The Problem of the Left's Woke Religion

It is a fundamental part of my faith that every human has a religion -- especially the people that insist they don't.

In the writings of Nietzsche he maintains that now that God is Dead we are going through decadence and then nihilism in a process that will end in the Revaluation of All Values.

But surely he is wrong. The decline of Christianity as the faith of the educated class immediately prompted replacement religions, most obviously Marxism and Communism. In fact what is interesting about the Left is how it has picked up the essential content of the Axial Age religions. 

First, there is Original Sin, the idea that there is an essential flaw in human nature that humans must work to repair. Obviously, the new Original Sin is racism. Or, in the words of a journalist supporter of Britain's lefty Jeremy Corbyn:

“We can build a world free of injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence”

Yep. There's a lot of Original Sin crashing around these days.

Second, there is Heaven on Earth. The cunning of Christianity is that is does not promise Paradise except after death. But the modern religions promise Heaven on Earth, just like the quote above: "a world free of injustice, oppression," etc.

But I think that the old Sin of inequality and oppression is clearly in the process of being replaced by Climate Change, which also includes both Original Sin and Eternal Redemption.

In Climate Change the Original Sin is the "carbon pollution" of the Earth with the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is peculiarly similar to the original notion of Original Sin with Adam and Eve becoming conscious of their nakedness, their sexuality. For sexuality is central to living things, just as carbon is central to all life on the Earth.

In Climate Change the attainment of Eternal Redemption is obtained, just as under Christianity, by enormous acts of penitence and denial, to retreat from lives of consumption and luxury and instead live a Buddha-life of contemplation under a Bodhi tree.

So nothing has changed.

What Climate Change provides, of course, apart from the penitence of the Commoners, is a magnificent scope for heroic deeds for the activist class. Just as in a world war, the rulers get to direct traffic and conjure forth prodigious efforts and march enormous armies across the world.

OK. So far so good.

Now I think our educated Gentry believe in a false religion. I just don't believe that any true religion can possibly be constructed to encourage a ruling class to admire itself in the mirror for its eternal fight against oppression and climate change. There is a word for that: self-conceit.

But what will it take to explode the conceit and the self-delusion of our ruling class and its educated Gentry supporters?

I have two analyses I use to help me on this. The first is Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. He says that the frenzy of heretic-hunting peculiar to Inquisitions and Reigns of Terror and Great Purges tends to collapse after a season because humans cannot live at that level of frenzy for too long -- any more than people can live in a perpetual sexual orgasm. At some point the frenzy collapses and normal life resumes.

So, we can say, eventually the present cancel culture will burn itself out. The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

The other analysis is from When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al. This is an examination of a small cult in the US that flourished shortly after World War II with people that believed that they were going to be visited by UFOs on a certain day and carried away to Paradise by the aliens in their UFOs. So what happens when the prophecy fails? Initially, the believers amp up the intensity of their belief. But then, eventually, the members of the cult start to fall away and the cult breaks up.

Yes. And then there is Jim Jones in Jonestown, where the leader gets the whole cult to commit suicide.

The problem that I see is that it is not clear to me that we can ever get past the modern Original Sin of racism. Lefties will be descanting on "injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence" till the end of time.

Maybe the answer on this front is for Blacks to start voting Republican. Could it happen? Who knows?

And whatabout Climate Change? What would it take to discredit the prophecy of runaway climate change? Would it take a collapse of electrical generation when it is all wind and solar and a day dawns when there is no wind and precious little sun? Or will it take a sharp drop in global temperature in association with the current solar minimum?

Or will Woke Hegemony collapse in the face of the current surge of "populist nationalism" which, I would judge, is a revolt of the Commoners against their educated Gentry rulers?

Or perhaps, like the Roman emperor Constantine who switched Rome from paganism to Christianity, the day will come when the educated ruling class decides to lead the Commoners rather than oppose them. I wonder what that would look like.

The problem, of course, is encapsulated in Ben Franklin's maxim, that "Experience keeps a dear school but they will learn in no other." Our rulers will not change until they have experienced a very nasty knock on the head. Unfortunately the knock on the head will not be confined to the conceited educated Gentry but will also affect the lives of ordinary Commoners. And, I dare say, women and minorities, the "oppressed peoples," will be hardest hit.

The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.