Comments on: Brave New World Reconsidered: A Tale of Two Gnosticisms

By: Wesley Kopera

Wesley Kopera — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:17:40 +0000

Hi, do you have a blog feed I can subscribe to? I looked around but couldn’t find it, thanks in advance.

By: Gumbo as Soul Craft | Front Porch Republic

Gumbo as Soul Craft | Front Porch Republic — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:15:03 +0000

[...] “Brave New World” – read Mark Shiffman’s thoughts on the book’s twin Gnosticisms here — the people have surrendered their liberty and their personal autonomy to a state that has [...]

By: Al

Al — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:20:50 +0000

Very insightful review. Thanks for it.

By: Bob Cheeks

Bob Cheeks — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:26:48 +0000

Mark, the point you make here is most important,”this one-sided elevation into the transcendent, neglecting the unity of finite and infinite that gets crystallized in the Incarnation, is one of the hallmarks of Gnosticism,” in that it details the hypostatization of the transcendent, where the desire for immortality (athanatizein), the “escahtological existence” (a potential result of the individual’s encouter with the Incarnation), can distort into “the integral existence of man” as a function of a distorted gnostic existentialism that seeks “the annihilation of nature and history.”
In the end the examiniation of gnosticism taken up here at FPR is a good first step in understanding man in his existence, in his relationship with his fellow man and in his search for God. Our culture has lost the meaning of the symbols of, for example, truth, order, love, and existence. It is in our immutable nature to seek to recapture them; we must or face annihilation.

By: Jason Peters

Jason Peters — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:17:56 +0000

Mark: A very provocative last phrase (in a very provocative essay) and the seed, let us hope, of another essay.

By: Septeus7

Septeus7 — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:45:44 +0000

You have written an excellent post Mr. Shiffman. I believe this the first time I’ve read someone who actually mostly understood Brave New World and the deeper deception of it. BNW like most works of British System propaganda has no really opposition to the liberal paradise of the Brave New World and so it disarms those who think it is presenting a dystopia. It is not a dystopia but the ultimate utilitarian utopia throughly consistent with the doctrines of British Radical Liberalism.

But I have you correct Mark one wrote. You wrote that the BNW “lacks any significant presence of animal life.”

Wrong. It does not lack any animals but lacks human beings. It story about animals some civilized and some wild. What is totally lacking is the creative free human being because the entire work is an attack on the idea of being human.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:30:22 +0000

Mark,

Thanks. You’ve put your finger on one troubling dimension of BNW when I read it with students… the absence of any really good alternative. We’re easily seduced into this kind of either/or, between the shallow indifference of last men and the heroic resignation of those who know. And you’re right, heroic resignation is a persistent temptation to those of us who occasionally pass under the name (for lack of better) as “conservative.” When we buy into these terms, it’s difficult to be transformed at all. Ironically, both gnosticisms, purportedly aiming to escape the world, tend toward the reinforcement of the status quo.

The truth that this great rivalry can obscure is that the world is neither that good nor that doomed. As Hopkins says, “And, for all this, nature is never spent;/There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”