The Little Red Blog

Blaming the Gnostics

{Patrick Deneen’s recent essay on “Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism” is too irritating for me to ignore. For a man whose intelligence I once admired to declare that public health measures undertaken during a pandemic reflect “the [Gnostic] belief that the physical world [is] abhorrent” causes in me the same reaction that Greil Marcus had to Bob Dylan’s “Self-Portrait” album: ‘What is this shit?’}

“[Eric] Voegelin saw the rise of totalitarianism as a potent form of fully political Gnosticism - or the belief in human perfectibility through politics.” (Patrick Deneen)

One grows weary of pointing out that Eric Voegelin’s polemics against “modern Gnosticism” represented a grotesque misunderstanding of the nature of ancient Gnosticism. One grows especially weary when someone who should know better—in this case, Patrick Deneen—repeats Voegelin’s nonsensical claims. For instance, Deneen quotes this with approval from Voegelin’s New Science of Politics:

“With the prodigious advancement of science since the seventeenth century, the new instrument of cognition would become, one is inclined to say inevitably, the symbolic vehicle of Gnostic truth. In the Gnostic speculation of scientism this particular variant replaced the era of Christ by the era of Comte. Scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western society; and the immanentist pride in science is so strong that even the special sciences have left a distinguishable sediment in the variants of salvation.” ¹

“Scientism” may be taken as the attempt, via natural science and materialism, to unlock the operating secrets of the physical universe, the very universe which the Gnostics dismissed as an error, an abortion, or a prison. Gnostics never sought to understand the universe or to control it; they sought to escape it. Idiosyncratically, Voegelin equated (and confused) scientific empiricism with spiritual illumination and metaphysical speculation, perhaps because they all can be considered types of knowledge (“gnosis,” of course, means “knowledge”). Of course, revelation, tradition, and authority are also types of knowledge, but neither Eric Voegelin nor Patrick Deneen object to them.   

In any case, Deneen, inspired by Voegelin, proceeds to slap the “Gnostic” label on Liberalism, Progressivism, and anything else to the left of the political space where Deneen has planted his revanchist flag:

What was once a “reformist left” is today a radicalized messianic party, advancing its gnostic vision amid the ruins of the Christian civilization that once balanced these forces. What we today call “woke” is merely a new articulation of the revolutionary dream that was once vested in Communism. The examples are legion: the wholesale transformation and even elimination of the “traditional” - i.e., natural - family. The effort to define sexuality according to human desire, aided by technological interventions. An understanding of crime solely as a function of the social order. ² The disdain toward those who work in non-gnostic areas of life - the working class.  The effort to impose bio-political dominion over all of human life during the suddenly irrelevant “crisis” of the pandemic was but an extension of this deeply Gnostic impulse - the belief that the physical world was abhorrent, that we could through masking, distancing, and enforced medical intervention eliminate risk of disease and death.

That last claim is so ludicrous as to border on the idiotic, but Deneen isn’t done:

Voegelin’s fears have come true. The progressive ruling class that populates and runs the main institutions of American and European society are now the most thoroughgoing and ideological exemplars of political gnosticism. Their relentless efforts to extirpate any remnant of the predecessor “classical and Christian” society is daily on display. As Voegelin observed, gnostics necessarily become the most vocal anti-Christians, rightly detecting that they are the greatest threat to the “re-divination” of the political order. Those who bear the stamp of that belief - in significant part, in deference to the limits and realities of the created order - become marked as domestic enemies. ³

In his essay, and following Voegelin, Deneen repeatedly refers to “political Gnosticism”: “A feature of political Gnosticism,” he writes, “is its insistent denial of reality, history, and limits.” The adjective “political” carries a lot of weight there, especially given that the ancient Gnostics were not at all political, in part because politics did not exist at the time and in part because the Gnostics believed the physical world to be utterly beyond redemption, which makes dubious the very idea of “political Gnosticism”. Having invented the category, however, Voegelin was free to describe its inhabitants however he liked; as Deneen explains, “Voegelin described gnostics [as being] marked by ‘disregard for the structure of reality, ignorance of facts, fallacious misconstruction and falsification of history, irresponsible opining on the basis of sincere conviction, philosophical illiteracy, spiritual dullness, and agnostic sophistication.’” If Eric Voegelin said it, who are we to question the accuracy of his description?

As to the current issue supposedly at hand in the essay—Russia, America, and the war in Ukraine—Deneen declares that “the war over Ukraine continues to serve the Gnostic ambitions of America’s political classes.” Increasingly unhinged, he goes on to refer to America’s “rotten ruling class,” which he also characterizes as “the laptop class,” which is funny, because you just know that Professor Deneen owns, works on, and carries around with him a laptop. That aside, he frets about nuclear war and about the possibility that “our fellow countrymen and children will be asked to fight and die” for a regime that despises them and their beliefs.  

What any of that has to do with Gnosticism is anyone’s guess. Ancient Gnostics were anathematized and harried out of existence by the Church centuries ago, their writings destroyed, their reputations slandered; some of them, like the Cathars and Albigensians of southern France, were simply murdered (“Kill them all,” was the order famously given; “God will know His own.”) You would think that, after all this time, Gnostics could be allowed to rest in peace rather than being blamed for the woes of modernity.

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Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism (substack.com)

¹ “Sediment in the variants of salvation” is not as well known as Voegelin’s catchy “immanentizing the eschaton,” perhaps because, while the latter phrase is merely obscure, the former is completely unintelligible

² Deneen may have just read the libretto from “West Side Story”: “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!”  

³ Has Patrick Deneen been marked by the Biden regime as a domestic enemy? It doesn’t seem to have hurt his career in academia or on the lecture circuit, much less his book sales.

 

 

Wednesday with Pascal: The Retreat of the Gods

{For an existential Russian blue cat, Pascal is surprisingly obsessed with early Christianity and with its beliefs about Satan and his demons.)

"My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power." (Paul, 1 Corinthians)

Peter Brown is the doyen of scholars of late antiquity and early Christianity. This is from   his The Rise of Western Christendom (second edition, 2003):

In the course of the third century CE, Christian communities expanded rapidly and unexpectedly. There is little room for the myth that Christians were a perpetually hounded minority, literally driven underground by remitting persecution. Nor is there any truth in the more modern myth which presents the advance of Christianity as due to its being a religion of mercy and equality among the underprivileged. Christianity was by no means the religion only of slaves and simple folk. Christians were not innocent of wealth, of slave-owning, or even of power.

The Christian churches of the third century were not places where the world was turned upside down. What was striking about the Christian groups was their intense sense of order and of belonging to a network of similar communities which stretched from one end of the Roman world to the other.

Set against the existing religious landscape, early Christianity was the same as, only different from, its rivals:

What would have struck a contemporary was that the Christian Church was unlike the many trade associations and cultic brotherhoods which proliferated in the Roman cities, in contrast with which the Christian church was a variegated group. High and low, men and women met as equals because equally subject to the overruling law of one God. Those who entered such churches were encouraged to find in them an orderly assembly. Grown men, married women and children, widows and unattached women: each group was carefully separated and seated in their appropriate place. Social differences were not expunged in such gathering; they were, rather, handled with an elaborate and pointed courtesy.

Social distinctions prevailed on earth, but eternity was a different matter. In the metaphysical realm, in heaven and in hell, there would be neither rich nor poor, powerful nor powerless, aristocrat nor plebe:  

The message which was preached in these churches was severe: it was about salvation and about sin. It was through this preaching that Christianity emerged as an unusually democratic and potentially wide-reaching movement. It takes some leap of the modern imagination (which has come to be saturated for centuries by Christian language) to understand the novelty of seeing every human being as subject to the same universal law of God and as equally capable of salvation through the conquest of sin, brought about by baptism followed by permanent and exclusive membership of a unique religious group.

That is all exemplary, and it constituted an advance (at least in theory) towards modernity’s declaration that “All men are created equal”. ¹ However, as Peter Brown makes clear, life on earth remained spiritually perilous:

Salvation meant, first and foremost, salvation from idolatry and from the power of the demons. “The unity of God and the refutation of the idols” were themes which any Christian lay man or woman was free to expound to outsiders. All past tradition was reinterpreted by such teaching. In polytheist belief, the lower ranks of gods had been treated as ambivalent, moody creatures, capable of being spiteful and manipulable on some occasions and generous and powerful on others. Christians developed this division of the gods in a more radical direction. They ascribed to all gods without exception the unreliable qualities of the lowest gods.

Centuries after Jesus, demons persisted and plagued humankind:

These lower gods had usually been spoken of by polytheists as ‘daimones,’ as invisible, intermediary beings. To the Christians, all gods were ‘demons,’ in the sense in which we still use the word ‘demon’. They were not just touchy; they were evil. Christians never denied the existence of the gods. Rather, they treated all gods, even the highest, as malevolent and unreliable. The demons were faceless invisible powers, past masters of the art of illusion. They merely used the traditional rites, myths, and images of polytheism as so many masks, so as to draw the human race ever further away from the worship of the One true God. Seen with Christian eyes in the age of Constantine, the immemorial worship of the gods throughout the Roman world was a grand illusion; the ancient rites to which the emperor Diocletian paid such heavy reverence were no more than a tawdry stage-set, set up by demons so as to stand between mankind and its rightful God.

Part of Christianity’s appeal was its demonstrated ability to overcome and to expel demons:

Nor was this God a distant reality. Christian communities encountered the polytheist world along a front which crackled with demonstrations of divine power. Exorcism, for instance, was a well-known form of religious drama. Christians used this common practice to teach nothing less than a condensed lesson in the direction of world history. Christ, they believed, had already broken the power of the demons in the invisible world. Now his servants could be seen to drive them from their last hiding places on earth. Exorcism rendered palpable the preordained retreat of the gods, as the demons, screaming the names of traditional divinities, withdrew violently from the bodies of the possessed when challenged by the name of Christ.

There is no way, at this historical distance, to assess the various motives behind conversions to early Christianity. However, it seems likely that persuasion, apologetics, and even the Sermon on the Mount produced fewer converts than did convincing displays of “divine power”; Satan and his minions served as convenient foils for Christian exorcists, whose triumphs over unseen (and, perhaps, nonexistent) forces were the ultimate proof of the Christian gospel.  

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¹ This is not unlike the claim that the Christian doctrine of Original Sin has the effect of creating an egalitarian “democracy of sinners”. 

What the early Christians were up against

Books Report

Of interest (at least to me):

The Rise of Western Christendom, by Peter Brown

Peter Brown is the doyen of historians of late antiquity and early Christianity. His 2003 classic The Rise of Western Christendom was a revision and expansion of the original edition published in 1996.

In the 2003 revision, Brown, chronicling “Western Christendom” from 200 CE to 1000 CE, extended his gaze to the east, making clear that Christianity was not originally a western religion:

“Throughout this period, the Christianity of what we now call Europe was only the westernmost variant of a much wider Christian world whose center of gravity lay, rather, in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The eastern Roman Empire was not a remote and unchanging presence of little relevance to the emergence of Latin Catholic Christianity; rather, it (and not Rome) lay at the hub of a worldwide Christianity which stretched as far into Asia as it did into Europe.”

Brown acknowledged that he had been prompted “in light of modern scholarship” (archeological discoveries in particular) to rethink his views on “the conventional Grand Narrative [regarding] the spread of Christianity in late antique and early medieval western Europe.” Here is an example of Brown’s new perspective:

It was in the early Middle Ages, and not earlier, that the Christian imagination took on its peculiarly western shape. There occurred a series of irrevocable “precipitations” of ideas which had existed in diffuse form in late antique Christianity, but which had never been brought together with such decisive clarity of focus until the seventh and eighth centuries. These novel “precipitations” did not occur in late antiquity but in the period between 550 and 750 CE; they mark the true “End of Ancient Christianity”.

These [early medieval] changes are not associated with dramatic changes in doctrine. They are considerably more important than that. They represent nothing less than a slow reorientation of the Christian imagination of the West. It is as if, having traveled all day through a landscape, we looked out the window to discover we had, indeed, entered a different region. Old landmarks are nowhere to be seen. New ones dominate the horizon. There are now large monasteries, pastoral systems devoted to confession and to the saying of Mass for the relief of souls in the other world. We can even detect the first, tentative outlines of the “Christian” cemetery, after centuries where such an institution had been strikingly absent.

It is only by looking back to the beginning of our journey that we realize that these new landmarks (landmarks which we now take for granted as part and parcel of Christianity) had simply not been there when we started out. On issues which intimately affect the Christian view of the afterlife and the day-to-day practice of all believers, we have left behind an ancient Christianity.  

Peter Brown (historian) - Wikipedia

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The Bolsheviks in Power, by Alexander Rabinowitch

Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks in Power focuses on The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd. Rabinowitch, who had previously written Prelude to Revolution and The Bolsheviks Come to Power, was given access, in the 1990s, to previously inaccessible Soviet archives; what he found there “demolishes standard interpretations of the origins of Soviet authoritarianism.”  

What Rabinowitch sought in his research was, essentially, an explanation of how Bolshevism went so wrong so quickly, in the process betraying its own ideals:

If the success of the Bolshevik party in 1917 was at least partly attributable to its open, relatively democratic, and decentralized character and operational style, as seemed clear, how was one to explain the fact that it was so quickly transformed into one of the most highly centralized, authoritarian, political organizations in modern history? Further, if soviets, in 1917, were genuinely democratic, embryonic organizations of popular self-rule, as my studies also suggested, how was it that the independence of soviets and other mass organizations was destroyed so quickly? Most fundamental, perhaps, if the goal of many of the dissatisfied lower-class citizens of Petrograd who spearheaded the subversion of the Provisional Government and facilitated the Bolshevik seizure of power was the creation of an egalitarian society and a democratic-socialist, multiparty political system, and if this goal was shared by many prominent Bolsheviks, as my research also showed, how was one to explain the extraordinary rapidity with which these ideals were subverted and Bolshevik authoritarianism became firmly entrenched?

Rabinowitch’s narrative covers, among much else, “the rapid fall of influential moderate Bolsheviks, the formation of the dreaded Cheka, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Red Terror, the national government's flight to Moscow, and the subsequent rivalry between Russia's new and old capitals.” According to him, “In the first few days after October, amid internal and external counter-revolutionary threats, the ad hoc nature of Bolshevik government could perhaps be justified. Most Bolsheviks viewed the first repressive decrees as extraordinary measures to deal with temporary emergencies.” Instead, those “temporary” measures and tactics shaped the regime that emerged from the wreckage of civil war, and the “emergencies” never disappeared.

Alexander Rabinowitch - Wikipedia

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Grand Hotel Abyss, by Stuart Jeffries

Zach Beauchamp, writing at Vox, recently interviewed the British journalist Stuart Jeffries about the meanings (and misunderstandings) about postmodernism. Postmodernism, of course, is a well-known gateway ideology that leads inevitably to Cultural Marxism; and it turns out that Stuart Jeffries has already plunged down that rabbit hole as well. In 2016, Jeffries published Grand Hotel Abyss, a history of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist (and post-Marxist) thinkers—Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse—widely accused of seeking to destroy Western Civilization by replacing Truth with Relativism, Nihilism, and Critical Thought.

The evil that men do, it has been said, lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Here is how Jeffries’ publisher (Verso Books) describes the book:

Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. (Benjamin was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France.)

From the relative comfort of [postwar] California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One- Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin.

By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.

In the words of Stuart Jeffries, “The Frankfurt School deserves to be freed from its detractors, from those who have wittingly or otherwise misconstrued its works for their own ends. It also deserves to be liberated from the idea that it has nothing to say to us in the new millennium.”

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Zach Beauchamp’s interview of Stuart Jeffries is at: How capitalism undermined postmodernism - Vox Jeffries’ most recent book is Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern

Sunday Sermon: "Song of Bernadette"

"Song of Bernadette"

There was a child named Bernadette
I heard the story long ago
She saw the Queen of Heaven once
And kept the vision in her soul
No one believed what she had seen
No one believed what she heard
But there were sorrows to be here
And mercy, mercy in this world

So many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine
Torn by what we've done and can't undo
I just want to hold you, come on let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do

We've been around, we fall, we fly
We mostly fall, we mostly run
And every now and then we try
To mend the damage that we've done
Tonight, tonight I just can't rest
I've got this joy inside my breast
To think that I did not forget that child
That song of Bernadette

So many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine
Torn by what we've done and can't undo
I just want to hold you, won't let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do

I just want to hold you, come on let me hold you
Like Bernadette would do

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Bill Elliott / Jennifer Warnes / Leonard Cohen

Song of Bernadette lyrics © Music & Media Int'l, Inc, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Jennifer Warnes version: (3) Song of Bernadette (Digitally Remastered) - YouTube

Aaron Neville & Linda Ronstadt version: (3) Song Of Bernadette - YouTube

Jenny Sings Lenny

Saturday Lecture: The Role of the Individual in History

(In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Georgi Plekhanov was considered the leading theoretician of Russia's Marxist Left. Lenin himself granted Plekhanov pride of place, even though Plekhanov broke with Lenin and opposed the 1917 Bolshevik takeover. In the following excerpt, Plekhanov responds to critics who claimed that Marx’s “historical determinism” (or “economic determinism”) excludes any role in history for individual agency, just as determinism undermines the idea of free will. Plekhanov insists that determinism and agency are not incompatible.}   

G.V. Plekhanov, from “The Role of the Individual in History”:

[Critics of] dialectical materialism regarded it as a doctrine which sacrifices all other factors to the economic “factor” and reduces the role of the individual in history to nothing. Materialists began to be accused of betraying leanings towards quietism even before they had worked out their dialectical conception of Nature and of history.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that the materialist conception of the human will is quite compatible with the most vigorous practical activity. At all events, this has been the case in history so far. Men who have repudiated free will have often excelled all their contemporaries in strength of will and have asserted their will to the utmost. History shows that even fatalism need not be a hindrance to energetic practical action; on the contrary, in certain epochs it was a psychologically necessary basis for such action.

Those who think that believing that a certain series of events is inevitable is sufficient to eliminate all motivation to affect, or to counteract, such events are very much mistaken. Here, everything depends on whether [I believe that] my activities constitute an inevitable link in the chain of inevitable events. If they do, then I waver less and the more resolute are my actions. There is nothing surprising in this: when we say that a certain individual regards his activities as an inevitable link in the chain of inevitable events, we mean, among other things, that for this individual, lack of free will is tantamount to incapability of inaction, and that this lack of free will is reflected in his mind as the impossibility of acting differently from the way he is acting. This is precisely the psychological mood that can be expressed in the celebrated words of Luther: “Here I stand, I can do no other,” and thanks to which men display the most indomitable energy and perform the most astonishing feats.

When the consciousness of my lack of free will presents itself to me only in the form of the complete subjective and objective impossibility of acting differently from the way I am acting, and when, at the same time, my actions are to me the most desirable of all other possible actions, then, in my mind, necessity becomes identified with freedom and freedom with necessity; and then, I am unfree only in the sense that I cannot disturb this identity between freedom and necessity, I cannot oppose one to the other, I cannot feel the restraint of necessity. But such a lack of freedom is at the same time its fullest manifestation.

Again, being conscious of the absolute inevitability of a given phenomenon can only increase the energy of a man who sympathizes with it and who regards himself as one of the forces which called it into being. If such a man, conscious of the inevitability of this phenomenon, folded his arms and did nothing, he would display his ignorance.

But what effect will the consciousness of the necessity of a given phenomenon have upon a strong man who does not sympathize with it and resists its taking place? Here the situation is somewhat different. It is very possible that it will cause the vigor of his resistance to relax. But when do the opponents of a given phenomenon become convinced that it is inevitable? When the circumstances favorable to it are very numerous and very strong. The fact that its opponents realize that the phenomenon is inevitable, and the relaxation of their energy, are merely manifestations of the force of circumstances favorable to it. These manifestations, in their turn, are a part of the favorable circumstances.

But the vigor of resistance will not be relaxed among all the opponents; among some of them the consciousness that the phenomenon is inevitable will cause it to grow and become transformed into the vigor of despair. History in general, and the history of Russia in particular, provides not a few instructive examples of this sort of vigor.

A French historian has written, “At any given moment a man may, by the sudden decision of his will, introduce into the course of events a new, unexpected and changeable force, which may alter that course, but which cannot be measured itself owing to its changeability.” It must not be thought that “sudden decisions” of human will occur without cause. That would be too naive. Rather, the mental and moral qualities of a man who is playing a more or less important role in public life, his talent, knowledge, resoluteness or irresoluteness, courage, or cowardice, etc., cannot help having a marked influence on the course and outcome of events; and yet these qualities cannot be explained solely by the general laws of development of a nation; they are always, and to a considerable degree, acquired as a result of the action of what may be called the accidents of private life.

Does not this conclusion contradict the conception of a social development conforming to laws? No, not in the least. The effect of personal peculiarities is undeniable; but no less undeniable is the fact that such could occur only in the given social conditions. By virtue of particular traits of their character, individuals can influence the fate of society. Sometimes this influence is very considerable; but the possibility of exercising this influence, and its extent, are determined by the form of organization of society and by the relation of forces within it. The character of an individual is a “factor” in social development only where, when, and to the extent that social relations permit it to be such.

Georgi Plekhanov - Wikipedia

For what it's worth, I highly recommend Plekhanov's "On the So-Called Religious Seekings in Russia," first published in 1909: On the So-Called Religious Seekings in Russia by Plekhanov 1909 (marxists.org) It is far more intelligent and far more entertaining than Lenin's crude atheistic vitriol. 

Georgi Plekhanov, aka 'Carnac the Magnificent'

A Troika of Deplorables

(To be clear: the authors referenced below—William Lind, Michael Anton, Timothy Gordon, and Michael Robillard—may be fine, decent human beings. It is only their political/ideological views which I deplore.}

According to William Lind (at The American Conservative), modernity is, among many other flaws, terminally ugly:

A curious aspect of today’s America is its combination of wealth and ugliness. In the past, money usually led to beauty: to classical, baroque, and art deco buildings, to the music of Biber, C.P.E. Bach, and Boccherini, to the art of Michelangelo, Titian, and Gainsborough. Now, money buys decadent art, painful music, and alienating architecture. Most prominent architects belong to the “turd in the punchbowl” school; they delight in forcing something disharmonious into a previously charming neighborhood. America’s commercial districts, with their endless strip malls and parking lots, have to be among the ugliest ever built. A southern mayor, speaking at a Congress on the New Urbanism, showed a slide of one of his city’s main streets and said, “I call this our corridor of crap.”

One need not share Mr. Lind’s ideology to agree with his premise that a good deal of the American landscape has been uglified. The disagreement revolves around who, or what, is responsible for the uglification:

Three reasons why we are awash in ugliness stand out. The first is the abolition of the concept of beauty by relativism. There are no objective standards. Everyone’s opinion is of equal value, and there are nothing but opinions.

A second reason is a change in the means of cultural transmission. Today, electronic screens are the means of cultural transmission, and they drive morals, aesthetics, and culture ever lower. Why? Because money is to be made by appealing to the widest audience, which means the least educated, crassest, and most vulgar. Relativism having abolished all standards, there are no limits on how low taste dare go.

A third force promoting ugliness: ideology, specifically the ideology of cultural Marxism, currently parading itself in the Emperor’s clothes of “wokeism.” 

Good Christ, does anyone on the Right know anything about “cultural Marxism”?

Anyone who can discuss the uglification of America without mentioning the word “capitalism” is either disingenuous or obtuse.

The Ugliness of Everything - The American Conservative

Michael Anton is one of the Right’s intellectual lights, which gives you some idea of the darkness on that edge of town. Nevertheless, Anton is not wrong when he explains:

The “socialism” with which we are most familiar today—high and progressive taxation, a generous welfare state, nationalization of key services such as health care, an expansive list of state-guaranteed “rights,” combined with the retention of private property and private ownership of most means of production—Marx and Engels deride as “bourgeois socialism,” i.e., not only not the real thing but fundamentally closer to bourgeois capitalism than to true socialism, much less communism.

In short: bourgeois socialism is not true socialism, much less communism.

Now, if only Anton had the sense to realize, or the honesty to admit, that it is therefore preposterous to equate American liberals’ efforts to bolster the welfare state (social safety net) with Marxism or Bolshevism. Alas, despite his having spelled it out, neither Anton nor his conservative colleagues seem able to understand, or willing to recognize, the difference between Communism and what is called in much of the world “democratic Socialism”; and so, on they go, Anton and his ilk, prattling about gulags and tyranny, pretending to be persecuted, marginalized, and silenced while commanding impressive speaking fees, book contracts, and prestigious think-tank fellowships.

Socialism and the Great Reset - The American Mind

Finally, at The American Mind, Timothy Gordon and Michael Robillard do their utmost to convince young readers not to go to college. Their rationale is as simple as it is specious:

The modern university has succumbed, in the name of the triple-headed god of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), to the hegemonic ideology of woke intersectionality. All decisions about staffing, curriculum, and student life must be minutely inspected for their adherence to dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy. Despite an ever-growing list of instances of campus hysteria, cancellation of conservative voices, and violent harassment of heterodox university speakers, the unquestioned cultural narrative persists: One must go to college in order to flourish as a full person in society.

Nor is this calamitous situation limited to the humanities; “Even traditionally rigorous courses of study have been blighted. Woke university professors have declared mathematics “a field dominated by whiteness and racism.” At the University of Toronto, one can now take a “Liberating Mathematics” course which seeks to “re-imagine” mathematics, offering the mathematically incompetent a handy excuse in the form of a “daring critique” of math, allegedly delegitimizing it as having drawn predominantly from “the experiences and narratives of men.” In formal logic, scholars have declared “there is much more to be done–especially on decolonizing our curriculum.” 

The authors wax predictably grim over the prospect of academic decolonization:

This woke takeover of the hard sciences is reinforced by an entrenched set of professorial and administrative hiring quotas, overbearing and overbroad institutional incentives and disincentives, and an oppressive campus culture submerged in the now-unquestionable presuppositions of woke orthodoxy. All this has engendered a reinvigorated cult of scientism.

Gordon and Robillard then briefly discuss Stalinism and Lysenkoism, thus linking American universities to Stalinist atrocities. They conclude by urging, “We need to encourage STEM-inclined Zoomers to circumvent the college-industrial complex altogether, to marry young and learn a trade, and to get on with their lives in a world hopefully soon delivered from woke-mathematics and nature-hating scientism.”

The authors have a book due for release soon from Regnery Press, titled Don’t Go to College: A Case for Revolution. The spirit of the Sixties lives on, albeit in unexpected quarters: “tune in” to Fox News and Infowars, “turn on” the woke liberal elite and the nefarious Deep State, and “drop out” of modernity to find your own, doubtless very different, Benedict Option.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages. The cost of one admission is your mind.  

 The Triumph of Scientism - The American Mind

The Three Horses of the Woke Apocalypse

Wednesday with Pascal: The Limits of Reason

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has only recently learned that his namesake was one of the great Catholic philosophers of late medieval/early modern times. Inspired, or at least intrigued, by that realization, Pascal has been browsing the work of other Catholic thinkers, especially the anti-Enlightenment contingent which included Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Juan Donoso Cortes. Less well known is the Spanish theologian Jaime Luciano Balmes, from whose book European Civilization the following excerpt, lightly edited, is taken. Balmes’ intent was to demonstrate the superiority of Catholicism (with its emphasis on Church authority) over Protestantism (which emphasized individual conscience and understanding). For Balmes, it was Protestantism which had led, inevitably, to the secularization and hubris of the modern world.}

Jaime Luciano Balmes:

If  you  deprive  the  human  mind  of  the  support  of  authority  of  some  kind  or other,  on  what  can  it  depend?  Abandoned  to  its  own  delirious  dreams,  it  is forced  again  into  the  gloomy  paths  which  led  the  philosophers  of  the  ancient schools  to  chaos.  Reason  and  experience  are  here  agreed.  If  you  substitute private  judgment for  authority, all the great  questions  respecting  God  and  man  remain  without  solution.  All  the  difficulties  are  left;  the  mind  is  in  darkness,  and  seeks  in  vain  for  a  light  to  guide it  in  safety :  stunned  by  the  voices  of  a  hundred  schools,  who  dispute  without being  able  to  throw  any  light  on  the  subject,  it  relapses  into  a  state  of  discouragement  and  prostration.  Doubt,  pyrrhonism,  and  indifference  become  the  lot  of  the  greatest  minds;  vain  theories,  hypothetical  systems,  and  dreams  take  possession  of  men  of  more  moderate  abilities ;  the  ignorant  are  reduced  to  superstitions  and  absurdities.

Let  the  human  mind  enjoy  all  its  rights;  let  it  boast  of  possessing  that  spark of  divinity  called  the  intellect;  let  it  pass  over  all  nature  in  triumph,  observing all  the  beings  by  which  it  is  surrounded,  and  congratulate  itself  on  its  own  immense  superiority,  in  the  midst  of  the  wonders  with  which  it  has  known  how to embellish  its  abode;  let  it  point  out,  as  proofs  of  its  strength  and  grandeur,  the changes  which  are  everywhere  worked  by  its  presence;  by  its  intellectual  force and  boldness  it  has  acquired  the  complete  mastery  over  nature.  Let  us  acknowledge  the  dignity  and  elevation  of  our  minds,  but  let  us  not  forget  our  weakness  and  defects.  Why  should  we  deceive ourselves  by  fancying  that  we  know  what  we  are  really  ignorant  of?  Why forget  the  inconstancy  and  variableness  of  our  minds,  and  conceal  the  fact,  that with  respect  to  many  things,  even  of  those  with  which  we  are  supposed  to  be acquainted,  we  have  but  confused  ideas?  How  delusive  is  our  knowledge,  and what  exaggerated  notions  we  have  of  our  progress  in  information?  Does  not one  day  contradict  what  another  had  affirmed?  Time  runs  its  course,  laughs at  our  predictions,  destroys  our  plans,  arid  clearly  shows  how  vain  are  our projects.

What  have  those  geniuses  who  have  descended  to  the  foundations  of  science, and  risen  by  the  boldest  flights  to  the  loftiest  speculations,  told  us?  After having  reached  the  utmost  limits  of  the  space  which  it  is  permitted  to  the  human  mind  to  range  over, after  having  trodden  the  most  secret  paths  of  science, and  sailed  on  the  vast  ocean  of  moral  and  physical  nature,  the  greatest  minds of  all  ages  have  returned  dissatisfied  with  the  results.  They  have  seen  a  beautiful  illusion  appear  before  their  eyes, the  brilliant  image  which  enchanted them  has  vanished;  when  they  thought  they  were  about  to  enter  a  region  of light,  they  have  found  themselves  surrounded  with  darkness,  and  they  have viewed  with  affright  the  extent  of  their  ignorance.  It  is  for  this  reason  that the  greatest  minds  have  so  little  confidence  in  the  strength  of  the  human  intellect,  although  they  cannot  but  be  fully  aware  that  they  are  superior  to  other men.  The  sciences,  in  the  profound  observation  of  Pascal,  have  two  extremes which  meet  each  other:  the  first  is  the  pure  natural  state  of  ignorance  in  which men  are  at  their  birth;  the  other  extreme  is that  at  which  great  minds  arrive when,  having  reached  the  utmost  extent  of  human  knowledge,  they  find  that they  know  nothing,  and  that  they  are  still  in  the  same  state  of  ignorance  as  at first.

If the human mind has conceived too great an esteem for itself, let it study its own  history, in  order  to  see  and  understand  how  little  security  is  to  be  found in  its  own  strength.  Abounding  in  systems,  inexhaustible  in  subtleties;  as ready  in  conceiving  a  project  as  incapable  of  maintaining  it;  full  of  ideas  which arise,  agitate,  and  destroy  each  other,  like  the  insects  which  abound  in  lakes; now  raising  itself  on  the  wings  of  sublime  inspiration,  and  now  creeping  like  a reptile  on  the  face  of  the  earth; as  able  and  willing  to  destroy  the  works  of others  as  it  is  impotent  to  construct  any  durable  ones  of  its  own;  urged  on by  the  violence  of  passion,  swollen  with  pride,  confounded  by  the  infinite variety  of  objects  which  present  themselves  to  it; confused  by  so  many  false lights  and  so  many  deceptive  appearances,  the  human  mind,  when  left  entirely to  itself,  resembles  those  brilliant  meteors  which  dart  at  random  through  the immensity  of  the  heavens,,  assume  a  thousand  eccentric  forms,  send  forth  a thousand  sparks,  dazzle  for  a  moment  by  their  fantastic  splendor,  and  disappear without  leaving  even  a  reflected  light  to  illuminate  the  darkness.

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Jaime Balmes - Wikipedia (1810—1848)

Monday Musings

Bradley Thompson, the self-styled “Redneck Intellectual” (at Substack) is perplexed by the (supposed) continued appeal of Communism. He simply cannot understand “how and why highly educated people could still become fanatical followers of a philosophy that is directly responsible for the murders of over 100 million people over the course of just 70 years. How is it possible,” Thompson asks, “that, despite the one-party rule, secret police, arrests, propaganda, censorship, ethnic cleansing, purges, show trials, reeducation camps, gulags, firing squads, and man-made famine, men and women could still think that communism is a noble ideal?”

Such questions are fair enough, but, having asked them, Thompson does not even attempt to answer them. Instead, he simply hammers away at the evil of Marxism and the perversity of those who adhere to it: “Marx should be viewed first and foremost as a moral philosopher—as a moralist who appealed to man’s worst impulse: envy. There is nothing noble or attractive about Marxian socialism. Marxism is, by definition, totalitarian and genocidal by motive, design, practice, and result.”

Yet there are still people attracted to Marxism, even though, Thompson insists, “The political goal of communism is to annihilate freedom in all realms of life—economic, social, and intellectual. The theory of socialism necessitates the use of coercive force in practice. The Marxist ideal necessarily leads to censorship, secret police, reeducation camps, Gulags, and genocide in practice. Its violent and bloody history is evident for all to see. Marxian socialism begins and ends with violence and destruction.”

Again, this is all well and good, but does nothing to explain the continued appeal of Marxist theories. Rather than attempting to understand, Thompson instead issues a diatribe against anyone who does not share his Manichaean view of communism: “In the end,” he declaims, “all decent people must see that Marxism is evil—absolutely evil. It is a philosophy of mass murder, which is precisely what it has done wherever it has held power. Marxism necessarily leads to Stalinism, to Maoism, to Pol-Potism to Kim Il Sungism, to Castroism, to dictatorship, to the police state, to terror, to show trials, to the gulag, to genocide, and finally to the grave. In other words, the problem with Marxism is . . . Marxism.” He adds emphatically, “And don’t ever forget it!”

Despite the best efforts of the Redneck Intellectual, the riddle of Marx’s appeal to “highly educated people” remains unsolved. Either there is more to Marx than C. Bradley Thompson recognizes, or there is some mysterious correlation between being “highly educated” and being willing to embrace dictatorship, the police state, terror, show trials, the gulag, and genocide. Thompson, a highly educated person himself (Brown, Princeton, Harvard, Clemson, and the University of London), seems qualified to investigate the phenomenon; but he settles for vitriol rather than analysis, which gets us nowhere.

Understanding Marxism (substack.com)

Bradley Thompson - Wikipedia

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Deathbots, anyone?

Combining the imagination of Philip K. Dick with the passion of Nikolai Fedorov, modern technology will soon enable your “persona” (not you) “to live forever in the metaverse after your physical body shuffles off this mortal coil.” What and where is the “metaverse”? You do not need to know, and why would you even care? You will, after all, be dead.

Ronald Bailey (at Reason) explains, “By applying an unspecified artificial intelligence (A.I.), Live Forever”—a product/service of the “metaverse platform Somnium Space”—would instantiate a digital avatar of the user based on vast amounts of information collected as he or she interacts in Somnium Space through virtual reality headsets, controllers, and, eventually, full-body haptic suits with motion capture and biometric monitoring. Data on facial expressions, body language, gait, voice, conversations, and character traits would allow the avatar to walk, talk, and react just like the deceased user. Descendants and friends could interact with the avatar in a perpetually accessible digital seance years and decades later.”

I am--what is the word? Oh yes: gobsmacked. Let us continue with Bailey’s narrative:

At least initially, Live Forever avatars would be deathbots, or personalized chatbots based on training data voluntarily provided by specific dead individuals. "Maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it's actually A.I.," Somnium Space CEO Artur Sychov told Vice in April. "That's the goal." But "with the progression of A.I." over time, Sychov added, "we can recreate you better and better" using the same stored data.

According to Russian philosopher/theologian/futurist Nikolai Fedorov, “Our task is to make nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.” According to Philip K. Dick, in his story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (filmed as Total Recall), "Anything you think can be used against you." Good luck with the chatbots/deathbots; good luck with the whole immortality project. I'll settle for this one lifetime; the future will just have to get by without me.

'Live Forever' Plans To Offer Immortality in the Metaverse (reason.com)

Sunday Sermon: Who'll Stop the Rain?

Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Who’ll Stop the Rain?”

Long as I remember the rain been comin' down
Clouds of mystery pourin' confusion on the ground
Good men through the ages tryin' to find the sun
And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?

I went down Virginia, seekin' shelter from the storm
Caught up in the fable, I watched the tower grow
Five Year Plans and New Deals, wrapped in golden chains
And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?

Heard the singers playin', how we cheered for more
The crowd had rushed together, tryin' to keep warm
Still the rain kept pourin', fallin' on my ears
And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: John C. Fogerty

Who'll Stop the Rain lyrics © Jondora Music

CCR original: Creedence Clearwater Revival: Who'll Stop The Rain - YouTube

Margot Cotten cover: Who'll Stop The Rain - Creedence Clearwater Revival One Woman Band Cover - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: In Search of Gnosis

“It would be more correct to speak of Christianity as a branch of Gnosticism than to characterize Gnosticism as a Christian sect.” (Paul Carus)

Paul Carus, from “Gnosticism in Its Relation to Christianity”:

Gnosis was metaphysical or mystical insight, which comes in an unaccountable way by inspiration. But the main characteristic feature of Gnosticism was psychological and soteriological. Almost all Gnostic philosophers and teachers from Philo down to Plotinus were dualists who looked upon the soul as a spiritual entity temporarily entangled in the world of matter and longing for a return to its source. Material existence was in their opinion the cause of sin and evil, and to be delivered from the bondage of the body was the final aim of the soul and an end devoutly to be wished for.

The Gnostic aspirations were partly lofty and philosophical, partly ethical, going to the extreme of rigorous asceticism, partly fantastical, evincing a belief in visions and miracles after the fashion of common conjurers.

Gnosticism is commonly regarded as a Christian sect, but it is of far wider significance, and its proper appreciation throws a new light on the origin of Christianity and the early history of the Church. Gnosticism was a religious movement characterized by a seeking for Gnosis or enlightenment for the purpose of finding salvation. Its interests were concentrated upon the psychological problems of the soul and the metaphysical problems of the origin and end of the world, and when we bear in mind that in all its essential features it antedates Christianity we shall at once recognize it as a period of Sturm und Drang which immediately preceded the establishment of the Christian Church and paved the way for the acceptance of a religion whose claims and ideals, in contrast to the national religions of antiquity, were not only universal and supernational but at the same time personal and spiritual.

Gnosticism was full of vagaries, but it was possessed of a high ideal, and we shall appreciate its good sides if we regard the movement as a problem which stirred the human mind, rather than as a solution. The ideal which Gnosticism presented was great, but the efforts made by Gnostics for its realization must upon the whole be regarded as failures, and the Christianity of the Church is the result of the spiritual fermentation of Gnosticism. Christianity offers an answer to the questions of Gnosticism and is in this respect itself a Gnostic movement. Christians for a long time actually called themselves Gnostics, and some Church fathers, such as Clement, used the name Gnostic in the sense of Christian.

It was natural that the Christian Church, with increase of power, should begin to condemn all non-Christian Gnostics. By and by the very name began to be repudiated, and the kinship that obtained between the Christian solution of the religious problem and other Gnostic solutions lead to the idea of treating Gnostic teachers as heretical Christians.

While pointing out the pre-Christian existence of the Gnostic movement, we do not intend to slur over the differences that exist between the pre-Christian and post-Christian Gnosis; on the contrary, while we insist on their historical continuity, we would emphasize their difference, which is obvious and striking. The spread of Christianity marks an epoch in the evolution of the conception of the Gnosis inasmuch as the Christian Gospel forced a new issue upon the various Gnostic schools which could not be left unheeded.

The methods of the Gnostics resembled a chase after will-o'-the-wisps, and their results were mostly vain speculations and vague dreams. Apollos and Simon Magus may have been more brilliant and more ingenious than Peter and Paul; but the latter were more sober. There were enough most lamentable vagaries current among the early Christians. There was the belief in the imminent advent of Christ shared even by Paul, to which superstition many thousands fell victims by neglecting the duties of life. There was the communism of the Church at Jerusalem which made of their members destitute beggars, for whose benefit collections had to be taken up among the wealthier Christians of Greece. There was the chiliastic notion, with its apocalyptic excrescences. There was the belief in the resurrection of the material body from the grave, the restitution of the very flesh itself, most seriously insisted upon even in the Apostolic creed. But in spite of all these aberrations Christianity, as compared with the theories of the Gnostic teachers, was sobriety itself.

Christianity is not an accidental formation; it is a necessary result of the evolution of thought. The history of the Church is, especially in its beginning and during the Middle Ages, a sad medley of vagaries, intrigues, usurpations, and crimes, but through all the balderdash of dogmatic speculation, of mystical trash, of visionary theorizing, even in spite of the heresy trials, Bartholomew slaughters, and autos-da-fe, there goes the red thread of an upward aspiration which slowly, very slowly, leads to better and clearer conceptions, in constant search of the true Gnosis.

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Paul Carus - Wikipedia