Steve Watson

On the Modification of an Institution

August 22, 2026 – 10:39 am

A discussion with a group of friends turned – never mind how – to the subject of same-sex marriage (SSM.) I made the traditionalist claim that marriage is an institution whose purpose and function is to regulate sexual behaviour, to provide support for children and child-bearing women, and to support the nuclear family which is the smallest sustainable social structure and the fundamental partition of society. The laws supporting this institution accepted that function until quite recently. I argued that the SSM campaign and the changes to the law that it has occasioned are destructive of the traditional notion of marriage and risk subverting its valuable social function.

The problem with SSM, as I see it, is that the most popular argument given in support of the change is that marriage is supposed to be a recognition of inter-personal love and a support for the continuance of a relationship deemed essential for the happiness of the partners. This being the case there is no reason not to extend its coverage to partnerships of the same sex. Love and happiness are everyone’s right! Of course, I deny that this is a principal motivation for the continuance of the marriage institution – it is at best an incidental and historically unusual feature of modern marriage customs. As an end of marriage, however, this is competitive with the social good traditionally intended. It is not at all clear that the two ends can both be served by the same institution; nor has any effort been put into demonstrating or arguing that they can. If society comes to accept that rationale for marriage (implicitly even more than explicitly) and begins to treat marriage in general as being intended to support hedonistic goals rather than socially functional goals, then the originally accepted function of marriage may be subverted, and the institution may fail to produce the good effects of a well-functioning institution of marriage. In support of this contention, I think we’ve already begun to see the dire consequences of no-fault divorce – which was another institutional modification defended on reasonable grounds but inimical to the good functioning of the institution.

It occurs to me also that the case of the acceptance of SSM gives a clue to at least one mode by which institutions are made dynamic rather than static. Let us suppose that the form of marriage observing the traditional norms of that institution was in fact effective in bringing about the ‘intended’ stability in the formation and maintenance of the family unit. It may nevertheless have been the case that dissatisfaction with that institution arose from the perceived inability of that institution under those conditions to reasonably provide for the happiness (romantic contentment, companionability, etc.) of the participants. Dissatisfaction there might have led to a conviction that such happiness ought to be an intended outcome of the institution – or that the institution that made such personal happiness impossible ought to be dissolved. The latter is an extreme conclusion, but it is one that has certainly had its defenders in the socialist, feminist, and (prior) homosexual rights movements. Desiring to retain the institution, however, and desiring modification of its intended function to include the happiness criterion, would naturally lead to a modification of the set of norms that are considered applicable to the institution. Modification of the normset would then lead to a modification of the Institutional Function of marriage. Whether the modified function would match the intended function is quite another question.

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Towards a ‘Virtue Theory’ for Literature (2)

August 12, 2026 – 11:45 am

Earlier it was determined that :

Literature is a performance of language use (of a particular kind) and has natural elements of assessment as a performance of a certain kind. (They may not be the only elements of assessment, but they are the fundamentals.) In the particular case of fine literature as we are understanding it, those natural elements of assessment are exactly the elements of literature determined to be relevant to the two sources of pleasure in literature that we have identified: storytelling and language play. Excellence in literature will be judged by the degree to which excellence is displayed in those elements.

Functions Determine the Virtues

According to a long-established understanding of the nature of excellence in general, the excellence of a performance has to be understood in terms of the fitness of certain elements for the achievement of the purpose of the performance. This view of excellences can be most obviously traced to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which the excellences (αρεται, virtues) of character were determined to be traits or dispositions tuned to the achievement of happiness (eudaimonia) through the exercise of practical reason. In the argument to that point, Aristotle noted that excellences or virtues in other things that were described as good of their kind were precisely those qualities that fitted those things to perform their characteristic functions well – the sharpness of a knife, the skill of a flautist, the speed of a horse, etc.

The difficulty here, however, is that the functions of the two modes of linguistic performance – storytelling and language play – are, respectively, mysterious and merely vestigial. In the case of language play (let us call it the ludic mode,) it was argued earlier that the original function was to provide a mode of linguistic behaviour in which language competence could be demonstrated or honed and that the pleasure found in it functioned to reward participation in performances in that mode. That being the case, it would be reasonable to assume that the virtues in that performance are precisely those characteristics of the performance that demonstrate the competence of the performer, and which give pleasure to the audience. The same will of course apply to the performances in that mode which are the continuations of that juvenile mode into maturity.

In the case of storytelling (the narrative mode,) the function is not so clear, though, as was suggested previously, there have been hypothesized uses in social display or cultural transmission. Those uses, however, cannot constitute the function: the function properly performed has those uses. We can say no more than that the function of performances in the narrative mode is to transmit a structure of events and other contents in an interestingly integrated form. We are correspondingly required to deduce the virtues from the observation of the characteristics that give pleasure in the narrative mode – assuming, as we did for the ludic mode, that those pleasures are fitted to encourage the characteristics important to the function. The identification of those virtues will require us to distinguish the relevant pleasures from others that may be due to functionally irrelevant features of a performance (or of any performance.)

Constraints on the Literary Virtues

Two further points made be made that will assist in determining whether some identified characteristic of a literary performance can really be a virtue of that mode. In the first place, we may note that every virtue of a mode of performance can be present in any particular performance; which is to say that none of the virtues can be mutually exclusive. That this is generally assumed to be the case for the classical virtues of character, for example, is apparent  when Socrates is able to claim that they can be united in deriving from knowledge. More generally, it seems to be simply a matter of the meaning of the terms that if something counts as an excellence of a mode of performance it can be expected to be present in any particular performance.

In the second place, we shall assume that each of the virtues exists on a continuum and that the virtue does not consist in a simple maximisation of that particular characteristic. In this respect, again, we assume a similarity with the virtues of character. There is a distinction to be drawn here between those virtues and certain other kinds of positive characteristics. At first sight we might not be inclined to say, for example, that the right degree of sharpness in a knife was anything less than the sharpest it could be, that the right level of skill in a flautist was anything less than the best he could manage, or that the right speed for a horse (a racehorse, anyway) was anything less than the fastest a horse could go – and we note also that such characteristics are exactly the sorts of characteristics that cannot all be maximised (present at their ‘right’ degrees) at the same time. In practice, however, the sharpness of a knife, for example, its safety, its comfort of use, its strength, and so on are all characteristics that need to be balanced against each other in order for the knife to be optimal at its intended function, whereas virtues of the other kind have to be balanced against the function of the mode of performance itself. Therefore, both kinds of virtue (if the distinction is accepted) can be considered means in the Aristotelian sense.

It’s finally worth recalling the observation made in part 1 that we do not approach the identification of literary virtues alone or as an entirely new project. Literary critics and the general population from ancient times until today have had many opinions on the appropriate characteristics of fine literature guided by their relevant intuitions and operating on long experience of the form. It makes very good sense to take their opinions seriously.

Seven Ludic Literary Virtues

1. Syntactic Innovation

The ability to deploy or discover non-normative ways of constructing meaning-bearing locutions that do not stray so far from the bounds of normative syntax that the meaning becomes overly difficult to recover, or where there is ambiguity that that be intended. The associated vices of defect and excess would be respectively a too strict adherence to supposed syntactic norms and  a too liberal departure from those norms. Note that a failure to master the grammar is just grammatical illiteracy.

2. Lexical Invention

The ability to coin new terms according to implicit rules of word construction, or to deploy unusual or non-standard terms in ways that expand their semantic field. The associated vice of defect would be displaying a too limited capacity for invention and expansion of the language’s capabilities, while the vice of excess would be showing too great a tendency to employ unusual, jargon, erudite, specialist, exotic, or invented terms in which meaning is obscured beyond desirable limits. Note that simple errors in word use (using the wrong word, for example) or just not knowing the available vocabulary adequately is just lexical illiteracy.

3. Semantic Density

The ability to clearly express complex or multiple meanings within a limited compass by the artful use of language. This sort of semantic compression may involve alternative possible intended interpretations, intended ambiguities, metaphors, similes, irony, and a range of other techniques of semantic subversion, overlay, or extension. The  associated vice of defect would be an inadequate degree of semantic sophistication resulting in a pedestrian, plodding text, while the vice of excess would be a text that is so heavily saturated with semantic possibilities that it presents too formidable a barrier to comprehension. Unintended ambiguities, possible interpretations etc. are simple errors of clarity and intention.

4. Affective Control

The ability to direct the emotional effects of a text by the skilful use of language. This control may be effected through management of the tone, mood, atmosphere, reader response, etc. of a text. The associated vice of defect is the failure to adequately control the affective aspects of the text. Since every text necessarily has all the types of affect, this failure risks allowing the uncontrolled affect of the text to be irrelevant or distracting or contradictory to the intention of the author or the type of text. The vice of excess runs a similar risk by imposing affects where they are irrelevant or distracting or contradictory to the intention of the author or the type of text. In unskilled hands, attempted affective control can be seen as incoherent or manipulative.

5. Stylistic Distinction

The ability to create and maintain a style of expression in a text that distinguishes that text from others of a comparable kind by means of artful use of language – structure, lexicon, literary devices, etc. The associated vice of defect is the inability to develop a distinct style resulting in derivative, banal, or confused text stylings. The vice of excess risks producing texts whose stylings are distracting, idiosyncratic, confusing, etc. Note that a notably poor style that is not intended as such by the author is just the result of a lack of sensitivity to the language, not a form of stylistic distinction.

6. Musical Engagement

The ability to use features of language to create sonic effects pleasing or, at least, engaging to the ear. The relevant features include meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and repetition amongst many others. Obviously, this is particularly important in poetry (perhaps even definitively so,) but it has a role in any text. The associated vice of defect is to fail to create such pleasing effects making the text either not pleasant or even unpleasant. The vice of excess risks making the text confusing or inappropriate to its genre. It is well known that these features are not easily handled, despite their popularity.

7. Structural Complexity

The ability to create semantically coherent complex structures in a text – including an overall structure for any particular text. The structure may be defined in narrative, semantic, thematic, or other terms. The associated vice of defect is an inability to impose a semantically coherent structure beyond, of course, limited syntactic units, resulting in a text that lacks a unifying principle or principles and is experienced as fragmentary, pointless, or incoherent. It is worth noting that a second level of the vice is seen where only very simple overall structures are attempted, in which case there may be a risk only of tedium or predictability. The vice of excess risks producing texts whose structures are overly complex and prove unintelligible to the reader, producing confusion and frustration. Attempted structures that fail of coherence are just incompetent constructions.

Seven Narrative Literary Virtues

Although the characteristics that constitute ludic literary virtues are relatively little studied, at least quâ virtues, the narrative virtues turn out to be very well known and require little explanation. They are conveniently associated with the literary elements that are commonly listed as requirements for any piece of literature (meaning fine narrative fiction.)

1. Theme
2. Plot
3. Conflict
4. Character
5. Setting
6. Narration
7. Tone

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Stumbling Blocks on the Gnostic Path

July 19, 2026 – 4:39 am

Suppose that we have justified a Gnostic cosmology and cosmogony of the usual form: hierarchical heavens presided over by a more or less tripartite God and its Aeons and Luminaries and so on, a material world existing as the failed creative effort of a Demiurge, humans containing particles of divinity seeking to escape that world, and a redeeming Christ figure who brings knowledge which will allow that escape. Still, there are details that require to be filled in.

1. How does knowledge bring about liberation?

The role of knowledge is inspired by Neoplatonic philosophy, as is the idea that by some sort of intellectual enlightenment the divine soul can be reunited with the One (achieving ἕνωσις/henosis.) In the Neoplatonic system (to speak generally) this is possible because the human soul in contemplation participates in Nous (Intelligence, the first emanation of the One) because it is simply a reflection of Nous’ own activity, and this in turn is simply a reflection of the One’s Being, so that human contemplation has an essential identity with the One that ‘simply’ requires intellectual effort to realise. The rather cruder metaphysics of the Gnostics does not allow this form of ascent (known in Neoplatonism as ἐπιστροφή/epistrophe,) because the divine spark in Man is not so derived.

Instead, the idea is that since ignorance (of the One?) is the cause of the defectiveness of the world created by the demiurge, supplying that knowledge eliminates the effect – at least, in the knower. Since the writers must have been aware that even those who did have ‘propositional’ knowledge of the true nature of the world (like themselves) were not ipso facto liberated, the knowledge would have to be of some other kind, and if the propositional knowledge was nevertheless important then that other kind would have to be somehow dependent upon it. Again, by appeal to the Neoplatonists, it would be natural to assume that some kind of immediate experiential ‘knowledge’ was in question (and in support of this, γνωσις/gnosis is the word used for that sort of thing,) but then, what could be the contribution of the propositional knowledge so copiously imparted in their writings? Presumably, by directing the knower toward the real God and away from the Demiurge, whatever conscious efforts might be made towards achieving spiritual union with God could at least hope for some effect.

2. Why is this liberating knowledge secret?

The Gnostics find a role for Christ as a redeemer by claiming that the liberating knowledge cannot be achieved without divine revelation. His role then is to make this revelation and show us the way to achieve liberation. This knowledge, however, is restricted in availability and appears in secret traditions and oral transmissions rather than in the explicit texts concerning Christ’s teachings. Reasons given for this, and they are not many, are pretty unconvincing. It is claimed, for example, that the demiurge is jealous and desires no one to adore another God in his stead – he commands this of us in first Commandment of the Decalogue – and therefore these teachings are to be kept secret so that He will not destroy them, and His archons in command of the various worlds collaborate in this suppression.

In fact, it is more likely that the explicit reasons for secrecy are merely ad hoc explanations for a thing that was already preferred or existent. The Gnostic sects arose in a time when the general cultural influence and prestige of ancient mystery religions (such as those of Eleusis, Cybele, Orpheus, Isis, Mithras and many others) was very great and the tradition of secret knowledge being imparted by inspired teachers and (divine) sages was widespread (Apollonius of Tyana etc.) It would have been quite natural for the Gnostics to have adopted the forms and tendencies of the religious traditions about them, amongst those being the idea of secret doctrines, initiations, and being part of an elite of spiritually privileged souls. Hermeticism, one of the earliest pre-Christian ‘esoteric’ sects, which arose in Egypt (an early centre of Gnosticism,) and that is thought to have influenced the development of Gnosticism, was a semi-mystery religion; and Christianity itself from its beginnings had many of the elements of a mystery cult: Jesus was accepted to have had deeper teachings for his apostles than those he gave in parables to the general public, the baptism constituted an initiation without which full participation in the community was impossible, and so on.

3. What does this all mean for our sins?

In the usual view, we are sinful by nature because we are in rebellion against the will of God. This is either illustrated by the story of the Fall or that event is taken to taint the posterity of Adam; but in the Gnostic cosmology the God of this world is merely the Demiurge, and we do no wrong by defying His will. It is well known, in fact, that many Gnostic sects reinterpret the story of the Fall itself to make the God of this world its villain, rather than the serpent or ourselves. Moreover, since the Gnostics insist that without Christ or some other revelator of the Truth we cannot know of the true God, we cannot be said to sin by denying His will for we can have no knowledge of His will. It’s not even clear that the One has willed anything for us. It is hard, then, to see why we should be thought to have a sinful nature at all.

One problem this creates is that because Christ does not come to redeem our sins by his death his passion becomes a problem for the theorists and adds to the Christological chaos of the Early Christians. Another is that lacking any guidance to behaviour from the One True God, there seems to be no moral law at all – at least in the way that the moral law was understood by Christians of the time. The licence to immoralism that this provided was further supported by the Gnostic’s dismissive attitude to the physical world that the ‘moral agent’ inhabited, and, no doubt, by a desire to flaunt their disregard for the rules that bound those who were their spiritual inferiors. We may doubt the atrocity stories told by the heresiologists who accused them of every form of immoralism – not excepting cannibalism – but the danger of libertinism is very real.

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A Gnostic Library

July 16, 2026 – 8:18 am

Secondary Texts

Modern

• Brakke, D (2010) The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity, Harvard University Press.
• Ehrman, B (2003) Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, Oxford University Press
• Jonas, H (1958) The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, Beacon Boston
• Lewis, ND (2013) Introduction to “Gnosticism:” Ancient Voices, Christian Worlds, Oxford University Press.
• Markschies, C (tr. J Bowden) (2003) Gnosis: An Introduction, T & T Clark
• Pagels, E (1979) The Gnostic Gospels. Penguin
• Mead, GRS (1892) Simon Magus
• Pearson B.A. (1990) Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity
• Pétrement, S (tr. C Harrison) (1990) A Separate God: The Origins and Teachings of Gnosticism. Harper San Francisco.
• Rudolph, K (tr. R McL Wilson et al.) (1977) Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism. Harper San Francisco
• Williams M.A. (1996) Rethinking Gnosticism. An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category
  

Ancient

• Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies (Elenchus, Philosophumena) in Ante-Nicene Fathers 5 (tr. JH McMahon) 9-153
• Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses, On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis) in Ante-Nicene Fathers 1 (tr. Roberts/Rambaut) 309-567
• Epiphanius of Salamis, Against Heresies (Panarion) [Relevant sections are extracted in Layton, B The Gnostic Scriptures 185-216]
• Clement of Alexandria, Stromata (Miscellanies) in Ante-Nicene Fathers 2 (tr. JH McMahon) 299-568

Primary Texts

Online

• Gnostic Society Library: Sources on Gnosticism and Gnosis

Collections

• Barnstone, W & M Mayer (2009) The Gnostic Bible, Shambhala
• Layton, B (1995) The Gnostic Scriptures, Anchor Bible

Codices

• Askew Codex (Codex Askevianus, BL Additional MS 5114)
  • GRS Mead (1921) Pistis Sophia
• Berlin Codex (Akhmim Codex, Berlin Gnostic Codex, BG, Papyrus Berolinensis8502)
  • Gospel of Mary (BG 8502, 1) in Robinson J. The Nag Hammadi Library (tr. KL King, GW MacRae, RMcL Wilson, DM Parrott) 523-7
  • Apocryphon of John(NHC II, 1, III, 1, IV, 1; BG 8502, 2) in Robinson J. The Nag Hammadi Library (tr. F Wisse) 104-23
  • The Sophia of Jesus Christ (NHC III, 4; BG 8502, 3) in Robinson J. The Nag Hammadi Library (tr. DM Parrott) 220-43
  • Epitome of the Act of Peter (BG 8502, 4) in Robinson J. The Nag Hammadi Library (tr. J Brashler, DM Parrott) 528-31
• Bruce Codex (Codex Brucianus, Bruce 96)
  • Book of Jeu (Online Text)
  • Untitled Text(Untitled Apocalypse, The Gnosis of the Light) (Online Text)
• Codex Tchacos
  • Letter of Peter to Philip (NHC VIII, 2) in Robinson J. The Nag Hammadi Library (tr. MW Meyer, F Wisse) 431-7
  • First Apocalypse of James (NHC V, 3) in Robinson J. The Nag Hammadi Library (tr. WR Schoedel, DM Parrott) 260-8
  • Gospel of Judas (Online pdf, tr. R Kasser, M Meyer, G Wurst, F Gaudard)
  • The Temptation of Allogenes in Wurst, G & R Kasser (2007) The Gospel of Judas: Critical Edition. National Geographic.
• The Nag Hammadi Library (NHC I – XIII)
  • Robinson J. (ed.) (1978/88) The Nag Hammadi Library, Harper San Francisco

Texts of the Sethian Gnostics

• The Gospel of Judas (Online pdf, tr. R Kasser, M Meyer, G Wurst, F Gaudard) (ex Codex Tchacos)
• Robinson J. The Nag Hammadi Library
  • The Apocalypse of Adam (V, 5) (tr. GW McRae, DM Parrott) 277-86
  • The Apocryphon of John (II, 1; III, 1; IV, 1; and BG 8502,2) (tr. F Wisse) 104-23
  • The Thought of Norea (IX, 2) (tr. BA Pearson, S Giversen) 445-7
  • The Trimorphic Protennoia(XIII, 1) (tr. JD Turner) 511-22
  • The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit(also known as the Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians) (III, 2; IV, 2) (tr. A Böhlig, F Wisse) 208-19
  • Zostrianos (VIII, 1) (tr. JH Sieber) 402-30
  • Three Steles of Seth (VII, 5) (tr. JE Goehring, JM Robinson) 396-401
  • Marsanes (X, 1) (tr. BA Pearson) 460-71
  • Melchizedek (IX, 1) (tr. BA Pearson, S Giverson) 438-44
  • Allogenes (XI, 3) (tr. AC Wire, JD Turner, OS Wintermute) 490-500
  • The Second Treatise of the Great Seth (VII, 2) (tr. JA Gibbons, RA Bullard) 362-71
  • The Reality of the Rulers, also known as The Hypostasis of the Archons (II, 4) (tr. RA Bullard, B Layton) 161-9
  • The Thunder, Perfect Mind (VI, 2) (tr. GW MacRae, DM Parrott) 295-303
• Untitled Text (Untitled Apocalypse, The Gnosis of the Light) (Online Text) (ex Bruce Codex)
• The Coptic Apocalypse of Paul. Shneemelcher, W (1989) New Testament Apocrypha Vol 2 698f.

Texts of the Valentinian Gnostics

• Ptolemy’s Version of the Gnostic Myth in Irenaeus Against Heresies I, viii, 5, in Ante-Nicene Fathers 1 328f
• Ptolemy’s Epistle to Flora in Epiphanius Panarion (33.3.1 – 33.7.10) in Barnstone, W & M Mayer The Gnostic Bible 299-306
• Robinson J. The Nag Hammadi Library
  • The Gospel of Truth(I, 3; XII, 2) (tr. HW Attridge, GW MacRae) 38-51
  • Tripartite Tractate (I, 5) (tr. HW Attridge, EH Pagels, D Mueller) 58-103
  • Prayer of the Apostle Paul (I, 1) (tr. D Mueller) 27f
  • Treatise on the Resurrection(Epistle to Rheginus) (I, 4) (tr. ML Peel) 52-7
  • Gospel of Philip (II, 3) (tr. WW Isenberg) 139-60
  • A Valentinian Exposition (XI, 2) (tr. EH Pagels, JD Turner) 481-9

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Justifying the Gnostic Cosmos

July 12, 2026 – 5:30 am

The massively complicated cosmogony, cosmology, and metaphysics of Gnosticism often strikes students as merely fantastical. I propose, however, that a very large part of it can be explained as an attempt to integrate a small set of not-obviously-coherent principles and presuppositions. Amongst those are the following, listed here in no particular order:

• Christ appeared on Earth and is the path to our salvation
• God has to be purely good
• The material world is flawed and hard to explain as the creation of a purely good God
• The trinitarian doctrine indicates a tripartite nature of the ultimate God
• A feminine principle is required in the nature of God
• The Middle and Late Platonists have demonstrated that
  • The world has a hierarchical structure in which lower levels of reality are emanations of higher levels
  • The world is the creation of an emanation (known in that role as the Demiurge.)
  • All emanations ultimately originate from the Good.
  • The goal of man is to know the Good

On these assumptions, the general form of an argument for the claims made by the gnostic theorists can be imagined.

1. The world is a sad and inferior place, and we cannot explain why the perfect and good God would make it so poorly. Perhaps He didn’t make the world at all, but it was made by someone else, someone flawed.
2. But if that one made the world, He would have to be a divine being too. So, there is at least one divine being below the real God (between Him and us,) and if the real God is the real source of all Being, then He would have to be the ultimate cause of that one too.
3. That’s OK, because we already know that God has given rise to other divine beings in the form of the Holy Trinity, in which both the Holy Spirit and Christ ‘proceed’ from the Holy Father. The idea that those who proceed from the Father are equal to the Father is incomprehensible, so we think that there is going to be a hierarchy here, even if the precise nature of the hierarchy is going to be a bit mysterious.
4. But anyway, none of those are going to be the World Creator, because Christ is sent to save us from this world, and the Holy Spirit only works with the Holy Father and the Holy Son. So there has to be yet another level of Being between the Trinity and us.
5. Incidentally, how odd is it that the Trinity consists of two persons, both male, and a non-person? Wouldn’t it make more sense for a Holy Family to have a Holy Mother, or at least some sort of female principle? Particularly if we want to talk about the Trinity as a generative principle. It’s not as if we don’t have plenty of examples of divine family groups and divine females. Let’s suppose that the third, or rather, second person of the Trinity is the female principle, the Holy Mother, and call her Barbelo.
6. Getting back on topic, this is starting to look like a cosmic hierarchy, and we already have a model of the structure of the world in terms of a hierarchy of Being in the Platonist teachings that are the best philosophical explanations that we have for the way the world works. In that view, the lower levels are emanations of the higher levels and the highest level of all is the Good, which looks a lot like God. In that view too, the material world is a wretched thing that we need to get away from somehow. And they confirm our deductions in saying that the world is not the product of the perfect One but of an inferior Demiurge.
7. Let’s suppose then that the divine realm consists of a collection of emanations from God. The Trinity might be a special case in which they aren’t quite separated somehow, but the others can be fully autonomous divine beings. The Platonic emanations are the Forms of various things all subordinate to the Good (somehow,) so the emanations from God – call them Aeons – can be analogous hypostatizations of divine attributes, like wisdom, eternality, immeasurability, and so on. This divine realm is the ‘Entirety’ of the world (the Pleroma)
8. One of these Aeons has to be responsible for the flawed world that we see. Which one of the hypostatized divine attributes might act in such a way as could explain this flawed creation? It is proposed that Sophia ‘Wisdom’ is the one who is responsible. She, following her nature, sought to understand the Pleroma, but she was unable to fully comprehend it because it is only for the One to fully grasp it. But in her failure, the faulty thoughts that she had gave rise to a world, this material world, as a distorted version of the Pleroma – for creation by the divine is really just thinking a thing to be.
9. But if this were the case, then Sophia would be the real creator of this world, and She would be the God responsible. She would be the God who claimed that She was jealous and that there was no God but Herself. This can’t be right, because there’s no reason for Sophia to be a wicked, arrogant liar in that way, She is still, after all, a divine attribute. There must be a further step to be taken.
10. It is further proposed, then, that Sophia, in her failure, emanates not the world directly, but a being who, although divine, is, as a consequence of her faulty comprehension of the Pleroma, flawed, ignorant, and arrogant. He is called Ialdabaoth, and He then creates the world that we inhabit because He is a very hypostatization of a misunderstanding of the Pleroma and has both creative desire and fatal incompetence.
11. The world that He emanates is the standard world of concentric zones corresponding to the planets, the Earth, and perhaps some underworld areas, all ruled over by dedicated spirits Archons) and containing all sorts of living beings.
12. Now, we humans are also created by this Ialdaboth so we partake of this incompetent performance, and we are trapped here in this disastrous attempt at a world. What are we to do? How are we to be saved? We have two clues to the answer to this problem. In the first place we know that Christ came to save us. In the second place, we have the example of the Platonists (who have investigated the hierarchical nature of the universe) to tell us that the way to escape from the illusions and evils of this world is to come to know the truths of the higher worlds of purer Forms and more authentic Being.
13. Those two clues tell us that Christ has come down from the Pleroma to guide us to truths about the higher realms that will allow us to escape this sorry world.
14. But how can we escape this world when we are completely and utterly part of it, created along with the rest of it by Ialdabaoth in his great error? Clearly, there must be some part of us that is able to separate from this material world; a divine part. Again, we find support in the Platonic philosophers who tell us that the soul of man is indeed of a higher nature and only temporarily estranged from the world of Forms to which it must return.
15. A natural supposition is that, somehow, Sophia is at the root of this possibility: it cannot be Ialdabaoth, and the other Aeons are not involved. Perhaps she gave off divine sparks of herself in her retreat, and they have found housing in material bodies in this world.

And so, we find ourselves with something like these structures:

 

Note, of course, that this is just one possible chain of reasoning leading to one possible (Sethian) Gnostic-style cosmos. For various reasons, it might well have gone otherwise: where the solution to a problem is achieved through a hypothesized inference to the best explanation other choices could have been made leading to other solutions; where other problems occurred to the theorist solutions to those might have led in different directions; and where different presuppositions were present those might also have justified different outcomes. The point is, that the entire, seemingly absurd elaboration can be rationally motivated. Gnosticism is a serious position.

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Thoughts on Our Troubled Souls

July 10, 2026 – 11:57 am

1

In discussion, we have wondered about the lunacies that are afflicting us, and I have been asked what I make of them. I begin by noting that the nonsense we observe is characterized by its uniformly destructive nature. I have previously noted that in order to determine whether the agents of apparent madness will approve or disapprove of something there is always a simple litmus test to apply: something will be approved just insofar as it leads to a degradation of the institutions of the West or to the weakening of the West or to some other deleterious effects on the West (which is to say, on modernity itself.) I observe this with claims that CAGW/Climate Change/today’s label means we must destroy our energy system; humanitarian compassion means we have to open the borders to all comers; tolerance means that we must accept multiculturalism as the state ideology and no assimilation can be encouraged; historical guilt means that we must behave as if we have no right to exist in this country, aborigines must be privileged, obeisance must be paid at every public event, their flags need to be flown and their Voices dominate; and so on. The outcomes of these postures are so obviously and uniformly disastrous for the West (or for any Western country in which they are enacted) or for modernity, and the arguments for them are so weak, that one has to suspect that the outcomes are desired for reasons other than those provided by in those arguments.

What could motivate such nihilism? I think this enmity of modernity and of the West as its avatar is somehow related to the fact that modernity does not admit the role of any metaphysical element that provides an overarching organizing principle for one’s life. The modern zeitgeist is essentially materialistic and hedonistic (if anything.) There is no supernatural world to which the natural world is subordinate and for whose benefit the events and entities of the material world exist. In fact the ultimate pointlessness of existence is widely accepted amongst the class of those who consider such things – and this attitude percolates through society.

In the Christian period (300-1700) which was the precursor of modernity, life in the world had a purpose determined by an eternal principle of goodness, God, (the ultimate positive value) and everything that one did in the world was evaluated ultimately wrt that purpose. It wasn’t necessary that one was conscious of this dependency at all times or ever; it was sufficient that one knew that there were those who could, if called upon, explain how one’s life and choices fitted into the great eternal plan. There was a purpose, and you were a part of it. Other civilizations had similar, more or less sophisticated, systems that gave purpose to their members. The West had such a system but has now abandoned it.

This abandonment has resulted in a type of spiritual crisis – or a crisis in mass psychology if one would prefer – from two directions. In the first place, the fact that modern culture fails to satisfy this essential demand of any culture – to integrate the life of the individual both externally (in the world and society) and internally – has direct results on the participants in that culture. Their lives are unintegrated, with all the psychological ills that follow from that of dissatisfaction and aimlessness; and the effect of this may be disintegration of the culture itself, perhaps followed by atomisation (Bowling Alone) and re-integration into whatever units of sense-making present themselves (Neo-tribalism.) In the second place, the realisation of the meaninglessness, pointlessness, or sheer absurdity (in Nagel’s sense) of life in modernity manifests in a reaction against the culture that fails to satisfy this essential integrative demand of any culture. The realisation may come by observation of the lives of others or of one’s own situation, and the realisation may be either explicit or merely implicit. In either case the culture that fails to do its job will be rejected.

2

Our modern civilisation fails to satisfy our need for deep meaning and participation in something greater than ourselves and our own petty preferences. It was one of the boasts of those who argued the modern world into existence that this new civilisation would be self-consciously rational, by which we mean practically rational, and that mere traditions and irrational motivations would be set aside with the Morris dancers and transubstantiation. Weber, for example, was big on this characteristic of the modern world as it manifested itself in his time. In this new world, however, if we seek the ultimate motivations for our actions and the great purpose of our existence on Earth, we get no further than Aristotelian happiness. This compares unfavourably with the eternal struggle against absolute evil that justified the past worlds. The modern motivation – if it even counts as such – is obviously trivial, and our lives are diminished by its inescapability. Many people react to this pointlessness even if they are not explicitly aware of this being their motivation, by rejecting the modern world almost in toto, and yearning for release from its bonds of banality. Thus, we see large swathes of the populace leaping from one doomsday promise to the next – Global warming, the population bomb, organophosphates, hormones in the water, peak oil, limits to growth, etc. ad nauseam. It is a desire for destruction as a punishment for the ‘sin’ of diminishing the human spirit. Escape from contentment. Fear that this is all there is and it’s not enough, forever.

3

The modern secular, rational, individualist, materialist world lacks the magic and moral majesty that some people seem to need in order to give their lives meaning. It is not a ‘noble’ goal to seek one’s own happiness. A society built on that as its goal must be a trivial and unworthy society, and whatever can be done to humble it should be done. The fact that Western liberal market democracies have delivered more happiness and prosperity and general flourishing than any competing system by a long, long way is not at all to the point and will not move these dissatisfied folk at all. They will take the ‘emptiness’ of this success claim as further evidence of the vacuity of the West.

4

Deborah wondered whether there were non-religious formations that could play the integrating role that I’ve proposed for Christianity in the case of the west. I had been wondering about that, because it would be disappointing result to find that the only thing that made decent society possible was (sincere) acceptance of an ontology and associated teleology that was false – or that many people would find it impossible to accept. I hadn’t thought of an argument for either side, but Bill opined that the idea of a metaphysical principle of the appropriate sort really did seem to be restricted to religious thought and he could see no prospect of developing one independent of religious connotations.

In this case we may have something like the problem with ethical categorical imperatives or absolute obligations. It seems impossible to justify these in any way that doesn’t depend upon unacceptable metaphysical assumptions. What can be done is to explain how they come about according to naturalistic processes, how they contribute to the pursuit of societal goods when widely accepted, and why they should be encouraged as a kind of fiction or Noble Lie. What can’t be done is to make them independent objects in the world with non-instrumental justification. An ‘ought’ can only come from an ‘is,’ and such an ‘ought’ cannot be other than hypothetical or instrumental.

I made the pessimistic point that I’ve usually avoided mentioning before, that if it is indeed the case that people just can’t cope with a culture in which there is no external objective power to impose an unambiguous and non-arbitrary order upon their values and in which it is left up to themselves to create a value order whose arbitrariness is inescapably obvious, and if it is the case that modernity necessarily involves just such a culture, then we are in a pickle. 

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Some Comments on Prescriptive Multiculturalism

July 9, 2026 – 12:19 pm

It has no foundational texts

We were discussing the origins of the multiculturalist ideology and the idea that ‘Diversity is Our Strength.’ (I shall call this the MCD Complex – MCDC.) I pointed out that although Liberalism could point back to JS Mill and any number of other philosophers, and Socialists could point to Marx and Rousseau, and Feminists could look to de Beauvoir, and Anarchists had their Proudhons and Kropotkins, and even Conservatives – the least ideological of all ideologues – could refer to Burke or Halifax, and so on for the other political ideologies, there was no one of comparable calibre making the case for the MCDC; so where did these ideologies come from and how were they able so quickly to come to dominate the intellectual world of the élites?

It has no models

Moreover, if multiculturalism is championing something different from a multiracial or multiethnic society, it must mean that a single polity ought to contain arbitrarily many cultures. Now, this is a not a fact about the individuals in that society – for no single person is multicultural – but about subgroups. We are supposed, then, to welcome the existence of many distinct groups with comparable political power in a single polity, where each of those groups is distinguished by its own ways of life, interests, values, attitudes, etc. But that is an obvious recipe for intercommunal conflict. Such things may exist stably in authoritarian regimes like the Roman Empire or the Ottoman (where the millet system formalised the arrangement) or in Yugoslavia or other suchlike places, but there are precisely no successful liberal democratic examples, so how has it suddenly become the official doctrine of all the Western democracies?

It is oddly targeted

And note that it is only the Western democracies that are supposed to adopt the MCDC as policy / moral imperative / governing ideology. No one demands that Russia or China or Ethiopia or Iran or Fiji or Indonesia adopt the MCDC, or that they subject themselves to vast (barely regulated) inflows of immigrants in pursuit of the end of global diversification. This, at least, has been pretty widely recognised, but the reason for this tightly restricted application of what would seem to be universally applicable ideology remains elusive. And when it is addressed by defenders of the MCDC it is far too often in terms of a just punishment for previous sins of those societies (again, note, sins that are only counted as punishable for the West,) which gives ammunition to those who would treat it as an act of deliberate aggression against the West.

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Three Illusions of Consciousness

July 9, 2026 – 1:22 am

No inner monologue

Here‘s an interesting (short!) interview with a girl who says she has no internal monologue. The interviewer is trying to comprehend what that could be like and how it could be possible. 

I think a good way to start thinking about it is to realise that there is no actual little voice in anyone’s head, so what’s happening when we think that there is?

No inner imagery

Here’s a news release reporting on a study involving people who report that they can form no mental images. The report talks about how this is devastating for philosophers of mind (citing such contemporary analysts as David Hume) and indicating that it upends our ideas of abstraction formation.

I think a good way to start thinking about it is to realise (as philosophers have done for centuries) that there is no actual little image in anyone’s head, so what’s happening when we think that there is?

No inner reasoning

Usually cited as an argument against Free Will, the Libet experiment equally indicates that consciousness of a decision is not simultaneous with the neurological indicator that a decision has been made, thus conscious reasoning is not what produces the decision.

But consciousness is not where the work is done, any more than a committee’s report is where it’s work is done.

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Notes on ‘Populism’

July 8, 2026 – 3:05 pm

Does the Analysis of Populism Rest on a Mistake?

Scholars who are struggling to come up with a coherent and plausible characterization of populism may be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. They seem to have assumed that there is a thing that ‘populism’ describes and that all uses of the term are referring to the same phenomenon. This is an approach that might work with ‘water,’ to take a classic Kripkean example, or with ‘gold’ or ‘monkey’ or other obvious natural kinds (about which some people can be wrong and some uses can be mistaken,) but there are plenty of counterexamples to show that many terms just don’t have natural kinds as references. ‘Game,’ ‘fish,’ and ‘planet‘ are all problematic in this sense. The term ‘populism’ may well be of this latter sort. It has been applied in many different situations by many different actors for many different reasons, and there is no prima facie reason to think that they were all pointing at the same class of objects when they used the word.

One essential role of political science is to determine the natural kinds that appear in politics – if any – and to label them so that they can be used as tools of analysis. It is further required that the natural or commonplace vocabulary of discussion of political matters is analysed to determine whether discussion using those terms is conceptually coherent or whether it is effectively vacuous. In this case, the uses of the term ‘populism’ have to be analysed to determine which natural kinds, if any, each particular usage is referencing. If a usage cannot be charitably and faithfully rephrased in terms of any such natural kind terms, then the usage is illegitimate and effectively meaningless. On the other hand, if one kind seems close enough to serve as the referent for the vast majority of uses, it may be permissible to define ‘populism’ as referring to that kind; but let it be clear, we are not then discovering that populism is X but deciding, not observing that fact but stipulating it.

Proposing a Populism

My own observation of the use of the term suggests that what most people have in mind when they are using it now is:

a movement that arises when elites and elite political parties fail to address concerns felt widely in the political community (though perhaps not amongst the elites) and that attempts to act to address those concerns.

I would be prepared to take this as a first pass at a description of a political phenomenon that could pass as populism.[1] The next step, if I had sufficient interest in the matter, would be to determine the extent to which such a description covered the phenomena that are so named, the willingness of language users to accept the implicit definition, the connections that could be drawn to other phenomena – particularly causal and conceptual connections, and so on. (What I would not do is try to force every event that had been called by the name into the box that I had built.)

Some implications of the proposed definition are pretty obvious, of course: Populism needn’t be either left or right, it assumes that there is an elite class that has interests and that those interests may be perceived as in conflict with interests of the non-elite, it requires a party system for formation but is neither pro nor anti democracy itself, it is not necessarily either authoritarian or liberal, it is a mass movement rather than a mere faction, it is indifferent to class analysis beyond a simple elite/non-elite distinction, it does not necessarily involve the assumption of a moral distinction between the conflicting parties, it assumes a capacity for mobilisation, and so on. One notices that these obvious implications of the bare bones understanding of Populism rule out most of the political/sociological analyses that have been attempted.

On the Incoherence of the Populists

Note, in particular, that there is no need – nor should there even be an expectation – that any Populist movement should have any coherent ideology. It is not formed in response to ideological dispute, but rather a dispute over interests. For the same reason, there should be no expectation that it will be organized or directed according to any coherent ideology. If there is an ideological tinge to the movement it is likely to be the result of purely contingent circumstances of the political environment in which it arose. For example, it is not rarely the case that there already exists a ‘mainstream’ party whose ideology would seem to be in accord with (support or demand) the solutions offered by the populists, but because the elites refuse to follow that line – for whatever reason – the populists arise as an alienated faction of that party.

In any case, to criticise a ‘populist’ movement because its (implicit?) ideology is incoherent is usually a disingenuous move. Very few political parties of the mainstream today have coherent effective ideologies, whatever their manifestoes or their theorists might claim. This is largely because modern parties have to be alliances of smaller, possibly more ideologically coherent, groups in order to have electoral weight adequate to achieve any policy objectives. Criticisms of incoherence thus show, at best, a misunderstanding both of the populists and of the role of parties in politics. I would also point out that most of the media and academic critics who complain of the incoherence populist movements see themselves very much as allied to or members of the very elite formations against which the populists are acting. Their criticisms need to be read in that light.

[1] As a matter of interest and in support of the plausibility of that definition, it does seem to  align with the so-called Essex School analysis that claims to be applying some sort of ‘Discourse Analysis.’ That, however, might be no sort of recommendation, since the apparent ideological allies and sources of the Essex scholars are such figures as Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida. How this might relate to the Discourse Analysis that I learned from Kamp and Reyle’s  From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory is a mystery. I suspect there is no connection and that DA is just Austin/Grice/Searle in fancy dress.

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Greens vs Humans

July 5, 2026 – 9:50 am

Almost all mainstream political programs have ultimately aimed at (or at least have been justified in terms of) improving the lot of humankind. In this respect you might call them Eudaimonist. Socialists think that humans will flourish better with equality maximised, liberals think the same for maximising liberty, and so on for the other standard political positions. On the other hand, we have in recent years seen an increase in political appeal of a movement that is generally labelled Green, and it is remarkable that their political aim is not Eudaimonist at all but is the protection of encouragement of non-human Nature.

It is difficult to think of any other political movement through history, or any other political philosophy likewise, that didn’t have as its ultimate end the betterment of humanity or the greater flourishing of humans. When I have asked about this in discussions the only barely reasonable responses have referred to, say, the heated controversies over the trinity in some periods of the Late Mediaeval, or over the nature of the relationship between God and Christ in Constantinople (where it was said that one couldn’t even go for a haircut without the barber interrogating you on whether Jesus was of the same or similar nature as God.) These are certainly examples of ‘popular’ obsessions with theories that don’t seem intimately related peoples’ mundane interests, but I’m not sure they’re quite what I was thinking of. I guess the question is whether if that had been proposed as a political platform it would have been essentially inimical to human interests or whether it would have been irrelevant. In fact, I hardly see it as a political question at all – but why not? Perhaps because I imagine politics as being the question of settling the rules by which people live in a political community. This isn’t a question of rules of living but of rules of believing. Beliefs are relevant to the way we live but they’re not the same thing. Many things are ‘relevant’ to modes of life without being political facts or questions. 

Another example was given which I dismissed at the time but might be more relevant given the mode of life nature of politics I’ve just proposed. It was noted that the Albigensians were committed by their beliefs to the idea that sex is wrong and damaging to the soul and that they were therefore likely to act so that they went extinct. That’s true, I said, but their politics was still centred on human flourishing because they took the souls of humans as being the entities that required to be encouraged to flourish rather than their bodies. Humans are essentially their souls, not the meat packages in which they arrive on Earth. I’m not so sure about that now, because if politics is about establishing the rules of living in a community, then because the rules that derive from Cathar beliefs are counter to the continuance of that community they cannot be seen as focussed on the happiness of the members. Or is that just a rhetorical confusion? More thought is necessary, clearly.

If pressed on this, a Green might attempt to argue that we can’t have human flourishing without a healthy planet and that this justifies their focus, but their focus is nevertheless on the flourishing of Nature, not Man, and we are a secondary good if a good at all. Moreover, one might ask how they might react if made to choose between Man and Nature – they’d deny the reality of the choice, of course, but that would be transparently a dodge: we see repeatedly that whenever there is a choice between a human good and a good for ‘Nature,’ they will act for the latter against the former. And that’s not even counting the vast number of examples of their declared enmity towards humankind. How often have we heard that humans were a plague on the planet, that the world would be better without us, that zero population is our goal, and so on. One suspects that the argument for Nature from Man’s requirements is an ad hoc response and not at all a primary motivator.

One wonders what could possibly motivate this, and I have proposed two possible answers in conversation. In the first place, Nature is being taken as a replacement God for the secular age. It is a final value-giver in a world where the alternatives are either nihilism – accepting that there is no such thing as ultimate value and that there is no greater purpose to life than the satisfaction of simple self-interest that constitutes the very lowest level of our practical reasoning – or deism – pretending that there is a higher power of the God-sort that is able to give value to things. The latter is unacceptable to us as epistemologically unjustifiable, and the former is unacceptable to us as being psychologically destructive.

In the second place, I proposed that the current nihilistic anti-humanism of the Greens is a natural exaggeration in development of the moral nihilism and anti-modernism or anti-Westernism that entered into the environmental movement when it was recognised as a potential tool in the Cold War by the communists in the West and East. Since it became impossible for the Reds plausibly to argue directly for the benefits of the Communist system following the XXth Party Congress but long before the USSR fell, the environmental movement was seen as a stalking horse to encourage anti-nuclear sentiments, anti-development, anti-whatever as a way to weaken the West from within. Like the anti-nuclear movement itself, it continues as a zombie Trotskyism long past the use-by date of its instigators.

In any case, the consequence is that we cannot rely upon the Greens to enact or support policies that benefit humans, and they may actually find that our advantages are their disadvantages. The fact that they value Man below Nature is reflected in the net-zero obsessions of our political class, as just one example. And of course, any ideology is driven by its most enthusiastic supporters and there is a tendency to head to the extremes of ideological purity. In the case of the Greens and the environmentalists in general we see this with the very commonly expressed sentiments that Man is a cancer on the planet, that ZPG is to be embraced, that the population explosion is on us, our carbon footprint will smother the world, that the world cannot support so many of us, that human extinction might be a good thing, who’d miss us, Extinction Rebellion!, and so on.

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