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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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11: Another Long, Strange Trip One might think that the themes we've seen repeated from the eighteenth and nineteenth into the twentieth centuries -- the secularization and politicization of Christian attitudes toward heresy -- is limited to this earlier period, and that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would not be subject to the same tendencies. After all, a deep skepticism toward political meta-narratives is a major impetus for what became known as "postmodernism." Having seen the colossal failures represented by Leninism and Stalinism, not to mention National Socialism, one could expect that faith in such mass movements would have waned by the end of the bloody twentieth century. But one might forget that the original heresiophobic impulses of early institutional Christianity continue, sometimes in unexpected places, and that witch-hunts are not as far away as one might think. That Old Bugaboo, "Gnosticism," Yet Again The case of Carl Raschke, a professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, Colorado, is well worth considering. Raschke's work is akin to that of Georges Sorel, in that like Sorel, he seems to shift his fealty from one movement to the next without any clear underlying unity. He began his career with a book endorsing a more or less traditionalist view of American society: The Bursting of New Wineskins: Reflections on Religion and Culture at the End of Affluence (1978). In it, he defends "traditional culture" that, "in the past, sustained by grassroots associations and popular institutions, has actually been a bulwark against exploitation, while bureaucratic and totalitarian management has thrived on the formation of masses of rootless individuals." [1] He deplores "disorganized religion," and looks forward to a "resurgence of traditional life," to a "re-organization of religion" and a "rehabilitation of the common life" that reflects in a new way the medieval sense that "the order of religious meanings was intertwined with the order of society." [2] And he deplores the "new psycho-religiosity" of "mystical or semi-mystical moods." [3] Already in this first book, then, we see a nascent longing for a unified religiosecular state, and loathing for "psycho-religious" "heresy." But it is in his next book, The Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism and the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness (1980), that Raschke unveils a much more explicit heresiophobic agenda. The genesis of the book, he writes in the preface, came during the emergence of new religious movements during the 1970s. During this period, he began "groping toward some clues," and concluded with some haste that "the different underground religious communities" and indeed, "key attitudes on the part of certain intellectuals" are none other than "Gnosticism." What does he mean by "Gnosticism?" Not anything historically grounded, but rather people who are opposed to the " 'progress' of the modern, industrial world," people who are "in revolt against the course of modern history and seek salvation within the sphere of the timeless." [4] Thus -- even though Voegelin is not even in this book's index -- we know at once that we are in the presence of yet another Voegelin-inspired inquisitor. Sure enough, we soon find that Raschke is launching sweeping attacks hither and yon against "new Gnostics" who, he thinks, are engaged in a "revolt against history" and who refuse the notion of progress. Carlos Castaneda, the Marquis de Sade, Giordano Bruno, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Franz Mesmer, these are all "Gnostics," just as are the Romantic poets (notably Blake, Byron, and Shelley), philosophers such as Fichte and Nietzsche, the poet Yeats, the novelist Herman Hesse, the psychologist C. G. Jung, not to mention the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy. [5] He refers with distress to "American Gnostics," such as Whitman and Emerson, and claims that American "New Thought" was "America's pragmatic and simplified version of Gnosticism." 6 Once one defines "Gnosticism" broadly enough, why, one can find its adherents everywhere. The emergence of Asian religions in America, of hippies and of writers such as Alan Watts -- all these too are somehow "Gnostic" and thus to be feared. [7] Indeed, no less than all "the new religions constitute a Gnostic escape route for the masses of individuals in our society who, thrown out as the detritus of crumbling communal groups and institutions, including the family, are desperately looking for some kind of salvation by their own resources." [8] Gnostics, Gnostics everywhere! What is it that so exercises Raschke about his peculiar constructed "Gnosticism"? He sees it as a "Gnostic flight by mind-magic into eternity," a seeking of "salvation in the timeless world." [9] Of course, one might think that concepts like "eternity," "salvation," and "timelessness" might have positive religious connotations -- but evidently they don't if one is on the hunt for heresy everywhere. One is un surprised to read Raschke's final claim that "the danger these days is that we are all becoming Gnostics of a sort." [10] By this time, it's become clear that in his mind, everyone already is a Gnostic, save perhaps him! Raschke represents a kind of militant secularist, whose attacks on what he styles "Gnosticism" also assert the primacy of "time," "history," and "linear progress," as though if we were distracted from "linear progress" by art, poetry, or religion, "history" might disappear. There is a strange, pervasive anxiety informing the whole of this book. But that anxiety about "Gnostics" is nothing compared to the outright panic visible in Raschke's 1990 mass-market paperback Painted Black. This lurid little tome, its covers a tasteless safety-orange, "includes a shocking 8-page photo insert," and describes itself this way:
Clearly this is a work of no little hysteria. Raschke's own preface is similar in tone: he claims to offer a "comprehensive" study of Satanism, which "is not a 'new religion' deserving the sort of latitudinarian tolerance or respect one would be expected to accord under the U.S. Constitution, say, to an emergent sect of South Pacific pantheists." For "Satanism is a sophisticated and highly effective motivational system for the spread of violence and cultural terrorism, all the while hiding behind the cloak of the First Amendment." [12] The word "lurid" is the ideal description for this book, which lists numerous serial killings and ritual murders, and ties them together with figures such as Anton laVey, tossing in the Marquis de Sade, not to mention Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Friedrich Nietzsche. [13] The photo spread includes the obligatory shot of Aleister Crowley, heavy metal musician Ozzy Osbourne, graffiti on a garage door in Denver, and a couple of photos from the notorious trial of the McMartin preschool case, in which (amid some hysteria) various members of the Buckey family were convicted of serial child abuse. Typical of the book is this:
Where to begin? The band Marillion was in fact one of the most literary and sophisticated of all British rock bands during this period, and hardly could be described as "heavy metal" in any meaningful sense. To describe their melancholy and complex lyrics as being about "rape and mayhem" would be akin to reducing the complexity and genius of, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays to nothing but "Gnosticism" -- but, of course, that's what Raschke did in his earlier book, so one should hardly be surprised by much of anything at this point. Thus, the fantasy game "Dungeons and Dragons" is, in Raschke's learned opinion, a horrifying initiation into "black magic," and so on. [15] It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the hysterical nature of this book, nor the number of errors in it (although some have tried at least to chronicle them). [16] What distinguishes Painted Black from The Interruption of Eternity, aside from its bright orange paperback cover and its breathless sensationalism, is the fact that this is a real effort to awaken an American inquisition. Thus, he concludes by asserting that "Satanism" is becoming nothing less than a "major national problem." [17] And Raschke even goes so far as to liken the late twentieth century to the medieval period, when "there was a religious underground with striking affinity to today's counterculture." [18] He alludes to mass murderer Charles Manson, and then writes that "the claim of a corporate ancestry of (the medieval heresy] Catharism is far greater than a metaphor. It is the watershed of all modern systems of belief emphasizing the right of the human creature to revolt against the ultimate order of things." [19] Never mind that the Cathars were ascetic, harmless, and mostly massacred by the Church -- suddenly they are nothing less than the ancestors of Manson and, well, narcotics traffickers and child molesters! Already, he writes with a hint of satisfaction, the furor over Satanism has "yielded a climate of fear in middle-class quarters where fear had never flourished before." [20] What we need, he implies, is a good old-fashioned Inquisition. The police and "specialists" like himself are on board -- all they need is a little more widespread fear. This is dangerous stuff indeed. With self-styled "experts" asserting the certainty of ritual child molestation in various day care centers, some people were falsely imprisoned during the very period when Raschke wrote this book -- on the coaxed testimony of confused children and the lurid accusations of police and prosecutors on witch hunts. [21] Only later did questions arise. But the purpose of the justice system is not to provide a venue for witch-hunts -- it is to provide a sober, informed, judicious analysis of the facts. It is surprising, given the hysterical tenor of Raschke's book, and of numerous other books and public pronouncements by "experts," that there weren't more Inquisitional forays and witch-hunts that dispensed with those troublesome niceties insisted upon by the American Constitution and its various amendments. Fortunately, Raschke's book didn't have the kind of impact he so clearly wanted: to fully awaken the medieval Inquisitorial spirit. But as we shall see, the 1980s and 1990s "Satanic panic" was bad enough. Raschke's later works deserve some brief attention here. In 1996, he published a book on "postmodernity" that shows almost no trace of the harshly antignostic arguments of his earlier books. Instead, it appears that in the intervening decade and a half, he became enamored of the trendiest notions of the period- -- theoretical jargon, the focus on the body -- and gave up on hunting for heretics everywhere. [22] And his subsequent book, The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University (2003), is a paean to an imagined wonderful aeon of a "hyperuniversity" emerging via the impersonal venue of computers. He decries the "inherent conservatism" of "residential university faculty," and extols "a reformation of the academy by undermining the hegemony of the 'knowledge specialist.'" [23] He celebrates the fall of the "Medieval walls of the academy," and imagines instead an "anti-authoritarian" "postmodern" era of "hypertextuality" and the end of the "privileges" of those who in the past were the conservators of higher learning. [24] Are there the connections between the anti-heresiology of The Interruption of Eternity and Painted Black, Raschke's later celebration of "postmodernity," and what he imagines as the death of traditional higher education? One wonders. Certainly the times were not entirely conducive to an Inquisitor searching for the signs of heresy everywhere. But the times were in favor of those who embraced the latest fashionable concepts, such as "postmodernity," or "hyperuniversities." Little wonder that, having found little lasting support for his anti-heresiological campaigns, after the talk show circuit lost interest in him, he turned instead to embracing those currents that were least amenable to the conservation of the humanities and of traditions of academic knowledge. If so many of the great writers and intellectuals of the past were deluded "Gnostics," no doubt it would seem best to abandon the whole enterprise of academic tradition and to launch one's little boat onto the great, noisy, and shallow torrent of "the digital revolution and the postmodern university." Hence, if there is one overarching conclusion we can draw here, it is this: whatever its flaws, the late-twentieth-century American political and social system did not encourage or support the worst consequences of antiˇGnosticism. What we see in the anti-gnosticism of Raschke or others in academia or, for that matter, in the anti-occultism of evangelical Christianity, is their relative impotence. Whereas in Nazi Germany and in Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union, the Grand Inquisitors had very real consequences, in the United States of the late twentieth century, even the more extreme forms of antiheresiological rhetoric still did not have widespread consequences, let alone take thousands or even millions of victims. Although Raschke or various evangelical authors might see "Gnostics" or "heretics" behind every bush and in virtually every major intellectual since the seventeenth century, the secular American society that they deplored -- with its plethora of new religious movements and its broad religious pluralism -- still acted as a constraint against an American inquisition. But, as we will see, secular pluralism wasn't fully able to contain what became known as the American "Satanic panic."
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