The View From 1776

Phyllis Schlafly sketches the aims of too many teachers’ colleges who train our teachers (Teaching “Social Justice” in Schools).

Those aims are the ones notoriously espoused by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Senator Obama’s friends and co-workers in the Chicago schools project funded by the Annenberg Foundation.

Social justice is a doctrine of the secular religion of socialism.  And as Eric Voegelin demonstrated, socialism is a variety of modern-day gnosticism.

Voegelin in his 1959 Science, Politics & Gnosticism describes the salient characteristics of gnosticism, all of which apply to the doctrines of American liberalism and the concept of social justice as attainment of atheistic social perfection.  These gnostic characteristics correspond closely to the attitudes described in Phyllis Schlafly’s article. 

They also are the underlying foundation of Senator Obama’s appeal to dissatisfaction with American society and his message that he is the one possessed of special knowledge that can bring us together and create a near perfect world.

First, the gnostic liberal is dissatisfied with the world as he finds it.  He rejects the evidence of history that there always will be strife, wars, inequalities in ability and station, and some degree of poverty.  And he is confident that he has the knowledge (gnosis) to make things perfect, which he defines as equality in all things.

Second, the gnostic-liberal attributes the problems of human life to poor organization of the economic and political realms.  Evil and hardship must therefore arise from some identifiable source (capitalism? ownership of private property?) that deforms the proper structure of society.

Third, the gnostic-liberal has a deep faith that earthly salvation from the world’s tribulations is attainable, a trait markedly evident in the theoretical models of Soviet Russia and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, as well as in the campaign rhetoric of Senator Obama.

Fourth, the gnostic-liberal believes that this salvation is attainable through the process of history (which , of course, he uniquely understands).  Auguste Comte’s 1820s gnosis was his discovery of the “immutable law of history,” according to which there are three ages of human social development, the third stage in the 19th century being the new scientific, socialistic age into which only knowledgeable intellectuals could lead the masses. 

The same three-phase philosophy of history reappears in Hegel and Marx.  Note that Hitler’s National Socialism was consciously called the Third Reich to identify it with the gnostic millennium of earthly harmony and peace.

Note also that the nature of gnosis is that its secret knowledge is available and comprehensible only to a select few.  This has always implied in socialism a vulnerability to dictatorial concentration of power in the collectivized state.  In Italy and Germany of the 1920s and 1930s it was expressed as the Leader Principle – Il Duce and Der Fuhrer.  Senator Obama is notoriously self-identified as The One in whom human hopes and aspirations are to be realized.

Fifth, the gnostic-liberal believes that, having discovered the secret meaning of history, he can implement and control the process of history by political and economic means, i. e., via socialism. 

And, finally, the gnostic-liberal’s core belief is that salvation, the perfection of social relations and human conduct, is attainable via human action, here on earth.  This is the source of Lenin’s mystical concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat that would bring peace and harmony to the people and would lead to a gradual withering away of formal government, leaving the Soviet people living in a modern Garden of Eden – from each according to ability, to each according to need.

We see the manifestation of this mystical, gnostic vision every day in liberal politicians’ belief that individuals are incapable of fending for themselves, that only the national political state can do the job.  There is always something wrong with society and always a politician confident that one more set of regulations or one more welfare-state program will make everything OK. 

People want to believe that a body of secret knowledge will free them from Christianity’s stern admonitions to work hard, save for a rainy day, abjure hedonism, and recognize that perfection of human life is impossible in the earthly realm.  It’s so much easier to eat, drink, be merry, and let the government take care of us.