Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements

5. Moving Toward the Light: Self, Other, and the Politics of Experience in New Age Narratives

FIVE Moving Toward the Light Self, Other, and the Politics of Experience in New Age Narratives MICHAEL F. BROWN Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. . . . If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves. —Laing, The Politics of Experience To read R. D. Laing’s work today is to revisit an era—temporally close, temperamentally distant—when a renowned psychiatrist could conclude a book with fifteen pages of LSD-inspired word salad and still produce a bestseller.1 Laing claimed that self-estrangement was ubiquitous in American society, and he blamed it on resistance to the truth of inner experience. In his quest for a prophetic language that would bridge therapy and religion by revealing how an authentic self can achieve healthy communion with others, the mercurial Laing mapped terrain still under exploration by the New Age movement today—more than three decades after the publication of Laing’s The Politics of Experience. Informed by a powerful current of millennialism, the New Age holds that humanity is entering a time of transition, at the end of which collective rediscovery of the divine will inspire a social and political renaissance unlike any other in human history. People wary of rigid categories are unlikely to apply one to themselves, and “New Age” is no exception. Some spurn the term; others use it only for ironic effect. But it has stuck nevertheless. Today “New Age” encompasses practices and philosophies as diverse as shamanism, neopaganism, aura reading, goddess worship, channeling, crystal healing, past-life regression therapy, and the performance of rituals inspired by American Indian traditions. Within its ample 101 boundaries some scholars also locate certain new religions—the Church of Scientology, for instance—and quasi-religious groups that draw on the long-standing American obsession with self-improvement. Since the New Age first came to public attention in the early 1970s, it has puzzled social scientists and cultural critics, who disagree about its scale, significance, and trajectory. Surveying recent publications, one finds some that confidently identify the New Age as a movement of massive proportions and others that dismiss it as an inconsequential audience cult. The popular media, perhaps taking their cue from this scholarly ambivalence , alternately portray the New Age as everywhere and as nowhere at all. The New York Times made the latter claim a decade ago in a frontpage article assessing the results of a landmark survey of American religious affiliation: “And despite all the attention given to what devotees call the New Age, the number of adherents, 28,000 [in the entire U.S.] is practically insignificant” (Goldman 1991).2 Only five years later, this supposedly trifling movement had taken up residence in the White House, where Hillary Clinton carried on imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt under the direction of the therapist Jean Houston. The magazine Forbes, a publication not generally known for interest in alternative spirituality , reported in the mid-1990s that New Age workshops, book sales, and related activities generate nearly $14 billion a year in personal spending (Ferguson and Lee 1996), a figure that, if accurate, offers compelling evidence that the movement has a significant public following. If, as sociologists such as Brulle (1995: 316) argue, a movement’s political power may be measured in part by how its rhetoric influences the “definition of what constitutes common-sense reality,” then there is ample evidence that the New Age is more influential than many experts are willing to admit. The movement has made possible the emergence of new, explicitly spiritual forms of psychotherapy, a trend that will surely accelerate in the coming decades as affluent baby boomers grapple with mortality . The health-care industry has come to embrace alternative healing modalities—acupuncture, herbal medicines, natural childbirth, and the like—long championed by the New Age. Perhaps more surprising is the movement’s impact on management consultants and motivational trainers whose clients include the nation’s largest corporations (Bromley and Shupe 1990; Rupert 1992). The pervasiveness of New Age concepts in the world of training seminars came to wide public attention when it was revealed that the Federal Aviation Administration paid $1.4 million in fees to a disciple of the controversial channeler J. Z. Knight for stress management 102 BROWN classes attended by FAA employees (Hosenball 1995). In this and other ways, the movement plays an important role in the relentless expansion...