An Analysis of Eric Voegelin’s 4th and 5th Gnostic TraitsShow notes here
Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts.Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it modestly. He was born at the end of the Enlightenment and fully embraced its ideals,[1]which Isaiah Berlin summarized as:1. Every genuine question can be answered. If it can’t be answered, it’s not a genuine question.2. The answers to the questions can be discovered, learned, and taught.3. All the answers are compatible with one another.Those ideals are captured perfectly by science. Science is the discipline of power: it answers questions and puts them into neat boxes. Physics is especially good at this.Comte concluded that the principles of physics could be applied to society: “social physics” is what he initially called it before calling it “sociology.”Show notes here
This is a podcast episode from “Outside the Modern Limits,” a newsletter geared to help people understand and thrive in modernity. You can subscribe and find the show notes here.
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” RousseauRousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything.Significantly, Rousseau didn’t see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered philosopher of all time. He was so self-centered, biographers wonder if he was even capable of love.Show notes here.For notes regarding the first trait, click here.
A Diagnostic of the GnosticEric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels.The Swiss theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar was supposedly the first person to draw parallels between the ancient gnostic heresy and modern theories in Prometheus (1937), which examined modern German thought. Albert Camus did a similar thing with modern French thought in The Rebel (1951).[1]But Voegelin took the strain of thought much further in The New Science of Politics (1952). The book became a Time cover story and, voila, gnosticism was in the limelight, a least among nerds.Granted, later in life, Voegelin said he wasn’t sure “gnosticism” was the best term to use and thought perhaps it received too much attention, but he didn’t remotely conclude that the term didn’t work. Far from it. Later in life, at age 67, he published his most popular work, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1968).Show Note Here
For the fortunate few, that router is hard-wired with fiber optic. Most of us only get a wireless connection, and a wobbly one at that.Show notes here
If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world.Show notes here
Solon opened Athens to true order: the transformative order found through the Tao.Show notes here
Within 100 years, the Cartesians used impeccable logic derived from Descartes' I think there I am to reach two conclusions: there is no earthly agent of movement and there is no matter. There is only God and mind. Hume yanked God and mind out of these conclusions and the Cartesian Jenga tower came tumbling down.Show notes here
Something really bizarre happened around the year 500 BC, all across Eurasia. We started to realize that we live in the metaxy: an area comprised of transcendence and immanence. These ten thinkers, from Italy to China, led the way.Show notes here
Out of this paradoxical mish-mash of empire, Fascism, Catholicism, tradition, and modernity stepped a big dose of genius. Men who became giants in their fields, ranging from music to economics to psychoanalysis, many of whom fled Fascism to settle in western Europe or the United States. A partial list: Carl Menger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, Karl Popper, Viktor Frankl, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek.And Eric Voegelin.Voegelin is possibly the least known but possibly the greatest among them. He was poor at self-promotion, his prose was difficult, and his ideas were nearly impossible to appreciate. To compound the problem, he refused to “write down” to make his prose more accessible, insisting the reader make the required effort to understand the problem that was modernity, and then he compounded the problem even more by using neologisms that no one understood. Voegelin biographies spend a lot of time defining words, some even including a separate glossary at the end.But I suspect the real reason Voegelin never really caught on like, say, Freud or von Mises: He simply didn’t resonate. Luther wouldn’t have resonated in the 11thcentury; Nietzsche would have lived with the wolves in the 8th.Voegelin, with the analytic precision of a mathematician, tried to explain how transcendence plays into earthly politics. It wasn’t a song that played well in the exuberant and optimistic days of post-WWII America, which cared for such things about as much as Stalin cared about the Pope’s legions.On top of that, I believe Voegelin set himself an impossible task. The Tao can’t be explained in mathematical terms. But he was also correct: The Tao can’t be ignored, whether currently or in historical explanations.Show notes here
Before he published the Prince, Machiavelli published the seducer. Before he published a masterpiece of political philosophy, he published a comedy.The Mandragola (The Mandrake) tells the story of Callimaco, a handsome young man and seducer of women. He hears about the Florentine beauty Lucrezia and begins a conspiracy to seduce her. The problem is, she’s married. She’s married to a wealthy old man who can’t get her pregnant and they need a son to maintain their political position.Callimaco shows up, disguised as a doctor, and convinces her husband to give her a mandrake potion to increase her fertility. The problem is, Callimaco tells the old man, the first man who sleeps with her after she takes the potion will die. They decide to find an unwitting dupe to have sex with her. Callimaco, in different disguise, becomes the dupe, much to his delight. And Lucrezia’s. She at first was hesitant, but she relented and, convinced it was divine providence, takes Callimaco as her lover indefinitely.Everything turns out well. The old man get his male heir and Callimaco gets Lucrezia.Show notes here
A 50-year-old man had ritual sex with a 12-year-old girl while adult women assisted. And everyone was cool with it. That’s just part of the bizarre story told in Netflix’s Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey and the exploits of its prophet, Warren Jeffs. Show notes here
You're soaked in modernity. You think like a modern. It's not good. Consider doing the opposite of whatever your rationality tells you to do.Show notes here
“Modernitis”: A mental disease, rarely diagnosed, marked by intuitive confidence in one’s ideas and the findings of science.Show notes here
Descartes was a philosophical surgeon who lobotomized common sense from the modern mind without most people even noticing. It helped that western civilization was thoroughly prepped and anesthetized for the procedure.Show notes here.
Lycurgus put the “Spartan” into Sparta.Before Lycurgus, Sparta was like other Greek cities. Its citizens sang, celebrated love and good food, wrote poetry, and crafted fine pottery.After Lycurgus, Sparta became grim and tough, determined to keep its slave class under control despite the daunting slave-to-citizen ratio (10:1?).Music, poetry, fine pottery, and good food vanished. Family and love remained, but in twisted forms.Men were discouraged from marrying small wives. Men with vigorous wives were encouraged to lend them to vigorous men. Men who grew too old to service their young wives were expected to make her available to young men.Show notes here
Issue 11 of The Lamp features a review-essay about David Foster Wallace that is written by a man who is obviously conversant, not only with Wallace’s postmodernist prose, but also with the Wallace scholarship surrounding him. The writer of the absorbing essay? Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk. A monk? Yeah, yeah, I know: “Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton.” Monks write, often very well. But still. A man so conversant in something so postmodernistly cultural . . . a monk? It’s a snapshot into something important. Very important.It’s a snapshot of a thing I call “The Bridge Option.” Modernity was The Great Rejection, which was western civilization’s rejection of the Tao.The Great Rejection, being a rejection of the fundamental truth of our existence, wasn’t sustainable, so rejections of The Great Rejection started cropping up with increasing frequency as modernity rolled on. Counter-rejections were evident at the beginning of modernity in Blaise Pascal (a healthy counter-rejection) and the irrational Rosicrucian movement (not so healthy). As modernity steamrolled everything before it with increasing contempt and disregard for anything not steeped in its unholy trinity of Rationalism, Empiricism, and Progressivism, the counter-rejections have picked up steam as well. Show notes here
He sat on his mother’s couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954. In his 20s and the 1940s, he said he’d like to join his Russian comrades and fight against Fascism.He coined the term “Beat Generation” which became the proto-countercultural movement of the 1960s. He detested the 1960s counterculture, noting that the Beatnik’s was a movement of enthusiasm and glee, not one of disgruntled whining.He took Benzedrine, morphine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, and opium. He saw a statue of Mary turn its head.He died at age 47 from hemorrhaging of the esophagus, the drunkard’s classic death. His corpse held a rosary and his funeral Mass was held at St. Jean Baptiste Catholic Church.Such was the short life of Jack Kerouac.He was hip before it was hip, crisscrossing America in the late 1940s, from New York to Denver to San Francisco, with stops in Des Moines, Chicago, New Orleans, and points in-between, with a jaunt into Mexico City.Show notes here