being. That, and the fact that when we think there will be no real consequences for our actions, we reveal what Shitheaps we all really are. Alcohol can at times & with certain people, reveal this truth as well.
Of course the Gnostics just blame the Evil Demiurge for putting us in this Inherently Evil Material World. Sadly I have never met a Gnostic who could reflect well enough to realize that if the Demiurge is Evil, then how can 'spirit' be inherently Good? Oops.
Not sure any Gnostics said exactly that, but Zoroastrians for instance think that there is good spirit and bad spirit (which shows up in the physical world as good or bad).
Buddhism tries to solve the problem with non-dualism:
http : / / www . bhavanasociety . org / / main / quotes_full_page /
"There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned.
If, monks, there were no unborn… no escape would be discerned
from what is born, become, made, conditioned. But because there
is an unborn..., therefore an escape is discerned from what is
born, become, made, conditioned.”
~ The Buddha
Ud 8:3
Translator: Bhikkhu Bodhi
Udana 8:3
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I am so sorry I forgot about this. I had intended to reply, but I got sidetracked with ongoing health problems.
I don't have the energy now for a full comment, but if you will charitably understand I am not being snarky, in regards to 'Non-Dualism' I say this- There is either the Bus, or Me, not Both.
The bigger issue is the difficulty that humans have in dealing with the limitations of human thought, as it evolved as a pattern matching machine, to deal with survival in primeval times.
https://metarationality.com/rationalism-responses
Hope your health improves soon.