Comments on “The New Age: appeal and limits”

“What I write in this page is impressionistic, and unsupported by any specific evidence. This may be dangerously careless. On the other hand, I am not really interested in the New Age for its own sake. Instead, my goal here is to differentiate it from what I take to be its successor, what I am calling ‘contemporary pop spirituality,’ about which I’ll say much more later.”

You HAVE made rather a large, indiscriminate lump of things here, David; I will be interested in seeing to what rhetorical purpose. Myself, I see important distinctions between the ‘energy channels’ mapped in service of the practice of Asian traditional medicine and being guided by channeled Angelic / UFO / Atlantean spirit voices– for instance.

Slotting them together has more to do with philosophical analytical tidiness than with more empirical questions of how they function in practice, it seems to me. [I may sound as if I fear an ox of mine has been hit at least by the picador, if not the matador.]

Very interesting; I think you’ve captured the appeal of New Age very accurately and concisely: “What is important is the healer’s recognition of the client as a whole person—body, mind, and spirit—who is also inseparably connected with all living beings. ” I share your distaste for things New Age, but once you realize that that’s what it is about, it’s hard for me to say that it’s wrong – if the mumbo-jumbo helps people feel connected and whole, what’s wrong with it?

I know you aren’t out to write a complete history of the New Age, but it may be relevant that it grew out of the failure of the various social movements of the sixties to do anything productive. That always seemed the biggest thing wrong with it to me; that it took all that creative revolutionary energy and turned it into something bland, inward, and harmless.

You’re absolutely right that ‘most people lump them’– in fact, one of the really irritating features of what used to PROCLAIM itself ‘New Age’ is this intellectual slovenliness. That was before ‘new age’ became a slur, after the fashion of ‘politically correct.’ Ah, fashion and its vagaries!

Plus, what irony– that now the newage is being denigrated in the same indiscriminate way as it was promoted. In some cases, by those who jumped on the bandwagon first and are now making the first exits– scoping the scene for ‘the next big thing.’ Andrew Cohen, anyone? Wonder what he’ll come up with after dead German philosophers falls flat.

I think the Buddhist notion that selves are not solid objects but instead a buzzing inocherent confusion is incredibly valuable. But I don’t think it’s the whole story either.

It’s useful to think of the self as a sometimes useful and sometimes pernicious fiction, and the monotheistic god in a similar way. Constructing and maintaining these fictions is an ongoing process. Just because these things are fictional doesn’t mean they’re not real in some sense – just as, eg, that Hamlet is fictional doesn’t mean that “Hamlet” is not a real, important, and useful concept that has consequences in the real world.

So religion (all varieties – maybe Buddhism is an exception?) has an important role in building both of these fictions, reconciling them with each other, and doing so in a social setting to bind communities together. It also provides all sorts of entries for charlatans to come along and lead people to where they think they want to go. Presumably the long-running religions have sets of practices for doing this in ways that are not completely harmful. The fiction of a coherent self seems to be necessary for normal functioning, and while I’d like to believe that one can get by without a fiction of god, I’m starting to wonder about that.

I tend to think of the oneness/wholeness/monism/monotheism complex as something like a strong attractor in fictional concept space. I find myself strongly attracted, at least at times, while at other times repulsed. But there it is. I guess if somebody was offering to serve up my True Self on a silver platter by means of his religion, I’d be pretty sure that was fraudulent. But there are ways to talk about such things in ways that are more poetic, allusive, attuned to the paradox and impossibility of the task – those I at least wouldn’t dismiss out of hand.

I tried to articulate some of these ideas in blog posts over the years, like here and here. The latter even alludes to your grad-school work!

Too many interesting thoughts – I think on the whole we are on the same page, although perhaps looking at it from different angles.

Speaking of physicalism and MIT, have you seen Gary Drescher’s book Good and Real? He is trying to take physcialism as far as it can go – I coined the term “ultramaterialism” to review it.

The interesting thing to me about “God” is that it is not just an arbitrary fiction, like Harry Potter (who isn’t completely arbitrary either – stories about people who are unpleasant or unmemorable don’t achieve his exalted status), but is a more stable, inevitable sort of thing – like 3 or infinity. OK, I see your page on Sambhogakaya is saying much the same thing.

It’s quite true that we don’t know how numbers exist, but at least we know how to do stuff with them. Similarly, I like to say that religion isn’t actually about belief, it’s about ritual and community. Which may be overgeneralizing, but the modern flavor of Judaism that I am somewhat accidentally involved with (Reconstructionism) makes that fairly explicit. Or perhaps, to (mis?)use your term, it’s about stances or attitudes towards god, the universe, and others. The important thing about god is not whether or how he exists but what your attitude is towards him (obedient, fearful, awestruck, angry, etc). It appears to me that all these noisy atheiests are defining themelves by an attiude towards god and are just as captured by the concept as any believer.

Sorry to keep pimping my blog, but here’s another post that tries to articulate what religion is for – in this case, for having a way to talk about or relate to concepts that don’t make sense but are nonetheless necessary.