Wokism as Manichean Gnosticism

Discussion

Michel Bauwens:

EDITORIAL: WOKISM AS MANICHEAN GNOSTICISM

Gnosticism has a generic positive meaning, and a specific pejorative meaning.

Positively interpreted, Gnosticism is simply the recognition that there is a human capacity to know the divine; and in that context, it is often counterposed to mysticism as the union with the divine. In other words, the gnostic ‘knows’ and is in en-stasis, while the mystic <is> in union, and finds himself in ex-statis.

But what is of interest here is the pejorative understanding of Gnostics as extreme dualists, as typically found in Manicheism and the types of Christian Gnosticism that were fought both by the ‘pagan’ Neoplatonists and the Catholic-Orthodox Churches. These types of Gnostics, who indeed claimed to ‘know’ the divine, and had very extensive and detailed cosmogonies, believed the world was driven by the eternal fight between the god(s) of Good and those of evil. For the unionists, such as official Christians and Neoplatonists, evil is a lack, it has no independent existence and Creation is fundamentally positive, an expression of the divine. But for those dualistic Gnostics, the world is the work of an evil demiurge. I know this from personal experience as in my ‘seeking’ years, I was a member of a gnostic, neo-Manichean, neo-Cathar tradition, that believed that Yahweh was the evil Demiurg, and not the real God. A number of things flow from this, such as a vision that most people are indeed evil as well, that there are very few elect (those with superior souls that can exceptionally be saved), and that nothing good can be done in this world. Paradoxically, the very rejection of this world, may lead either to extreme asceticism, as the flesh and the body are evil, or, to the other extreme of what is sometimes called antinomianism, i.e. ‘anything goes’ as there are no legitimate norms in this world. We will see a bit below why this is important to understand contemporary wokism.

It is important to understand that such gnosticism can be entirely secular as well, at least in the interpretation of cultural analysts such as Eric Voegelin. Basically, St. Augustine still divided the world into secular and divine, and there was no salvation in the secular world (you can see here hints of gnosticism in the official Christian doctrine, which was a Middle Way doctrine), but it served to prepare oneself for the divine world. But Joachim de Fiore, an Italian monk who lived at the time of the re-emerging Italian city-states and the worldly burghers, saw it otherwise. He temporalized the ‘eschaton’, or as Voegelin calls it, there was an ‘immanentization of the eschaton’. So he saw the history of the world with a future, not with an end. The ‘world of the Father’, characterized by the law of the Old Testament, had been replaced by the Age of the Son through Christianity, with love as the guiding principle, but an inability to realize it. But soon, he predicted, a new age of the Spirit would be ushered in, in which everyone would be living as loving monks, in Edenic cooperative communities dedicated to the divine. It proved immensely appealing to a urbanizing world that was becoming capitalist, but it also quickly became ‘secularized’.

Voegelin sees the Reformation as a first expression of this, but then quickly followed by entirely secular versions, specifically Marxism and Nazism, which both expect a future age of more perfection. To put it in the most succinct way: Heaven is simply a future version of Earth, and the way to get there is to remove the evil people, the capitalists or the Semites, who uphold the structure of evil. As a former Marxist myself, I am not going to reduce Marx and socialism to this, but one has to admit that there is a underlying structure of secularized gnosticism in the historical movement. The reason is simple, all of us, even the most secular, carry with us the mental templates of millenarian culture. We can’t escape using the categories of the spirituality that we reject.

Now on to contemporary identity politics. I was first alerted to this gnostic aspect, after reading an interview with two activists in Yes! Magazine, which unfortunately, I have not been able to find again. But the gist was this: they described how their entire subjectivity was an addition of their oppressions. Now of course, oppression and domination exist, one would be blind or foolish to deny this, but to reduce our identity to these entirely negative processes is indicative of seeing the world as an evil place (and of an empty self I would add, the sign of failing collective identities in the present system).. Later on, after several years of study of the literature and practice of wokism, it was not difficult to see that this is indeed the fundament of their beliefs. Being human is defined as the sum of oppressions, and even more explicitly, the more intersectional points of oppression one has, the more one knows. It’s hard to be even more explicitly gnostic than this. The stress on ‘lived experience’, the monopoly of only those who have enough oppression points, entirely mirrors the belief of the Gnostics, that only a few elect can be saved.

Moreover, it is also widely documented that there is no redemption in wokism. Those that are marked by evil characteristics, whether it is Whiteness or Male Toxicity or being afflicted by old age (or even worse, by death, as in the evil Dead White Males who wrote books that have to be eliminated from the curriculum), cannot be saved. They can be ‘allies’ (but never equal partners in a common struggle for liberation), i.e. servant people that are subordinate, but never equals. And being a subordinate ally is not a way to redeem oneself, only a way to pay back the life debt, for ever, incurred by an oppressive existence and the collective karma of one’s evil group, of which we all have the visible stigmata. As Kendi says on page 19 of his book: the current generation of white people have to pay back for the sins of previous generations, and the future generations, for the current sins, but this process cannot end, ever. In other words, like for the Gnostics, the current world is un-redeemable. We are all literally predestined to play out our roles in the cosmic playground, as agents of good and evil. There is no way to escape evil, the only option is to obey the Elect, those who know.

(everything but being wealthy, which like their Protestant forebears, is seen as a sign of being elect, and be able to fund the movement, you will never catch a wokist critique anyone for wealth privilege; wokism seems specifically linked to a degeneration of the Calvinist ethos).

The evolution of the political trans movement, the fluid identification of gender identities ‘at will’ (self-ID), all the signs also show a strong antinomianism. The movement is extremely puritan and engaged, nearly ‘all the time’ in purity spirals and witch hunts, but not in the service of any asceticism. If lesbians are blamed for not accepting intercourse with people with male genitals, this is not a sign of asceticism, but rather of the opposite. The aim is not the mastery of desire, but the full liberation of desire, and technology is mobilized to inscribe the possibility of transforming bodies at will, even if it is at the cost of the capacity to feel through sensory genitals.

Finally there is of course the demand for total ideological conformity, the adherence to a fixed belief that is chock full of dogma. If one does not believe that 2+2=5, that females do not exist, one’s membership in the movement is immediately suspect and witch hunts surely follow, with the aim of eradicating the evil that is trying to contaminate their community. The Devil never sleeps, and vigilance must be incessant.

So let’s review the gnostic elements we have seen so far:

• The world is an evil place, ruled only by oppression, and there is no possibility to reform or transform it

• The world is divided hierarchically between the good people, and the evil ones, and there is no possibility for redemption at the individual level either. Your biological markers determine your fate and your place in the hierarchy.

Nevertheless, ‘conversion’ is paramount. If one is to be among the elect, it is paramount to accept the ‘gnosis’ i.e. the true knowledge of the real world. There is no room for dissent. Race and gender have all been redefined as a combination of physical characteristics, AND the right beliefs. Otherwise, ‘you are not really black’, etc ..

The important question is: can pure gnosticism ever win ?

Historically, the answer seems to be negative. Society needs norms, however flawed and culturally relative such norms can be. These norms can change, but cannot be abolished, as there is no collective life without shared norms, and for any culture or even species to survive, those norms need to be related to the self-reproduction of the species, and its consumptive needs (production or reproduction). Norms that violate this can only exist in small communities in a parasitical relation to the wider community that sustains it. Anti-norms however, as formulated by queer theory, can only exist for short periods of societal decline, when society is seeking new norms, and no longer understands the old norms. The underlying logic has been called the Great Relearning by Tom Wolfe.

And the story goes like this; periodically, human populations forget why the norms exist. (there might be good reasons for this, when dominant norms are no longer functioning). They challenge them, abandon them, or try new ones. Catastrophe ensues, society collapses. People re-learn that norms are necessary, and a new society or civilization evolves around new norms. And so the cycle goes on.

Non-antinomianist gnostic norms certainly have shown longevity. Buddhism is very gnostic, and christianity is mildly gnostic, but none of them is antinomian, on the contrary. As far as I know, Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism, and Hinduism, have created very limited, often secret, spaces where left-hand practices can be experimented with, very discreetly, but never as the official ideology.

So we should expect the more extreme forms of woke to be an expression of a temporary transition period but the underlying attitude is more resilient. This being said, a return to biological ranking and segregation, the main goals of the woke movement today, even though they are the historical norm, are entirely regressive to the values of the current world civilization. A return to dhimmitude, the separation of groups that was the norm in Ottoman society, is unlikely to gain majoritarian support. As an expression of the degeneration of the elites in the West, they will face the immense opposition of a much more conservative global working population, who are more attached to the norms of common decency than the elites of the day. I am not claiming such regression is impossible, world history of chock full of examples of them. I am hoping that the advantages of modernity, in terms of an egalitarian conception of personhood, will in the end be attractive enough to be part of the expected ‘transcend and include process, that leads to our next civilizational format. In the end, I stick to my belief that the alliance of the one and twenty percent, the owning and managerial segments of the population, cannot win from the 70% (assuming the totality of the elite is woke, which I don’t believe to be the case, certainly outside of the West). I believe we need a politics that creates a jurisdictional alliance that has much broader support.

All the solutions of the woke movement, lead to fast disintegration of the societies they are applied to. So in a weird way, perhaps we can be a bit optimistic since, even if it leads to the suicide of the civilizations where it becomes dominant, it is not an agent of transformation, but a sign of accelerated decline. In other words, even if it lasts a generation or two, it’s not (very) long term. The woke are a dissolving agent, nothing more. It doesn’t diminish the nightmare for those alive today, but it gives us hope for our children’s children.