On Seed Oils and the ‘New Gnosticism’ – The American Spectator

Never did I imagine that I would one day be writing about the intersection between gnosticism and canola oil, but it seems that my hand has been forced, so here we are.

Permit me to explain.

I was perusing the most recent issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, with its estimable contributions from Christopher Rufo, Theodore Dalrymple, Glenn Loury, and others, when I came across Malcolm Kyeyune’s essay on “The New Gnostics,” which promised to explain how “from neopaganism to cryptocurrency, the Internet today is full of strange quasi-faiths.” The title certainly piqued my interest, as gnosticism seems to be omnipresent these days. Digital technology, social media, and the embrace of what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls “non-things” all threaten to turn reality into something colloquially referred to as mere “meat space,” a gnostic turn of phrase if ever there was one. James Poulos at the American Mind has darkly warned of how the “posthumanity at the heart of woke religion and technology” will inevitably result in a “new techno-gnostic regime trying to assert mastery over us,” while the jurist Alfonso Ballesteros has likewise bemoaned the “predominant Gnosticism” inherent in post-humanism — the view that “human nature is something imperfect or incomplete that has to be enhanced by human selection or machine-hybridisation.” The discourse surrounding neo-gnosticism is not limited, however, to purely technological considerations. Ethan Peck at Human Events has argued that “gnosticism is the ancient heretical ideology behind today’s transgenderism and abortion movements,” and Curtis Yarvin has blamed most of our political ills on the decidedly gnostic practice of “acting in the real world, while thinking in an imaginary world of dreams.” According to the investor Marc Andreessen, “the theme of our era is uncashed checks suddenly popping up. Absurd pretensions, wistful fantasies, and pretty/ugly lies called by reality,” and what can explain this state of affairs better than our destructive tendency towards gnosticism?

These anxieties are hardly new. It has been 30 years since the cultural historian Christopher Lasch’s “Gnosticism, Ancient and Modern: The Religion of the Future?” appeared in the quarterly magazine Salmagundi. Gnostic movements, Lasch wrote, traditionally “take shape only in a climate of the deepest moral confusion, when old faiths were dying,” and that is precisely why this “gnostic impulse” now “finds expression in our time,” whether “in the scientific dream of solving the mysteries of the universe,” in “New Age spirituality,” or “more generally in a mood of extremity and existential nostalgia.” His conclusion was characteristically pessimistic: “as the common world, sustained by traditions now under attack as hopelessly parochial, recedes from view, our grip on the world around us weakens — our sense of it not just as ‘the environment’ but as our human home…. Gnosticism, the faith of the faithless, suits the twentieth century as well as it suited the second, and it may turn out to suit the next century better still. Its greatest opportunity, perhaps, still lies ahead.” How right he was.

Lasch’s prescient critique of gnosticism was inspired in no small part by the writings of Wendell Berry, the poet and environmental activist who, in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), cautioned against the dire effects of deracination and disembodiment:

You cannot devalue the body and value the soul — or value anything else…. Contempt for the body is invariably manifested in contempt for other bodies — the bodies of slaves, laborers, women, animals, plants, the earth itself. Relationships with all other creatures become competitive and exploitive rather than collaborative and convivial. The world is seen and dealt with, not as an ecological community, but as a stock exchange, the ethics of which are based on the tragically misnamed “law of the jungle.” This “jungle” law is a basic fallacy of modern culture. The body is degraded and saddened by being set in conflict against the Creation itself, of which all bodies are members, therefore members of each other. The body is thus sent to war against itself. Divided, set against each other, body and soul drive each other to extremes of misapprehension and folly.

Such is the existential threat posed by modern-day gnosticism, and it was therefore with considerable interest that I began to read Kyeyune’s disquisition on the “new gnostics.” Imagine my surprise, upon finishing the piece, to learn that I myself am a member of this new gnostic community. Since this accusation goes against every minute fiber of my being, I feel it deserves a response, though I will proceed deliberately in the interest of fairness.

Lasch described gnosticism as a “religion seemingly made to order for the hard times ahead,” and Kyeyune follows suit: “monumental shifts in economic reality invariably produce dramatic shifts in people’s social reality, as old expectations and beliefs no longer match up with the way things are. In earlier eras of American history, major crises, as well as the ideological and religious revivals that often followed them, played out in streets, churches, tent meetings, and lodges. Now the process takes shape primarily online, where the new Gnostics preach.” The internet, Kyeyune observes, is awash with “itinerant prophets, holy fools, hustlers, fraudsters, and soothsayers.” This is more a consequence of the human condition than anything else, and there have always been pretenders like Perkin Warbeck, quacks like Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, perjurers like the Tichborne Claimant, snake-oil salesmen like Clark Stanley, and fraudsters like the televangelist Jim Bakker, but I will concede that the internet may very well reduce their barriers to entry. So far, so good, but are these prophets, fools, and fraudsters actually gnostics?

Kyeyune himself provides a passable definition of gnosticism: a belief system “that postulates that humans contain a piece of God or the divinity inside themselves, to which they then lose access because of the material world’s corruption. Through proper spiritual knowledge, or gnosis, that connection can be rekindled, and the enlightened person can then break free from the corruption that surrounds him.” Kyeyune’s discussion, curiously enough, is then limited to the following two categories: (1) traders in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other forms of cryptocurrency, and (2) health-conscious seed oil disrespecters.

As for the first category, I am barely conversant in crypto-related matters, and I readily admit to being skeptical of the idea of purchasing glorified jpegs of “Bored Apes” or anything else, even if the images are “trackable by using Ethereum’s blockchain as a public ledger.” That said, if the mere act of possessing or consuming a work of art in a digital format is enough to qualify a person as a gnostic, then anyone with a Pinterest or Spotify account is on the road to gnosticism. Kyeyune’s real problem with the crypto community seems to be the ever-present

ethos of social awareness and anger at an unfair system, coexisting with a sort of dog-eat-dog philosophy, in which the light at the end of the tunnel, the “exit,” is always a personal one. The system is rigged, yes, but here’s your chance to make a ton of money without lifting a finger—just buy the right stock, the right NFT, the right crypto, at the right time. You deserved that money from the start anyway, until someone—the “system,” the government, the bankers—kept you from getting it.

I don’t doubt that there are ideologically motivated cryptocurrency traders, NFT purveyors, and GameStop short-sellers who imagine that they are nobly upending a rigged, predatory banking system, or democratizing the art world, or undermining the unlimited power of the state — grandiose things like that — but a great many others are attracted to those markets for the same reasons that investors were attracted to tulpenmanie in the 17th century, shares of the South Sea Company in the 18th century, the Railway Mania of the 19th century, or the more recent Japanese asset price and dot-com bubbles. Not every popular delusion is an instance of gnosticism, nor is every act of resistance against a preexisting system increasingly perceived as a gigantic confidence trick.

Kyeyune’s treatment of seed oils is even more provocative. Perplexed by the (admittedly pretty bizarre) imagery of “a half-naked man shoot[ing] a high-caliber rifle at a bottle of canola oil” included in Tucker Carlson’s Fox News special “The End of Men,” he wonders:

Why is the muscular man shooting at canola oil bottles, rather than something more practical—an actual target, say? The answer: because “seed…