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10.
Conclusion
The New Age movement deserves respect
for its attunement to nature and its search for meaning at a time
when neither nature nor meaning is valued in discourse in the humanities.
New Age has a core of perennial wisdom. It exalts the brotherhood
of man, encourages contemplation, and finds beauty in the moment.
But too much cultural energy has been absorbed by New Age over the
past twenty years to the detriment of the fine arts, which frittered
away their authority in their dalliance with trendy political tag
lines. Despite its appeals to the archaic, New Age is fuzzily ahistorical.
It lacks an analytic edge: with its soothing promises and feel-good
therapies, New Age induces a benevolent relaxation that may be disabling
in the face of aggression. In a world of terrorism, New Agers can
only take to the hills and leave their scriptures in jars at Esalen.
There was a massive failure by American
universities to address the spiritual cravings of the post-sixties
period. The present cultural landscape is bleak: mainline religions
torn between their liberal and conservative wings; a snobbishly
secular intelligentsia; an alternately cynical or naively credulous
media; and a mass of neo-pagan cults and superstitions seething
beneath the surface. All-night radio features call-ins about crop-circles,
UFO's, and abduction
by aliens, science-fiction themes popularized by Swiss writer Erich
Von Däniken's 1968 international bestseller, Chariot of the Gods (which attributes archaeological monuments to
extraterrestrials). Prime-time TV
programs are regularly devoted to seers like Rosemary Altea, James
Van Praagh, and John Edward, who claim to hear messages from dead
relatives hovering around audience members.
These developments are alarming. Science-its
objectivity impugned by poststructuralism and postmodernism-is desperately
needed to sort out the mystical muddle of New Age, but it cannot
do so without understanding. J. B. Rhine's inconclusive 1936 experiments
in parapsychology at Duke
University, for example, have been only erratically
followed up. Claims of telepathy have yet to be systematically compared
to known animal communication or to bird migrations linked to the
earth's magnetism. These matters have been left to tabloids and
talk shows, which have no apparatus of testing. There is nothing
supernatural or occult-only natural phenomena that science has yet
to chart or explain.
What is to be done? Higher education
needs to be worthy of its name. My proposal is the same that I have
made since co-creating the course "East and West" with artist and
community activist Lily Yeh at the University of the Arts in 1990.
The core curriculum for global education should be comparative religion.
Study of the major world religions (including Islam) is the key
to politics as well as art. As an atheist who worships only nature,
I view religions as vast symbol-systems far more challenging and
complex than poststructuralism, with its myopic focus on social
structures. Poststructuralism has no metaphysics and is therefore
incapable of spirituality or sublimity. There has been wave after
wave of influences from Asian religion over the century and a half
since Emerson and Madame Blavatsky, but the resultant New Age movement
is choked with debris-with trivia, silliness, mumbo-jumbo, flimflam,
and outright falsehoods. The first step in any solution is a return
to origins-to the primary texts of sacred literature, supported
by art history and archaeology.
The religious impulse of the sixties
must be rescued from the wreckage and redeemed. The exposure to
Hinduism and Buddhism that my generation had to get haphazardly
from contemporary literature and music should be formalized and
standardized for basic education. What students need to negotiate
their way through the New Age fog is scholarly knowledge of ancient
and medieval history, from early pagan nature cults through the
embattled consolidation of Christian theology. Teaching religion
as culture rather than as morality also gives students the intellectual
freedom to find the ethical principles at the heart of every religion.
*An
expanded version of a lecture delivered on 26 March 2002 at Yale University, sponsored by the Institute for the Advanced
Study of Religion at Yale.
Bibliographical
Note
Ancient
Mediterranean Religions
Cumont,
Franz, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism,
tr. Grant Showerman (1905; tr., 1956); Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (1951); Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype,
tr. Ralph Manheim (1955); Turcan, Robert, The Cults of the Roman Empire, tr. Antonia Nevill (1989; tr., 1996).
Transcendentalism
Allen,
Gay Wilson, Waldo Emerson:
A Biography (1981); Ando, Shoei, Zen
and American Transcendentalism (1970); Boller, Paul F., American Transcendentalism 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (1974);
Christy, Arthur, The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study
of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (1932).
American
Religious History
Bellah,
Robert N., Beyond Belief:
Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (1970); Bloom,
Harold, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
(1992); Ellwood, Robert S., The
Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern
to Postmodern (1994); Heelas, Paul, The
New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization
of Modernity (1996); McLoughlin, William G., Revivals,
Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in
America, 1607-1977 (1978).
Twentieth-Century
Cultural History
Bugliosi,
Vincent, Helter Skelter: The
True Story of the Manson Murders (1974); Howard, Gerald, ed.,
The Sixties (1982); Musgrove, Frank, Ecstasy and Holiness: Counterculture and the Open Society (1974);
Reich, Charles A., The Greening
of America (1970); Roszak, Theodore, The
Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society
and Its Youthful Opposition (1969); Teodori, Massimo, ed., The New Left: A Documentary History (1969).
Modern
Cults
Galanter,
Mark, Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion (1989;
rev. ed. 1999); Patrick, Ted, Let
Our Children Go! (1976); Pavlos, Andrew J., The Cult Experience (1982).
Drugs
Braden,
William, The Private
Sea:
LSD and the Search for God
(1967); Clark, Walter Houston, Chemical
Ecstasy: Psychedelic Drugs and Religion (1969); Fuller, Robert
C., Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious
History (2000); Harner, Michael J., ed., Hallucinogens and Shamanism (1973).
Miscellaneous
Brent,
Peter, Godmen of India (1972); Bucke, Richard
Maurice, Cosmic Consciousness:
A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901); Eliade, Mircea,
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,
tr. Willard R. Trask (1964); Isherwood, Christopher, ed. and introd.,
Vedanta for Modern Man (1951); James, William,
Varieties of Religious Experience:
A Study in Human Nature (1902).
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