Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa by Joseph Weber (review)

When I volunteered to review books on religion and the Midwest for this journal, little did I suspect that the first book proffered would present dilemmas about the definition of religion. The official position of Transcendental Meditation, as Joseph Weber makes clear in his close study, is that TM is a science, not a religion. I won’t drag in Durkheim, Tillich or Max Weber on this matter; for our purposes, suffice it to say that a federal court in New Jersey has ruled otherwise, so I can continue my review.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi took the West by storm in the 1960s, buoyed by celebrity endorsements by the Beatles and others. “A banner said WELCOME, but the way to the ashram was barred by a Hindu guard, a gate and a barbed wire fence,” Lewis Lapham wrote in With the Beatles, a celebrated account of the East-West encounter that Weber does not cite. That image would have continued resonance in the Maharishi’s move to the West.

Maharishi proved an astute entrepreneur and TM was packaged—and sold—as a scientifically proven technique that could not only resolve personal problems but also, with an intensive enough effort, solve intractable social problems like world peace. The movement’s popular success in the 1970s led to its purchase of a bankrupt college in Fairfield, Iowa, and an institutional presence now known as the Maharishi University of Management. Given that Maharishi died in 2008, Weber chooses to use the question of continuity as his principal theme. This is a legitimate scholarly question with long precedent in utopian and new religion studies, but not an imaginative one.

It does have the advantage of showing the dependence of Fairfield, Iowa, on TM, a company town of a New Age type. Weber does not evoke any kind of midwestern dependency theory, as Edward Watts did in his book An American Colony. He does not do much comparison with the town-gown (or in this case town-robe) trope so prevalent in small towns. But Weber does show how much Fairfield, often in spite of itself, has to hope that TM will survive. Maharishi ruled from Vlodrop, Holland; I would have liked a comparison of his reception there with that of Fairfield’s.

Weber often evokes the Amanas and other utopian communities to compare to the Fairfield movement. But some more obscure groups might be more illustrative. Alfred Lawson and his Lawsonomy movement bought the abandoned Des Moines University to the delight of neighborhood merchants in the 1940s. When his few followers did not venture outside campus, mercantile disillusionment ensued. In the 1840s a group of non-Brigham Young Mormons, followers of Sidney Rigdon, founded a utopian community in Attica, Iowa. Rigdon tried to run the group from near Pittsburgh; there seem to be parallels to Maharishi in Europe, although communication has become faster. The outsize claims of the TM movement, from meditators flying to achieving world peace, seem to compare to those of the most successful new American religion, once congregated not far away at Nauvoo, Illinois, but Weber suggests that TM may not have a second generation successor to rival Brigham Young.

The question I would raise rather than TM’s longevity—and it is an issue that Weber touches upon—is one of social ethics. When I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the late 1970s, a colleague wrote a letter to the campus paper claiming that the football team could not win because the stadium was too close to the hospital, and was receiving negative vibes from sick people. One of my housemates, a medical student, indignantly pointed out that perhaps hospital patients were suffering from the football team’s performance. Moreover, meditating to raise the stock market rate—even if it did fail miserably—does pose ethical questions that Weber...