I'm interested that you assume anyone who holds the position that abortion at any stage ends a life 'is just repeating a dogma some authorities have come up with.' That's quite a sizeable brush stroke, as is allocating political opinions (I'm not American, though from context I think you might be? No offence intended either way...).
I think some of the fuzziness around this question derives from the use by many activists of terms like 'child murder', because it unnecessarily forces a debate over whether a fertilised ovum is a 'child', which indeed becomes ridiculous rather quickly. A classic case of rhetorical shorthand taking on a life of its own (no pun intended).
A consideration of whether or not abortion ends a life (a more useful framing) makes ensoulment, as you imply, the only sensible binary we can discuss. Funnily enough, this was exactly the thought process that led me to the personal conclusion that all abortion does in fact end a life. Fewer than five years ago I was a firm 'safe, legal, and rare' advocate; however, I was also agnostic and very far from practising any kind of faith.
The most effective and beautiful explanation I ever heard about why sexual morality matters is this: that conception is the only moment at which man directly co-operates with a divine act of creation.
Naturally, not everyone believes this. But here's my rationale: if someone believes in the soul as immortal, and therefore believe that people who have left their physical bodies at the moment of death still exist as disembodied souls, I'm not sure why they would struggle to believe that the infamous 'clump of cells' cannot be the host of a created soul. Is the argument that it requires more physical space? Does it require a specific organ to inhabit?
Believing in the soul, and believing that the intellect is a faculty of the soul (per Catholic theology, YMMV), and observing that very young children quickly begin to exercise their intellect within their limited capacity – which rapidly develops as they grow – leads us hopefully to an agreement that a young baby already has a soul. Unlike the angels, created in a single instant as fully formed intelligent spiritual beings, we mud-based life forms need a little more time to develop. This is not controversial.
But if we accept that the soul, existing in the body, remains subject to this biological process of growth and development, the question of when exactly this soul deigns to enter the physical form becomes no less ridiculous than the question of whether or not a fertilised cell is a child. Why would it not be at the moment of conception? What exactly is it waiting for? And how certain can you be of that? Certain enough to risk ending a life?
'People who think like that are, frankly, hostage to a rigid belief system that looks at morality as a set of absolute laws, which they will mercilessly enforce even while they crush others and cause misery. It is the character trait of the holier-than-thou personality type that is quick to lecture everybody about morals...'
I completely believe you when you say you are not that person. But I think this type of person exists, and absolute situation-independent morals can easily be abused (and created) by them. I felt the need to call that out.
As for your argument here, it strikes me as sound and well-reasoned. To be honest I haven't read a lot of such reflections (even though I'm not American :)) - perhaps they get drowned out in the heat of the culture war. I would tend to agree that we can't really know, but it doesn't necessarily follow that there is no difference at all between conception and a child. Also, I think it's possible that the relation between soul and body is not so close, especially at the beginning, as you seem to imply. We tend to think sonewhat materialistically about these matters, but it might not be so clear. Anyway, I respect your stance. And if my "poking" here has led to you laying it down for us, then perhaps it was worth it.
Ah I'm sorry, I do remember now that you weren't American, I just forgot!
I certainly didn't mean that there is no difference between conception and a child, I agree with you there. I suppose I skipped over it because I've always tended to think that it's not a call I would ever like to make. But obviously, many people find themselves making it under duress and that's not something for me to judge them for at all.
Thanks for the response, it's so valuable to have actual conversations about these things instead of the culture war shouting..! :)
But if we accept that the soul, existing in the body, remains subject to this biological process of growth and development, the question of when exactly this soul deigns to enter the physical form becomes no less ridiculous than the question of whether or not a fertilised cell is a child.
This is the crux. Arguing about when precisely cells become "ensouled" seems about as productive as arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If we accept the idea of ensoulment, it's infinitely cleaner and more coherent to believe that it happens at the moment of conception.
Much of the vitriol around the abortion question relates to the legal requirement for hard, binary distinctions between human and not human, which as you point out it is obviously inappropriate. There's a continuum from blastocyst to newborn baby with a soft, fuzzy transition somewhere in the middle.
The obvious resolution is to drop the legal binary, and adopt a legal continuum. At one end is a baby, termination of which is murder and should be treated as such. At the other is the just-fertilized egg, termination of which is the moral equivalent of shedding a skin cell, and which should therefore carry no penalty at all. In between an escalating cost could be imposed, in the form of an abortion tax, rising from what is in essence a nominal fine as for littering, to a fine appropriate to a severe traffic violation, up to a financially ruinous levy. Such a system would, I think, strike most people as basically fair and reasonable.
This is an interesting idea John, one that I think has some merit but will of course be denounced by activists on both sides of the debate.
I think the functional issue of abortion is possible to be very humanized. It's easy to imagine someone with blue hair clipping their 12th punch on their abortion pass and castigate them as evil, but the truth when you listen to a lot of normal women who have had them talk about them is that it is a difficult choice and addresses severe consequences on all sides. It is not and will never be a simple debate. The problem precedes technology (women have been attempting to produce abortions long before it was a simple procedure), but technology now makes the issue more immediate and pervasive.
From a societal perspective, the idea that we have moved from "safe, legal, and rare" to "shouting your abortion" is certainly concerning. As someone who is about to have their first child, the thought that you can see the child in utero, hear the heart beat, and yet dismiss it as "a collection of cells" is ghoulish and fundamentally antihuman.
As any sort of collective societal moral center continues to fade in the face of extreme individualism, what will that narcissism continue to produce? There are some morals that arise simply from our biology, but without self restraint seen as a moral good and imperative they seem to be swallowed in many ways.
One thing I would quickly note about the gnosis discussion as well: it's not just James Lindsay who is espousing this idea though he may have originated it. N.S. Lyons has a fantastic piece on his/her substack about these ideas as well. I think there is some serious merit to the idea that though wokism isn't explicitly religious, like all manias it works through traits that humans have innate (the desire to be part of group, the euphoria that comes with holding the real truth, that truth was hidden (the gnosis), etc).
Re Gnosis, I certainly agree that woke ideology taps into some of these mechanisms you described, and it is certainly a danger with any kind of truth seeking and group affiliation. (See my piece "Gnosis Puffeth Up" where I talk about the danger of thinking you have some secret knowledge and are better than others). I just think that there is a certain "right" form of Gnosis, and that it's necessary. The path is full of dangers though, including the danger of falling prey to ego, group think, etc.
I would agree that there is very much a religiosity about the woke, complete with faith in the not-scientific, but it is much more like the Inquisition than Gnosticism. Gnosticism didn't become a major religion largely because it is a way of being more than infrastructure for global domination. The Gnostics were mostly peaceful. Now give the woke the kind of power the inquisition had and see what happens.
Very good points. That was kind of where I was getting at: wokeism has more in common with the authoritarian elements of Christianity (inquisition etc.) than with Gnostic sects and ideas.
I have to give Lindsay credit that he is willing to get into it with the Christian right on any issue, I just wish he had better friends to keep him accountable about his arguments.
I give him credit too (and obviously not only for that). I think part of why some of his sparring with the Christian right goes wrong surely has to do with the latter's own blind spots and certain fixed beliefs derived from authority. But Lindsay sometimes seems to map too much rigid linear logic on the history of thought, which is ok, but one must be on guard that there are always different takes that shed additional light and put into question certain assumed links. One must also try to put oneself in the shoes of those thinkers in the past and those who took up their ideas, as R. G. Collingwood argued.
The other side of the charge of Gnosticism is the *content* of the special knowledge reserved to the elite: that being the corruption of the material realm. The historical Gnostics rejected material embodiment as irrevocably tainted by the evil of the false creator. Salvation comes through a kind of ascetic renunciation of *this world*.
Which is an odd position to square with secular, atheist, materialist doctrines that center themselves in a vulgar aestheticism of sensation-seeking. IIRC he's trying to draw on Eric Vogelin's writings, which have interesting things to say on this topic, but I'm not sure the meat is there to connect the "woke" ideologies to classical religion and its heresies.
RE: Abortion, it was once put to me that a thing can be a right, and it can also be exercised well or badly by the individual bearing that right. Part of the issue with the debate around abortion is this need to search for a PRINCIPLE, in bold all caps, that decides the matter independent of any situation.
That's not realistic in most any circumstance where we have to decide what is best to do against many different sources of reasons for (not) acting, though you wouldn't know it from the crass legalism that passes for "moral debate" today.
Hi! I happened upon this blog just now. The linked article on the history of abortion teachings in Catholic thinking is very nice definitely helps inform the decision-making of someone who is on the fence about the morality of abortion and their own religious belief.
There is, however, one bad-faith or careless statement in the article. It makes the point that Catholics are 22% of the country, but Catholic hospitals are "One in six" beds, and that number "grew by 22% since 2001" (article is from 2020). The implicit argument being, Catholics are a minority holding the health system hostage, but 1 in 6 ~~ 17%, and if that's "22% more than 2001", that means that in 2001 it was ~~ 14% of beds, which is a large growth but perhaps not so much over 20 years. The argument by numbers on its own doesn't bear out. It might not have any bearing on the rest of the article but this sort of imprecision and sorta-lying with numbers really irritates me.
Again, it doesn't meant that hospitals SHOULD be beholden to any faith, or that there is some rule that hospitals should have religious representation proportionate to religious representation in the country. But if the number of Catholic beds is a problem at all, you don't need the relative number of Catholics; if you are just finding faith-based healthcare a problem, address that. The implicit numbers argument is no good.
Indeed, this part of the article makes a very bad argument. Frankly, I find it infuriating that society is increasingly unwilling to respect Christian/Catholic sensibilities, even if they turn out to be in a minority.
Classifying ‘woke’ (race Marxism) as a gnostic (a)religion has historical merit. It posits an world created by an evil principle (racism as all-permeating). This surface-level world is opposed by a good principle (anti-racism) which can only be perceived by the acolytes, the woke. To bring the world over to the good, the evil world has to be destroyed in its entirety (the eschaton). After that, paradise.
You are correct that this construct lacks any god. It has the structure of a religion without the central tenet. I therefore prefer to call it an areligion but am not too satisfied with the term.
As for abortion, here’s one of my anecdotes (Luc, you will know this). Before reunification West Germany had a very strict abortion law (no abortion unless the foetus wasn’t viable or the mother was about to die). As a consequence, women who wanted an abortion had to go to more liberal jurisdictions, like the Netherlands. To fight this, then interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble (pre assassination) ordered the West German border patrol to have (usually single) women returning from Holland examined by an official obgyn (Amtsarzt). At gunpoint. If it was determined that they had had an abortion, they were prosecuted. An estimated 5000 women were de facto raped by the West German government.
Oh dear, I didn't know this. It is a good example that black-and-white thinking about morality seldom works.
As for Gnosticism, I get the analogy (and it's not wrong), it's just that I think there are some very good and important ideas in Gnosticism that have been slandered by mainstream Christianity, *and* as far as I know, Gnostic communities/sects historically haven't engaged in the sort of witch hunts and authoritarian intolerance mainstream Christianity has often degenerated into (and which is also characteristic of the woke). Perhaps the label works for Lindsay because both atheists can get behind it ("they believe in crazy religious fairy tales!") as well as mainstream conservative Christians ("it's heresy!")?
The identification of totalitarian ideologies with Gnosticism goes back to Eric Voegelin (‘The New Science of Politics’ 1952) although he later modified this analysis to some extent. Describing socialism as a religion is of course an older idea, the Fabian’s did it in the 1880s and saw it as a good thing.
Arthur Versluis points out, quite rightly and as you say, that the historical Gnosticism does not resemble Voegelin’s version. However, to me that’s beside the point. Religious and ideological movements can have wildly differing expressions of the same foundational beliefs. The anabaptists spring to mind. If a movement exhibits the same structure as its ancestor, I find it fair to give it the same name. Secondly, calling the woke gnostic points to their revolutionary and destructive nature, an aspect that often gets overlooked in all the minutiae. For that reason I have long called the neo-socialists eschatological, which brings us neatly back to Voegelin and his exhortation: “don’t immanentize the eschaton!”.
I have several comments relating to your piece, an editorial critique if you will.
The first being we all have different beliefs and opinions, all of which have flaws, all of which have at best a tenuous grasp of our perceptions of reality. It is expected that we will have differences of perception and therefore differences of opinion. To disagree is to simply have a difference of perception and opinion. I do think it would be better, if one wanted to have a true conversation about differences of opinion to leave the ad hominem in the edit bin. Your disparagement of Christian conservatives as "right-wingers" was unnecessary. Are they all "tea-baggers" too? I think the point could have been made without that.
Additionally when discussing the choices to be made about a pregnancy you wrote, "... a society should be able to talk about such issues and find some compromise (which seems to have been possible for a long time until recently) without one side screaming...". Agreed, a society should. But when has it ever? The assumption that it 'should', does not make it so, and therefore is a false premise to begin the quest for one's position.
And lastly, you stated, "Wokeism is a sort of mimicry, ersatz religion, and to my mind, a central aspect in its development is its atheism/materialism." So isn't that a form of religion? It may not be founded on centuries of dogmatic doctrine, or vast libraries of literature, or heralded in great architectural proclamations of dominance (although there are many ways to make those same connections of today's 'woketopians" and the marxist governmental dialectics), but isn't your statement essentially inferring that is is a religion, albeit one of shallow roots and short history?
Notice I am not arguing your opinions. The topics of abortion and religion are historically intense and generally best left to thoughtful personal discussions and not anonymous keyboard warrior battles. I do think that many of your opinions could have been made more persuasive with a bit of patient editing.
Hey John, thanks for the comment. No worries, criticism is welcome and I have learned quite a bit from it since I started writing here. To your point about language, perhaps I could have phrased some of it in more friendly terms, but it felt right to put it like that. Sometimes you poke a bit, I guess, and I used "right-wingers" to distinguish them from liberal Christians.
As for compromise, well it would be preferable, no? And I think we had something like that for a while. Although I don't think it can ever be sustainable, as I have argued in my piece "The Human Condition..."
Is Wokeism literally a religion? I guess it depends on how you define it. What I had in mind here was that it explicitly rejects the idea of God or some higher, spiritual realm, if you will. Implicitly, wokeness might (perhaps) be indistinguishable from a religion with "shallow roots and short history", as you described it.
It is true that in some situations, the atheism/religion distinction seems to break down and become useless, depending on what people bring to the table. The only solution then is to better formulate what we actually mean.
Very interesting to learn about the Church’s changing stance on abortion through the centuries - particularly that saints accrued miracles in some cases through abortion and that for some time ‘ensoulment’ was the delineation factor. Also interesting to note that for so long it was marked (for males at least) at 40 days as the Tibetan book of the dead puts ensoulment at 49 days and the pineal gland, considered by many to be the seat of the soul, forms at that same timeframe.
Indeed. I wager when talking about souls merging with the biological, we can't really put a time stamp on it. For all we know, there might be a large window ranging even from pre-conception to post-birth (just speculating). No need to go all left hemisphere about it it seems to me.
NS Lyons uses (luxury) Gnosticism as a critique of wokeism to mean the upper middle class managerials (PMC) that have been throwing the working classes, producers, under the bus, while pandering to the global financiers and media-tech oligarchs that got rich from suburban consumerism.
Dirty jobs vs. etherealism-virtualism.
Virtualism is the emergent culture of digital capitalism and suburban consumerism. It is “otherworldly” in the sense of being detached from physical reality.
Traditional Gnosticism is metaphysics, renunciation of evil and sin. The most radical forms, in both Islam and Christianity, are seen as heretical because they don’t accept the need for formal religious hierarchy, rather they practice direct connection to Spirit. Kabbalah might be similar?
I suppose I'm one of those unreflective, knee-jerk, dogma-repeating christian right-wingers, so maybe I could speak a word or two in defense of my fellow neanderthals.
"It is just repeating a dogma some authorities have come up with."
As a Baptist, I don't recognize any religious authority outside of the Bible, so this accusation misses the mark in my case (and I'm far from the only one). I suppose you could be referring to catholics, but if so, what of it? In their view (wrong though it is), the authority of the church is given by God and superintended by the Holy Spirit. In which case following that authority is a good thing, not a bad thing. You may not agree with that, and I don't, but then you should provide a reason why it's wrong rather than just sneering at it.
"Do Christian right-wingers seriously believe that there is no difference between some cells at conception and a baby?"
Well at the end of nine months, they tend to be a bit bigger and have more parts than when they started out, but then there's a lot of differences between a baby and man too. Morally speaking, no, there is no difference. A person is a person is a person, regardless of race, regardless of gender, regardless of age, regardless of whether your fingers have grown in.
If you view it any other way, you leave yourself with the impossible task of deciding exactly when a person becomes a person (call it ensoulment if you like). Make this transition as fuzzy as you want, you're stuck with the fact that one day it's morally permissible to kill this creature, and the next day it's not because he or she crossed some threshold into personhood (or at least right-to-life-ness). If infanticide is immoral, but flushing a fertilized egg is not, you have to draw a line somewhere, and anywhere you draw it will be wrong.
The only morally consistent position is the one proposed by the idiot dogmaticians. Before fertilization you have a sperm, which is dad, and an egg, which is mom. At the moment of fertilization is when you start to have a tertium quid, a new creature that's a combination of mom and dad, but no longer one or the other. That's a person, and killing people is wrong.
For the life of me I can't understand why protecting the weak and speaking up for the voiceless is such a horrible "rigid" and "merciless" thing, "crushing others and causing misery." From where I'm standing, I see a pro-life movement that stands up for both women and babies, seeking to do everything possible to help mothers in desperate situations, while compassionately and firmly insisting that killing babies (born or otherwise) is not the answer to our problems.
Some much more can and should be said, but I've already gone way past an appropriate length for blog post comments. Hope this helps you understand us a bit better. (And I am american although I live in Europe :)
One of the tragedies of this time and place is that half-baked "intellectuals" such as James Lindsay are taken as "authorities" on the perennial great matters of human existence.
His writings (rantings) have more in common with P T Barnum whose was of course wrong - there are thousands of suckers born every minute and thousands who pretend or are suckered into believing that Lindsay is an authority on the perennial matters of human existence. He was/ is an atheist and as such even pretends to provide a unique understanding of God.
His New Discourses website is pathetic and boring.
There is nothing remotely new to be found there and he repeats the same simplistic stuff over and over again.
Humans evolved as an intensely socially cooperative species with complex emotional bonds within kinship groups (gene pools). Social cooperation, eusociality, is a survival adaptation. People need meaning. Without religion, they make up stuff that is usually worse, to fill the vacuum.
I'm interested that you assume anyone who holds the position that abortion at any stage ends a life 'is just repeating a dogma some authorities have come up with.' That's quite a sizeable brush stroke, as is allocating political opinions (I'm not American, though from context I think you might be? No offence intended either way...).
I think some of the fuzziness around this question derives from the use by many activists of terms like 'child murder', because it unnecessarily forces a debate over whether a fertilised ovum is a 'child', which indeed becomes ridiculous rather quickly. A classic case of rhetorical shorthand taking on a life of its own (no pun intended).
A consideration of whether or not abortion ends a life (a more useful framing) makes ensoulment, as you imply, the only sensible binary we can discuss. Funnily enough, this was exactly the thought process that led me to the personal conclusion that all abortion does in fact end a life. Fewer than five years ago I was a firm 'safe, legal, and rare' advocate; however, I was also agnostic and very far from practising any kind of faith.
The most effective and beautiful explanation I ever heard about why sexual morality matters is this: that conception is the only moment at which man directly co-operates with a divine act of creation.
Naturally, not everyone believes this. But here's my rationale: if someone believes in the soul as immortal, and therefore believe that people who have left their physical bodies at the moment of death still exist as disembodied souls, I'm not sure why they would struggle to believe that the infamous 'clump of cells' cannot be the host of a created soul. Is the argument that it requires more physical space? Does it require a specific organ to inhabit?
Believing in the soul, and believing that the intellect is a faculty of the soul (per Catholic theology, YMMV), and observing that very young children quickly begin to exercise their intellect within their limited capacity – which rapidly develops as they grow – leads us hopefully to an agreement that a young baby already has a soul. Unlike the angels, created in a single instant as fully formed intelligent spiritual beings, we mud-based life forms need a little more time to develop. This is not controversial.
But if we accept that the soul, existing in the body, remains subject to this biological process of growth and development, the question of when exactly this soul deigns to enter the physical form becomes no less ridiculous than the question of whether or not a fertilised cell is a child. Why would it not be at the moment of conception? What exactly is it waiting for? And how certain can you be of that? Certain enough to risk ending a life?
'People who think like that are, frankly, hostage to a rigid belief system that looks at morality as a set of absolute laws, which they will mercilessly enforce even while they crush others and cause misery. It is the character trait of the holier-than-thou personality type that is quick to lecture everybody about morals...'
Am not!
I completely believe you when you say you are not that person. But I think this type of person exists, and absolute situation-independent morals can easily be abused (and created) by them. I felt the need to call that out.
As for your argument here, it strikes me as sound and well-reasoned. To be honest I haven't read a lot of such reflections (even though I'm not American :)) - perhaps they get drowned out in the heat of the culture war. I would tend to agree that we can't really know, but it doesn't necessarily follow that there is no difference at all between conception and a child. Also, I think it's possible that the relation between soul and body is not so close, especially at the beginning, as you seem to imply. We tend to think sonewhat materialistically about these matters, but it might not be so clear. Anyway, I respect your stance. And if my "poking" here has led to you laying it down for us, then perhaps it was worth it.
Ah I'm sorry, I do remember now that you weren't American, I just forgot!
I certainly didn't mean that there is no difference between conception and a child, I agree with you there. I suppose I skipped over it because I've always tended to think that it's not a call I would ever like to make. But obviously, many people find themselves making it under duress and that's not something for me to judge them for at all.
Thanks for the response, it's so valuable to have actual conversations about these things instead of the culture war shouting..! :)
But if we accept that the soul, existing in the body, remains subject to this biological process of growth and development, the question of when exactly this soul deigns to enter the physical form becomes no less ridiculous than the question of whether or not a fertilised cell is a child.
This is the crux. Arguing about when precisely cells become "ensouled" seems about as productive as arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If we accept the idea of ensoulment, it's infinitely cleaner and more coherent to believe that it happens at the moment of conception.
Hey, the angels and pins stuff isn't as bad as sometimes assumed :)
Much of the vitriol around the abortion question relates to the legal requirement for hard, binary distinctions between human and not human, which as you point out it is obviously inappropriate. There's a continuum from blastocyst to newborn baby with a soft, fuzzy transition somewhere in the middle.
The obvious resolution is to drop the legal binary, and adopt a legal continuum. At one end is a baby, termination of which is murder and should be treated as such. At the other is the just-fertilized egg, termination of which is the moral equivalent of shedding a skin cell, and which should therefore carry no penalty at all. In between an escalating cost could be imposed, in the form of an abortion tax, rising from what is in essence a nominal fine as for littering, to a fine appropriate to a severe traffic violation, up to a financially ruinous levy. Such a system would, I think, strike most people as basically fair and reasonable.
John, this is a ridiculous idea.
It does, however, map somehow better to what might be really going on than previous attempts of legislation.
This is an interesting idea John, one that I think has some merit but will of course be denounced by activists on both sides of the debate.
I think the functional issue of abortion is possible to be very humanized. It's easy to imagine someone with blue hair clipping their 12th punch on their abortion pass and castigate them as evil, but the truth when you listen to a lot of normal women who have had them talk about them is that it is a difficult choice and addresses severe consequences on all sides. It is not and will never be a simple debate. The problem precedes technology (women have been attempting to produce abortions long before it was a simple procedure), but technology now makes the issue more immediate and pervasive.
From a societal perspective, the idea that we have moved from "safe, legal, and rare" to "shouting your abortion" is certainly concerning. As someone who is about to have their first child, the thought that you can see the child in utero, hear the heart beat, and yet dismiss it as "a collection of cells" is ghoulish and fundamentally antihuman.
As any sort of collective societal moral center continues to fade in the face of extreme individualism, what will that narcissism continue to produce? There are some morals that arise simply from our biology, but without self restraint seen as a moral good and imperative they seem to be swallowed in many ways.
One thing I would quickly note about the gnosis discussion as well: it's not just James Lindsay who is espousing this idea though he may have originated it. N.S. Lyons has a fantastic piece on his/her substack about these ideas as well. I think there is some serious merit to the idea that though wokism isn't explicitly religious, like all manias it works through traits that humans have innate (the desire to be part of group, the euphoria that comes with holding the real truth, that truth was hidden (the gnosis), etc).
Well put.
Re Gnosis, I certainly agree that woke ideology taps into some of these mechanisms you described, and it is certainly a danger with any kind of truth seeking and group affiliation. (See my piece "Gnosis Puffeth Up" where I talk about the danger of thinking you have some secret knowledge and are better than others). I just think that there is a certain "right" form of Gnosis, and that it's necessary. The path is full of dangers though, including the danger of falling prey to ego, group think, etc.
I would agree that there is very much a religiosity about the woke, complete with faith in the not-scientific, but it is much more like the Inquisition than Gnosticism. Gnosticism didn't become a major religion largely because it is a way of being more than infrastructure for global domination. The Gnostics were mostly peaceful. Now give the woke the kind of power the inquisition had and see what happens.
Very good points. That was kind of where I was getting at: wokeism has more in common with the authoritarian elements of Christianity (inquisition etc.) than with Gnostic sects and ideas.
I have to give Lindsay credit that he is willing to get into it with the Christian right on any issue, I just wish he had better friends to keep him accountable about his arguments.
I give him credit too (and obviously not only for that). I think part of why some of his sparring with the Christian right goes wrong surely has to do with the latter's own blind spots and certain fixed beliefs derived from authority. But Lindsay sometimes seems to map too much rigid linear logic on the history of thought, which is ok, but one must be on guard that there are always different takes that shed additional light and put into question certain assumed links. One must also try to put oneself in the shoes of those thinkers in the past and those who took up their ideas, as R. G. Collingwood argued.
The other side of the charge of Gnosticism is the *content* of the special knowledge reserved to the elite: that being the corruption of the material realm. The historical Gnostics rejected material embodiment as irrevocably tainted by the evil of the false creator. Salvation comes through a kind of ascetic renunciation of *this world*.
Which is an odd position to square with secular, atheist, materialist doctrines that center themselves in a vulgar aestheticism of sensation-seeking. IIRC he's trying to draw on Eric Vogelin's writings, which have interesting things to say on this topic, but I'm not sure the meat is there to connect the "woke" ideologies to classical religion and its heresies.
RE: Abortion, it was once put to me that a thing can be a right, and it can also be exercised well or badly by the individual bearing that right. Part of the issue with the debate around abortion is this need to search for a PRINCIPLE, in bold all caps, that decides the matter independent of any situation.
That's not realistic in most any circumstance where we have to decide what is best to do against many different sources of reasons for (not) acting, though you wouldn't know it from the crass legalism that passes for "moral debate" today.
Hi! I happened upon this blog just now. The linked article on the history of abortion teachings in Catholic thinking is very nice definitely helps inform the decision-making of someone who is on the fence about the morality of abortion and their own religious belief.
There is, however, one bad-faith or careless statement in the article. It makes the point that Catholics are 22% of the country, but Catholic hospitals are "One in six" beds, and that number "grew by 22% since 2001" (article is from 2020). The implicit argument being, Catholics are a minority holding the health system hostage, but 1 in 6 ~~ 17%, and if that's "22% more than 2001", that means that in 2001 it was ~~ 14% of beds, which is a large growth but perhaps not so much over 20 years. The argument by numbers on its own doesn't bear out. It might not have any bearing on the rest of the article but this sort of imprecision and sorta-lying with numbers really irritates me.
Again, it doesn't meant that hospitals SHOULD be beholden to any faith, or that there is some rule that hospitals should have religious representation proportionate to religious representation in the country. But if the number of Catholic beds is a problem at all, you don't need the relative number of Catholics; if you are just finding faith-based healthcare a problem, address that. The implicit numbers argument is no good.
Indeed, this part of the article makes a very bad argument. Frankly, I find it infuriating that society is increasingly unwilling to respect Christian/Catholic sensibilities, even if they turn out to be in a minority.
Classifying ‘woke’ (race Marxism) as a gnostic (a)religion has historical merit. It posits an world created by an evil principle (racism as all-permeating). This surface-level world is opposed by a good principle (anti-racism) which can only be perceived by the acolytes, the woke. To bring the world over to the good, the evil world has to be destroyed in its entirety (the eschaton). After that, paradise.
You are correct that this construct lacks any god. It has the structure of a religion without the central tenet. I therefore prefer to call it an areligion but am not too satisfied with the term.
As for abortion, here’s one of my anecdotes (Luc, you will know this). Before reunification West Germany had a very strict abortion law (no abortion unless the foetus wasn’t viable or the mother was about to die). As a consequence, women who wanted an abortion had to go to more liberal jurisdictions, like the Netherlands. To fight this, then interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble (pre assassination) ordered the West German border patrol to have (usually single) women returning from Holland examined by an official obgyn (Amtsarzt). At gunpoint. If it was determined that they had had an abortion, they were prosecuted. An estimated 5000 women were de facto raped by the West German government.
Oh dear, I didn't know this. It is a good example that black-and-white thinking about morality seldom works.
As for Gnosticism, I get the analogy (and it's not wrong), it's just that I think there are some very good and important ideas in Gnosticism that have been slandered by mainstream Christianity, *and* as far as I know, Gnostic communities/sects historically haven't engaged in the sort of witch hunts and authoritarian intolerance mainstream Christianity has often degenerated into (and which is also characteristic of the woke). Perhaps the label works for Lindsay because both atheists can get behind it ("they believe in crazy religious fairy tales!") as well as mainstream conservative Christians ("it's heresy!")?
The identification of totalitarian ideologies with Gnosticism goes back to Eric Voegelin (‘The New Science of Politics’ 1952) although he later modified this analysis to some extent. Describing socialism as a religion is of course an older idea, the Fabian’s did it in the 1880s and saw it as a good thing.
Arthur Versluis points out, quite rightly and as you say, that the historical Gnosticism does not resemble Voegelin’s version. However, to me that’s beside the point. Religious and ideological movements can have wildly differing expressions of the same foundational beliefs. The anabaptists spring to mind. If a movement exhibits the same structure as its ancestor, I find it fair to give it the same name. Secondly, calling the woke gnostic points to their revolutionary and destructive nature, an aspect that often gets overlooked in all the minutiae. For that reason I have long called the neo-socialists eschatological, which brings us neatly back to Voegelin and his exhortation: “don’t immanentize the eschaton!”.
I have several comments relating to your piece, an editorial critique if you will.
The first being we all have different beliefs and opinions, all of which have flaws, all of which have at best a tenuous grasp of our perceptions of reality. It is expected that we will have differences of perception and therefore differences of opinion. To disagree is to simply have a difference of perception and opinion. I do think it would be better, if one wanted to have a true conversation about differences of opinion to leave the ad hominem in the edit bin. Your disparagement of Christian conservatives as "right-wingers" was unnecessary. Are they all "tea-baggers" too? I think the point could have been made without that.
Additionally when discussing the choices to be made about a pregnancy you wrote, "... a society should be able to talk about such issues and find some compromise (which seems to have been possible for a long time until recently) without one side screaming...". Agreed, a society should. But when has it ever? The assumption that it 'should', does not make it so, and therefore is a false premise to begin the quest for one's position.
And lastly, you stated, "Wokeism is a sort of mimicry, ersatz religion, and to my mind, a central aspect in its development is its atheism/materialism." So isn't that a form of religion? It may not be founded on centuries of dogmatic doctrine, or vast libraries of literature, or heralded in great architectural proclamations of dominance (although there are many ways to make those same connections of today's 'woketopians" and the marxist governmental dialectics), but isn't your statement essentially inferring that is is a religion, albeit one of shallow roots and short history?
Notice I am not arguing your opinions. The topics of abortion and religion are historically intense and generally best left to thoughtful personal discussions and not anonymous keyboard warrior battles. I do think that many of your opinions could have been made more persuasive with a bit of patient editing.
Hey John, thanks for the comment. No worries, criticism is welcome and I have learned quite a bit from it since I started writing here. To your point about language, perhaps I could have phrased some of it in more friendly terms, but it felt right to put it like that. Sometimes you poke a bit, I guess, and I used "right-wingers" to distinguish them from liberal Christians.
As for compromise, well it would be preferable, no? And I think we had something like that for a while. Although I don't think it can ever be sustainable, as I have argued in my piece "The Human Condition..."
Is Wokeism literally a religion? I guess it depends on how you define it. What I had in mind here was that it explicitly rejects the idea of God or some higher, spiritual realm, if you will. Implicitly, wokeness might (perhaps) be indistinguishable from a religion with "shallow roots and short history", as you described it.
It is true that in some situations, the atheism/religion distinction seems to break down and become useless, depending on what people bring to the table. The only solution then is to better formulate what we actually mean.
Very interesting to learn about the Church’s changing stance on abortion through the centuries - particularly that saints accrued miracles in some cases through abortion and that for some time ‘ensoulment’ was the delineation factor. Also interesting to note that for so long it was marked (for males at least) at 40 days as the Tibetan book of the dead puts ensoulment at 49 days and the pineal gland, considered by many to be the seat of the soul, forms at that same timeframe.
Indeed. I wager when talking about souls merging with the biological, we can't really put a time stamp on it. For all we know, there might be a large window ranging even from pre-conception to post-birth (just speculating). No need to go all left hemisphere about it it seems to me.
NS Lyons uses (luxury) Gnosticism as a critique of wokeism to mean the upper middle class managerials (PMC) that have been throwing the working classes, producers, under the bus, while pandering to the global financiers and media-tech oligarchs that got rich from suburban consumerism.
Dirty jobs vs. etherealism-virtualism.
Virtualism is the emergent culture of digital capitalism and suburban consumerism. It is “otherworldly” in the sense of being detached from physical reality.
Traditional Gnosticism is metaphysics, renunciation of evil and sin. The most radical forms, in both Islam and Christianity, are seen as heretical because they don’t accept the need for formal religious hierarchy, rather they practice direct connection to Spirit. Kabbalah might be similar?
I suppose I'm one of those unreflective, knee-jerk, dogma-repeating christian right-wingers, so maybe I could speak a word or two in defense of my fellow neanderthals.
"It is just repeating a dogma some authorities have come up with."
As a Baptist, I don't recognize any religious authority outside of the Bible, so this accusation misses the mark in my case (and I'm far from the only one). I suppose you could be referring to catholics, but if so, what of it? In their view (wrong though it is), the authority of the church is given by God and superintended by the Holy Spirit. In which case following that authority is a good thing, not a bad thing. You may not agree with that, and I don't, but then you should provide a reason why it's wrong rather than just sneering at it.
"Do Christian right-wingers seriously believe that there is no difference between some cells at conception and a baby?"
Well at the end of nine months, they tend to be a bit bigger and have more parts than when they started out, but then there's a lot of differences between a baby and man too. Morally speaking, no, there is no difference. A person is a person is a person, regardless of race, regardless of gender, regardless of age, regardless of whether your fingers have grown in.
If you view it any other way, you leave yourself with the impossible task of deciding exactly when a person becomes a person (call it ensoulment if you like). Make this transition as fuzzy as you want, you're stuck with the fact that one day it's morally permissible to kill this creature, and the next day it's not because he or she crossed some threshold into personhood (or at least right-to-life-ness). If infanticide is immoral, but flushing a fertilized egg is not, you have to draw a line somewhere, and anywhere you draw it will be wrong.
The only morally consistent position is the one proposed by the idiot dogmaticians. Before fertilization you have a sperm, which is dad, and an egg, which is mom. At the moment of fertilization is when you start to have a tertium quid, a new creature that's a combination of mom and dad, but no longer one or the other. That's a person, and killing people is wrong.
For the life of me I can't understand why protecting the weak and speaking up for the voiceless is such a horrible "rigid" and "merciless" thing, "crushing others and causing misery." From where I'm standing, I see a pro-life movement that stands up for both women and babies, seeking to do everything possible to help mothers in desperate situations, while compassionately and firmly insisting that killing babies (born or otherwise) is not the answer to our problems.
Some much more can and should be said, but I've already gone way past an appropriate length for blog post comments. Hope this helps you understand us a bit better. (And I am american although I live in Europe :)
One of the tragedies of this time and place is that half-baked "intellectuals" such as James Lindsay are taken as "authorities" on the perennial great matters of human existence.
His writings (rantings) have more in common with P T Barnum whose was of course wrong - there are thousands of suckers born every minute and thousands who pretend or are suckered into believing that Lindsay is an authority on the perennial matters of human existence. He was/ is an atheist and as such even pretends to provide a unique understanding of God.
His New Discourses website is pathetic and boring.
There is nothing remotely new to be found there and he repeats the same simplistic stuff over and over again.
Humans evolved as an intensely socially cooperative species with complex emotional bonds within kinship groups (gene pools). Social cooperation, eusociality, is a survival adaptation. People need meaning. Without religion, they make up stuff that is usually worse, to fill the vacuum.