Author: Alexander Riley

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Professor's Questions and Prompts

Summary of Voegelin’s “Ersatz Religion”

The subtitle is “The Gnostic Mass Movements of Our Time,” which nicely summarizes what he’s up to here. Voegelin’s thesis is that there are numerous modern political movements that in the structure of their belief systems resemble Gnosticism.

(Gnosticism was a religious movement in antiquity, existing at the same time as early Christianity, probably preceding it, and which exercised some influence early in the history of Christianity as a heresy.)

Voegelin gives six central characteristics of Gnostic belief structure:

  1. The Gnostic is “dissatisfied with his situation.”
  2. The cause of this dissatisfaction is attributed to the “intrinsically poor…organiz[ation]” of the world.
  3. It is believed that salvation for/from the corrupt, poorly organized world is possible.
  4. The method of transformation of the corrupt world for a perfect one will be historical and this-worldly.
  5. Human action can produce this beneficial transformation of the world.
  6. The Gnostic sees his task as acquiring the knowledge to transform the wicked world and then acting as a prophet of the need for this transformation.

Among the political movements Voegelin classifies as Gnostic in structure are progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism. As I indicated in our discussion, I want to suggest that wokeism—a mutated and much more virulent form of progressivism that negates virtually every founding institution of Western civilization—should be included as the latest such movement.

The Gnostic perspective on the direction of the change desired is modeled on the Christian idea of perfection, though it necessarily distorts it in moving it from the supernatural realm to this world.

For the Christian, perfection is achieved by the justified believer only in the afterlife, though this life is sanctified as the training ground for efforts to reach that pure state.

For the Gnostic, it is envisioned that the perfect state can be reached in this world, whether that perfect state is only hinted at and the emphasis is on the progressive movement toward it or it is carefully defined, as in Marxism’s vision of a classless communist utopia to follow the fall of the bourgeoisie.

Voegelin then launches on an analysis of the symbolic structures at work in the thought of a 12th century Christian theologian Joachim of Fiore (below), in order to show how many of these modern political Gnosticisms borrow from that structure.

Joachim imposed the trinitarian nature of God on history, claiming that world history would consist of three great ages, that of the Father (from the beginning until Christ), that of the Son (from Christ until the mid-13th century), and that of the Holy Spirit (what came after that). Modern Gnostic movements borrow this tripartite symbolism: Marxism sees human history as divided into the era of primitive communism, the era of capitalism, and the era of classless utopia, whereas wokeism thinks in terms of a similar trinity of primitive freedom and equality (sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans), slavery, and finally liberation in the perfect and hierarchy-free multicultural society.

Joachim of Flora

Joachim also emphasized the importance of great leaders and prophetic figures that would be needed to move from one epoch to the next. The communist and fascist fascination with all-powerful leader figures (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Mussolini, Hitler) and prophets (Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci), who are typically intellectuals, is structurally very similar.

Finally, Joachim believed “the community of spiritually autonomous persons…a community of monks” was the engine of movement through the stages.  Their autonomy is centrally about freedom from institutions. In Joachim’s case, this meant mostly independence vis-à-vis the sacraments of the Church. For the neo-Gnostics, it often is seen as escape from the bonds of the state, the family, and all other social institutions.

The Gnostic program for perfecting the world must, in Voegelin’s argument, omit elements of the nature of the world and being that disprove the program. He demonstrates this by looking briefly at such omissions in the work of Thomas More, Hobbes, and Hegel.

The Gnostic project is a corruption of Christianity also in the ease by which it is believed. Christian faith, by contrast, requires great personal strength, given the paucity of “tangible” certainty to undergird it. The leap of faith is difficult and it is constantly challenged by empirical affairs.

Gnostic movements are thus tempting especially to those who lack “spiritual stamina”: “[G]reat masses of Christianized men who were not strong enough for the heroic adventure of faith became susceptible to ideas that could give them a greater degree of certainty about the meaning of their existence than faith.”

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Class Minutes

Class Notes 8/31

We started class by opening the discussion back up on readings from last week (8/24). We did a lengthy examination of Collins’ introductory definition of intellectuals as “people who produce decontextualized ideas.”

Most ideas most people, including intellectuals, have are contextualized, that is, they are closely connected to whatever is happening to us in a given situation or moment. The idea “The cat is hungry” is generally motivated by e.g., hearing the cat meow in a certain way.

Decontextualized ideas are disconnected from immediate situations and contexts and have to do with more abstract and generalized phenomena. A decontextualized idea about hungry cats is “Cats are carnivores that, in the wild, hunt prey.” Intellectuals are, far more often than non-intellectuals, concerned with such decontextualized ideas.

Another piece of this decontextualization is the intellectual search for ideas that are true regardless of context and situation. This gets to Collins’ argument (which is also made by Gouldner and Molnar) that Truth is often a central intellectual concern that motivates their efforts.

Collins also notes that Truth is viewed as a “sacred object” in such intellectual communities that is pursued in the same way that religious faithful pursue God. We talked a bit about what makes something sacred and how intellectuals can be understood as engaged in relationships with sacred objects. The sacred is defined by Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology who wrote near the end of his life a monumental study of the origins of religious life, as that which is seen as transcendent of everyday life, which stands outside of and above the mundane, and which is recognized as having a certain power that can cause us to feel reverence and/or fear in its presence. Sacred things have to be secluded and protected from pollution by the profane or mundane, as they can lose their power if they are soiled by those everyday things. This is why sacred objects are surrounded by rituals of purification and taboos.

We talked about how sacredness can be seen in intellectual life in the way e.g., some figures are recognized almost as saints or holy figures. I gave the example of a talk in Berkeley by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Hundreds of people crammed into a smallish auditorium to hear him talk about his latest research and the attitude was of hushed reverence. When he appeared on the podium, he was applauded vigorously. In France, a saying humorously referred to his elevated status: “Après Dieu, Bourdieu/After God, Bourdieu.” People came up to him after the talk seeking his autograph on copies of his books, just as you would expect to see at a celebrity book-signing.

Sacredness was seen by Durkheim as a generalizable concept that can be found in numerous fields outside religion and intellectual life. We talked a bit about sports examples. I mentioned the example of the baseball player Reggie Jackson in my youth. He was widely recognized as a great player from early in his career, but perhaps the moment that raised him to sacred status was his hitting three home runs on three pitches in a World Series game in 1977.

We then moved to discussing the readings on the schedule for this week.

We spent most of our time on the Shils chapter “The Intellectuals and the Powers.” Shils, like Collins, begins by emphasizing the intellectual relationship to the sacred: “In every society, there are some persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of their universe and the rules which govern their society…more than the ordinary run of their fellow men, [they] are inquiring, and desirous of being in frequent communion with symbols which are more general than the immediate concrete situations of everyday life and remote in their reference in both time and space [i.e., decontextualized ideas]. In this minority, there is a need to externalize this quest in oral and written discourse, in poetic or plastic expression, in historical reminiscence or writing, in ritual performance and acts of worship.”

Intellectuals are thus scholars, artists and performers of all sorts, and public figures who dedicate themselves to writing and reporting on decontextualized ideas. Their unique relationship to the sacred is better understood if we recognize that, historically, the intellectual class grew out of the priestly class. That is, the first intellectuals in all societies were religious intellectuals, who spent their time thinking about God/the gods and theorizing the relationship between the supernatural world and our world. Even when the modern intellectual class arose and some intellectuals separated themselves from religious institutions, that close relationship to sacredness remained. We can see the history of the relationship in the fact that the institution in which many (but not all) intellectuals operate–the university or college–was created in the West by the Christian church.

Shils argues that certain functions that intellectuals fill need to be met in any society, so there will always need to be intellectuals.

We then talked a bit about some of the “intellectual traditions” Shils presents, which give us neat ways of understanding how many intellectuals conceive of their identities and their relationship to the larger society.

The tradition of scientism rejects tradition as such as irrational and it embraces the pursuit of objective knowledge through rigorous testing and experimentation. Intellectuals in this tradition are often found among Gouldner’s technical intelligentsia and in universities.

The romantic tradition values originality, spontaneity, and creative individualism above all else. Not rigorous testing but the authentic expression of impulse and passion are important here for intellectual self-identification. Artists and performers are more common in this tradition.

We ended class by briefly introducing the revolutionary/apocalyptic tradition. This begins in religious intellectuals who reject the established faiths in which they were educated to embrace a morally binary vision of the world as it is as fallen and to anticipate the coming of a great cataclysm that will burn away all the fallenness of this world to create a perfect Utopia. Later, in modern secular intellectuals, this tradition lives on in forms of political Utopianism such as communism and Wokeism. We will have much more to say about this tradition in weeks to come, as it is of central importance for our investigation of Wokeism.

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Course Readings

Readings Week of 10/12

All chapters from Paul Liberatore book (“Introduction,” “A Revolutionary Hero,” et al.)

“Requiem for a Radical“

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Course Readings

Readings Week of 10/5

“The New Student Left” and “The Berkeley Student Movement”

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Course Readings

Readings Week of 9/28

“Stalin, Rakosi, Intellectuals”

“We Must Not Disillusion the Workers”

“Antifa” (chapter 1) and “Afterthoughts”

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Course Readings

Readings Week of 9/21

“Intellectuals in Search of a Religion”
“America Has Gone Mad”

“Themes”

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Course Readings

Readings Week of 9/7

“Ersatz Religion”

“Alienation of Intellectuals” (this is chapter/thesis 11 in the Gouldner book)

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Course Readings

Readings Week of 9/14

“The Intellectual as Progressive”

“Secularized Religion” and “Man-God”

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Course Readings Uncategorized

Reading week of 8/31

Alvin Gouldner, “The New Class as a Speech Community” (chapter six in the Gouldner book I put up with last week’s reading)

Ed Shils, “The Intellectuals and the Powers”

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Professor's Questions and Prompts Uncategorized

Summaries of readings for 8/24, combined with class notes and some prompts for blog writing

We started class a few minutes late as my air conditioner started leaking about 30 minutes before the start of class, and we had to adjourn slightly earlier than originally intended b/c I had to meet the technician for an emergency repair. We will make up for the time lost next week by an extra-scintillating discussion!

I gave a brief introduction to the course topic, which can be summarily expressed as “An Analysis of Wokeism in the Intellectual Class in Contemporary America.” I didn’t fully define Wokeism, as we’ll be getting into that topic properly only later in the term. It’s sufficient at this point to define it as the latest version of an intellectual form of utopian belief that has become highly influential in American institutions.

Molnar, “The Emergence of the Intellectual”

This gives a brief account of the birth of the modern Western intellectual. Lots of historical detail, but here are a few key points to retain:

Human societies have long pursued Peace, Unity, and Prosperity, but in the pre-modern world it was recognized that perfectly achieving any of them was an impossibility. Technological advance and social changes (especially in the political order) made it seem beginning with the Renaissance that they might be perfectly achievable, and intellectuals began to devote themselves to the task of how to achieve them.

In the medieval world, a unity of belief and understanding of politics was achieved through Christianity. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Voyages of Discovery (especially that of the Americas) pushed Western societies away from this unity as the bourgeois class emerged as the leading social group. It quickly demonstrated antagonism to the old classes, which desired to preserve Christian unity and the balance of power between King and Church. The bourgeoisie had one sole interest: material acquisition. This increasingly became the dominant value in the West.

Intellectuals quickly established a symbiotic relationship with the bourgeois class, becoming their advocates and their source of technical innovations that drove production ever higher. Figures such as Rousseau expounded philosophies that preached that human nature was pristine and only corrupted by bad social arrangements. The search was thus on for the perfect political and social order in which humankind could flourish. But in addition to producing liberal democracy, these new intellectual worldviews also led to totalitarianisms, including what Molnar calls “totalitarian democracy.”

As modernity advanced, the intellectual class came to understand its own mission as superior to that of its bourgeois allies. Increasingly, intellectuals began to yearn to rule themselves instead of subordinating themselves to others.

Collins, “Coalitions of the Mind”

The main theme you should take from Collins is that intellectuals can be defined as those individuals who dedicate themselves to the “sacred object” of “Truth.” This sacred object operates for them according to the same basic symbolic principles as holy objects operate for the religious community.

Collins also argues that intellectuals pursue positions of status in their intellectual ranks in their behaviors with respect to the sacred objects. They participate in constant “interaction rituals” in which they can display their prowess with ideas in lectures and intellectual meetings, show their positions on debates and disputes in writings and public talks, and thereby rank themselves among others in the intellectual group.

He means the concept of interaction rituals to be generalizable, that is, all humans participate in these, and for the same basic sociological reason: to rank themselves in status hierarchies. In this way, Collins gives us a useful sociological theory for understanding the activity and beliefs of intellectuals.

Gouldner, “Introduction”

As I mentioned in class, we’ll be reading a few more chapters of Gouldner’s book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class as the semester continues.

In this introduction, he sets the stage for his discussion of what he calls the New Class (the modern intellectual class, which has two subparts: humanistic intellectuals and the technical intelligentsia) by briefly looking at some historical elements of the intellectual class’s emergence. Some of the ground covered overlaps with Molnar, e.g., both emphasize the importance of secularization in the rise of the intellectual class. Gouldner however is more a sociologist than a philosopher, and so he talks a good deal about the major institutional setting of intellectual life: the school. Schools become a space in which a whole new culture is produced and foisted upon students, centering on a new form of discourse that he will describe more later, the Culture of Critical Discourse (CCD).

The two types of intellectuals split in their functions and their attitudes to the social world. Humanistic intellectuals become more alienated from the societies in which they live, as they are marginalized from social and political power and feel as though they should be higher on the status hierarchy. They are driven to challenge and attack their own social orders, pointing toward utopian alternatives in which the realm of ideas will play a more central role.

Some questions to help prompt your blog writing:

How can we put these three perspectives on the modern intellectual class into conversation with one another? Are they compatible? If not, why not?

Why should we consider intellectuals in an analytical lens that is not their own? That is, what is the benefit of studying intellectuals the same way that they study other objects (e.g., microbes, or political states, or religious communities)?

Gouldner and Molnar share the view that intellectuals are a power-seeking social group, just as all other groups are. What do you think the intellectuals themselves would say about this? Which of the various scenarios Gouldner presents as possible future roles for the New Class (pp. 6-7) do you think has most been realized since he wrote his book (published 1979)?