P2P, spiritual narcissism, and post “new age” spirituality

“What we think of as “spirituality” today is not at all a departure from the narcissistic culture of consumption, but its truest expression. Consumer materialism and spirituality coevolved as ongoing reactions against the seemingly repressive institutions of both state and church.”

I’m a big fan of Douglas Rushkoff, author of the above quote, which comes from a provocative article in the Reality Sandwich. However, I believe the analysis in this article is too one sided a condemnation of contemporary spiritual forms.

Just below, I’m republishing my own analysis, published here in March 2006, which is a evaluation of the ‘new age’ movement from a peer to peer point of view.

Michel Bauwens:

Despite the many misgivings about this broad phenomena that was once called the “new age” movement, I think that overall it played a very necessary role in the evolution of human culture of the late 20th century, as necessary as the Romantic movement a century before.

Defining the new age is of course a very difficult thing, since to many different people it means different things, it has been appropriated by all kind of cults, and has of course become a permanent marketing concept in bookshops, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Essential to the new age is in my view that it was a corrective reaction against an excessive rationalization and mechanization of western life, a reaction on the dissociation between desire and reason that is at the basis of Western civilization. As a reaction it was both necessary, and contained many exaggerated features. I would define it first of all as a general kind of sensibility that one can find in: alternative and complementary medicine, ecological sensibility, an openness to non-traditional spiritual paths be it Eastern or Western esoteric, alternative methods and lifestyles in the fields of education, architecture, communal living; an attention to both healing of the self and an attempt to re-enchant the world through connections with both the natural world and the world of subtle-spiritual experiences.

The flowering of the new age coincided with the political defeat of the 1968 movements, that resulted in a turning inward of many people who felt at the same time obliged to adapt to a world in which they could not recognize themselves, while attempting to nevertheless live their values, and change their life concretely, on a smaller scale, as individuals, families, or communities. The time in which it arose, the end of a long boom, coincided with the continuation of the mechanization and commodification of life in a global capitalist system, a loss of efficiency of the traditional social technologies of control (the institutional framework of school, army, prison, and the like), but especially in the traditional Western Christian traditions which were becoming empty shelves.

One of the first tangible benefits of the new age was to reintroduce the consciousness in the Western world, that spirituality was not a matter of belief, but one of personal experience, that the various traditions contained a vast array of psychotechnologies that could open up new vistas of being and experiencing. It created a possibility for many people to re-integrate this vast body of knowledge and experience, and in a way that individuals could experiment and choose their own combination, rather than following a conventional tradition.

It was also a vehicle to rediscover the dissociated aspects of Western man prior to 1968: the integration of the body, the use of groups with techniques to facilitate authentic communication without the social mask. It was in many ways what Freud would term a “regression in service of the ego”, a return to the repressed areas of the soma (bodily energies), the instinct, emotions, mind and consciousness. Unfortunately, because it proceeded from a total lack of experience, as well as had no grounding in tradition, it frequently stayed in that regressive mode, as a reaction, it was too anti-mind, and disdainful of the critical subjectivity that was one of the hard won features of the western tradition. But to paraphrase Lenin, it probably was a necessary infantile stage of development. In any case, for many it offered many avenues of integrative work on their selves, a positive orientation of self-work and change, in a otherwise dark period of negative social change.

In other ways, it was an heir to Utopian Socialism, given the seeming inability to change society as a whole, countless individuals starting changing their life concretely: first of all by abandoning a blind trust in the mechanistic approaches to the human body espoused by Western medicine; through leaving aside the knowledge-stuffing rote learning in education in view of regarding the child as a whole; and these kind of changes have made the world unrecognizable from what it was 30 years ago. Whatever the negative features of the neoliberal age, many institutions have become more humane, more egalitarian, more respectful, more attuned to the whole person. Individuals changed, institutions evolved, and many small scale communal experiments, even if many failed, yielded valuable learning experiences. To those who fear irrationality, I would answer that most of the people involved were from the top layers in terms of intelligence and education. In a time frame where the left disintegrated and many social acquisitions were undone, the new age sensibility was a guarantee that millions of individuals were continuing concrete efforts. In another important contribution, I see the new age sensibility as also responsible for having forged a new kind of human being that was more apt to survive in a knowledge-based network society.

Of course, now that we have seen the glass half full, it is necessary to attend the glass half empty. As we have said, the new age was reactionary in its exaggerated rejection of cognicentrism, it went often too far in rejecting the role of the mind and of critical intelligence. Instead of integrative, it was often regressive, a “liberation from below”, where selfish desire could reign unchecked.

It fell prey in many instances to cultism, mindless anti-modern reactions, extreme radicalism in food and medical matters that could not recognize anything positive in western science. Spiritually, it had often a rosy outlook, that served as a compensation for living through a dreary reality in which hyper-competition was in many ways degrading the quality of life.

Finally, being born itself in an age of hypercommerce, it didn’t take on the feudal trappings of the earlier spiritual movements, but the trappings of the market, and started functioning in many ways as a series of capitalist enterprises, following a market and a marketing logic, and from the point of view of the users, generating a consumerist attitude of pick and choose. It stayed into an interiorist mode of changing individuals, neglecting social change processes, and got recuperated by cognitive capitalism. Many of these trappings, which sometimes verged on extreme exploitation by scumbag gurus and cults, are now in my view incompatible with a authentic spirituality, which now must be open-ended and participative, and not based on a market model of for-paid experiences. In addition, we must now both reject cognicentrism, but also the regressions of the new age to pre-cognitive levels, and instead opt for an integrative understanding and development of soma-instinct-body-mind-consciousness, where each layer can develop transparently following its own logic, with critical subjectivity intact, but also without any dictatorship of the mind which supposes it already knows where we are heading in these processes of individual, organizational, and societal change. Following Ferrer’s critique in his book Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology, we must also reject viewing the spiritual in terms of individual experience and rather see it as a function of relationality

In conclusion, while we are now definitely beyond a positive role for the new age, it has outlived its usefulness, and its many sub areas are now integrated in the fabric of self, organization, and society, it was a historically important neo-Romantic movement, which served to balance the excessive rationalization and/or mechanization of society, and despite its own excesses, it was a vehicle of change for individuals, communities, and institutions/society.”

4 Comments P2P, spiritual narcissism, and post “new age” spirituality

  1. AvatarDuff

    Excellent summary and balanced view. Rushkoff gave what I think of as a solid critique, but a bit overboard in its total rejection of personal development and self-help. I’ll be reading your article again, as I am a critic as well as a participant in personal development and “new age” views of spirituality.

  2. AvatarMrTeacup

    Michel, two points I’d make in response:

    You say:

    “One of the first tangible benefits of the new age was to reintroduce the consciousness in the Western world, that spirituality was not a matter of belief, but one of personal experience”

    I think this is a bit ahistorical. The notion of interiority in Western religion, particularly Protestantism, is very strong, and goes back at least to St. Augustine’s division of the inner, spiritual world and the outer world. The Protestant doctrine of private judgment, that one should follow one’s conscience in matters of faith, is also a very significant part of the Western tradition that should not be ignored. Even the New Age anti-authoritarian, anti-institution ethic can find its roots in the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of believers, which rejects the idea of an institution mediating between individuals and the divine. And don’t we find the Quaker testimonies of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality in New Age spirituality?

    These links to Western tradition are so strong, so I think we should reject the typical account of New Age spirituality as the importation of Asian religions into the West. Looking from a cultural perspective, isn’t it more accurate to say that New Age spirituality is actually Protestantism with Asian religious theology, and not quite the spiritual revolution that it is so often claimed to be. I think what we find instead is that New Age took us one step further along what is turning out to be the Western tradition of individualism and interiority.

    Secondly, you say:

    “Finally, being born itself in an age of hypercommerce, it didn’t take on the feudal trappings of the earlier spiritual movements, but the trappings of the market”

    I think this is account soft-pedals the degree to which modern spirituality supports capitalist-consumerist culture. It is not just that contemporary neo-romantic spirituality is quietistic and simply accomodated the dominant economic system, failing to address the exploitations of capitalism, it also directly facilitated it. We should look to the book “The Romantic Ethic And The Spirit Of Modern Consumerism” to see how the same Romantic ethic which drives contemporary spirituality also drives consumerism. On this point, I think Rushkoff’s is right that the New Age/self-help movement didn’t sell out, it was sold-out to begin with.

  3. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    Hi thanks for these insightful comments …

    Regarding your first remark, it probably depends where you’re coming from, but for example in european culture, there was a stark division between those that “believed”, and those, the secular atheistic and even anti-religious culture, that rejected that belief. But the intermediate position, that there are a wide variety of psycho-technologies which can be experienced, affect the bodymind and change our relationship to the cosmos, was very absent from the whole surrounding culture. It simply wasn’t available on a realistic scale. I suspect that even in protestant countries, there was little separation between ‘experiences’ and belief … i.e. most believers are convinced that an external divine person is talking to them and immediately embed their experiences in mythological. The new age practices, based on an autonomous individual that can experience various spiritual experencies without the attendant mythological beliefs, did exist before, but became a massive possibility with the broader acceptance of such practices. It is only ‘after the fact’, after the experiences, than many started discovering that even the traditions that we had rejected, also had such possiblities within them.

    Regarding your second remark, well, I believe it is one sided. The “new age” that I knew in the late seventies, was very varied, it was about communal living, alternative education and medicine, environmental concerns, i.e. the for-profit selling of experiences and ‘rapid enlightenment’ was just part of it, not the whole of it. I’ve seen and experienced what rushkoff is talking about, for example Osho was clearly about preparing the advent of neoliberal “(hu)Man”, but equating the whole of the spiritual revival with this particular part of it, is reductionist in my point of view,

    Michel

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