A Meditation on Gnosticism Over at Substack This Morning
The guy who demands that everyone be rational becomes the most irrational of all.
That’s an old Taoist zinger. It rang true when Lao-Tzu swayed atop his water buffalo to the misty hills of eternity; it’s true today as we clatter along in our mechanical Jacobins, guillotinely crisp in our rationality.
Your run-of-the-mill rationalist—all puffed up with his TED Talks and New York Times—doesn’t even clock that he’s gone off the rails. He’s too busy weaving his tidy little webs of logic, spun from the moldy crumbs of academia and the glossy tripe of newsstands, to notice the lunatic staring back from the mirror. He’s snug and smug, cocooned in self-righteous certainty, a suburbanite Smaug hoarding his glittering pile of abstractions. Kick that cocoon open, and he’ll hiss and scamper like a roach caught in the kitchen light, desperate for the next dim safe space corner to hide in.
But here’s the kicker: even if you leave him alone, that cocoon’s gonna split open anyway. Sometimes it’s a slow rot; sometimes it’s a full-on schizophrenic meltdown, like Louis Sass explores in his classic Madness and Modernism. Sometimes it’s a biblical switcheroo—Saul the know-it-all turned into Paul the Mystic. Or maybe it’s weirder still, like back in the Enlightenment, that golden age of rationality, when the culture paradoxically went nuts with ghost shows, severed hands clutching at shadows, and nightmare carnivals. The point is, the rationalist’s house of cards always tumbles.
Two things you can bank on: nothing’s certain, and that smug rationalist’s swagger will switch to a stumble at some point. John Lennon knew it—“Instant Karma’s gonna knock you right on the head.”
And yet some of these clowns persist like their knowledge is invincible. When Instant Karma invades, they double down in their cocoon saloon of rationality and refuse to come out or let anything else in.
These are the real a**holes, every last one of ‘em—or, if you’re feeling fancy, call ‘em “gnostics.”
Gnosticism’s the old sin dressed up in new jargon: knowledge as a god, a shiny apple dangled by that serpent in Eden. Bite it, Eve, and you’ll run the show. That’s when the brain’s left half got uppity, decided it didn’t want to play second fiddle to the right anymore. Forget being the loyal deputy; it wanted the throne.
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Eric Scheske
