If the left hemisphere's grip on people's minds can be loosened, McGilchrist says, their perceptions will change. They will see "into the depth of things . . . all at once [and] recognize them for what they are, no longer overlaid by our projections."
When this happens, the conventional notions and mental clichés we live by in our everyday world get shoved aside, and the "hall of mirrors" (a favorite McGilchrist phrase to describe our left-hemispheric perception and experience) will come crashing down as we see things in their naked--beautiful--existence.
We then get a taste of Huxley's experience with mescalin. We get a glimpse of what Thoreau saw at Walden. We become like those patrons at Alice's Restaurant.
We start to break through that door to the other side.
00:10: Thomas Sowell
04:15: The Death of Chevron
11:25: Fatty Bolger
Show Notes:
Gardening is just a hobby, and it might not always be practical. But it is arguably the pursuit that postmodern man needs the most. A Copernican revolution in metaphysics explains why.
Modernity is the left hemisphere gone wild. Gnosticism, with its dualistic approach and emphasis on knowledge that gives salvation and control, is a left-hemispheric political religion that thrived during the twentieth century and has today settled in as the dominant cultural disposition that drives public debate. Today’s powerful elites aren’t gnostics, but they ride their left hemispheres like cocaine-fueled jockeys on rabid horses. Because gnosticism and today’s powerful elites are dominated by the left hemisphere, they’re natural allies and they’re coming together in a final effort to do what modernity has been trying to do for centuries: eliminate altogether the Tao part of The Reality Spectrum. It can’t be done, short of eliminating humanity altogether, so the Tao continues to manifest itself in all sorts of ways.
Pick four traits. The last one must be "victim."
It's because we live in a gnostic culture that rails against the evil "structure." If there's a structure, there must be victims of the structure.
Ancient gnosticism used the ancient cosmic system: The earth was in the center, surrounded by the air and spheres: sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and a ring of fixed stars that close it all off.
That was more-or-less accepted astronomical science around the time of Christ. It was nothing novel.
But the ancient gnostic took the cosmological system one step further: it taught that the cosmological system was a prison.
Every ancient gnostic sect taught this idea. Most sects said the cosmos was the creation of an evil god, the “Demiurge,” who created the cosmos as a structure of deception. The Demiurge then outfitted the structure with demons and archons who acted as prison guards to make sure no one got out of this cosmological prison.
Gnosticism offered liberation from the prison. The cosmological prison was the sine qua non of gnosticism: If existence wasn’t a prison, the gnostic’s product—knowledge, the map, the plan for escaping the prison—was worthless.
Gnosticism without a structural evil to overcome is like football, baseball, or basketball without a ball.
Parts IV and V of an Analysis of Eric Voegelin's Six Gnostic Traits
Alienation is the Marxist bugbear. He sees alienation everywhere because it emanates from the economic substructure and works its way through the socio-political superstructure. Natural economic evolution would eliminate it, but the ruling classes are suppressing the evolution out of self-interest, so a revolution needs to bring about the evolution.
Show notes here
Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?
Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts.
Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it modestly. He was born at the end of the Enlightenment and fully embraced its ideals,[1]which Isaiah Berlin summarized as:
1. Every genuine question can be answered. If it can’t be answered, it’s not a genuine question.
2. The answers to the questions can be discovered, learned, and taught.
3. All the answers are compatible with one another.
Those ideals are captured perfectly by science. Science is the discipline of power: it answers questions and puts them into neat boxes. Physics is especially good at this.
Comte concluded that the principles of physics could be applied to society: “social physics” is what he initially called it before calling it “sociology.”
By applying scientific findings and mathematical truths to social interactions, the government and its intellectual advisers could greatly improve society.
He was positive it would work. He was so positive, in fact, that he popularized the term “Positivism” to describe his and other contemporary academics’ extremely positive expectations of science
Comte was hailed as an academic hero. The French erected statues and monuments in his honor and named streets after him. He had replaced the hidebound restrictions of tradition, king, and pope with the only thing that could be trusted: science, bolstered by math. No more religion, just facts.
This is a podcast episode from "Outside the Modern Limits," a whimsical newsletter that comes out every Saturday that is geared toward helping people understand and thrive in modernity. You can subscribe and find the show notes here.
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau
Rousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.
Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything.
Significantly, Rousseau didn’t see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered philosopher of all time. He was so self-centered, biographers wonder if he was even capable of love. He said of his long-time mistress, a lowly laundress that he,
Never felt the lease glimmering of love for her . . . the sensual needs I satisfied with her were purely sexual.
When those sensual needs resulted in five children, he put them into orphanages, which, given the state of orphanages in the 18thcentury, was practically a sentence of torture and early death: only five percent of orphan children survived to adulthood, and most of the adult survivors became beggars and vagabonds.
Eric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels.
The Swiss theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar was supposedly the first person to draw parallels between the ancient gnostic heresy and modern theories in Prometheus (1937), which examined modern German thought. Albert Camus did a similar thing with modern French thought in The Rebel (1951).[1]
But Voegelin took the strain of thought much further in The New Science of Politics (1952). The book became a Time cover story and, voila, gnosticism was in the limelight, a least among nerds.
Granted, later in life, Voegelin said he wasn’t sure “gnosticism” was the best term to use and thought perhaps it received too much attention, but he didn’t remotely conclude that the term didn’t work. Far from it. Later in life, at age 67, he published his most popular work, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1968).
Brains beat brawn. The Titan Prometheus knew that. He joined Zeus in his battle against the Titans.
Prometheus later befriended the race of men. He saved them when Zeus thought about extinguishing them. He taught them arts and science. He gave them tools. Zeus increasingly found Prometheus’ promotion of the human race tiresome and troublesome.
And then Prometheus gave humans the gift of fire, in direct violation of Zeus’ orders.
Zeus was livid. He ordered Prometheus bound: Kratos (Power) and Bia (Force) held him while Hephaestus fettered him to a chain on a crag hanging over the Black Sea. An eagle came every day and ate his liver, which regenerated every night.
For the fortunate few, that router is hard-wired with fiber optic. Most of us only get a wireless connection, and a wobbly one at that.
If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world.
Within 100 years, the Cartesians used impeccable logic derived from Descartes' I think there I am to reach two conclusions: there is no earthly agent of movement and there is no matter. There is only God and mind. Hume yanked God and mind out of these conclusions and the Cartesian Jenga tower came tumbling down.
Something really bizarre happened around the year 500 BC, all across Eurasia. We started to realize that we live in the metaxy: an area comprised of transcendence and immanence. These ten thinkers, from Italy to China, led the way.
Voegelin was not charismatic. He was a “gentleman thinker.” He didn’t like small talk and valued his time. His personality didn’t attract a cult-like following. He didn’t establish a school or movement. But he’s important.
Before he published the Prince, Machiavelli published the seducer. Before he published a masterpiece of political philosophy, he published a comedy.
The Mandragola (The Mandrake) tells the story of Callimaco, a handsome young man and seducer of women. He hears about the Florentine beauty Lucrezia and begins a conspiracy to seduce her. The problem is, she’s married. She’s married to a wealthy old man who can’t get her pregnant and they need a son to maintain their political position.
Callimaco shows up, disguised as a doctor, and convinces her husband to give her a mandrake potion to increase her fertility. The problem is, Callimaco tells the old man, the first man who sleeps with her after she takes the potion will die. They decide to find an unwitting dupe to have sex with her. Callimaco, in different disguise, becomes the dupe, much to his delight. And Lucrezia’s. She at first was hesitant, but she relented and, convinced it was divine providence, takes Callimaco as her lover indefinitely.
Everything turns out well. The old man gets his male heir and Callimaco gets Lucrezia.