The Albigensian massacre, chronicle of Saint-Denis, 14th century, London, British Library.
As Edward Feser astutely recognizes, perverse instincts apparently lurk in the depths of human nature causing repeated outbreaks of pathological religious impulses featuring the embrace of fanatical dualism, communal ownership of property, sexual deviance, and rejection of normality, tradition, and the existing order of society.
In the Middle Ages, they did not let the crazies take over the universities, the culture, and the arts, they went in and wiped them out.
In a Catholic World Report essay not too long ago, I argued that the so-called “woke” phenomenon, which has in recent years suddenly risen to enormous influence in Western politics and culture , is best understood as a new riff on the Gnostic-Manichean style of politics identified by Voegelin. There is the characteristic thesis that the everyday world is utterly suffused with evil – “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” “transphobia,” and the like, all interlocked to form a suffocating structure of “intersectional” oppression. There is the appeal to various forms of gnosis (Critical Race Theory, feminist theory, gender studies, etc.) that purportedlyallow the adept to perceive this oppression in a way others cannot. There is the Manichean divide between those who are enlightened by this gnosis and the wicked who resist it.
But attention to the details reveals disturbing further parallels with Catharism in particular, even if they manifest in secular rather than theological terms. For example, the “transgender”phenomenon evinces an alienation from the body and from the natural end of sex no less radical than that of the Cathars, and with comparable intellectual incoherence and moral disorder as its sequel. For the Cathar, the body is like a dark prison from which the spark of light that is the true self seeks release. For a “trans” person, his male body (for example) belies his true self as a “trans woman,” or as “non-binary,” or as having some other “gender identity.” For the Cathar not ready to advance to the status of the Perfect, the body’s appetites may nevertheless be freely indulged, even to the point of extreme debauchery, so long as procreation is avoided. For the trans person, the body’s sexual organs might be destroyed and refashioned so as to reflect his true gender identity, but they might instead be preserved and deployed in a manner that gratifies his governingsexual fetish. Thus do we have the bizarre claim that a “trans woman” is simply a “woman” full stop, even if “she” has male genitalia.
The Cathar hatred of corporeal life and its procreation also finds parallels in the extreme environmentalist component of the wokemovement, which regards the human race as a “cancer on the planet,” and in the normalization of abortion, euthanasia, and childlessness. The Cathar condemnation of state violence for the sake of upholding law and order finds a parallel in woke calls to “defund the police” and end the “carceral state.” The Cathar eschewal of meat and dairy products finds a parallel in the contemporary vogue for moralistic veganism (in the name of animal rights or sustainability or the like). The Cathar rejection of private property finds a parallel in woke refusal to enforce laws against vagrancy and shoplifting.
Like that of the Cathars, woke rhetoric often sounds superficially peaceful. But also like the Cathars, the wokenevertheless practice coercion and even violence when they judge it useful for advancing their cause. This includes doxxingand other forms of intimidation; rioting, looting, and even occupying large areas (as in 2020’s CHAZ protest in Seattle and the siege of the federal courthouse in Portland); the shutting down of roadways and the vandalism of paintings, public statuary, and the like as routine protest tactics; the mutilation of bodies in the name of “gender identity”; and the promotion of “gender transition” even among children, along with the imposition of extreme ideological curricula, against the wishesof parents.
In general, wokeness, like Catharism, is essentially about the radical subversion of normal human life in the name of a paranoid Fmetaphysical delusion. Like Catharism, its fashionableness has nevertheless found it support among a large segment of the wealthy and powerful. And like Catharism, its rise has been facilitated by the Church’s being in such a low state that it is unable to provide an effective counterbalance.
* I was disappointed by the book, but I thought the title was very apt.
