There is much that could be said about this. 1) All gnosticisms have a religious ideal structure, and are cultic in ways in which we have of-late become familiar. The decay of our present technological civilization and its disorientations have re-opened "the religious question," which the Hebrews, Greeks, Hindus, Christians and all traditional cultures have affirmed as being coeval with being human - as part of the structure of all persons. It was no accident that Karl Marx wrote against this, and hope that the question of origins/destiny would be forgotten. Gnosticisms appeal to this question, but are not religions - though they may try to gain that status, attach themselves to religions, or replace them. People - especially young people who are thown into "fluidity," are desperate, and this is pretty much all our "culture" (which is itself hardly more than an ongoing adaptation to technology) has to "offer" - i.e. is capable (has the internal resources for) offering.
Confirmation: There is an inchoate, ad-hoc mystical quality to these present manifestations - "Gender," "Whiteness." Further check: the dualist/manichean (simple good/evil) structure within which they are understood by Paracletes/Acolytes and within which they express themselves publicly - their unreasonable anger, even hatred.
The Han as representing "Whiteness?" Exemplary nonsense, but a structurally necessary sort of outcome. By structure, these movements lack the concepts of reconciliation with God/community found in actual religions, and, in their present form - the one we see - mostly see those who have not accepted/submitted to initiation/catechesis as inherently "evil" as opposed to wrong.
One additional sample/confirmation: "Intersectional Theory," the more-or-less agreed-upon means of prioritizing the cults/cultists among themselves, relies upon two related mystifications: "Privilege" (put positively) and "Victimhood" (put negatively). By calling it "theory," it attaches itself to what it intends to replace - our culture of scientism. But, plainly, there is nothing whatever "scientific" about it.
This mimics the propagation of gnostic cults in relation to Judaism and Christianity.
Widespread Lysenkoism is a structurally necessary outcome - the false attachment to/praise of/mimicry of science while utterly subverting it.
The enemy here is not Christianity - which has not been authoritative in the West for centuries - but "The Enlightenment" - as the incarnated Spirit of Whiteness or White People, interchangeably (interpreted broadly - as both literal and inchoate truth).
I think of the Counter-Englightenment (in part) as an egalitarian steamroller set in motion to destroy all the barriers and boundaries supposedly separating the Oppressed from the Oppressor. (The Enlightenment of course has been sentenced to death for failing to achieve Utopia, and for being a project written, produced and directed by Christian European men, who now must atone for the sins of their fathers.)
But one of the problems with the egalitarian steamroller is that it levels all walls, even the load-bearing ones: so now that such oppressive dualities as man/woman adult/child citizen/foreigner civilized/barbaric erudite/ignorant etc etc have been steamrolled we can see their Promised Land come into view: a world of depressed gender-questioning eternal infants who learn history and morality from comic books and who consider any injury to esteem a hate crime.
Basically Nietzsche's Last Man with drugs and Wifi.
Have just found your Substack, looking forward to reading...cheers
boy, did Marxists, Crit Theorists (I repeat myself), Marcuse etc and millions of other aspiring philosopher-kings feel tremendous envy for Darwin and his testable, observable, refutable Theory of Evolution. It was like Darwin introduced a new musical style and every song afterward sounded similar.
'Theory' was another way for Leftists to disguise their almost wholly political project as disinterested scholarship, and it also worked as a wrench to disassemble and deconstruct all it could get its hands on.
And the sad part is it worked better than they could have ever imagined...
Marcuse seems humane, anymore. HIs descendants have betrayed him - the element that is humane in him, as well as his realism (mostly). He was a utopian, too, but he tried to be a real philosopher. These cults do not have anything like that level of thought - their success is the consequence of the degraded condition of people's souls - as shown by what they do and say. Gnosticism is not a search for truth, but a kind of vision - it has its own logic, apart from that of philosophy or religion.
Post-Modernism turned out to be true - not ontologically, but as a description/prediction of the course of a particular civilization.
I agree postmodernism turned out to be true, but mostly in the sense of inevitable civilizational exhaustion, as entropy always triumphs in the end, and all man-made things eventually crumble.
I don't know how humane Marcuse seems to me, I will try not to judge him based on the idiocy of this acolytes, though he does strike me as the typical Marxist intellectual trying to sell Slavery in a package labeled Liberation. (But I will confess I'm biased.)
Also, as an American, he does seem to be possibly History's least grateful rescued refugee: he escaped Nazi Germany, lived a prosperous famous life in California, yet still denounced America for being just as repressive as the USSR. But I have not read all his works, so maybe he does smuggle one sentence of gratitude in there somewhere.
You are right to say that I have been generous towards Marcuse - I am thinking only of One Dimensional Man. To be generous is not to be just, and I have done him no respect by looking away from so much.
He disgraced himself late chasing the favor of activists and ideologues; he failed as a philosopher. He seems to have forgotten Socrates' example as he neared death.
Well, every religion is a cult; this is no different, and every story of the great spiritual crises that led well-known converts to plunge themselves into the ecstasy of rebirth into a new being sounds exactly like this. Every story begins with what's clearly a terrible struggle with depression and anxiety, sometimes of great loss, and the new-found faith is the drug that alleviates all anguish.
Among the parts of this tragedy is the failure of parents like Daisy's to say *no.* We will pay for any therapy but not to have your body reconstructed into a new form. If the only available therapy insists on the next step towards consecration--well, parents have had to fight for their children's best interests against the medical profession before.
I appreciate your work and I especially appreciate the qualiity of your thought and writing; that's often greatly lacking from others.
Most humans have a natural desire for objective meaning outside of themselves. Perhaps u do not. And that's fine! But if humans don't have healthy avenues to express their need for transcendence, they'll funnel their desires into ersatz religions like gender/racial ideology...or something even worse.
Humanity will have religion one way or another. You can denigrate religion if you want (by equating child mutiliation with Christianity), but it won't be replaced with humanism/rationalism or whatever. It will be replaced by increasingly worse cultish behavior.
It has been widely ridiculed, but last year I decided to read Fukuyama's The End of History and The Last Man. I'm glad I did, because The Last Man questions whether Fukuyama's thesis is correct. He wonders whether people's non-material needs are great enough and cannot be fulfilled *within* liberal society, so that a movement will arise to overthrow liberalism in seeking to fill this hole. The displacement of liberalism and its practices on the left today by critical studies dogma seems to confirm this fear. The movement looks very much religious and hostile to liberal values.
Every search for objective meaning grows into a cult, even if adherents imagine themselves purely secular beings. They're not *ersatz* religions--they're all the same.
One can find meaning outside and above oneself without needing any dogma to offer a roadmap. Most people claiming to be *of faith* are just making God in their own image and trying to force that, one way or another, on others.
I...don't know how you could observe 1000 years of (at least nominally) christian western civilization and conclude it is of the same substance as the Successor Ideology. Even if Christianity is false, it has produced better results than what we have now.
There is clearly something different happening now that the above commenter Tommaso Di Maria has explained better than I can.
The only thing different is the speed of communication enabling the latest cult craze to reach everywhere quickly.
You actually consider this different from holy flagellants stripping themselves raw in convents and monasteries; the acts of the Inquisition; the bloody wars that wiped some Christian sects right out of history? The burning alive of heretics?
Human nature is a durable thing. Civilization and its tools try to tame and channel the worst of human impulses into something less harmful and more fruitful. Every era has its crazes and its horrors and its moments of extraordinary beauty.
And every cult member thinks he has the answer to all of it.
You seem to be making a secular argument for why Christianity is useful for society. From that perspective, what makes you sure that Christianity is the best outlet for a human need for transcendence?
He makes the claim that "humanity will have religion one way or another". He only mentions Christianity in an example of how people denigrate religion. His post is not making the case that "Christianity is the best outlet for a human need for transcendence".
This movement is so much more shallow than any of the world's major religions - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and a number of others. All of these faiths contain elements of beauty, morality, and responsibility that extend outside of oneself.
This is your fallacy. The beautiful parts are the myths and poetry that seduce believers and the desperate-to-believe into thinking they've found "truth" by enabling them to ignore the ugly parts.
And why, exactly, do we have "major" religions? Because in the brutal conquests of adherents, every little local faith was crushed and it's still-useful parts absorbed into the mythology of the conquerors.
The shallowness of these bigger cults lies in the inability to conceive of divinity without dogma.
Certainly from a believer's perspective. That's the essential error, in thinking any human being can determine the "truth" of the Unknowable. If belief were kept personal, it would be of no interest to a civil secular society.
But believers in any faith tend to overstep their place.
"If they are to distinguish themselves from -- and establish their own superiority to this culturally generative practice, they must find persuasive grounds to do so."
Yeah, I think this is so *very* true. Unfortunately, I'm not at all sure that reason and logic will be of any help. Or may be of *some* help, but not be sufficient. TYTY again.
False religions have thrived in many historical periods before ours. Most have featured death and disfigurement. The act of piercing body parts, surgical removal of body parts and murder, especially murder of children, have repeatedly shown up in cults that feature demon worship, common today in gang and drug cults, and in the religious followers of certain bands and music subcultures.
Those who reject Christianity often descend into demon worship, sometimes even surrendering themselves to demon possession, aided in that surrender through music and dance. Deviant sexual practices are almost always associated with drugs, rock 'n roll, and other deeply rhythmic music. Also, body piercing, tattooing and outlandish dress and behavior. All of this is accompanied by suicide and murder.
Let's not forget that the sexual mutilation of children/adolescents features in more mainstream religions as well, e.g. the infant circumcision of Judaism, and the FGM of various tribal religions. I wouldn't exactly call those any more "false" than Christianity, it's just that Christianity happens to not require it.
Tbf, many secular people have their boys circumcised. I view it's modern usage (outside of Judaism) as serving a practical purpose (or not, as some think it has negative effects on sexual health). My father and I are uncut, but my brother was circumcised. I don't think there is any real difference in performance. Fwiw we both had our sons circumcised. I have another friend who was circumcised in grad school out of concern for phimosis. Research shows that uncut penises are, on average, longer than circumcised ones. I needed all the help I could get. Lol.
There is much that could be said about this. 1) All gnosticisms have a religious ideal structure, and are cultic in ways in which we have of-late become familiar. The decay of our present technological civilization and its disorientations have re-opened "the religious question," which the Hebrews, Greeks, Hindus, Christians and all traditional cultures have affirmed as being coeval with being human - as part of the structure of all persons. It was no accident that Karl Marx wrote against this, and hope that the question of origins/destiny would be forgotten. Gnosticisms appeal to this question, but are not religions - though they may try to gain that status, attach themselves to religions, or replace them. People - especially young people who are thown into "fluidity," are desperate, and this is pretty much all our "culture" (which is itself hardly more than an ongoing adaptation to technology) has to "offer" - i.e. is capable (has the internal resources for) offering.
Confirmation: There is an inchoate, ad-hoc mystical quality to these present manifestations - "Gender," "Whiteness." Further check: the dualist/manichean (simple good/evil) structure within which they are understood by Paracletes/Acolytes and within which they express themselves publicly - their unreasonable anger, even hatred.
The Han as representing "Whiteness?" Exemplary nonsense, but a structurally necessary sort of outcome. By structure, these movements lack the concepts of reconciliation with God/community found in actual religions, and, in their present form - the one we see - mostly see those who have not accepted/submitted to initiation/catechesis as inherently "evil" as opposed to wrong.
One additional sample/confirmation: "Intersectional Theory," the more-or-less agreed-upon means of prioritizing the cults/cultists among themselves, relies upon two related mystifications: "Privilege" (put positively) and "Victimhood" (put negatively). By calling it "theory," it attaches itself to what it intends to replace - our culture of scientism. But, plainly, there is nothing whatever "scientific" about it.
This mimics the propagation of gnostic cults in relation to Judaism and Christianity.
Widespread Lysenkoism is a structurally necessary outcome - the false attachment to/praise of/mimicry of science while utterly subverting it.
The enemy here is not Christianity - which has not been authoritative in the West for centuries - but "The Enlightenment" - as the incarnated Spirit of Whiteness or White People, interchangeably (interpreted broadly - as both literal and inchoate truth).
I think of the Counter-Englightenment (in part) as an egalitarian steamroller set in motion to destroy all the barriers and boundaries supposedly separating the Oppressed from the Oppressor. (The Enlightenment of course has been sentenced to death for failing to achieve Utopia, and for being a project written, produced and directed by Christian European men, who now must atone for the sins of their fathers.)
But one of the problems with the egalitarian steamroller is that it levels all walls, even the load-bearing ones: so now that such oppressive dualities as man/woman adult/child citizen/foreigner civilized/barbaric erudite/ignorant etc etc have been steamrolled we can see their Promised Land come into view: a world of depressed gender-questioning eternal infants who learn history and morality from comic books and who consider any injury to esteem a hate crime.
Basically Nietzsche's Last Man with drugs and Wifi.
Have just found your Substack, looking forward to reading...cheers
An excellent summary of the moment - it isn't easy to think through the smoke.
And thank you - I will be following this line of thought, over the next few essays. Keep in-touch.
A presto!
love your comments!
boy, did Marxists, Crit Theorists (I repeat myself), Marcuse etc and millions of other aspiring philosopher-kings feel tremendous envy for Darwin and his testable, observable, refutable Theory of Evolution. It was like Darwin introduced a new musical style and every song afterward sounded similar.
'Theory' was another way for Leftists to disguise their almost wholly political project as disinterested scholarship, and it also worked as a wrench to disassemble and deconstruct all it could get its hands on.
And the sad part is it worked better than they could have ever imagined...
Thank you.
Marcuse seems humane, anymore. HIs descendants have betrayed him - the element that is humane in him, as well as his realism (mostly). He was a utopian, too, but he tried to be a real philosopher. These cults do not have anything like that level of thought - their success is the consequence of the degraded condition of people's souls - as shown by what they do and say. Gnosticism is not a search for truth, but a kind of vision - it has its own logic, apart from that of philosophy or religion.
Post-Modernism turned out to be true - not ontologically, but as a description/prediction of the course of a particular civilization.
I agree postmodernism turned out to be true, but mostly in the sense of inevitable civilizational exhaustion, as entropy always triumphs in the end, and all man-made things eventually crumble.
I don't know how humane Marcuse seems to me, I will try not to judge him based on the idiocy of this acolytes, though he does strike me as the typical Marxist intellectual trying to sell Slavery in a package labeled Liberation. (But I will confess I'm biased.)
Also, as an American, he does seem to be possibly History's least grateful rescued refugee: he escaped Nazi Germany, lived a prosperous famous life in California, yet still denounced America for being just as repressive as the USSR. But I have not read all his works, so maybe he does smuggle one sentence of gratitude in there somewhere.
Grazie!
You are right to say that I have been generous towards Marcuse - I am thinking only of One Dimensional Man. To be generous is not to be just, and I have done him no respect by looking away from so much.
He disgraced himself late chasing the favor of activists and ideologues; he failed as a philosopher. He seems to have forgotten Socrates' example as he neared death.
Well, every religion is a cult; this is no different, and every story of the great spiritual crises that led well-known converts to plunge themselves into the ecstasy of rebirth into a new being sounds exactly like this. Every story begins with what's clearly a terrible struggle with depression and anxiety, sometimes of great loss, and the new-found faith is the drug that alleviates all anguish.
Among the parts of this tragedy is the failure of parents like Daisy's to say *no.* We will pay for any therapy but not to have your body reconstructed into a new form. If the only available therapy insists on the next step towards consecration--well, parents have had to fight for their children's best interests against the medical profession before.
I appreciate your work and I especially appreciate the qualiity of your thought and writing; that's often greatly lacking from others.
Most humans have a natural desire for objective meaning outside of themselves. Perhaps u do not. And that's fine! But if humans don't have healthy avenues to express their need for transcendence, they'll funnel their desires into ersatz religions like gender/racial ideology...or something even worse.
Humanity will have religion one way or another. You can denigrate religion if you want (by equating child mutiliation with Christianity), but it won't be replaced with humanism/rationalism or whatever. It will be replaced by increasingly worse cultish behavior.
It has been widely ridiculed, but last year I decided to read Fukuyama's The End of History and The Last Man. I'm glad I did, because The Last Man questions whether Fukuyama's thesis is correct. He wonders whether people's non-material needs are great enough and cannot be fulfilled *within* liberal society, so that a movement will arise to overthrow liberalism in seeking to fill this hole. The displacement of liberalism and its practices on the left today by critical studies dogma seems to confirm this fear. The movement looks very much religious and hostile to liberal values.
Every search for objective meaning grows into a cult, even if adherents imagine themselves purely secular beings. They're not *ersatz* religions--they're all the same.
One can find meaning outside and above oneself without needing any dogma to offer a roadmap. Most people claiming to be *of faith* are just making God in their own image and trying to force that, one way or another, on others.
I...don't know how you could observe 1000 years of (at least nominally) christian western civilization and conclude it is of the same substance as the Successor Ideology. Even if Christianity is false, it has produced better results than what we have now.
There is clearly something different happening now that the above commenter Tommaso Di Maria has explained better than I can.
The only thing different is the speed of communication enabling the latest cult craze to reach everywhere quickly.
You actually consider this different from holy flagellants stripping themselves raw in convents and monasteries; the acts of the Inquisition; the bloody wars that wiped some Christian sects right out of history? The burning alive of heretics?
Human nature is a durable thing. Civilization and its tools try to tame and channel the worst of human impulses into something less harmful and more fruitful. Every era has its crazes and its horrors and its moments of extraordinary beauty.
And every cult member thinks he has the answer to all of it.
You seem to be making a secular argument for why Christianity is useful for society. From that perspective, what makes you sure that Christianity is the best outlet for a human need for transcendence?
He makes the claim that "humanity will have religion one way or another". He only mentions Christianity in an example of how people denigrate religion. His post is not making the case that "Christianity is the best outlet for a human need for transcendence".
This movement is so much more shallow than any of the world's major religions - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and a number of others. All of these faiths contain elements of beauty, morality, and responsibility that extend outside of oneself.
This is your fallacy. The beautiful parts are the myths and poetry that seduce believers and the desperate-to-believe into thinking they've found "truth" by enabling them to ignore the ugly parts.
And why, exactly, do we have "major" religions? Because in the brutal conquests of adherents, every little local faith was crushed and it's still-useful parts absorbed into the mythology of the conquerors.
The shallowness of these bigger cults lies in the inability to conceive of divinity without dogma.
It looks like you’re saying the beautiful parts are myths, and the ugly parts are truth. Or did I misunderstand you?
You've misunderstood me.
Would you agree that, from a believer’s perspective, it’s all truth?
Certainly from a believer's perspective. That's the essential error, in thinking any human being can determine the "truth" of the Unknowable. If belief were kept personal, it would be of no interest to a civil secular society.
But believers in any faith tend to overstep their place.
[edited for grammar]
Many states are making it impossible for parents to say "no".
Parents need to get smarter and louder fast.
TOP quality, Sir. Another great catch!
"If they are to distinguish themselves from -- and establish their own superiority to this culturally generative practice, they must find persuasive grounds to do so."
Yeah, I think this is so *very* true. Unfortunately, I'm not at all sure that reason and logic will be of any help. Or may be of *some* help, but not be sufficient. TYTY again.
False religions have thrived in many historical periods before ours. Most have featured death and disfigurement. The act of piercing body parts, surgical removal of body parts and murder, especially murder of children, have repeatedly shown up in cults that feature demon worship, common today in gang and drug cults, and in the religious followers of certain bands and music subcultures.
Those who reject Christianity often descend into demon worship, sometimes even surrendering themselves to demon possession, aided in that surrender through music and dance. Deviant sexual practices are almost always associated with drugs, rock 'n roll, and other deeply rhythmic music. Also, body piercing, tattooing and outlandish dress and behavior. All of this is accompanied by suicide and murder.
Let's not forget that the sexual mutilation of children/adolescents features in more mainstream religions as well, e.g. the infant circumcision of Judaism, and the FGM of various tribal religions. I wouldn't exactly call those any more "false" than Christianity, it's just that Christianity happens to not require it.
Tbf, many secular people have their boys circumcised. I view it's modern usage (outside of Judaism) as serving a practical purpose (or not, as some think it has negative effects on sexual health). My father and I are uncut, but my brother was circumcised. I don't think there is any real difference in performance. Fwiw we both had our sons circumcised. I have another friend who was circumcised in grad school out of concern for phimosis. Research shows that uncut penises are, on average, longer than circumcised ones. I needed all the help I could get. Lol.