Gnostic Nation

By mid-week do you dream of the weekend and a few days of freedom from the drudgery of work? Do you think of a holiday as an ‘escape’? And do you think that politicians are hopelessly detached from the “real world”? If so, then maybe you have, like the rest of us, Gnostic leanings.

But what does an ancient heterodox religious movement have to do with our 21st century lives and can we really draw such historical parallels? It has become fashionable to think of our lives as similar to those of the men and women of Late Antiquity. In politics it has become a commonplace to talk of the emerging system of governance in terms of “Empire” and to view America as a new hyper-power to rival Rome in terms of its cultural influence, military power and in its megalomania. It is not, however, just the current Bush administration that would have had Gibbon writing about fantasy and folly for in some sense the growth of religious fundamentalism is also a sign of the ‘virtualisation’ of politics, driven as it is by a rejection of the norms of history, tradition and community.

With the rapid emergence of China and India fears of decline are not totally misplaced. There is an uncanny feeling that we’re living in the autumn days of a civilisation, and that there are, as George Steiner points out, no new beginnings. As with the decline of Roman Empire, there’s the feeling that things are coming undone not just because of military overstretch but because there’s a loss of nerve, a radical turning inward: in short, a new Gnostic age is upon us.

The essential feature of Gnosticism according to the thinker Hans Jonas was the sense that the individual was a lonely, atomised, self “thrown into” a hostile world that is not of his own making. One consequence of this radical dualism was that Nature and the world were devoid of any intrinsic standards or values and that they were nothing but a realm of force and power.-a view that our modern scientific outlook has done little to negate. As with the first Gnosticism, we find ourselves isolated, alienated in a world from which God is utterly remote and if not dead, then at least seriously ill. For Gnostics, ancient and modern, truth and salvation come from within, from knowledge (“gnosis”) of the divine spark that is surrounded by an infernal order, the satanic mills.

One could endlessly speculate on the causes of this new mood: urbanisation, cosmopolitan rootless-ness and mutli-culturalism, globalisation, science and technology: all seem equally strong candidates. Perhaps the most important is our obsession with personal happiness and pleasure, as if the body and our raw sensations were our defining and only reality. And modern-day consumerism, with its internet shopping and the ‘no-places’ that are the shopping malls, only fuel this extreme sense of inwardness.

The surest sign that we’re living in a Gnostic age is the development of an unbridled individualism in what is coming to be called ‘the century of the self’; the coming of age of a ‘me-generation’ that is, as Simmel would say of the meteropolitans, blasé about the world around them; we seem to be bewitched by private lives-our own and that of others- and this is manifested in our fascination with celebrities and the vogue for biographies.

But perhaps the clearest indicators that we’re entering a new Gnostic age come from popular culture. One can hardly fail to escape the huge interest in ghosts, angels, near-death experiences, new age cults, Sufism and contact with the ‘spiritual world’. In all of these cases one can detect a profound dissatisfaction with organized religion which is deemed to be too politicised, ritualistic or ‘worldy’. Salvation lies within, says the prison governor in the immensely popular film, The Shawshank Redemption.

Recent television programmes and films have also captured this Gnostic feeling.
The cult programme ‘the X-files’ specialised in informing us that the world was not quite what it seemed. Phrases such as ‘trust no-one’ and ‘the truth is out there’ spoke of a deep suspicion of the world. It was as if the world itself was one big conspiracy theory. Such a view is mirrored in our penchant for all sorts of conspiracy theories-from crazy Zionist ones to staged moon landings to the current blockbuster, The Da-Vinci Code. And the Gnostic idea that reality as we know it is actually being manipulated by some alien force was a central theme of major films like the Matrix and The Truman show. But if you are truly a modern and not an ancient Gnostic, then your reaction to this article will have to be one of sheer indifference. Did I hear you say yeah, like, whatever?