The New Gods by Emil M. Cioran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lowering Cultural Sea Levels

One might suspect Cioran of being a modern Gnostic given his persistent references to worldly horrors, both human and natural, his understanding of suicide, and his rather dim view of human ‘fleshiness’. But he is not. For Cioran, Gnosticism is merely another form of wishful fantasy. As he takes great pains to point out, Gnosticism is a great way to avoid our responsibilities, which is even a worse flaw than believing we have any. It gives us the excuse we need for our vices and deficiencies. “The Demiurge is the most useful god who ever was. If he were not under our hand, where would our bile be poured out?”

Gnosticism is one of the first Christian heresies (also popular as such in the other monotheisms of Islam and Judaism). It asserts that the universe was created by a god-like cosmic force, the Demiurge, which separated the souls of human beings from the presence of the official, supreme God and entrapped them in material filth. Gnosticism arises periodically in various forms, especially among intellectuals, as an explanation for the patent extent of evil in the world. Whether perceived as poetry, philosophy, or ontology, Cioran finds such thoughts offensive.

For Cioran, Gnosticism is not some abstract metaphysical theory. Or at least that isn’t what worries him. Gnosticism is an ethic, a code of behaviour, which justifies hatred: “Each and every form of hate tends as a last resort toward him [the Demiurge]. Since we all believe that our merits are misunderstood or flouted, how admit that so general an iniquity could be the doing of mere man?” Gnosticism is bad because it promotes the doing of bad things to each other as well as to whatever else exists on the planet.

Western religion has absorbed a great deal of Gnostic tradition despite its heretical designation. Christianity (as well as Islam and Judaism), for example, denies that evil exists except as an absence of God, a lack 0f the good. What appears as evil is merely a vacuum waiting to be filled by the knowledge of the true God... and by more believers who will spread his fame. Hence the command to “go forth and multiply and replenish the earth,” to fill the world with the consciousness of God and his infinite goodness. This is more than the blind leading the blind; it is the blind making others blind for their own good.

The effect of this command is to deputise each one of us as an official part-time demiurge. We all are authorised the power of creation, the power, no the duty, to procreate, to replicate ourselves at all costs until we destroy all other forms of life. Genetic defectives, sociopaths, abusers, those unable to provide the essentials of life, ill-equipped and ill-trained adolescents, dynasty builders, we are all enticed to reproduce, not only by nature but also by this cultural imperative. According to Cioran, “Parents—genitors—are provocateurs or mad.” The downward trends in world fertility rates suggests that many people are agreeing with Cioran’s diagnosis, not because sex is evil but because having children is mostly selfish and stupid.

The Supreme God is now all but gone as more than a symbol of various global faith-tribes in all the monotheistic religions. So our demiurgic power and authority is effectively unconstrained by any reference to absolute good. Heaven and hell are sterile metaphors. This is frightening, more frightening than the former religious doctrines. To combat this fear we have switched our allegiance elsewhere. “In the eyes of the ancients, the more gods you recognize, the better you serve divinity, whereof they are but the aspects, the faces.” The great advantages of polytheism are tolerance and, as in the American Constitution, the separation of powers. But we’re no longer accustomed to this kind of regime. We prefer our gods with single names and singularly impressive strengths. So our history has lasting consequences.

“Under the regime of several gods, fervor is shared. When it is addressed to one god alone it is concentrated, exacerbated, and ends by turning into aggression, into faith.” We have learned faith and we intend to practise it with new gods, or rather with one new God that each 0f us constructs. Theology has replaced mythology, with disastrous ethical consequences. We are forced to choose our god - Christian or Muslim, capitalist or socialist, communist or fascist, black, brown or white. These are clear choices supplied ready cut and packaged, with prices attached. As Cioran quips laconically, “We do not beseech a nuance.” As the conservatives like to remind us all: ‘We need boundaries.’

“There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism.” As long as no one takes their religion as more than a mark of solidarity, no one notices the presumption. This is why evangelical Christianity, Islam, or even Judaism as ‘faiths’ are so dangerous in a democratic society. Their truths are non-negotiable; their people are united in resistance to those not their people. So “as soon as a divinity, or a doctrine, claims supremacy, freedom is threatened.” Nineteenth century Protestants were correct: the Catholic Church did indeed desire the subversion of American freedom. But so did those Protestants; and they still do.

There are no longer any false gods, merely diverse and contradictory interpretations of the same God. This subtilely but decisively is destroying politics around the world. What remains is a sort of hostile nihilism expressed perfectly by Trump and Putin and Modi and their cronies. Cioran got it exactly correct: “We denounce the coexistence of truths because we are no longer satisfied with the dearth each one affords.” Today, it is the Christians who have slid into Gnosticism. They feel they are surrounded by evil and untruth and must escape at all costs. The planet and its people are collateral damage.

The alliance between dictatorial rulers and ‘strong faith’ is not accidental. Since the ascendancy of Christianity in the Western Roman Empire and Islam in the Eastern, it has always been so. Quite apart from its political impact, this alliance has also been disastrous aesthetically. “Nothing more odious than the tone of those who are defending a cause, one compromised in appearance, winning in fact; who cannot contain their delight at the idea of their triumph nor help turning their very terrors into so many threats.” Hatred is an aesthetic, one which monotheism promotes consistently. It is through this aesthetic not political debate that racism, misogyny, and violence proliferate.

Cioran doesn’t so much deconstruct individual ideas as point out the questionable foundational presumptions of the entire edifice of European thought. A large part of this foundation is religious; and although generally forgotten and ignored, it lies there mouldering and rotting until it can no longer support the weight we culturally load onto it. Like the wooden piles that support the canal houses in Amsterdam, the foundation crumbles when exposed to the air. In this sense Cioran moves counter to perhaps the most visible symbol of our present; he lowers cultural sea levels.

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