[MD] New Age++

[david buchanan]

Howdy MOQers:

dmb opens:
I don't know if I could calculate the percentage of bullshit, but I think 
its safe to say that there are retailers and "workshop" leaders in the new 
age category that deserve to be ridiculed or even exposed as frauds. And 
I've seen some spectacularly stupid books in the new age sections of book 
stores. But I have to say that I'm not very impressed with Locke's critique 
either. Ken Wilber's critique is more careful and harsh. I think Pirsig and 
Campbell share the same basic stance too, but I'll say more about that 
later. In fact, Ian, you should grab your Wilber books and check each index 
to see if any of your favorite scientists are criticized. It seems I'm a 
little more skeptical than Ian and a lot more skeptical than Gav, and yet I 
also have a great deal of sympathy. It seems that we've lost touch with the 
myths, with our bodies and with the earth and that this is a serious 
problem. And I guess the trick is to reconnect and reintegrate these 
premodern aspects of the self without regressing or devolving....

Ant quoted Bill Hicks:
“Aren’t we supposed to be agents of evolution?”

Ant said:
That comes back to Gav’s mention of the “unconscious becoming conscious” as 
understood by Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” i.e. the evolutionary shift 
from egotistical small-mindedness towards enlightenment as described by the 
Buddha, or “the ‘heaven on earth’ that jc was on about a while back.”  The 
central message of Tolle, Buddha and Jesus may still be largely 
misunderstood and/or overlooked... I'm not sure I would like to portray this 
shift of consciousness as "New Age" (the term has too many dubious 
connotations for me) though...

dmb says:
I'm will Bill and Ant here. For all its wackos and flakes, there is an 
impulse to deepen and broaden one's perspective within this "movement". And 
I think this impulse is one of the more valid responses to scientific 
materialism, consumer culture and mainstream religion, which have all become 
"emotionally hollow and spiritually empty". And despite Ian's skepticism, I 
think mysticism is part of the solution to that problem.

Ian said:
             ...the prosaic truths of GOF-Science, can learn a thing or
two from the higher truths of myths and legend. Believe me I'm
serious. DMB's presentation was my favourite at the conference. I'm
talking a new enlightened "science" - a new-objectivity - recognising
the limits to conceptualisation and the value of real experience and
participation, etc (as posited in myth and legend).

dmb says:
Aw shucks. And thanks for bringing it up. My conference paper, as part of 
the conclusion, says, "And finally, I think we have to make sure that our 
new Orpheus is more a philosopher than a hippy. (Said the hack who hasn't 
had a haircut in eight years.) If our new Orpheus is going to resemble that 
pre-Socratic version, if he is going to be the kind of Orpheus that was a 
central figure among the Pythagoreans and other philosophical mystics, then 
he will have to be a very worthy character, one capable of conducting a 
Chautauqua even if he never does so on screen. We're ressurecting this 
ancient Orpheus precisely because he didn't just sing love songs or protest 
songs. Our hero follows the code of art and can create new forms without 
recklessly destroying the old ones. We're digging him up because his songs 
were about the origins and fate of the cosmos, they were about the geneology 
of the gods. His songs were about the oldest idea known to man, he sang 
about the physical and moral order of the universe."

Please notice the reference there to the MOQ's "code of art". I had 
originally planned to include some quotes from Campbell to expand on that 
concept, but they were edited out along with lots of other things. Anyway, I 
think this concept gets at what good and bad about the "new age". It gets at 
the distinction between the regressive, reactionary aspects and the 
evolutionary and creative aspects. If there was a "director's cut" of FUN 
WITH BLASPHEMY, these would be in it....

Here's Joseph Campbell, in his MYTHS TO LIVE BY:
"Let me recall at this point Nietzsche's statements regarding classic and 
romantic art. He identified two types or orders of each. There is the 
romanticism of true power that shatters contemporary forms to go beyond 
these to new forms; and there is, on the other hand, the romanticism that is 
unable to achieve form at all, and so smashes and disparages out of 
resentment. And with respect to classicism likewise, there is the classicism 
that finds an achievement of the recognized forms easy and can play with 
them at will, expressing through them its own creative aims in a rich and 
vital way; and there is the classicism that clings to form desperately out 
of weakness, dry and hard, authoritarian and cold. The POINT I WOULD MAKE - 
and which I believe was also Nietzsche's - is that form is the medium, the 
vehicle, through which life becomes manifest in its grand style, articulate 
and grandiose, and that the mere shattering of form is for human as well as 
for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms 
of all civilization."


MYTHS TO LIVE BY:
"One cannot help remarking, however, that since about the year 1914 there 
has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even 
disdain for those rital forms that once brought forth, and up to now have 
sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilizaton. There 
is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is 
taking over. Its beginnings date back to the 18th century of Rousseau, with 
its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage. 
Americans abroad, from the time of Mark Twain onward, have been notorious 
exemplars of the ideal, representing as conspicuoulsly as possible the 
innocent belief that Europeans and Asians, living in older, stuffier 
enviroments, should be refreshed and awakened to their own natural 
innocences by the unadulterated boorishness of a product of God's Country, 
our sweet American soil, and our Bill of Rights. In Germany, between the 
wars, the Wandervogel, with their knapsacks and guitars, and the later 
Hitler Youth, were representatives of the reactionary trend in modern life. 
And now, right here in God's Country itself (published in 1972) idyllic 
scenes of barefoot white and black 'Indians' camping on our sidewalks with 
their tomtoms, bedrolls, and papooses are promising to turn entire sections 
of our cities into fields for anthropological research. For, as in all 
societies, so among these, there are distinguishing costumes, rites of 
initiation, required beliefs and the rest. They are here, however, 
explicitly reactionary and reductive, as though in the line of biological 
evolution one were to regress from the state of the chimpanzee to that of 
the starfish or even amoeba. The complexity of social patterning is rejected 
and reduced, and with that, life freedom and force have not been gained but 
lost."

MYTHS TO LIVE BY:
"The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should 
realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and 
being. And the first function of the rites of puberty, accordingly, must be 
to establish in the individual a system of sentiments that will be 
approproate to the society in which he is to live, and on which that society 
itself must depend for its existence. In the modern Western world, moreover, 
there is an additional complication; for we ask of the adult something still 
more than that he should accept without personal criticism and judgement the 
habits and inherited customs of his local social group. We ask and we are 
expecting, rather, that he should develop what Sigmund Freud has called his 
'reality function'; that faculty of the independently observant, freely 
thinking individual who can evaluate without preconceptions the possibilites 
of his enviroment and of himself within it, criticizing and creating, not 
simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action, but becoming 
himself an innovating center, an active, creative center of the life 
process. Our ideal for a society, in other words, is not that it should be a 
perfectly static organization, founded in he age of the ancestors and to 
remain unchanging through all time. It is rather a process moving toward a 
fulfillment of as yet unrealized possiblities; and in this living process 
each is to be an initiating  yet cooperating center. We have, consequestly, 
the comparatively complex problem in educating our young, of training them 
not simply to assume uncritically the patterns of the past, but to recognize 
and cultivate their own creative possibilites; not to remain on some proven 
level of earlier biology and sociology, but to represent a movement of the 
species forward."

I'd be happy to discuss this further, but basically I think this is what the 
code of art means. I think that the basic idea is that each of us needs to 
be "an ommpvatomg center, an active, creative center of the life process", 
to be an "agent of evolution", which begins "in your own heart and hands". 
And I think Pirsig's critique of the hippy movement, that it started out as 
a positive, evolutionary movement but degenerated into hedonism, that it 
became opposed to social and intellectual values and then confused the 
biological with the Dynamic, can serve as a warning to the new agers as 
well. Its the same problem of regression vs evolution. And isn't it 
interesting that Campbell sees that "ridiculous nature-boy sentimentality" 
in both the hippies and in Germany's budding Hitler youth? Anyway, I think 
this is also the meaning of Pirsig's complaints about the notion of the 
"noble savage" and his idea that we should dust off those old forms and 
judge them impartially, that we should be gratful for the job civilization 
has done in taming the biological organism. And I think the big idea here is 
simply that evolution shouldn't entail destroying the forms that have come 
before, it should build upon them. There is no premodern answer to our 
postmodern problems, but alienation from our premodern self is part of the 
problem. That's why we want to re-integrate myth, but not regress to mythic 
thinking. That's why we want to get back in touch with nature, but without 
abandoning our solar-powered laptops or our sophisticated permacultural 
farming techniques. We want a spirituality that stands up to intellectual 
scrutiny so that we can have myth and science at the same time, in a 
worldview without drawers and compartments.

Thanks.
dmb

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