This is the third in a series of articles exploring the phenomenon of Gnosis or Gnosticism from a “Non-Voegelinian Perspective.” Eric Voegelin (1901-1986) in The New Science of Politics (1952), Science Politics & Gnosticism (1965), and elsewhere used the term “Gnosticism” to refer to the “closed” or ideological-totalitarian systems that, for him, expressed the essence of modernity. Voegelin was a critic of modernity, just as he was a critic of the ideological-totalitarian systems, and in his usage the term Gnosticism (taking it out of quotation-marks) always carried a strong pejorative connotation. In Voegelin’s view, as expressed especially in the multi-volume study Order and History (1957-1965), Gnosticism sought to triumph but failed to do so in Antiquity, but then emerged anew in the early modern period to become the dominant Weltanschauung of the Twentieth Century. Voegelin did not mean – as some took him to mean – that specific Gnostic doctrines, surviving in latency during the medieval period, then sprang back to life in all their details; rather, Voegelin argued that the difficulty of coming to terms with the “tension” (the perceived imperfection or even hostility) of existence inclined some people to deny existence by constructing an elaborate “second reality.”

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1. Introduction

Spain is in the throes of the worst economic crisis in its recent history. Reeling from the collapse of a debt-driven construction boom, Spain entered recession in the second quarter of 2008 and posted six consecutive quarters of negative growth. Although the economy grew by 0.1 percent during the first quarter of 2010, Spain’s growth prospects are poor and any pick-up could be short lived.

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Duly Noted. “What is wrong with us?” When inconveniently resisting victims endanger the peace of the universe. Cultures compared.

 

1. Regardless of the supposedly globalized and interconnected world, segmented thinking and selective perception is more the rule than the exception. Many nations and movements manage to convince themselves that certain menacing phenomena cannot possibly affect them. At the same time, there is a tendency to hold a devalued image of the threat that these development carry in their belly. The method behind addictive self-delusion consists of one-sidedly overemphasizing the compatible aspects of the observed force while determinedly ignoring those signals that represent a threat.

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These days, one who would write about the unfolding meeting of the West with the Wall of Reality must choose every day whether to write on that day or take some action to protect his family from what he’d be writing about.

Financially, escape is no longer possible, for the crumple zone of the careening vehicle has already been smashed. Insane governments have turned a crisis of imprudent banking into a crisis of imprudent sovereign debt. To cure a disease of debt they have issued more debt. To address a fundamental crisis of insolvency, they are pumping the stock Keynesian emetic as though this were a crisis of liquidity. Like Michael Crichton’s environmentalists (1), destroying Nature they arrogantly wanted to manage, pedigreed economists at the helm of the West’s fiscal and monetary destiny have engaged in ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously intrusive intervention that will be followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage caused by the repair.

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Part I of this series posed the linked questions whether Eric Voegelin’s characterization of Gnosticism in his various books on the topic was valid – and whether, as Voegelin asserted, modernity, in the form of the liberal and totalitarian ideologies, could be understood as the resurgence of ancient Gnosticism.  The purpose of Part I was not to furnish definitive answers to those questions, but rather to explore two critiques of Gnostic doctrine from Late Antiquity. These were the essay Against the Gnostics by the Third-Century Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus and the discussion in Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Books III, IV, and V) of the Manichaean religion, a late variant of Gnosticism. The exposition concluded that the two accounts of Gnosticism although written more than a century apart (Augustine being subsequent to Plotinus) were convergent and largely similar. The prose did not state vigorously that Plotinus and Augustine, in their critiques, anticipate Voegelin, but readers might justly have inferred that as a tacit thesis. Readers might also have registered, as they read the various critical descriptions of Gnostic belief, many parallelisms between ancient cultic doctrine and modern political ideology – particularly the prohibition of questions.  I refrained from drawing such parallelisms myself partly so as not to burden the exposition with them but also because I wrote in full confidence that informed readers would find their own way to those same parallelisms. 

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Discovered: The deficit is about spending. The crisis, its speculators and its victims. Nuclear excuses. Islam and the open society. Burkas for pictures. When opposing fundamentalists insult the moderates.

 

1. A headline that was not but that could have been “Obama visits: Conditions in the Gulf of Mexico deteriorate.”

 

2. Ignored interrelationships. (1) There is only one way to reduce the deficit caused government outlays. Would you believe this? It is by cutting spending. (2) There is a reason why item 1 is so hard to digest. Reducing expenditures may be good economics but amount to bad politics. The less deserved an allocation the more vigorous the support it generates.

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Nearly a month into Britain's new coalition government and perhaps the defining image of Prime Minister David Cameron shows him strolling casually along Westminster, without security, mingling with the crowd. At other times he has eschewed his motorcade, and sent away his police motorbike escort. We – and perhaps more especially those who despise Britain – are supposed to believe that he is a man of the people. He is like us, and we are like him. In the cold light of day, however, Cameron's actions reveal only that he is disconnected from reality:

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Entertainment and fireworks by Kim. China to the rescue? Illegal immigrants and the medicine. Losing sleep over nukes. Peace, Israel and the bomb.  

1. According to an international investigation, North Korea has sunk a ROK warship. Now the North has issued a warning. The protesting South is to refrain from provocations. By this standard, even registering an attack is warmongering. At the same time, so Pyongyang, retaliation, such as international condemnation and economic sanctions against the handout takers, will result in a military reprisal.

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The trend of politics in the Western nations since Eric Voegelin’s death in 1986 has made his work increasingly relevant to any philosophically rigorous conservatism or traditionalism. In particular, Voegelin’s argument that liberalism and its Leftwing metastases constitute an evangelical religious movement, mimicking and distorting Christianity, has gained currency. The pronounced irrational character of the “Global Warming” cult and the obvious messianism of Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency have together sharpened the perception that contemporary Leftwing politics shares with history’s specimen-type doctrinally intransigent sects an absolute intolerance for dissent, even for discussion, along with a conviction of perfect certainty in all things. The sudden experience of Leftwing triumph attests that, indeed, utopian radicalism draws its strength from a deep well of resentment that puts it in conflict, not merely with those whom it regards as heterodox, but also with the inalterable structure of reality. Voegelin argued – in The New Science of Politics (1952), Science Politics & Gnosticism (1965), and throughout Order and History (1957-65) – that the rebellion against reality was a recurrent affliction of civilized life; he pointed to the acute anticosmic sects of Late Antiquity as offering a paradigm of the phenomenon and expanded the scholarly designation of them as “Gnosticism” to cover insurgent ideological doctrines of the modern period, particularly Marxism and National Socialism.

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In post-modern Spain, where everything (including the term “financial crisis”) is relative, politics will be far more important than economics in determining whether the country avoids a Greek-style debt default.

 

European governments are hoping that a massive new €750 billion ($1 trillion) bailout fund will contain the sovereign debt crisis that started with Greece and now threatens to destabilize the euro currency. But the rescue package, which is on top of a separate €110 billion package to rescue Greece from bankruptcy, essentially transfers the burden of debt from one European country to another and does little to prevent profligate countries from reaccumulating unsustainable debt.

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I get a few comments from people who wonder why I write about subjects such as astrophysics, Indo-European languages or wine when there are so many problems in the Western world. It is a fair question. I have published perhaps a million words on the Internet, yet the only book to appear in print so far based on my material is Defeating Eurabia, part of which is available online in German. For Scandinavian readers, I have contributed a long chapter in Norwegian to the book Selvmordsparadigmet (“The Suicide Paradigm”), published in May 2010 by the writer Ole Jørgen Anfindsen who runs the website Honest Thinking.

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Content criminals, safe citizens. Natural wealth, abuse and corruption. The IRS’ ideal illegal. The Greeks have a term for it: going broke together. Failing to learn from experience is the norm.

 

1.There is a weekly German TV program dedicated to the background of the news. A recent segment introduced its public to the way Giuliani has made order in New York. The story described the city as having been a murder capital and its subways as a combat zone. Giuliani’s illustrated policy of “no tolerance” followed. Severe chastisement for even minor crimes, the extensive police presence and the neighborhood patrols made for good footage. Close to the finish, the Mayor’s success got the credit it deserves. The case reminds one of Uribe’s accomplishments in Colombia. His resolute actions against the Communist guerilla created security and an economic upswing. Between 2004 and 2008 the GNP doubled and the FDI tripled. Even in the globally recessionary 2009, Colombia’s growth continued.

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The American astronomer Gerry Neugebauer (born 1932), son of the great Austrian historian of science Otto Neugebauer, did valuable pioneering work in infrared astronomy. He spent his entire career at the California Institute of Technology. Together with the US experimental physicist Robert B. Leighton (1919-1997), also at Caltech, he completed the first infrared survey of the sky. Leighton is also known for discovering five-minute oscillations in local surface velocities of the Sun, which opened up research into solar seismology. The American physicist Frank James Low (1933-2009) became a leader in the emerging field of infrared astronomy after inventing the gallium-doped germanium bolometer in 1961, which allowed the extension of observations to longer wavelengths than previously possible. He and his colleagues showed that Jupiter and Saturn emit more energy than they receive from the Sun.

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The process of combining light elements into heavier ones – nuclear fusion – happens in the central region of stars. In their extremely hot cores, instead of individual atoms you have a mix of nuclei and free electrons, what we call plasma. The term “plasma” was first applied to ionized gas by Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), a physical chemist from the USA, in 1923. It is the fourth and by far the most common state of matter in the universe in addition to the three we are familiar with from everyday life on Earth: solid, liquid and gas. Extreme temperatures and pressure is needed to overcome the mutual electrostatic repulsion of positively charged atomic nuclei (ions), often called the Coulomb barrier after the French natural philosopher Charles de Coulomb, who formulated the laws of electrostatic attraction and repulsion.

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Natural and unnatural unions. Guess who fits the €-zone’s requirements! Who and what has failed? The overcooked spaghetti and the perils of police work.

 

1. What masquerades as the Greek crisis is in reality a general solvency crisis of profligate sovereign borrowers. The dilemma presented still demands a long-term response. The situation makes one conclude that Europe’s economic union is composed of bits that do not fit. Or that the pieces fit – but only in another picture. A union – whether political or economic – can be forged out of parts that have, while still separated, developed underlying similarities. This criterion amounts to a spontaneous convergence. Lacking this pre-condition, creating by fiat an association for the purpose of cajoling incompatibles mix into a new brew, will totter at the first challenge. Economically and politically, the EU has been made to grow too fast and too far.

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