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.

RTWT

* I was disappointed by the book, but I thought the title was very apt.

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.”
— John Keats

In Mother Jones, Clive Thompson describes with relish the coercive fantasies of a variety of leftist sophisters, economists, and calculators, who theorize on the ways and means to end the growth and expansion of the human population and economy, and who yearn for stagnation and retrenchment.

What would just a world be like? Thompson quotes Peter Alan Victor, a environmental sophister at the University of Toronto and a former senior economist at the World Bank named Herman Daly.

Americans would need to scale back our energy consumption to 1960s levels (assuming we stick to a predominantly fossil-fueled economy). Victor, for his part, points out that 1983 was the last year that “the world economy was just at the level of the capacity of the planet to support it.” Since then, of course, world population has exploded and global resources have dwindled even further.

Beyond these big-picture parameters, none of the experts has really crunched the numbers to envision what daily life might be like in a no-growth world—though they agree that it’s something people had better start thinking about.

For starters, they say, Western consumption rates would need to shrink disproportionately so that citizens of countries like India and El Salvador could enjoy a lifestyle upgrade. Why? The no-growthers argue that a world with fewer yawning inequities between the rich and poor would be more stable; but quite apart from that, their models require stabilizing world population, and raising the economic lot of the poor is a proven way to do that.

Given the shift in wealth needed to accomplish this, Americans would need to turn back the clock to well before 1983; in fact, we’d be pretty lucky even to find ourselves where we were in 1960—when the median family made $35,994 in today’s dollars (versus $61,932 in 2008).

Hardly the plenitude we’re accustomed to. Still, technological advances mean that your dollar buys a lot more than it did back then. For a couple of bucks, you can score a pocket calculator that does things it once took a million-dollar university machine to accomplish. “We’re better at making things now,” Victor says, so our living standards would be considerably higher than this figure suggests.

In a no-growth economy, as Daly points out, we would still consume new stuff—just at a much slower pace. People might need to develop a renewed appreciation for durable goods that require lots of labor to make but ultimately use fewer resources than their throwaway counterparts. We would also have to evolve away from “positional” consumption—feeling good because you possess something the Joneses don’t.

So maybe hipsters won’t be buying the latest iPhone every 12 months­. Or perhaps we’ll seek more fulfillment through activities with a lighter footprint—sports, music, hiking. The vexing reality is that the no-growth thinkers simply don’t know how things would shake out. We don’t have any realistic examples to learn from, after all. In the past, the only no-growth societies were agrarian or consisted of hunter-gatherers.

But these great minds are willing and eager to take us right back there. We need only surrender the necessary authority to credentialed experts in Environmental Witch-Doctory like themselves.

Hat tip to Troy Senik.

Andrew Thomas observes that liberals want to be punished. Liberalism is a lot like BDSM. Liberals yearn to surrender to a domineering master. For them, pain turns into pleasure.

[L]et’s objectively review the initiatives in the neolib agenda: Environmentalism, global passivism, overpopulation, socialized healthcare, and promoting government intervention into all aspects of life. All of these priorities require individuals to sacrifice their lifestyles, their income, and/or their basic comforts.

This past week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exhorted, “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory…” in order to sacrifice ourselves to the gods of global warming. As presidential candidate Obama said, “We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times…” He seems to indicate that he wants us to starve and freeze.

Most of these initiatives involve the inflicting of pain and misery. Tom Daschle, in his book “Critical: What We Can Do About The Health Care Crisis” says health-care reform “will not be pain free” and that seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of having them treated. In other words, you will suffer a slow agonizing death under government mandate.

As a final phenomenological exercise, impassively observe the level of neolib support for this agenda. It has not appeared to wane. In fact, neolib fervor continues to increase as the promised level of suffering increases.

Hatred of life, detestation of abundance and material success, self-infliction of pain are all very old patterns of perversity associated with extreme forms of religious aberration. In the Christian context, this sort of thing was usually classified as a heresy, being rightly identified with Manicheanism, a mystical Middle Eastern sect which viewed the universe as dualistic, featuring a good spiritual world created by a positive “Father of Greatness” and a fallen and defective material world created by the “Prince of Darkness.”

In the good old days, when patterns of insanity of this kind led to destruction of works of art, physical assaults on persons, and rejection of property rights in favor of some new millenialist regime prominently featuring sodomy and free love, the Church of Rome and the knightly aristocracy would take drastic action to stamp it out and restore order.