Yeah, I always thought this was a pretty stupid way to go about messaging. Especially someone as smart as Feser should not be engaging in this, even if he does point to some superficial similarities. The thing is a) even with some (fewer than there are differences) similarities in how they view human nature, only James Lindsay is annoying enough to try and actually say they're one in the same and are genealogically related so why bother pointing it out and b) it being "gnostic" in some ways doesn't make it false, nor do most people even care if it's gnostic. Attack it's veracity, not it's imagined shared characteristics with ancient religions. Good article.
"In fact, if the apostles of woke have a metaphysical disposition at all, it’s much more optimistic than Feser et. al portray. Far from rejecting the material world, the woke think we can create a worldly paradise if only we can extirpate inequality and discrimination."
This is the crucial difference between leftism and gnosticism. Leftists are materialists and optimists through and through. They are levelers who want to flatten the cosmos down into raw sensuality and material factors, eliminating the spiritual and hierarchical dimension altogether. The leftist parody of theosis is to tear down the "idols" of any kind of higher authority intermediate between God and man so that everyone can become relatively divine by having nothing above them. It is more of a heresy deriving from the protestant impulse than anything to do with Gnosticism. It's actually the opposite of what the gnostics were trying to do, which was to accomplish a segregation of the material from the spiritual, strengthening the hierarchy.
It's true however that Gnosticism has a satanic, antinomian undercurrent to it. There's a kind of horseshoe effect where if you see the spiritual as reducible to the material you disenchant the world, but if you see the spiritual as too divorced from the material then you end up back at just disenchanting reality again because the spiritual is inaccessible. Because they see this world as the creation of the Demiurge, and not the ultimate God, Gnostics tend towards extreme pessimism and life-denial. If this world is entirely severed from God then it is of no consequence to the moral life whatsoever, and like leftists Gnostics come to see all existing power-structures as manifestations of darkness. Recently, the leftists have even come to support the power-structure through a strange inversion, whereas Gnostics, even more than anarchists or libertarians, have a consistent suspicion towards all forms of power. You can see this for example with David Ike, to my knowledge the most influential modern gnostic.
Truly orthodox Christianity also seeks to transcend the material world, not because matter is inherently evil, but because it becomes evil when it is the highest aim of man. Seeing the life of this world as a form of initiation into eternal mysteries instituted by God, orthodox Christianity avoids the pessimism of the Gnostics, the materialism of the leftists, and the antinomianism of both.
I think it is not wrong to see politics as a manifestation of corrupt theology, but you're correct that conservatives usually misunderstand the spiritual significance of the ideologies they oppose, usually because their own spiritual framework is disoriented.
I thought this was terrific. The more political commentary - or any commentary - wanders off into abstract speculation the more I find myself muttering, 'Yeah, maybe. Or maybe this is another Just So story'. I much prefer this grounded, arguably prosaic approach to one that is deep and meaningless.
I agree with the general sentiment that this was a good essay. But I'll play devil's advocate for a moment: conservatives are misidentifying a real philosophical attitude which is the common cause of all the things they call "Gnostic". There is a human tendency to pursue idealism at the expense of realism, and some people are more prone to this than others. Many white antiracists fall into this camp, hence the conservative identification of this unbounded idealism with "woke". You're correct to point out that the more important cause of woke is simple who-whom tribalism, which is what motivates most non-white wokesters, and this is fundamentally non-ideological.
Oh, I forgot to finish my point. The conservative instinct is somewhat correct, as you'd expect: to be a sincere woke white person, you'd have to be delusionally idealistic. But their intellects aren't sharp enough to assign causality properly, or use the right words, and they fundamentally refuse to understand how black people think differently from them. Plus, piety signaling is how you climb the status ladder in the Christian tribe.
Good article. I think what people are seeing as gnosticism is actually the way in which the enlightenment used the garden myth. The negative enlightenment, a la hobbles, took the garden as "the state of nature", and says that human nature originated as fallen, and only civilisation can save it. The positive enlightenment, a la Rosseou, says that the original humanity is edenic, and it becomes corrupted from social structures fron which we need liberation. In either case, the fall and restoration narrative is brought into the material realm, and dealt with societally. This is a much more genralisable application of heresiology to politics.
Great article! i know how annoying it is when the average midwit conservative blames the problems of the world on the typical antagonists of their never-given- second-thought-in-their-lives worldview, but I'd like to give some nuances to this topic as the spiritual and the metaphysical are big topics and we have only a small picture of them. First I'd like to recognize that conservatives had a good intuition in seeing a gnostic tendency to transgress limits or boundaries, this is what the occultist Rudolf Steiner recognized as the luciferic impulse, this tendency towards egocentrism, individualism, revolution against the authorities and everything that tries to get rid of what chains one into rules is one which we can find in many traditions, although not so radical in all cases. Both gnosticism and leftism (in every period since it's existence) tend to a transgression of boundaries. In gnosticism we find an impulse to repudiate the material for its limitations on the spirit and the left in general has a disdain for authoritarianism and the state. Wokism has a disdain for essentialism or any categorization that places people into boxes such as gender, race, nationality, etc., they consider all of this as fascistic and an attempt against their individual (egoic/narcissist) desires. Definitions are boundaries. That's why they have adopted this social constructivist in opposition to realism/essentialism, in the end is just the good ol' nominalism from the middle ages. But there's also a second spiritual force which Steiner considered as an ahrimanic force, which is diametrically opposite to the luciferic impulse, it tends towards materialism, imposing boundaries, negation of the spiritual, and more things. The contemporary times would be more ahrimanic, as they tend towards a more physicalist, scientistic worldview and for that reason has transhumanism as it's modern religion. In fact, its an inversion of gnosticism, because instead of looking for salvation in the inmaterial it looks for it now by trapping us in more matter, ironically. There is this psychic pattern flowing through our unconscious that wants to be free of all the restrictions we have as embodied beings, but because we don't believe in the spiritual anymore we will create it. So in part i agree with you that modern wokism does not base it's ideology on gnosticism, that would be ridiculous and historically inaccurate, but the psychic patterns seem the same. In conclusion, i think conservatives have confounded the form with the content (gnosticism instead of the luciferic impulse) and in your case you mistook the content with the form (gnosticism as centered in the spiritual instead of the patterns that equates them in their goals). Nonetheless, i find your clarification quite prudent so that people know how to distinguish between things and learn how to see the little details that make topics like this not so simple. 👍
I think what's also rooted in gnostic tendency of our corrupt souls is denial of hierarchy, authority, strict rulers. See the movie Wish or alike. Also, all those "atheists" like CosmicSkeptic who say things such as "God can't be real because of so much evil in this world, if He exists, He is so cruel I deny Him". It's a heresy that seems to be a reaction to evil in this world. Another reason is drift towards pelagianism.
You know that the woke people aren’t the only ones who believe in blank slates right? Aristotle famously held it by saying what is in the intellect was first in the senses. To act as if it’s a novel ideal is not true. And in Fesers very article about Gnosticism he concedes that wokeism isn’t quite the same as Gnosticism because it’s more of atheist tint of Gnosticism but it has a lot of the same impulses
Thanks so much for writing this. It was sorely needed!
Yeah, I always thought this was a pretty stupid way to go about messaging. Especially someone as smart as Feser should not be engaging in this, even if he does point to some superficial similarities. The thing is a) even with some (fewer than there are differences) similarities in how they view human nature, only James Lindsay is annoying enough to try and actually say they're one in the same and are genealogically related so why bother pointing it out and b) it being "gnostic" in some ways doesn't make it false, nor do most people even care if it's gnostic. Attack it's veracity, not it's imagined shared characteristics with ancient religions. Good article.
"In fact, if the apostles of woke have a metaphysical disposition at all, it’s much more optimistic than Feser et. al portray. Far from rejecting the material world, the woke think we can create a worldly paradise if only we can extirpate inequality and discrimination."
This is the crucial difference between leftism and gnosticism. Leftists are materialists and optimists through and through. They are levelers who want to flatten the cosmos down into raw sensuality and material factors, eliminating the spiritual and hierarchical dimension altogether. The leftist parody of theosis is to tear down the "idols" of any kind of higher authority intermediate between God and man so that everyone can become relatively divine by having nothing above them. It is more of a heresy deriving from the protestant impulse than anything to do with Gnosticism. It's actually the opposite of what the gnostics were trying to do, which was to accomplish a segregation of the material from the spiritual, strengthening the hierarchy.
It's true however that Gnosticism has a satanic, antinomian undercurrent to it. There's a kind of horseshoe effect where if you see the spiritual as reducible to the material you disenchant the world, but if you see the spiritual as too divorced from the material then you end up back at just disenchanting reality again because the spiritual is inaccessible. Because they see this world as the creation of the Demiurge, and not the ultimate God, Gnostics tend towards extreme pessimism and life-denial. If this world is entirely severed from God then it is of no consequence to the moral life whatsoever, and like leftists Gnostics come to see all existing power-structures as manifestations of darkness. Recently, the leftists have even come to support the power-structure through a strange inversion, whereas Gnostics, even more than anarchists or libertarians, have a consistent suspicion towards all forms of power. You can see this for example with David Ike, to my knowledge the most influential modern gnostic.
Truly orthodox Christianity also seeks to transcend the material world, not because matter is inherently evil, but because it becomes evil when it is the highest aim of man. Seeing the life of this world as a form of initiation into eternal mysteries instituted by God, orthodox Christianity avoids the pessimism of the Gnostics, the materialism of the leftists, and the antinomianism of both.
I think it is not wrong to see politics as a manifestation of corrupt theology, but you're correct that conservatives usually misunderstand the spiritual significance of the ideologies they oppose, usually because their own spiritual framework is disoriented.
I thought this was terrific. The more political commentary - or any commentary - wanders off into abstract speculation the more I find myself muttering, 'Yeah, maybe. Or maybe this is another Just So story'. I much prefer this grounded, arguably prosaic approach to one that is deep and meaningless.
More recently, I’ve seen accusations of Gnosticism limited more specifically to transgenderism rather than social justice in general.
Wow, excellent article.
Thank you!
I agree with the general sentiment that this was a good essay. But I'll play devil's advocate for a moment: conservatives are misidentifying a real philosophical attitude which is the common cause of all the things they call "Gnostic". There is a human tendency to pursue idealism at the expense of realism, and some people are more prone to this than others. Many white antiracists fall into this camp, hence the conservative identification of this unbounded idealism with "woke". You're correct to point out that the more important cause of woke is simple who-whom tribalism, which is what motivates most non-white wokesters, and this is fundamentally non-ideological.
Oh, I forgot to finish my point. The conservative instinct is somewhat correct, as you'd expect: to be a sincere woke white person, you'd have to be delusionally idealistic. But their intellects aren't sharp enough to assign causality properly, or use the right words, and they fundamentally refuse to understand how black people think differently from them. Plus, piety signaling is how you climb the status ladder in the Christian tribe.
It would be hypocritical of me to denounce idealism itself as bad, but taking it too seriously is bad.
Good article. I think what people are seeing as gnosticism is actually the way in which the enlightenment used the garden myth. The negative enlightenment, a la hobbles, took the garden as "the state of nature", and says that human nature originated as fallen, and only civilisation can save it. The positive enlightenment, a la Rosseou, says that the original humanity is edenic, and it becomes corrupted from social structures fron which we need liberation. In either case, the fall and restoration narrative is brought into the material realm, and dealt with societally. This is a much more genralisable application of heresiology to politics.
Great article! i know how annoying it is when the average midwit conservative blames the problems of the world on the typical antagonists of their never-given- second-thought-in-their-lives worldview, but I'd like to give some nuances to this topic as the spiritual and the metaphysical are big topics and we have only a small picture of them. First I'd like to recognize that conservatives had a good intuition in seeing a gnostic tendency to transgress limits or boundaries, this is what the occultist Rudolf Steiner recognized as the luciferic impulse, this tendency towards egocentrism, individualism, revolution against the authorities and everything that tries to get rid of what chains one into rules is one which we can find in many traditions, although not so radical in all cases. Both gnosticism and leftism (in every period since it's existence) tend to a transgression of boundaries. In gnosticism we find an impulse to repudiate the material for its limitations on the spirit and the left in general has a disdain for authoritarianism and the state. Wokism has a disdain for essentialism or any categorization that places people into boxes such as gender, race, nationality, etc., they consider all of this as fascistic and an attempt against their individual (egoic/narcissist) desires. Definitions are boundaries. That's why they have adopted this social constructivist in opposition to realism/essentialism, in the end is just the good ol' nominalism from the middle ages. But there's also a second spiritual force which Steiner considered as an ahrimanic force, which is diametrically opposite to the luciferic impulse, it tends towards materialism, imposing boundaries, negation of the spiritual, and more things. The contemporary times would be more ahrimanic, as they tend towards a more physicalist, scientistic worldview and for that reason has transhumanism as it's modern religion. In fact, its an inversion of gnosticism, because instead of looking for salvation in the inmaterial it looks for it now by trapping us in more matter, ironically. There is this psychic pattern flowing through our unconscious that wants to be free of all the restrictions we have as embodied beings, but because we don't believe in the spiritual anymore we will create it. So in part i agree with you that modern wokism does not base it's ideology on gnosticism, that would be ridiculous and historically inaccurate, but the psychic patterns seem the same. In conclusion, i think conservatives have confounded the form with the content (gnosticism instead of the luciferic impulse) and in your case you mistook the content with the form (gnosticism as centered in the spiritual instead of the patterns that equates them in their goals). Nonetheless, i find your clarification quite prudent so that people know how to distinguish between things and learn how to see the little details that make topics like this not so simple. 👍
I think what's also rooted in gnostic tendency of our corrupt souls is denial of hierarchy, authority, strict rulers. See the movie Wish or alike. Also, all those "atheists" like CosmicSkeptic who say things such as "God can't be real because of so much evil in this world, if He exists, He is so cruel I deny Him". It's a heresy that seems to be a reaction to evil in this world. Another reason is drift towards pelagianism.
I see it as a Neo Bolshevism tailored for the 21st century. It’s virulently Antiwhite.
The real origin of 'wokeism' and even liberalism is Christianity itself.
You know that the woke people aren’t the only ones who believe in blank slates right? Aristotle famously held it by saying what is in the intellect was first in the senses. To act as if it’s a novel ideal is not true. And in Fesers very article about Gnosticism he concedes that wokeism isn’t quite the same as Gnosticism because it’s more of atheist tint of Gnosticism but it has a lot of the same impulses