Eric Voegelin and the New Gnostic Religion of “Intersectionality”

Dr. Christopher Manion and I have posted many articles and blogs here at LRC concerning the brilliant insights of one of the greatest political philosophers of the 20th Century, the late Professor Eric Voegelin. In three very important new articles, First Church of Intersectionality; Intersectionality As Religion; and Is Intersectionality a Religion? analysts have continued following in the Voegelian tradition of dissecting this latest form of gnostic political religion sweeping academia and campuses coast to coast. Author Elizabeth C. Corey notes:

In 1968, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin published a little book called Science, Politics and Gnosticism. In a section of that book entitled “Ersatz Religion,” he argued that modern ideologies are very much like ancient Gnostic movements. Certain fundamental assumptions, Voegelin wrote, characterize both ancient and modern Gnosticism.

The gnostic, Voegelin observed, is fundamentally dissatisfied with his situation and believes that the world is “intrinsically poorly organized” and that salvation from the world’s evils is possible. The gnostic further thinks that “the order of being will have to be changed in an historical process” and that this is possible through human effort. Finally, the gnostic looks for a prophet who shares saving knowledge about how to make the transformation happen. It turns out that the intersectional project accords in every detail with Voegelin’s description.

Intersectional scholars are, by definition, unhappy with their situations in life. From an outsider’s perspective, this seems more reasonable for some than for others, though it’s apparent that everyone feels it to a greater or lesser extent. Most affectingly, at the Notre Dame conference, several black feminist scholars from South Africa described the explicitly repressive measures they had endured at their universities, where the prejudice against them is overt and sometimes results in violence. As one scholar put it, “It’s not like I’m full of despair.” Then she paused and thought for a moment. “But, of course, I am full of despair.”

I would put the modern source of this elitist scientism back to the Enlightenment.  There is a dark side of the Enlightenment and its social engineering progeny that many libertarians (particularly those enamored by Ayn Rand’s militant atheism) do not acknowledge.  They continue to blindly hold to the secular mythology that the Enlightenment was entirely about bringing truth, reason, tolerance, and light to the miserable masses held in bondage and superstitious oppression by Throne and Altar.  A wide range of dedicated scholars such as James Billington, Michael Burleigh, Murray Rothbard, Henri de Lubac, Thomas Molnar,  John Gray, Terry Melanson, and F. A. Hayek have documented the emergence of ersatz gnostic political religions as outgrowths of the Enlightenment.  First a stridency emerged from clandestine Free Masonic enclaves such as the Parisian La Loge des Neuf Soeurs, the Grand Orient (and in Weishaupt’s Illuminism) which influenced the savage course of anti-clerical genocide in the French Revolution — and later in Comtian Positivism and Marxist dialectical materialism — all of which saw Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, as its sworn deadly enemy.

In his book, The New Science of Politics, Voegelin examines in detail the Puritan movement as a variant of modern gnosticism, essential to understanding the seminal Puritan concept of The Redeemer Nation I discussed in an earlier LRC post today.

 

 

7:55 am on July 21, 2017