In Postliberal Order, Patrick Deneen summarizes Eric Voegelin on political gnosticism:
What we today call “woke” is merely a new articulation of the revolutionary dream that was once vested in Communism. The examples are legion: the wholesale transformation and even elimination of the “traditional” – i.e., natural – family. The effort to define sexuality according to human desire, aided by technological interventions. An understanding of crime solely as a function of the social order. The disdain toward those who work in non-gnostic areas of life – the working class. The effort to impose bio-political dominion over all of human life during the suddenly irrelevant “crisis” of the pandemic was but an extension of this deeply Gnostic impulse – the belief that the physical world was abhorrent, that we could through masking, distancing, and enforced medical intervention eliminate risk of disease and death. All the while these various mandates followed the trajectory of a raft of other economic and social policies that had led to the empowerment of a disembodied “laptop class” – or what N.S. Lyons has dubbed “the Virtuals” – at the expense of the working class, or the “Physicals.” The decades following America’s victory in the Cold War was a perfectly scripted expression of Gnostic belief and power – ironically, the pyhrric lap of a “classical and Christian” civilization that was enjoying the fruits of victory over its Gnostic foe.
Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism
