The Epochal Sea Change of the West—Part Two

The Gnostic culture I termed PC multiculturalism is the latest manifestation of the epochal sea change of the West. Over the past approximately 50 years (increasing with each passing decade), it has become the dominant sociopolitical paradigm throughout Europe, Great Britain and North America, as well as, to a great extent, throughout the satellite cultures of the West (Australia, Central and South America).

I will now recount, to the best of my ability, all the significant manifestations of this epochal sea change in the history of the modern West (approximate dates are affixed in parentheses):

1) the Protestant Reformation (early 16th century)
2) the Scientific Revolution (16th century)
3) the dissolution of Christendom (16th-17th centuries)
4) the French Enlightenment and French Revolution (late 18th century)
5) the massive subculture of religious syncretism beginning in the 19th century
6) World War I (early 20th century)
7) Communism (1917-1987)
8) German Nazism and other Fascisms (1930s-1945)
9) World War II (1939-1945)
10) the dismantling of Western Colonialism (1940s-1960s)
11) the 60s Cultural Revolution
12) PC multiculturalism (late 1960s-present).

We see with #1 that the epochal sea change began approximately 500 years ago (with an initial marker in the first or second decade of the 16th century with Luther’s disordered epiphany, the so-called Turmerlebnis). Each of the enumerated items is a complex contributing factor to an overall kinesis in history that itself becomes complex by the interrelations of the factors as they combine and overlap. Furthermore, for any one of the single enumerated factors taken into consideration, there can be found precursors and roots that go back in history beyond this 500-year period.

Our enumeration also graphically situates PC multiculturalism as a spearhead of a monumental arc. However, we mustn’t impose a simplistic chronology of process upon the list. It is not merely a uniform process that simply changes costume with each passing century: it is, rather, an overarching complex kinesis that manifests, over time, different expressions, without any necessarily inexorable arrow—either of form, impetus or entelechy.

On the other hand, our enumeration is not merely a collection of otherwise dissimilar entities: there is a common ground unifying them: the movement from a noetic culture to a Gnostic culture. This movement is, of course, less conspicuous and more amorphously diluted in some of the processes listed. Also, some of the items of our list do not so much name an expression of the movement as they identify a major manifestation or symptom that attends the overall epochal arc of that movement in the period we are considering (the last 500 years).

In terms of sheer virulence of expression of this movement, we may now rank the processes, in descending order:

1) German Nazism and other Fascisms (1930s-1945)
2) Communism (1917-1987)
3) the French Enlightenment and French Revolution (late 18th century)
4) PC multiculturalism (late 1960s-present)
5) the Protestant Reformation (early 16th century)
6) the Scientific Revolution (16th century)
7) the massive subculture of religious syncretism beginning in the 19th century
8) the 60s Cultural Revolution

Meanwhile, we rank in descending order of virulence the manifestations or symptoms that have attended this epochal change:

1) the dissolution of Christendom (16th-17th centuries)
2) the dismantling of Western Colonialism (1940s-1960s)
3) World War I (early 20th century)
4) World War II (1939-1945)

Ordinarily, we would rank World War II higher than World War I, but the fact that much of its inherent virulence is already located in our #1 above lessens its weight compared to World War I—which had, incidentally, profound effects upon the collective psyche of the West, laying some of the existential, philosophical and sociopolitical groundwork for the rise of an explicit anti-Westernism in the West. The reader might at this point have noticed that I nowhere locate ‘anti-Westernism’ on my original list of 12. This is because it is already contained in several of the processes—including in PC multiculturalism.

The reader might also have surmised the subtext of the epochal sea change of the West: in its movement from a noetic culture to a Gnostic culture, it is also a movement from Occidentalism to anti-Occidentalism. This, in turn, adverts our attention to another thesis we will unfold in a later post: namely, that on one level, the West is the Cosmos. And since the principal pathos of the Gnostic psyche is a contemptus mundi—i.e., an antipathy to the Cosmos as an overarching existential and ontological ‘prison’ that prevents humans from finding the key to their deepest longing, salvation—that contempt for the world becomes a contemptus Occidentalis, or anti-Westernism. In the Gnostic case, salvation involves either an escape from the Cosmos that imprisons the Gnostic, or a transfiguration or utopianization of the Cosmos into a soteriological structure. The former is the way of the ancient or classical Gnostic; while the latter typifies the modern Gnostic. The modern Gnostic then directs his contemptus mundi appropriately at the mundus (Latin for the Greek cosmos) at hand: the West.

We will not find it necessary to explicate fully the final two points we noted in our previous post, only to restate them now with a dash of amplification:

1) Islam is another example of a Gnostic culture—the most successful and longest-lasting of all, in fact. We shall revisit this in a future post. Suffice it to say that Islam—contrary to what supremacist Muslims and their sugarcoating PC multiculturalist friends might wish to argue—is not a Western phenomenon, and so, it does not properly belong in an analysis of the epochal sea change of the West—with the following crucial exception:

2) PC multiculturalism—the latest manifestation of the epochal sea change of the West—is the principal factor that might ensure the victory of Islam over the West in the coming century. This is so because of two main factors:

a) PC multiculturalism contains comprehensively and intricately anti-Western features, and as such, it weakens the requisite self-defense of the West: why defend something you oppose? (There is a subtle complication to this problematic formula that permits wiggle-room for PC multiculturalists to claim that they are in fact defenders of the West; we shall examine this too in a future post, and we shall find that the ‘wiggle-room’ is tiny indeed and that the argument for it obfuscates untenable, self-contradictory and ultimately self-defeating propositions.)

b) PC multiculturalism—partially but not wholly due to (a) above—involves a widespread, concerted and sociopolitically powerful tendency to sugarcoat and whitewash Islam and thereby to erect a prejudicial wall of protection around it, with a corollary mechanism for surgically detaching all instances of dangerous ideology and behavior on the part of Muslims from Islam proper.

With (a) and (b) as features of the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of the West in the beginning of the 21st century—just as Islam is attempting to revive (after a relatively brief period of quasi-hibernation due to the circumstance of the spectacular rise to global superiority of the West beginning in the 16th century) its former, authentic and original imperative to conquer the world—the West’s capacity for self-defense will be increasingly limited.