Hi Everyone. I apologize for not writing much lately. I’ve had a lot of deadlines lately, but I did write an excellent post I thought you all would like. Please enjoy!
Its very useful to look at overall discourses and their place within the wider social context.
There is a discourse going around now, mostly entitled “conspirituality” after a popular, and admittedly very interesting podcast. This movement has been exploring the confluence of the New Age movement, various conspiracy theories, and a number of what they call “wellness” practices, usually explored in a deeply commercial context, like GOOP, or Instagram influencers.
There is a subtext to this dialogue, a kind of subtle message behind all of it, that there is nothing to the New Age and “Wellness” movements aside from the aforementioned cultural appropriation, conspiracy, and cognitive biases that lead to “wellness” believe systems.
This is utter nonsense. And I strongly suspect propagandistic nonsense.
I’m not gong to say that there is not a problem with conspiracy in the NEw Age movement, which has taken a particularly nasty ethnic nationalist turn in the last few years with the increasing emergence of some kinds of conservative christianity into this cultural milieu. Nor that there isn’t a problem with cultural appropriation. There absolutely is, and it needs to be ethically addressed.
But the idea, and indeed the subtly promoted line that there is nothing to New Age spirituality besides these things is one founded in complete ignorance to history and to the lived reality of these traditions outside of the commercial contexts.
The New Age is an outgrowth of the Western esoteric tradition, itself a deep outflow of spirituality with a well documented textual history stretching back to classical antiquity (in the hermetic texts), and possibly even earlier, in that those texts were based on earlier Egyptian and Mesopotamian traditions that stretch back to before the dawn of writing. That group of adepts tend not to display themselves publicly, and as such as nearly invisible in the discourse on the New Age.
The external construction of “wellness” as purely an commercial enterprise based on exploiting the many dissatisifed with conventional medicine based on NEw Age beleifs is also deeply problematic. It ignores the existence of medical traditions outside of allopathic (conventional) medicine, giving it what we call in social sciences, hegemonic power, instead of correctly placing it as one of numerous ideas around health and illness that has become dominant in recent history due to numerous commercial and political factors. Not least of which the alliance of the Pharmaceutical cartel, the research complex, allopathic medical education and the mass subsidization of allopathic medicine to the exclusion of other systems in the 20th century.
Lastly the cultural appropriation issue. Of all the issues with the new age, this is indeed the most real. This is a problem, plucking superficial aspects of indigenous and other traditions is a great injustice. I will address this in separate discussions, but with proper ethics, it is entirely possible to have cultural interchange between different traditions, without the appropriative and performative aspects that the commercial environment of the current era has encouraged. And, as I have said above, there is a core of Western mystery traditions and healthcare traditions outside of allopathic medicine that is the core of these movements, but never openly discussed.
In this conspirtuality discourse, the true difficulties of the New Age movement are really not dicsussed much, aside from the appropriation thing which does need a good long correction. These problems are, in my view
1) Source amnesia and lack of citation and historical awareness
2)Lack of structre and guidance of senior adepts for those entering into these traditions, which is essential in nearly every other spiritual tradition
3) Cultural appropriation, as discussed above.
I’m so grateful to my old high school friend Peter Breeze for allowing me to discuss my thoughts on this topic on his podcast.