Post Spam 3: New Age

[talktooloose]

I've gotten really fed up with "New Age Spirituality" lately. Perhaps it began when rfmcdpei posted about Nazi Germany's affinity with such beliefs, perhaps it began when our Marketing Director kept having to miss days because her daughter still had pink eye a week after starting homeopathic treatment and couldn't go to day care.

The child has an infection in her eye that isn't clearing up. Give her topical anti-biotics already.

An interesting perspective came to me by way of Michel Houllebecq in his novel The Elementary Particles (also lent to me by Randy). The last section of the book is written from the point of view of the future and the commentator writes the following about Dzerzinski, one of the main characters:

He was the first of his generation to see beyond the ridiculous,
contradictory and outmoded superstitions it adopted to the fact that
New Age thought appealed to a very real suffering symptomatic of
psychological. ontological and social breakdown. Beyond the repellent
mix of fundamentalist eco-babble, attraction to tradition and the
"sacred" which they inherited from their spiritual forebears, the
Esalen commune and the hippie movement, New Agers had a genuine
desire to break with the twentieth century, its immorality, its
individualism and its libertarian and antisocial aspects. It
testified to the anguished awareness that a society cannot function
without the unifying axis of some kind religion; it was, in effect, a
call for a new paradigm.

I'll buy that.

Comments

[mofic.livejournal.com]

A few books you might find useful, if you haven't read them yet:

Eric Hoffer. The True Believer
Marvin Gardiner. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
Shermer (can't remember his first name) Why People Believe Weird Things

[mentalmakeup.livejournal.com]

Michael Shermer! He is simultaneously one of my heroes and someone who I kind of want to have a big screaming match with (he provokes that kind of reaction, I think.).

Also awesome sites are the Amazing Randi Foundation or randi.org, and fun is the "Bad Astronomy" blog and forum at bad astronomy.com.