Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: New Age

Kurzinhalt: New Age beliefs are generally eclectic, holistic and self-centred

Textausschnitt: 359b The late 1960s prepared much of the ground for what have come to be called 'New Age' beliefs, which fused snippets of Eastern mysticism, astrology and occultism, environmentalism and psychotherapy, and whose eclectic philosophies nowadays adorn entire walls in bookstores. New Age beliefs are generally eclectic, holistic and self-centred. They appeal overwhelmingly to white middle-class people - a Briton of West Indian origin dismissed a New Age event as 'something for poofs' -including a disproportionate number of women, who believe that they will discover their true inner self, suppressed by the combined forces of male-dominated Western scientific rationality and a consumer economy. In a sense, it represents a spiritualised form of the Marxist quest for an end to alienation, although New Age is less coherent than the study of economics. Its powerful ecological component reflected the concerns first articulated by the American biologist Rachel Carson in her 1963 warning against indiscriminate use of DDT and other pesticides, Silent Spring, as well as more heady attempts to fuse science and religion, notably the British chemist James Lovelock's notion that life on earth has a collective consciousness symbolised by the earth-goddess 'Gaia'.1 (Fs)

360a New Age religions often reach backwards to pre-modern (or utterly fantastical) cultures and times - the Native Americans and King Arthur are favourites - or reach outwards to less developed societies. Viewed superficially, the New Age religions seem little more than an updated form of the romantic belief in ex oriente lux, a post-imperial cultural cringe that has replaced the alleged arrogance of Western imperialism with limitless credulity in response to the spiritual beliefs of the underdeveloped world. New Age religions share much of the Western culture of self-repudiation that is evident in other more supposedly rational areas of life. But this is to miss how the Western New Agers have subtly transmogrified these beliefs, leaving out anything that does not chime with their own existing views and desire for Western comforts. Out goes anything resembling stoical acceptance of the insignificance and transience of our lives on earth, for otherwise what would be the point of religions based on self-development? Out goes any notion that reincarnation may involve a judgement on the moral character of one's past or present life, or, put crudely, the prospect that one might accordingly be reborn as a rat or cockroach. Out too goes any notion that the heights of spiritual 'awareness' might require exercises of a kind that might once have taxed an Ignatius Loyola. Instead, spiritual wisdom can be acquired through a weekend at a Scottish or Welsh meditation centre or on a two-week holiday in Thailand. If time is pressing, the distilled experience, can be made available through the crash course as video or DVD package, paid for with a credit card over the internet, in ultimate obeisance to the Western rationalisation of time that the New Age deplores. Ancillary services include such things as feng-shui consultants to check out the presence of gremlins and hobgoblins in a new house. (Fs)

361a Although the therapeutic culture is probably here to stay, it seems doubtful whether New Age religions will have much greater longevity than the hippies, a few of whom still linger on in tepees in Welsh valleys that time forgot. Some of it will undoubtedly be absorbed into the dominant commercial culture, whether as management technique or as a branch of healing. Pity all those (graduate) corporate employees who have to play motivational games that might excite five-year-olds. The eclectic nature of New Age beliefs also militates against their being easily communicable to fresh generations of adherents, who, as products of conventional education, may react to the beliefs of their middle-aged parents with incredulity. Although Christians may deplore what could be called a soft recrudescence of European paganism with orientalised accretions, it is salutary to remind ourselves that even the most generous estimate of the numbers currently involved in organisations catering to New Age spirituality amounts to a mere third of the worshippers lost to one Christian denomination (the Methodists) over a forty-year period.1 (Fs)