Neo-Gnosticism, ideology and the culture wars: the contemplative antidote – perennial tensions: a reply to Jersak
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This reply speaks to Brad Jersak's analysis of the left–right culture wars spectrum and his critique of identity politics. He offers an alternative rooted in his studies of George P. Grant and Simone Weil's notion of the primacy of the Good vis-à-vis the triumph of the will that undergirds modernist assumptions. Jersak's thesis is confirmed and would be strengthened by careful attention Eric Voegelin's assessment of Gnosticism in The New Science of Politics. What needs further attention on the way of just peacemaking is the important turn from the vita activa to a sustained vita contemplativa as a way of knowing and being (cf. Merton). Finally, using Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (1946) reminds us of the inevitable clash between idealists and realists, raising the question of how, in the end, the owl of contemplative wisdom might navigate conflict between doves and hawks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.024 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".