Brussels, Belgium -- For the past 200 years, much of the fate of Europe has been determined near this lovely city. That is equally true at the moment as the leaders of Europe meet in what slowly is becoming the capital city of Europe to make decisions that well may determine whether the euro and even the European Union will continue to exist.
 
As every schoolchild knows, Napoleon was finally defeated two centuries ago at the battle of Waterloo - close enough to Brussels to be considered a suburb. The great battles of World War I were fought largely within a drive of an hour or so from Brussels, to the west.

In several essays at the Gates of Vienna blog and elsewhere I have dealt with the subject of genetic intelligence measured in IQ, inspired by Michael H. Hart’s groundbreaking and very politically incorrect biohistory book Understanding Human History. Many people consider this topic to be “racist” and therefore taboo, but I will write about anything that I deem to be practically and scientifically relevant. On the other hand, there are quite a few things that IQ does not fully explain. We will look at a few of them here, related to geography, population density and level of urbanization. The single most important thing that IQ does not explain is why the scientific Revolution took place among Europeans, not among northeast Asians who have at least as high average IQ as whites. I will leave that issue for a separate essay.

Eric Voegelin’s critique of modernity claims that liberalism, the creed of the Enlightenment, is “Gnostic.” Voegelin (1901-1985) drew the term “Gnosticism” from a strain of Late Antique religiosity. The term “Gnostic” refers to that array of sects and cults the adherents of which thought of themselves as forming a saintly elect among the perishing masses on account of their possessing, as their souls, sparks of divinity that had become trapped in the world of matter. The ancient Gnostics (as the previous installments in this series will have shown) abhorred the world of matter and claimed to sojourn in it only as exiles from a realm of pure light, which was the “real” world despite appearances. Voegelin labeled Gnosticism an anticosmic rebellion against reality, emphasizing the tendency of Gnostics to construct what – borrowing from novelists Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer – he called a second reality built on principles contrary to those governing what morally and intellectually adjusted people understand to be the actual or first reality. Gnosticism for Voegelin constitutes a social pathology for the reason that the upholders of the second reality, once having invested their emotion in it, make it a fetish and regard criticism of it as lèse majesté. Organized Gnosticism tends to become a censorious war, a jihad or crusade, to protect the second reality from examination and, more aggressively, to coerce assent to the second reality’s existence.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.