The primal trauma of the modern liberal self
Steve D. writes:
When I read the Hillary supporter’s comment at the LA Times blog quoted in your “The white-hot indignation of a white Hillary supporter,” I thought it was little more than the typical, hysterically over-the-top rhetoric of American liberalism. Yet contrast these two quotes, the first from the Hillary supporter, the second from the CNN story about women in al Qaeda:
“I felt shred to smithereens because the diminished dignity of anyone is a subtraction from my own.”
“I felt that my heart was about to explode in my chest … I am powerless.”
The first is complaining about vote-counting in the Democratic Party; the second about official exclusion of women as active terrorists by a major terrorist organization. What is the connection here?
It’s not clear to me what is the sex of “roly luis,” the signed name of the LA Times commenter, so I can’t be certain that the connection is that both are women. So what explains the eerie similarity of language—the tendency to argue primarily from affected feelings rather than law or morality, plus the sheer, hyperbolic bathos of the words—that one sees in an American liberal and a would-be Moslem terrorist?
LA replies
And please don’t forget the teen-aged Barack Obama’s reaction, when his grandfather informed him that the persistent panhandler who had frightened his grandmother at a bus stop was a black man:
“The words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure.”
In all three instances it is the language of the modern liberal self. Anything external to the self that intrudes on the self or presents standards that conflict with the self’s own desires is an unbearable attack on the self’s very existence and integrity.
However, I haven’t answered Steve’s question: how can a Muslim terrorist share this liberal sensibility?
I see two possible answers.
The first is George W. Bush’s and the neocons’ answer: that in every human heart, including the hearts of female Muslim terrorists, lives the desire for equal human dignity.
The second is that everyone today, even Muslims, have been formed by the modern liberal sensibility.
Some might say that those two answers are the same.
Erich writes:
You wrote of two examples of liberals plus one of a Muslim:
“In all three instances it is the language of the modern liberal self.”
The Muslim woman’s aggrieved angst is not likely to be a manifestation of the “modern liberal” pathos, and yet it does share a consanguinity with it: the pathology that ties all three of those examples together is gnosticism—Islamic gnosticism being a special variant with its own history, Leftist gnosticism more amorphous and culturally incoherent; but both rooted existentially in the same pneumopathology (disease of the spirit).
LA replies:
I agree, but could you explain how the three comments are gnostic?
Chris B. writes:
“Anything external to the self that intrudes on the self or presents standards that conflict with the self’s own desires is an unbearable attack on the self’s very existence and integrity.”
What if that thing that intrudes upon the ego is existence itself—and the subsequent desire for equality with other people is to minimize any reminder of this fallen state?
LA replies:
Chris has begun to answer the question I posed to Erich. The basic experience of gnosticism, common to both ancient gnosticism and what Eric Voegelin calls modern gnosticism, is that the world is alienating and senseless, a vast right-wing conspiracy as it were, and thus that the Creator who made this world, as portrayed in Genesis, is not the real God but a false god who has created a false, delusive world. Truth is to be found, according to ancient gnosticism, in the true, hidden god who is completely apart from the Creation, or, according to modern gnosticism (the focus of which is society rather than the cosmos), in some total political transformation of society or in a sense of the self as being utterly independent of its surroundings. The modern idea of the Totally Liberated Self is as much an expression of gnosticism as is, say, Communism.
The common theme is that the structure of existence—which, as I put it, consists of (1) the vertical hierarchy of truth, in which some things are more true and some things less true, some things closer to God, and some things further from God, and (2) the horizontal relationship of different cultures or ways of seeing truth—is an unbearable imposition on the self and must be rejected, either by the liberated self, or by an all-explaining, world-encompassing ideology (e.g. the Bush Doctrine), which has no truth outside itself.
Dimitri . writes:
That’s amazing how the supposedly “medieval cult” and the “most progressive movement” reveal more and more resemblance. Regarding why it happens, I would suggest a third answer, which does not contradict the two possibilities you offered. My guess is that Islam is the final destination of a liberal, not only modern, but medieval as well. It is a sort of the black hole from which no liberal can exit.
LA replies:
Yes, and that would fit with my nightmare prediction that Western liberals will, when the time comes, eagerly submit themselves to a new Caliphate of the West.
Erich writes:
The three expressions are not necessarily gnostic by themselves (i.e., it would be possible for non-gnostics to feel the ways they describe, for other reasons). They become recognizable as expressions of the gnostic pathos when they are contextualized in the gnosticism shared by the three people quoted.
“I felt shred to smithereens because the diminished dignity of anyone is a subtraction from my own.”
“I felt that my heart was about to explode in my chest … I am powerless.”
“The words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure.”
The leftist (I prefer that to “liberal”) variant of gnosticism is an amorphous sense of a collective that participates in various ways in Revolution against the structures of existence and against the mysterious and unavoidable imperfection those structures reflect. Since imperfection is unavoidable, and since the gnostic lusts after perfection, the gnostic has no choice but to orient his life, actions, thoughts and emotions around the transfiguration (whether through social engineering or destructive Revolution) of the existing system. One can recognize in the two leftist expressions quoted the unbearable intolerance with sociopolitical forces and agents that are perceived to be both frustrating the utopian desideratum of the gnostic, and attacking the trans-national brotherhood and sisterhood of the collective that is devoted to that desideratum.
The Muslim variant of gnosticism shares everything I described above with the leftist variant, and only differs in terms of having, for the most part, a different mythology derived from a different history (though at the beginning, Mohammed and early Muslims were to some degree influenced by similar gnostic sects that infected Western civilization—and in recent times Muslims have become influenced by Western gnostic pathologies such as Communism, Fascism and Nazism).
LA replies:
Erich’s reference to the gnostic desire for perfection reminds me of the way liberals deal with the question of morality. For liberals it is a truism that since all people are morally imperfect, all statements of (traditional) moral principles or ideals are hypocritical (hypocrisy is one of the liberals’ favorite words); and therefore, in order to cease being hypocritical, we should drop all moral principles and adopt the more relaxed liberal ethos of the “merely human.”
Erich continues (this comment came in before my above comment was posted, so he and I are really thinking along the same lines):
I agree with your summary of Voegelin’s view in your reply to Chris B., and it provides a complement to my comments about “imperfection” insofar as the gnostic finds not merely the ongoing acceptance of imperfection intolerable—what he more particularly finds intolerable is the classical and Christian way of orientation to perfection through the medium of imperfection. The gnostic does not want to suffer perfection through imperfection; he wants to abolish imperfection and (in the more extremist version) to abolish humans who stand in the way of that abolishment.
LA writes:
In passing, I’d like to ask Erich, who is the author of Jihad Watch Watch: what are the chances that the only two people I know of who write detailed criticisms of Robert Spencer’s inconsistent position on Islam also happen to be students of Eric Voegelin’s teaching on gnosticism?
LA writes:
I never got this simple idea before. If there is a vertical hierarchy of truth, then everything below the top of that hierarchy is imperfect. Hierarchy implies imperfection. And this is the very thing that the gnostic cannot endure. It’s not that he longs for spiritual perfection, because the idea of spiritual perfection implies that as we are now, we are not perfect. Rather, it’s that he wants to be perfect as he is. So there must be nothing higher than himself. If there is anything higher than himself, then he is not perfect as he is.
Erich writes:
I suppose it depends on the angle from which one criticizes Spencer. From my experience with Voegelinians on the now defunct EV forum, most of them are so soft on Islam that they would probably classify Spencer as a “bigot.”
Erich writes:
You wrote:
“It’s not that he longs for spiritual perfection, because the idea of spiritual perfection implies that as we are now, we are not perfect. Rather, it’s that he wants to be perfect as he is. So there must be nothing higher than himself. If there is anything higher than himself, then he is not perfect as he is.”
I think this does not capture all gnostics. What your description captures is more what could be termed “gnostic lite,” a kind of incoherent liberalist amoralism that is also hypocritical and self-contradictory insofar as its practitioners continue to be parasitic on the sociopolitical structures they otherwise disdain.
But the more truly gnostic is in fact caught up in a deeper existential conflict which is also a conflict of political existence. He semi-consciously recognizes this (through the fog of his willful refusal to submit himself to conscience and repentance, of course) in his gnostic desire either (1) to escape the imperfect cosmos to a transcendence utterly outside the cosmos—which would be classical gnosticism—or (2) to try to transfigure the cosmos through violent Revolution or social engineering—which is modern gnosticism. Modern gnosticism implicitly recognizes, therefore, the need for transfiguration, and therefore resembles the Platonic and Christian modes of relation to transcendence. Where it differs is in its intolerance of suffering imperfection in order to attune to perfection, for the gnostic semi-consciously sees that suffering imperfection is imposed upon us by the gods, or by God, and we have no choice but patiently to abide that mystery. Voegelin noted that Karl Marx, in his university thesis on Prometheus, being made to suffer by the gods and cursing the divine because of his agony, purposefully omitted the words of Aeschylus in his mythopoetic rendering which forms the main story of Prometheus studied by Marx: “Truly, this man is diseased!” Marx simply lopped off that ending because he wanted to change the structure of reality: No, man does not have to suffer God. Man can choose to be his own God.
But—here is the difference between the hard-core gnostic and the “gnostic lite”—the former realizes it will take a herculean effort, a Revolution, a bloody transfiguration, or short of that, a vast and concerted deployment of social engineering and the aggrandizement of political power that will require.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 02, 2008 01:54 PM | Send