Getting to know ideas at their deepest levels is something I love to do. It helps me to uncover what is going on at the surface. With these two world views — Christianity and whatever you call woke/social justice — I’m starting to understand what I think is the real reason they’re coming into conflict.
For the sake of accuracy, I’ll be referring to the Christian world view as Judeo-Christian, since it truly was Jewish before it was Christian, and they share it.
Opposing Fundamental World Views
There is a fundamental assumption at the base of leftist dogma that is irreconcilable with the Judeo-Christian view of reality. It’s why priests and nuns received harsher penalties than career criminals in Soviet gulags.
For leftists, the nature of reality is restrictive and forces inauthenticity through oppressive power that needs to be challenged in order to transform reality. This is the exact opposite for the Judeo-Christian perspective and why I think there is such a deep conflict.
For Judeo-Christian believers, the nature of reality is good despite the suffering we will experience. It is to be understood as a permanent structure we should work within, not seeking to change reality but to understand it.
It really is a deep religious battle that is going on here and not simply a matter of shallow politics. I don’t think there is any way to resolve it outside of understanding what the riff is at the deepest level. These two types of world views are irreconcilable. At best, they can exist in a pluralistic society that tolerates disparate views. But they cannot both be incorporated into the structure of society because they are polar opposites of the most fundamental of world views.
Leftist Gnosticism
Leftist see the world as a type of restrictive prison. Their views at the roots are based on the ancient concept of gnosticism which sees certain individuals in society as having special knowledge about the nature of reality. Their moral imperative is to then work against the power that oppresses the authentic nature of man and break us free from that prison.
(The link below is something that further explains leftist gnosticism.)
They have received this concept philosophically through a long line of philosophers and mystics ranging from Plato, Hegel, Marx, and now the critical theorists who use this power structure view of the world to fight against the oppressive nature of reality. They are the people with special knowledge, or what they refer to as “gnos” or now, “social consciousness”.
They see reality as what we have been forced to accept under an oppressive dynamic that does not allow us to express our authentic selves. The power structure is systemic and all encompassing. It’s an inherently pessimistic view of the nature of being. In order to remove the chains of society and more fully express our nature, we must first wake up to the nature of this prison and then challenge the structures that keep us from that authentic expression.
The nature of reality is not inherently good, it is bad. It is oppressive. But it is not fixed. We can be agents of change by challenging the oppressive structure (praxis) by transforming ourselves and our world, moving it ever closer to an abstracted state of existence where we are as gods because we are gods when not oppressed by this mental prison of being.
Judeo-Christian Reality
For Jews and Christians, creation is good and it is a fixed reality. The Judeo-Christian view of the world is outlined well in Genesis and Exodus. Towards the end of the creation story, God recognizes that what was created is good.
In spite of any suffering we will experience, the value of life itself and our ability to reason, understand, and experience being is worth the trouble. Reality is something we can recognize that has an internal consistency and does not change throughout time. What was true about the nature of our ancestors is true about our nature. We can recognize ourselves in them and can use those moral expectations in our lives today. The moral progress throughout history we experience is expected to continue.
It’s an inherently positive view of the nature of being.
God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. — Genesis 1:31
Soon after, in Exodus, when Moses asks God his name, God simply says, “I am.” There are several different ways to think of or interpret this meaning because Hebrew has no tense for “to be”. To think of it as God telling Moses that He is the nature of Being is accurate enough.
The point here is that being is a permanent state. It is something we are to recognize and abide by, not transform.
Consequences
I think this is what is truly at the base of today’s culture wars and why they seem so volatile and all-encompassing. They are truly a disagreement over the nature of reality itself, and penetrate into every aspect of our societies.
The depth of an idea can be characterized by how many other ideas rest upon it. Few concepts are deeper than the very nature of reality itself.
This is also likely why anti-semitism keeps rearing its ugly head in progressive culture. We saw it in the women’s movement as the organizers started aligning themselves with the openly anti-semites from The Nation of Islam. You can also see it as progressive writers start to paint Jews as just some other form of privileged white people. Whoopi Goldberg recently got in trouble for this same game. They likely aren’t sure exactly why they’re doing this, but I think it is this deep disagreement on the nature of reality.
The problem with seeing it in Jewish belief systems is that there are few groups that fit the narrative of “historically oppressed” better than the Jews. And when you are supposedly fighting the oppressive nature of reality, it’s hard to balance that against the people who originated the world view that’s the exact opposite of yours.
“Yeah, you’ve experienced oppression, but the reality of your existence is inconvenient for our project.”
I’m not sure what if anything can be done about this. But I do think that understanding any problem at its most fundamental level is the best first step.