-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.enteract.com/~artmoris/postmod.htm <A HREF="http://www.enteract.com/~artmoris/postmod.htm">Notes on Postmodernism, New Age, and Fascism</A> --[1]-- Notes on Postmodernism, New Age and Fascism compiled by G. A. Morrison ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Introduction: parallel aspects of Postmodernism, New Age and Fascism 2.World view determines social reality 3. Decline of Classic Christianity; a brief history of Christianity 4. Marxism 5. Demystification of nature 6. Transition to postmodernism: aspects (fear of evil spirits, etc) 7. New Age Popular: New Age and Churches, and Science, and UFO sci fi religion, and radical environmentalism, animal rights. 8. Postmodern academics and relation to New Age. 9. Nietzsche 10. Deconstruction 11. National Socialism and Nature Religion 12. Conclusion **Introduction As the traditional religious basis of society has weakened over the past two or three centuries, some -at first sight- unrelated, bizarre ideologies and faiths strange to secular rationalist eyes, have come into view: Recent examples: The New Age movement, the animal rights movement, and the mostly academic postmodernist movement, accompanied by the revival of a radical form of orthodox religion known as fundamentalism. We have seen the rise and defeat of several major quasi religious movements in our century. The collapse of the spiritual force and the temporal armor of Marxism. The decay of Liberalism. The military but not spiritual defeat of Nazism. "We live in an interregnum, an interval between strong ideologies." - Lilienfeld, K. We appear to be repeating Roman history, except that this time the process is going in reverse, from a weakening transcendent monotheism to an polytheistic immanence. This set of notes and references is intended to point out common features of the many facets of the New Consciousness, or Postmodern Consciousness movement which is beginning to overshadow secularism and traditional religion in the 20th century. The main feature of the ascendant world view is the idea of magical thought, a resacralized nature, or immanence, implying one-world politics and nihilistic ethics. By magic is meant the use of human will to control fate. Contrary to the expectation of many sociologists of the '60s, religion has not expired in the face of modernity. The idea was that everyone would finally become enlightened secularists and religion would decline and vanish. Ironically, that in itself was a kind of millennial idea. This is secular humanism translated into political terms, essentially what Europeans would call Socialism. Secular humanism is seen to generate an insufficient level of myth-making or spirituality to sustain the human need for enchantment. **World view determines social reality Everyone has a conscious or unconscious world view that determines the approach to everyday life. "Every transformation of man, except perhaps that which produced neolithic culture, has rested on a new metaphysical or ideological base"-Lewis Mumford. The only way to measure the spiritual state of an individual is to observe the outward changes in one's actual day to day life. It is an observed fact that a religious conversion can have a profound effect on one's mundane life. This is like micro-economics. A mass conversion changes the life way of a whole community. This is like macro-economics. Reasoning in reverse, what type of world view leads to a desirable type of social reality? Religious world views and political ideas have consequences often unforeseen by their originators. If religion merely influenced one's innermost thoughts and feelings fleetingly, it would be of little consequence in the real world. However this is not the case. With Christianity, ultimate concern for salvation led to the Inquisition's torture of heretics, who were thought to threaten the destruction of believers' souls. However if religion determines social reality, how do we explain the social reality of Japan? Japan has no religion of the monotheistic variety such as Lutheranism that we would associate with material ambition and progress. Like other defeated nations in the aftermath of war, Japan tried to fill its spiritual vacuum with material aspirations. "Japanese have the sense of social shame as acute as the western metaphysical sense of sin. Part and parcel of this self-consciousness is the Japanese compulsion to compete with oneself; a compulsion which turns every craft and skill into a marathon of self-discipline"- Alan Watts. If we look closely at the New Religions of Japan, we find that the more "irrational" of these actually encourage their followers to live more "rational", conformist, regulated lives as employees in a highly industrial society. Could it be that Japan has a spiritual vacuum, already severe but worsened by the enforced demise of State Shinto, that can only be filled with work and material ambition? "If one comes from a moral tradition where an electronic assembly is primarily a moral order rather than just a neutral pile of substance, it is easier to feel an ethical responsibility for doing good work on it"- Robert Pirsig Spiritual hunger seems an essential part of human experience. Eventually the new faith, whatever it may be, will emerge and become the establishment. (or will events move too fast for any consolidation?) Consequences of ideas: Calvin's "predestination" created an existential burden for the believer; a "sign" was required which would reveal the "elect"; namely, good works. Work as a calling was a form of asceticism, proof of election, and a force in the rise of capitalism. Luther and Calvin probably did not foresee this. - Max Weber. Empirically we have different cultures which seem linked to different value systems in subtle ways. Any world view based on supernaturalism will have fear of ghosts and evil spirits as one of its major consequences. Spiritual orientation can have a powerful influence on social, political and economic life. Buddhism and Hinduism lacked an ethic that endorsed rational industry and commerce. If New Age is basically derived from Hinduism, could this be one factor in the "malaise" (1970s to 1990s) of the economy? Confucianism teaches moderation and traditionalism. Judaism, according to Max Weber, has a dualistic ethic that is unfavorable to the capitalist ethos. **Judeo-Christianity: Decline of Classic Christianity Perhaps after 20 centuries the spiritual force of Christianity has finally run out. It took 400 years for Christianity to conquer the Roman Empire. Today we have mass media to speed up these kinds of processes immensely. Christianity in its classic form no longer exists except in the form of an empty shell. "We are at the point where it is no longer possible for western man to know the transcendent God as a source of life or joy". The Judeo-Christian tradition, in the sense of its mythos being taken with deadly seriousness, has been beaten down by the successive hammer blows of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin, with the most devastating yet to come: Turing's legacy, the control of heredity, mortality, and the advent of artificial super-human intelligence; unlike mere theories these will be concretely undeniable. It will generate by far the most profound spiritual crisis in history. The recent defeat (1997) of the world chess champion by a computer is but a foretaste of the humiliation to come. Christianity is admittedly very flexible. Up to now it has adapted itself to the changing times. The New Testament has a very strong spiritual power that has preserved its influence for almost 2000 years. One of the main factors in this is that Jesus was enormously gifted in the spiritual realm. Even a nonbeliever must admit that the Gospel is a stunningly dramatic story. "The ancient Christians were animated with a contempt for their present existence...of which the doubtful and imperfect faith of modern ages cannot give us an adequate notion" -Edward Gibbon, 1788. How many of today's Christians would be willing to be eaten by lions as the only alternative to genuflecting before a pagan idol? Probably a very small percentage. Rather like the decayed fortunes of Soviet Marxism before its collapse. Fundamentalism is a traditional religion in a desperate state of denial. It is a last gasp, like the flareup of a candle just before extinction. Fundamentalist Christianity does not take the modern world seriously. In spite of vehement denials, many of its basic myths are insulting to women, and imply a disregard for the natural environment. The religion no longer has the spiritual or temporal power to suppress the various heretical movements such as New Age. Religion has a very strong cultural inertia, it remains stable through all kinds of political changes. it is a kind of critical mass phenomenon. The Social Gospel and the Death of God theology were two attempts to save Christianity by demythologizing it. Marxism is a third, and much more tragic, attempt. What place does Marxism have in the history of modern religions? **Marxism in the context of religious history "Marxism, certainly an attempt to supplant traditional religion, is an exception because it is materialistic and non-sacralizing, essentially a demythologized Judeo-Christianity, a secular humanism with millennial overtones. There are close analogies between the proletarian revolution and final attainment of communism on one hand, and the Christian hope for the millenarian second coming and final judgment. It offered the proletarian the opportunity to become a dignified maker of history. The title "tovarisch" or comrade, was analogous to the Christian "brother". Marxism as Marx proposed it was meant to be in practice similar to the Christian Middle Ages, with its societal brotherhood of the faith. The multitude would believe and "go along". There would be an elite of the totally dedicated to rule and guide them, similar to the Medieval clergy and religious orders. The fatal flaw which eventually became obvious was the total lack of an external standard or control on the elite's behavior, no extra-human criticism of excess. Anything, even mass murder, could be justified in service to the Party. This is an example of an idea with consequences unexpected by the originator. Gandhi disparaged "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good". When asked about the origin of Stalinism, Solzhenitsyn said "Man forgot God". Marxism is essentially a Judeo-Christianity which has been stripped of its transcendent "vertical dimension" as Paul Tillich might put it. The legalistic and millenial aspects of Christianity are preserved in Marxism. Friedrich Nietzsche thought that future attempts at world conquest would go under the slogans of universal brotherhood, democracy and socialism. In his day, Socialism was a very idealistic thing. The proletariat and those elements of the middle class that are in danger of falling into the proletariat, are most likely to follow millenarian and magical thinking as a reaction to the disenchanting effects of industrial routine. When society breaks down, due to rapid technical changes, and economic dislocations, the masses are easily thrown into panic, becoming prey to totalitarian irrationalisms. Communism, like Nazism at its height, had an certain spiritual aura of invincibility which, once punctured, led to a fatal hemorrhage. ** A Brief History of Christianity Christianity is the only religion that stands or falls on supposed historical happenings. Judeo-Christianity depends on the idea of a definite beginning and end of world history. When Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, only 5% of the Roman Empire was Christian, the rest were worshipers of Sol Invictus, Mithraists, classical pagans, and adherents of mystery religions, many of which were similar to Christianity. It was a confused religious situation, like today. The Roman pagans regarded Christianity as a social disease. "Religion is the universal neurosis that spares the individual the task of creating a personal neurosis"-Freud. Christianity, as Jacob Bronowski and Kenneth Clark suggested, emphasizes the ideas of creativity and rebirth, which propelled Western civilization forward. There are no "miracles" in the usual sense. This is an unworthy view of God. The real miracle is that of existence itself. "The church triumphed over ancient Gnosticism because of its superior social efficacy"- Bloom. "You get this idea of what being a good Christian is and you become stricken with your own inadequacy."- M. Muggeridge. Mysticism, rather than being a direct communication with God, may be a method for generating insights from ones' own unconscious mind. "With William Blake we can "name God as Satan", i.e. to identify the transcendent Lord as the ultimate source of alienation and repression. "The progress of civilization will lead to a permanent anesthetizing of the human spirit, until the world is filled with specialists without spirit and sensualists without heart. - Max Weber. By the 1890s the irrationalism of Europe had reached a state of near-hysteria. This condition had occurred before: around the first century, with its decay of classical Hellenism into superstitious mystery religions, and the late Middle Ages, with its rediscovery of Greek thought and anxiety over salvation by works. These periods are now seen to be watersheds of history, after which momentous changes took place in the structure of society. In short, the predicament is that if Christianity is demythologized, then the spark goes out of it leaving an empty shell, a wishy-washy socialism, its churches ripe for takeover by the New Age, and if not demythologized, it remains reactionary and is simply not in step with the unprecedented requirements of today's society. Indeed we observe that where the mainline churches are, New Age is strong, competing for the same clientele. **Secularization, science, the Enlightenment and demystification of nature "Only orthodoxy is vulnerable to relativism. Fundamentalism is a product of the modern period when people were beginning to abandon the traditional outlook and ask for an empirical description of the world. This led many religious into the fallacy that if their doctrine were to continue having the force of truth, they must be upheld as literal statements of a scientific type. This is responsible for the grotesque attempt to deny concrete evidence of the past history of life and the physical world. The result was to discredit the Christian religion entirely in the eyes of vast numbers of people. "By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance"- Erasmus. As long as we are able to formulate testable theories about the universe, we are justified in saying the universe is "rational". Ironically, the church, which in a sense paved the way for science, became an enemy of science. The Christian metaphysical world view supported science, and yet science (Copernicus, Darwin) conflicted with the various provincial specific aspects of the Bible. It contained the seed of its own destruction. Today's Christians, at least the more active fundamentalist ones, tend to ignore social issues like pollution because they believe the Second Coming will take care of the mess without any human effort. If one truly believes, then it logically follows that one is rather nonchalant about pollution, famine, overpopulation and war. They are merely a new version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, ushering in the Millennium. Secularization is merely the decay of an old religion in preparation for the new. Analogy with Rome. The result will probably be an amalgam of New Age and Christianity, if such a monster can be imagined. The open Western society depends on the 18th cent. Enlightenment, which in turn depends on the Reformation. Theism gave rise to science by demystifying nature by creating the idea of a single unified source of authority for the workings of the universal laws of nature. The idea of both a good and evil principle in the universe, as one may tend to find in the relativist world, is Manichaeian. It leads to the idea that evil is not the responsibility of the individual. This was overcome by the idea of a regular, exact physical universe, since in such a universe, no evil principle could be seen at work. Thus the way for modern science was paved, even if Christians did not foresee this at the time. Manichaeians were the main competitors of Christianity for several centuries. >From the viewpoint of Judaism, Christianity, as it evolved culturally, has objectionable features of idolatry and pagan polytheism in its concept of the trinity; i.e. Christianity is basically a grafting of paganism onto Judaism. ** Transition to Postmodern Consciousness SETI is a secular expression of the yearning for union with the absolute. Civilizations fall when there is no consensus around a positive view of the future. "In the declining days of antiquity, the common creed of all pagans came to be a scientific pantheism, in which the infinite power of the divinity that pervaded the universe was revealed by the elements of nature."- Franz Curmont. "Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species... for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world".- H.P. Lovecraft "In declaring that the universe could have spawned beings so far advanced in evolution that they could manifest godlike powers and might even exist without physical bodies, science has brought back in perhaps more dangerous form, the "gods" and "demons" of ancient religions to haunt modern man." - Dave Hunt. "People are more autonomous today because of the attitude that any problem has a technological solution, and the intuition that science may defeat even death itself: witness the crude cryogenic experiments with corpses which some hope will be revived. Liberal Catholics, Episcopalians and certain other mainstream religious groups have embraced some New Age-postmodern ideas about environmentalism, feminism, the nature of God, etc. One possible impetus for the anti-drug laws is organized religion's fear that people will have new religious revelations that do not fit the old doctrines. What has changed since ancient times? Only our ideas about how the universe works, not so much why it exists, or why it is possible to make rational sense out of the universe in the first place. These factors should not affect the formation of a mythical outlook. "We have a bleak shallow rationalism which offers stones instead of bread to the emotional and spiritual hungers of the world. The logical result is an insatiable hunger for anything extraordinary. If we add to this the great defeat of human reason, demonstrated daily in the newspapers, the picture that unfolds before us is one of universal spiritual distress, comparable to the beginning of the Christian era". It is not that primitive man personifies or animates objects in the physical world; the concept of physical object has simply never occurred to him. The primitive man literally does not know an inanimate world. The Irrational means letting your emotions and instincts have primary control over actions and beliefs, the primacy of instincts and emotions over thought. Let thought be a servant to your emotions and desires (Hitler's message to his followers). Irrationalism is also the belief that the universe cannot be "understood" even approximately, that empiricism is useless. (Anti-evolution agitation), that the universe cannot be systematized in theory or doctrine. All these movements (in introduction) have as common factor the decay of rationality into romanticism and nihilism, a product of the rejection of transcendence and a re-enchantment of Nature, and resurgence of magical thought patterns. This could be taken as most economical definition of the New Age movement, to include not obviously religious phenomena like deconstruction and "political correctness": which come under the heading of Postmodernism. Generalizations may be dangerous, but without them little can be said. What is the real difference between J-C and paganism? J-C emphasizes transcendence, avoiding "idolatry" toward parts of the physical world, while paganism embraces it, inviting a magical approach to the world. A child is convinced that a monster lurks under the bed when the light is turned out. An adult experiences a (hypnopompic) hallucination while in the borderline waking state. The built-up rational outlook, however, resulting from years of inculcation from cultural surroundings, which took many centuries to create, confer a certain immunity to the fear of such "evil spirits", and enable one to shrug off such experiences as natural mental phenomena. With the rise of the postmodern New Age, that cultural environment is weakening. ** New Age: a general description "Equality suggests to the Americans the idea of the infinite perfectibility of man".- Tocqueville. "The New Age movement is the strongest social force in the nation today - Carl A. Raschke, religion professor. We have today an emerging force known as the New Age movement. The term New Age has been used by the occult community for over a century. New Age is very pervasive, amorphous and difficult to pin down, therefore one must look for common characteristics of the various practices. New Age is like the elephant as perceived by the blind men. Fundamentalists see it differently than secular humanists. Even different New Agers give different definitions. In many ways it is amorphous, yet to be shaped. Close attention has been paid to New Age by Christian fundamentalists, who are discredited in the eyes of the mainstream. Fundamentalists have been "crying wolf" for so long in so many areas that now no one is paying attention to them when they are actually onto something. New Age is a complete rejection of the J-C tradition and bedrock American values. It represents re-enchantment of Nature, monism, pantheism, anti-transcendence. "The old gods are stirring from their slumber and reaffirming their hold on our imagination." Vedanta is the basis of New Age thought. Panentheism: a New Age formulation in which God is both external and part of the physical universe. It appears that the New Age is attempting answer Paul Tillich's question: How can we bring religious awe, the sense of the sacred, back into human life? The rational question "Is it so?" has been replaced by the main axiom of New Age: "If it feels good it must be true". New Age meets psychological needs. The New Agers do have a legitimate complaint: that old religions are not in step with today's requirements. New Age has admittedly performed the valuable service of bringing to light and popularizing certain medical ideas and techniques such as acupuncture, which otherwise might have been ignored for a much longer time. New Age is an eclectic blend of the belief systems of the ancient world; Vedanta, neo-paganism, New Thought, Theosophy, the Romantic movement of the 1960s counter-culture. Theosophy introduced compatible ideas from the East: Reincarnation, karma, spiritual masters. There is Elite New Age and there is Popular New Age. The elite goes for C.G. Jung, deconstruction, radical environmentalism and women's spirituality. The masses go for Shirley MacLaine, crystal healing, 12 step, and UFOs. On the surface there seems little connection, but the underlying metaphysics is the same. Neopaganism is another name for the New Age, although it may be a somewhat narrower term: Groups such as womens' and mens' spirituality. Sword and Sorcery science fiction is modern pagan myth making in action. Channeled entities resemble the warriors and princesses, and space brothers of Sword & Sorcery science fiction and fantasy. Today's science fiction is essentially a generator of myths on a large scale. New Age can be viewed as a set of abortive Neo Pagan movements, attempting to fill the spiritual vacuum left by the weakened Judeo-Christian religions, whose myths no longer speak to most people today. Animism and polytheism are natural tendencies of the human mind. So we might say that the hegemony of the three western monotheistic religions is almost unnatural. "Pantheism is the permanent natural bent of the human mind. It is the attitude into which the mind automatically falls when left to itself"- C.S.Lewis. The imaginary companions of many children can be compared to the familiar spirits of shamanism. In a rational environment the child will be socialized away from these "visions". In a primitive society, the hallucinations and imaginings will be encouraged. Eastern religions are filtered through the American culture as they are adopted. McLuhan's global village is one New Age vision of the future. The real distinction between New Age and orthodox monotheism is that New Age is based on magical thinking. I.e. the individual will is able to control fate. Immanence implies that the individual is divine, therefore can control fate. New Age is an attempt at re-enchantment, a liberation of the repressed irrational part of man. Magic comes from the tradition which is outside of the consciousness of historical time. Secularism, thought to be the final destination of the modern world, is now seen as merely a bridge to New Age. "The magical heritage casts a threatening and possibly permanent shadow over all of man's other creations, and could suddenly overwhelm civilized cultures."- D.L. O'Keefe. The New Age is a reemergence of Gnosticism, a new Hellenistic age. Historically, receiving Gnosis, the individual is awakened and knows that he is divine. [at first] disenfranchised upper class Jewish intellectuals were the most common converts to Gnosticism. Later it became Hellenized. Gnosticism is individualistic. They believed that the soul of each individual has a spark of the divine. Inner illumination, spiritual elitism, libertinism, asceticism, and anti-institutionalism were typical of Gnosticism. The Transcendentalists Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Alcott, etc, believed that the divine exists in all persons. They favored intuition over reason. Is intuition nothing more than a reasoning too complex to be explained simply, or is it the release of deep irrational animal instincts? N.A. has penetrated publishing, the mass media, the staid corporate world, even the Pentagon. Corporate culture, as is well known, often has cultlike features, and many companies require employees to attend New Age seminars to heighten efficiency and productivity. Employees are encouraged to think of themselves as merged with the company as One. Some have experienced severe psychological reactions. NA is spreading into business management practice. At the Stanford business graduate school, the syllabus includes Tarot, meditation, chanting, dreamwork, and discussion of the "New Age Capitalist". Werner Erhard, the founder of est, abandoned his family, yet gets contracts from NASA for giving his est seminars. A Claremont graduate school professor's symposium discussed "out-of-body experiences", ESP, spirit survival after death, reincarnation. One professor said: "This conference could not have been held ten years ago". NA is as much political as religious. The "hundredth monkey phenomenon", a central myth of the New Age, leads us in the direction of manipulation by totalitarian forces, a world dominated by the persuasive and the powerful. Once the "critical mass" is reached, the whole world is supposed to convert to the new world view or paradigm. From that point on, curiosity, doubt, criticism become subversive of the New Order. We become a herd. "Linear, left brain, Western science" is the putdown used by the NA-Postmoderns. So far the movement is eclectic, anti-authoritarian, decentralized, anarchistic and diverse, without a strong leader. "New Age can simply be individuals thinking globally and acting locally". That could change quickly. An obstacle to NA: To use computer terminology, Christianity has an "installed base" 2000 years old. Is fatalism a consequence of a monistic world view? New Agers are trying to formulate a metaphysical basis for their positive view of the world; a way to make social action and personal fulfillment compatible with mysticism. New Age is a shift from Authority to individual spiritual discovery. NA exalts change and evolution. New Age is a continuation of the counterculture of the 1960s. T. Roszak compared Ginsburg's poetry to "oracular outpourings of rhapsodic prophets...and beyond them to the shamanism of the stone age". To New Age, consciousness is the primary substance in the universe. In astronaut Edgar Mitchell's ideas: There is matter and spirit in the universe, and consciousness is the bridge. New Age ethics: since every person, animal and thing is of equal worth, everyone's point of view is equally valid, regardless of how it affects others. We will see an increasingly lenient criminal court system under New Age influence, because the individual is blended with everything else and ceases to have primary importance. NA believes that victims will be reincarnated anyway, so why worry. Elvis and Lennon are reincarnated, so are the victims of street violence, so we really need not care, according to NA metaphysics. To a New Ager, we ourselves construct reality. If this is the case then there can be no external criteria for quality, truth, or objectivity. **New Age and the Churches Why did Christianity eclipse Paganism? Christianity had better social services. New Age in some ways emulates this; it has, for example, come up with the hospice movement. During the rise of Christianity, the philosophical elite ridiculed paganism, weakening it among the masses, since the masses respected the philosophers. Christianity is on the defensive, perhaps now in the position that paganism was formerly. Christianity regards man as irretrievably fallen, independent of lifestyle. New Age regards the fall as remediable through raising the consciousness to become a god. Occultism is "rejected knowledge". Fundamentalists and NAers have in common the idea of an apocalyptic end of the present age. New Age is still mainly "underground", not tightly organized. Jesus is considered one of the New Age spiritual masters. In liberal Protestant circles, meditation, yoga, "A Course in Miracles", human potential training and "Process Theology" have converted many churches into New Age outposts. When Christianity was new, it took over the holidays and practices of the superseded religions. Christmas falls on the date of a Roman pagan festival. New Age may eventually do this. Christmas has already drifted into a secular realm, the transition stage. Church also adopted from paganism the architecture, vestments, deification of humans, veneration of relics, the Virgin Birth. New Age seems to be gradually taking over the mainstream churches from the inside. UC Santa Barbara estimates 12 million active New Agers, 30 million avidly interested. New Age Journal increased circulation 9-fold in the 1980s. as an index of the New Age, 24% of the people believe in reincarnation. Is it possible that a nominal Christianity could go New Age without realising it? Matthew Fox's Catholic "Creation Spirituality" is essentially New Age. Fox has been "disciplined" by the Vatican for his views, but this has only served to make them more attractive. The Dominicans have now (3/93) expelled Fox from the order. **Narcissism New Age's relation to the consumer culture and narcissism. This encourages passivity, losing hold of active participation in molding ones' world. Totalitarianism involves exactly this type of loss of autonomy. Existentialism was a style of philosophy intended to give meaning to meaninglessness, illustrating the human organism's insistence on breaking through and finding meaning in existence, whatever it takes. The Superman, another essential of the totalitarian mindset: Nietzsche's Superman can be understood as an aspect of postmodernism: the common man is to hold the hero, the leader, the guru, the Fuhrer, in awe as being possessed of capabilities beyond his own. Nihilism is merely the means by which the Superman induces the common man to denigrate himself, then destroy himself to make way for the Superman. Today Narcissism takes the form of Postmodernism, a desperately nostalgic attempt by baby boomers to magically return to the security of childhood. Reruns of "Leave it to Beaver" are elevated to the status of pagan idols. "Since his death, Elvis Presley has become the center of a pagan religious cult. Like the flying saucer, he is an archetype, a god, a super celebrity. His life story is eerily similar to that of the Greek god Dionysus, who was son of a mighty river (Mississippi), and of the Sun (Sun records), made magnificent music, and whose appearance drove his female followers into such a frenzy that they attempted to tear him to pieces. Elvis is the Jungian archetype of the eternal adolescent; the high liver, the narcissist, the seeker of excitement. New Age is closely linked with the consumer culture; with the narcissistic flitting from one fad to another. When life is a struggle for survival, no one is bored or lonely. How to recognize a New Ager: "A combination of radical subjectivity combined with ferocious superficiality" - Jay Rosen. New Agers are aware that their egos are not as strong as that of the guru's. None of the fads put the believer in touch with power and fame; New Age and advertising reinforce each other, they both generate anxieties. N.A. is structured like a pyramid with the rich and famous at the top, the believers at the bottom. "Misunderstood attempts to save America's dream of worldly progress by magical and supernatural means include: Scientology, Silva Mind Control, Est, and fundamentalists who believe Jesus will supply financial needs right now". -Marvin Harris. Today religion has been reduced to a consumer item in a spiritual supermarket, much as it was in late Rome. Cults arise when religions fail, when the religious establishment begins to break up. The decline of the family is not a passing fad, it goes back to the industrial revolution. **New Age, science and technology The idea of material progress is alien to the Eastern occult religions. Is it irrevocably so? The New Agers are attempting to graft the Western idea of progress onto the Eastern ideas. Whether they succeed will determine if NA will overcome its opponents. The idea of spiritual progress (in the west) goes back at least through the Middle Ages. The Tao is a force that one can use for good or evil. Compare with Star Wars. As Pirsig implied, if a belief is not science based, it just won't fly. For those who reject divine revelation, survival can appear to be the only discernable value operating in nature. This is what Nietzsche meant when he said that "God is dead". The New Age is fundamentally anti-science but for the most part pro-technology. It is nourished by fads like video games. What is the reaction when skeptics debunk the New Age? If the New Agers have no respect for the debunkers, then the criticism has little effect. New Age will in effect say "Rationalists are responsible for the state of today's world, thus you have nothing to say to us". Eastern religions include ideas such as the eternal recurrence that are more consistent than Western religions with 20th century discoveries in science. Ironically however, the philosophical basis of the scientific method itself is not consistent with the monism, fatalism and quiescence of the East. If God is the universe, then the universe cannot be rationally understood. New Age accepts evolution, but regards it as a spiritual development, a purposeful increase in consciousness, directed by God-in-Nature, along the lines of Teilhard de Chardin's theology. Quantum physics with its probabilities may have weakened, at least in the mass mind if not the scientific mind, this world-picture of a rigidly law-obedient Nature. If new myths are to be born they must be credible; today that means technological in flavor. Paradoxically they can be anti-scientific and at the same time technological. The archetypes of the UFO and Elvis worship fit this requirement perfectly. Myth is a stronger force than rationality. To say that the inner consciousness is changing may be speculation, but the antirational movement is real and probably measurable, e.g. in terms of student test scores. New Agers use the term "paradigm shift". Today's mythos is no longer the scientific method (the tree) but on its fruits, "high tech" and comfortable lifestyle. However, the fruit will not last without the tree. Technology becomes magical. New Age is "romancing the past": the unrelenting pressure to conform, the fear of evil spirits. A curious dichotomy exists between the individuality of NA and its main myth of critical mass, mass paradigm shift, mass acceptance of the new paradigm, tuning into a mass mind. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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