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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Isn't the through-line that connects these things together just good, old-fashioned Gnosticism? The religious view that the material world is evil and that the subjective relgious experience is primary is all that is needed for to connect propensity to suicide, disgust with the material world, obsession with purity and disease, and antinatalism.

There might be some psychological root to that as well, given that it seems to pop up many times through history, or some kind of philosophical prion that warps the perception of reality of anyone who comprehends it.

Isn't the through-line that connects these things together just good, old-fashioned Gnosticism?

Ah yes, the only religion so fundamentally anti-life that it has to be violently extirpated and its records burned whenever "it" pops up, lest it... stop existing?

There's a reason that particular type of heresy keeps on appearing on Christianity.

I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges. And there's a set of mindsets and incentives that can make this grow quickly and escape control before it collapses in on itself.

All ideologies have failure modes like this, and a lot look like that kind of mass psychosis. Usually the long lasting ones have institutional mechanisms to prevent those failure modes from capturing people.

The thing is we don't really have those anymore.

I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges.

Wouldn't Buddhism be the motherlode of such ideas, then?

SN 54:9:

“Because, lord, the Blessed One, with many lines of reasoning, gave the monks a talk on the unattractiveness (of the body), spoke in praise of (the perception of) unattractiveness, spoke in praise of the development of (the perception of) unattractiveness. The monks—(thinking,) ‘The Blessed One, with many lines of reasoning, has given a talk on the unattractiveness (of the body), has spoken in praise of (the perception of) unattractiveness, has spoken in praise of the development of (the perception of) unattractiveness’—remained committed to the development of (the perception of) unattractiveness in many modes & manners. They—ashamed, repelled, & disgusted with this body—sought for an assassin. In one day, ten monks took the knife. In one day, twenty monks took the knife. In one day, thirty monks took the knife. It would be good, lord, if the Blessed One would explain another method so that this Saṅgha of monks might be established in gnosis.”

This is an isolated incident, though, and the Patimokha, the monastic code, explicitly rejects speaking of the positives of death on pain of expulsion for life:

Should any bhikkhu intentionally deprive a human being of life, or search for an assassin for him, or praise the advantages of death, or incite him to die (saying,): “My good man, what use is this evil, miserable life to you? Death would be better for you than life,” or with such an idea in mind, such a purpose in mind, should in various ways praise the advantages of death or incite him to die, he also is defeated and no longer in affiliation.

I think that the tendency you are describing has to go back at least to Plato, well before Christianity entered the scene. If anything, Christianity opposes that trend by making the bodily resurrection a key element of its theology and affirming that the material world was good when it was originally created. Of course many influential Christian theologians have been influenced by (neo-)Platonism, so there is plenty of Christian theology out there that is susceptible to this heresy, but I am pretty sure its origins in Western thought is Platonism rather than Christianity.

Plato's a good suspect. And in a sense the inquisition was Aristotelians crushing Platonist revolts. But I'm not convinced it started with him. You can see things that look like this in pre-socratics like Pythagoras.

And within Christianity Gnosticism seems to always come from the east, with more platonic theology.

CS Lewis mentions the paradox of how Christianity is not only more spiritual than any Greek philosophy, it’s more carnal than any pagan religion: blood, perfectly pure God in farting, belching human flesh, a real human sacrifice to trade for your life, insistence that certain bodily acts stain the soul, and so on.

The Gnostics lose sight of the carnality of Christianity because of the ick factor, or as Lewis put it, “repellent doctrines.”

All ideologies have failure modes like this, and a lot look like that kind of mass psychosis. Usually the long lasting ones have institutional mechanisms to prevent those failure modes from capturing people.

In the Middle Ages, it was supposedly not uncommon for rich people to spend the end of their lives in a small cell in a monastery, forgoing all Earthly pleasures for the promise of redemption.

And while there's probably not much loss to society in retiring a few old lions early, lots of young fertile people entered monasteries and convents, forgoing any chance of having a family line. These people didn't have any personal assets, but their institutions become incredibly wealthy. By the time of Henry VIII, the monasteries supposedly owned 1/3rd of the land in England. Shutting them down unlocked massive gains in prosperity.

And the priesthood likely acted as an IQ shedder as well.

The fact that Europe rose relentlessly despite a large percentage of its population being devoted to heavenly pursuits is really remarkable.

I suppose the problem with today's ascetics is they don't exist within the fabric of a vibrant, growing, pro-natal society.

An institution that collects knowledge and spurs technological growth but also hoards societal wealth and prevents all its high-IQ members from ever reproducing? We have that today, it’s called “Silicon Valley”

Monasteries seemed to take mostly younger children of the nobility which society had no good answer for anyways.

Nobles usually endowed a monastery with some land in exchange for taking in their runts. I reckon the kids would have been fine spending the cash squeezed from the starving peasantry on hookers and blow directly instead of having to re-earn it through prayer.

Who would advance civilization and pray for the salvation of humanity if they did that though?

lots of young fertile people entered monasteries and convents

How many is "lots" here? We talk about this every so often here and I've never gotten a good idea.

According to Perplexity about 2% of the population of England were under holy orders at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.

Probably higher among the upper classes.

I think estimates for the monastic population in Europe in the period 1200 to 1500 vary wildly by country, time and methodology (a lot of extrapolation from census estimates by historic demographers coupled with estimates of average monastic population multiplied by the total number of monasteries in a province, which were often somewhat well recorded). Figures online seem to cluster around the 0.4% to 2% range for the total of all clergy.

Thanks. That range seems high, higher than I assumed, but not high enough for many of the theories about the problems caused by their absence (e.g. monasteries as release valve/containment zone for autists and other types)

The fact that Europe rose relentlessly despite a large percentage of its population being devoted to heavenly pursuits is really remarkable.

I suppose the problem with today's ascetics is they don't exist within the fabric of a vibrant, growing, pro-natal society.

Is it possible that the two are related?

Cistercian monasteries spread new technologies through high and late medieval Europe much faster than the historical norm.

Yes, and I think that aligns with the point @TitaniumButterfly was making.

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