Judaism II: Judaism vs. Gnosticism

Many right-wing intellectuals have come out in a grand crusade against Gnosticism, or more accurately, "Techno-Gnosticism". But is it really Techno-Judaism?

Now, listen to these retarded ass-faced morons like Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, and the chastity cage longhouse-dwellers known as the “Postliberals”. They will tell you about how our enemies are “Gnostics” because they want to escape reality for transhumanism, essentially. The cure for this, of course, is Christianity (not in Lindsay’s case, and in Peterstein’s case, “Abrahamic Unity”). For some reason they accuse Hegel of being a Gnostic, and Hitler, and Marx, even though Hegel was comparatively much less Gnostic than mainline Christians. If anyone is Gnostic it is these Evangelicals who think that they will be zapped up to Heaven and Earth will literally become Hell. But anyways, this is not what we see today. I don’t like Gnosticism, but they’re not the same. There is a similarity between these things, but Gnosticism has a strong ascetic element. Escaping the material world means rejecting material. What we see, is much more similar to the traditional Jewish idea of the “World to Come” or “Heaven on Earth”.

You might remember that I talked about this in my Evangelion post a week or so ago. There is this spirit in Judaism going back probably to Antiquity, that there is no “heaven” to escape to. Heaven, or Eden, must be built on Earth. Here, in the material world. This is a concept in Kabbalah especially, that the material world is “broken” but can be turned into a paradise. In some cases this involves ascetic behavior and even the ultimate dissolution of matter, but it clearly is not the same as the Gnostic view of “escape from the world”. It involves collective action, it isn’t an individual journey. I am no expert on the exact details, but in the last post I discussed the division between Kabbalah and the Maimonidean Judaism of the middle ages, which was more rationalistic and I believe more influenced by Islamic and Hellenistic philosophy (I must clarify, this is not a defense for medieval Judaism. I am against Judaism in pretty much all its forms. People will say I am simping for it, I am not). But one of the primary founders of Kabbalah, Nachmanides, split with Maimonides over the world to come. Where Maimonides viewed it as an afterlife, Nachmanides viewed it as an enlightened age in the physical world, where people lived forever in a state of (religious) ecstasy. Now, this guy Isaac Luria, who I lightly mentioned in my last post, is much more influential to the modern Kabbalists and does seem to have a gnostic twinge, where the gradual restoration of the world also involves a gradual escape from matter. But the primary difference is that Gnosticism is an inward, ascetic movement, while all of these Jewish beliefs of the “world to come”, be it an afterlife or eternal life, be it in the physical world or out of it, are not inward. They are outward and involve collective action, and changing the physical world into an ideal world.

This to me seems somewhat similar to Mahayana Buddhism, where instead of simply escaping Samsara, enlightened Buddhists are expected to become Buddha-like themselves and enlighten the entire world in an act of compassion and sacrifice, so that the entire world can escape Samsara. I’m not a huge fan of it, but in my opinion this is a false equivalence as the Buddhists are still ultimately interested in escaping the world, not transforming it through action. They are simply being compassionate by helping others do the same. And again, even among these religious Jews there has always been an element which considered the World to Come as fundamentally a continuation of our material world.

Gnosticism, expectedly, is highly elitist and Gnostics believe that some people (Hylics) were hopelessly doomed to the material world. Only some special people naturally came into the Gnostic fold, and not everyone could even hope to achieve Gnosis with indoctrination. This is not at all what we see among the modern left. Our society is built on Universalism, and this is probably much more the fault of Christianity than anything else, but I digress.

What we really see emerge from this Jewish “world to come attitude”, is this deep devotion to linear ideologies which posit an “end to history”. This already sort of existed among Christians, which helped spur on these “end of history” ideologies, but it is much more visceral among Jewish religion. Christianity benefits from having an individualistic aspect. This world, it is fleeting. Your soul can go to heaven or to hell. It doesn’t really matter what everyone around you does. Like Mahayana Buddhism, it encourages compassion for your fellow man in finding the truth, but this is a process of belief and not action. Judaism, on the other hand, demand that humans act collectively to change the world into something utopian. And it will stay this way, eternally, unlike the Pagan view that golden ages do not last forever, but neither do shithole ages. This is also unlike the Zoroastrian view that Ohrmazd will correct the world, as this is an act of divine will.

This view of the world, this is much more akin to what we see today than Gnosticism. It also is actually clearly noticeable. Like, there is no “Gnostic elite”. Gnostics, as an identifiable group, do not exist anymore or at least not in the west. Meanwhile, Jews do exist and Jews very obviously use this aspect of Jewish religion to justify their encouragement of the two great “end of history” Ideologies today. That is, progressive Liberalism and Marxism, and basically everything in between. Like I said in my post about Evangelion, Heidegger literally pointed this out and yet people will still use Heidegger as a polemic paintbrush to expose the “Techno-Gnostics”.

This extends to completely secular Jews as well, by the way. Many Reform Jews believe that the most integral aspect of Judaism is social progress and advancement of the world to a utopian state. They think this is what makes someone a Jew. So obviously, this impacts the attitudes of secular Jews who may not have been raised religiously, but whose families were Jewish. This is not a religion. It is a world-feeling.