A new discussion thread for supporters

Since I’ve now shifted most of my focus and writing towards this upcoming manuscript (it’s due to my editor 1 April), I’ve decided I’m going to write occasional discussion posts for paid supporters full of fragments and threads of thought related to the research and thinking I’m doing towards it.

I think it will be interesting for us both. You’ll get glimpses into the way my mind works, and I’ll get a chance to write out and hopefully discuss some nascent observations with an intelligent audience. I hope you’ll consider commenting.

So, here’s what I’ve been reading and thinking about this week.

Wokeness is religious, but so are all politics

This is probably one of the most underdeveloped points in many of the theories and criticisms I’ve read regarding woke ideology, though many people have made initial attempts at unraveling this.

An unfortunate legacy of the transition to capitalism and the “age of reason” is that we’ve all come to make a distinction between religious/theological thought and ideology and political thought. We imagine that our ancestors were all extremely superstitious just four hundred years ago, but that all suddenly ended and now everything is modern and secular.

It’s like we all instantly “evolved”: every way of thinking about the world suddenly threw off its theological roots and transformed itself into a fully rational belief system. But we didn’t. However, because we keep telling ourselves we did, we cannot see the obvious theological and religious dimensions of our political institutions and ideological formations.

The key here is the concept of cosmology. Every political formation constellates the world according to certain rules and then operates from the co-ordinates it has set. Marxism quite obviously has a cosmology: the whole bit about history being a constant class struggle is in the same order of cosmological thinking as a Christian’s belief that humans were expelled from Eden. On that matter, though, classic liberalism also posits a kind of fall from grace, along with a route towards bringing the kingdom of heaven onto earth.

Also, conclusions to certain theological questions are woven invisibly into most political conflicts. The question of idealism versus materialism is ultimately a question about the nature of the divine. Idealism posits that we shape the world according to our thoughts, and these thoughts are independent from matter itself (just like the Christian god, the ultimate thinking being who stands outside of creation). Materialism insists the opposite: thought is a product of material conditions and the material world. It doesn’t come from outside nature because there is no such thing as “outside” nature. This, as I have written about in All That Is Sacred Is Profaned, is also the animist and polytheist framework.

So the question then is not whether any political ideology is religious, but rather what are the cosmological constellations through which that ideology operates.

Authoritarian, Totalitarian, Fascist…or Fundamentalist?

Tangential to this question is the search for a political ideology that most mirrors woke political ideology.

The short answer is that none of them do.

As background, I’ve heard from others that a populist accusation about my critiques is that I equate woke ideology with fascism. This is most obviously not true, especially since one of my major problems with Antifa is the way that accusations of fascism are no longer linked to any sort of understanding of historically-existing fascisms.

That is, fascism now means anything that people want it to mean, just like terrorism or democracy. We’re in the place Orwell complained about last century, in which “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.”

It always feels like a futile struggle, but it’s important we keep terms as close to their historical meaning as possible, or at least re-introduce those meanings whenever possible. If you’ve read Being Pagan, you’ve probably noticed I’m obsessed with etymology, and that’s one of the reasons why. Another reason is that tracking the changes in a word’s meaning helps us understand the historical forces which caused those changes.

So, though I doubt any of the sorts of people who claim I believe the woke are ‘fascist’ ever take the time to read my writing, let’s be clear: they’re not. Neither, however, are most of the people or ideologies currently smeared as fascist.

Two other terms have experienced similar slippage: authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Of all three, only totalitarianism has any real relevance to woke ideology, and only insofar as there are those who fully believe that social justice identity politics should be legislated and enforced through state power. There are indeed some who believe that: consider Ibram X. Kendi’s belief that racism can only be fixed through discrimination (“the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination”).

The only way to enact that sort of discrimination is through state power, but here we need to remember that even though some woke ideologues may dream of such a thing happening, there will be no re-education camps for people guilty of micro-aggressions in the United States. That’s not because the ideology or the ideologues are opposed to such a thing, but rather that demographically no such thing would be possible there.

So, though there are totalitarian tendencies in the woke ideology, it’s hardly at the point where it could create a really-existing totalitarian situation. Thus, we need to look elsewhere for ideological parallels, and here we come yet again to religion.

While fundamentalism is yet another one of those terms that means whatever we want it to mean, the historical roots of it are in protestant Christianity in the United States. That movement pushed for a kind of scriptural literalism, but what it was really doing was asserting the primacy of core (“fundamental”) beliefs that could not be debated, discussed, or intellectualized. God created the heaven and the earth in six days, and that couldn’t be debated. Nor could other fundamental beliefs, such as “god created man and woman.”

Woke ideology also posits fundamental beliefs that cannot be interrogated. “All whites benefit from white privilege,” for example, which is a fully esoteric statement that cannot be proven or disproved. Other statements of belief that fall into this esoteric category include “trans women are women” or even concepts such as “cis-hetero-normative white male supremacy.”

These are all statements of faith, affirmations of a not-yet-fully-codified dogma which constellates a particular cosmology. Cosmologies themselves cannot be debated: if you have ever heard an atheist and a Christian argue with each other about the existence of god, you’ll have noted that such arguments are impossible to resolve. Both parties are arguing from completely different cosmological frameworks which cancel out the other’s. That is, they are arguing about things that within their own orders of meaning cannot be subject to argumentation, and ultimately just end up shouting each other down or at best “agreeing to disagree.”

The thing about fundamentalism which makes it a better parallel than others is that fundamentalisms are usually constructed through a sense of embattlement and victimhood. Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms both see themselves as a righteous minority, defenders of the truth against a world that seeks their annihilation. Everything becomes evidence that a majoritarian evil (be that evolutionary biology, European secularism, TERFs, or fascists) is on the rise and must be fought.

The Kingdom of Heaven

One other aspect of fundamentalism is instructive here. In all cases, fundamentalism is also a utopian project, positing an eventual moment when the kingdom of man will be replaced by the kingdom of god. Think, for example, of the Islamic fundamentalist desire to create a new Caliphate, or the Christian fundamentalist belief that America will one day again be a “Christian Nation.” Many aspects of Zionism and also of many leftist currents display this utopian belief, the “messianic promise” which Walter Benjamin heavily criticized.

Woke ideology absolutely displays this same tendency, especially in the belief of many that they are merely helping usher in an inevitable progress. The focus especially here is on being on the right side of history, and thus there’s quite an obsession with the potential of youth to finally displace the older (racist, sexist, etc) ways of thinking. In America, Christian fundamentalists urge the mass reproduction of children as a key to the making the utopian future a little sooner, while woke ideologues push heavily for the implementation of new gender and race theories in education so to rush the inevitable arrival of the promised equality land.

Linear time is a core feature of the same monotheist framework I mentioned in my previous essay. It sees time as a march, an arrow, a progression from one point to another. Animist and polytheist conceptions of time, on the other hand, are often cyclical. In this view, it isn’t so much that “history repeats itself” but rather that history is full of repeating forms.

That is, history is process, not progress. What some describe as the “pendulum” of history is really just the process of action and reaction. There is no “back” and “forward” to go, but rather an infinite number of paths, each of which eventually trace back onto other paths.

There aren’t many political ideologies which ascribe to this conception, but there are countless religious ones. But again, all political ideologies are ultimately also obscured theological ideologies.

Iconoclasm and polytheist shepherds

I’m currently reading several books about Protestant and Puritan iconoclasm, because I think more than any other recent historical period these moments provide the most relevant parallels.

While reading one of them, I noticed something that again seems quite similar to the way woke ideology operates now. A problem I’ve seen other writers on this subject encounter (for instance, both Wesley Yang and N.S. Lyons) is that it’s hard to explain precisely where the political interest for the powerful is in these eruptions, besides just general instability, the prevention of class consciousness among the poor, or a general shift in neoliberal capitalist policies.

The question here is about the dynamic itself. How do you explain the relationship between the ideologues (Kendi, Crenshaw, Butler, etc) and the populist embrace of their ideas? None of those ideologues are themselves engaged in cancel crusades or smearings, nor are they actual political leaders, nor do they seem interested in accumulating political power. Yet they are undeniably responsible for the current eructations of woke populism.

So what’s actually happening?

That’s where the Protestant iconoclasm is quite instructive. Just before those eruptions, late-medieval Europe was full of a popular religious sensibility that more closely resembled the pagan period during the “dark ages” than it did the moments just after or before. Everyone was revering icons, statues, holy wells, and especially treating the saints with a degree of worship that was much more like pre-Christian European belief than anything we think of as Catholic.

As a side note for those interested in paganism and polytheism, Erasmus railed particularly against shepherds treating St. Anthony as if he were a god. They gave offerings to him not just for the safety of their flocks but also for many other reasons, and according to Erasmus they believed not appeasing the saint would bring wolves or disease upon them.

So it’s quite funny, because cults to St. Anthony often were most popular in Europe where reverence to Pan and Hermes were most common. Anthony is given many traits in hagiography previously associated with Hermes—not just regarding sheep, but also the finding of what is lost (related also to the protection from thieves, which was the domain of Hermes) and also for steadfast and truthful speech (Hermes was invoked for this same thing).

So in the early roots of Protestant iconoclasm was a fear that everyday people were “reverting” back to pagan ways. This continued throughout the entire period, especially in England where elaborate ornamentation and saint images were seen as idols and invitations to “pagan” idolatry.

More relevant to the matter of the relationship between woke ideologues and the woke populists is the dynamic noted by one of the historians of this period, who notes that none of the Protestant writers were themselves leading the actual mobs into smashing up churches or ancient pagan sites, nor were they (with the later exception of Oliver Cromwell) leading angry righteous mobs into violence against “idolaters.”

The mob violence arose regardless, and of course those “learned doctors” of theology were fully aware of what their ideas were causing. However, they were able to maintain a protective distance from those mobs and even argue that such actions were not actually their intended goal, that their interest was strictly moral and theological.

I’ve noticed in particular that woke ideologues maintain this same kind of plausible deniability and intellectual distance. When asked about the extreme online abuse of women in the name of protecting trans people or about incidents regarding rape of women by men who were merely pretending to be trans, Butler always changes the subject. Kendi and Crenshaw both deny there is any effort to teach Critical Race Theory in schools or that intersectional identity has been used by highly abusive “activists” to silence people they have physically and sexually harmed.

To those of us sympathetic to their general goals (as I am), this kind of denial is quite maddening. Those less sympathetic, on the other hand, use these denials as proof that such ideologues are being willfully dishonest and have more conspiratorial goals in mind.

The truth is more complicated, though, and it’s not a new phenomenon. It’s precisely the same mechanism that occurred during the iconoclastic eruptions and throughout all of the Reformation. Ideologues wrote works proposing an oppositional framework to the current one, those works were disseminated via the newly-created printing presses to the masses, and those masses used those frameworks as a justification for violence against those they felt were oppressing them. Their ressentiment wanted a target, a new rising elite gave them one, and the eventual result was complete societal change leading to the birth of industrial capitalism.

That’s the final piece of that equation. The societal breakdown and chaos caused by this mob violence created an opportunity for new political centers to arise. Without that disruption, the bourgeoisie may never have achieved the dominance they did, a dominance which then allowed them to make society in their own image. That’s the “societal change” part, the one that is also happening now. Again, Marx and Engles noted that this is a core effect of bourgeois social relations, the constant ‘“revolutionizing” of all of society along with the modes of production.

As I said, history doesn’t repeat itself but is nevertheless full of repeating forms. This form is repeating, and it may have the same results. What’s worse than industrial capitalism? I guess we’re about to find out.