Women may have stopped flying, but they still needed miracles. Sottile writes that in the Victorian era, women could transcend their inferior status by channeling spirits. “Spiritualism and women’s rights were intertwined,” she adds, sometimes in dramatic fashion. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, “strange rappings” would shake “the very table where suffragists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments,” Sottile notes. When Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society a few decades later, she positioned herself as the chief spiritual authority of a new religious movement. She was an odd figure who’d fled her much older husband in a search for esoteric truth, and her tales bore a touch of the grandiose: She spoke of ascended masters, and ancient wisdom, and a great spiritual destiny for herself....By 2011, Sottile writes, the nexus of conspiracy and New Age belief had become so pronounced that experts coined a term for it. “Conspirituality” thrives on social media, and the rise of Trump has only supercharged it. Many of its most prominent voices are women like Carlson, who listen to their inner voices to the exclusion of all others, and they tilt, often, to the far right.
I know several of these women, and none of them are remotely on the political right, for whatever that is worth. One of them was a banker in Charlotte with a significant position at the national headquarters and a husband who disappointed her; she left job and husband and moved to India, later returning a mystic who taught yoga and proclaims that she can spiritually heal you and talk to the dead. Another is a Doctor of Philosophy who didn't decide to pursue the academic career she had invested so many years in, but now teaches yoga in Savannah. There are quite a few others.
The article goes on to suggest that the practice is mentally unhealthy -- "The self is not boundless, and a woman who delves within her own mind can trap herself there" -- but these women seem quite happy to me. Well adjusted? No, not that: they have rejected that as an important consideration. But they seem happy. The one teaching yoga on the docks in Savannah in the morning is much happier than she was when I knew her as a Ph.D. candidate. The life of rising each day with the dawn and leading others through exercises to the subtropical sunrise sounds pretty idyllic. It seems (from afar) to have improved her mental health as well as her physical health.
It is definitely healthier than the article's conclusion:
In America you can believe anything, and you can sell just about anything, too. “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known,” the apostle Paul told the Corinthians. We are all Paul by our mirrors, looking for the truth, wanting to be seen. But the glass is cracking. Behind it there’s only a wall.
That is merely despair. Despair by tradition is a mortal sin precisely because it destroys the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
10 comments:
For people who aren't familiar with Instapundit, Ed Driscoll posted excerpts from a couple of articles including the one at NY Magazine which Grim has linked above.
I happened to watch this lecture last night by Ronald Hutton (Gresham College) on the origins of Wicca. He presented the thesis that the modern Pagan/Wiccan movement really started in England in the 1950s and spread out from there. He ties its growth to the parallel rise of feminism, environmentalism, and increased emphasis on open self-expression and empowerment.
What an odd conclusion: because some people turn to mysticism and reach conclusions that trouble the author, anyone searching for truth must be deluding himself. Ten bucks says the author believes sensible people (such as the author) are steely-eyed realists who never fall for phantasms. By co-incidence, I'm just about to post about the journalism fad for stories that have no news to report, only more or less unsubstantiated (but political useful) predictions of doom.
Thanks! Looks interesting.
I now take claims that such-and-such a group has turned right to mean that the left has continued its drive to the extreme to the extent that such-and-such a group now looks right wing to them in the rear view mirror.
Is there anyone who reads blogs who isn't familiar with Instapundit? :)
Yes; by coincidence, yesterday I saw a story that reported that the tariff disruption to the market had been completely erased. Which is what you'd expect, if you understand that the purpose of these markets is to allocate capital away from less-likely-to-profit activities towards more-likely-to-profit ones, rather than to fund people's retirement.
That's part of it here, I think, although AVI correctly points out that some of these things -- the focus on back-to-the-natural that drives anti-vaccine skepticism in general (as opposed to the specific skepticism of COVID-era mRNA vaccines), the health food craze, but also the eugenics and racism -- was a feature of Nazism and of pre-Nazi German mysticism. Also of the hippies, Planned Parenthood, etc.
Is it 'right wing'? Is it 'left wing'? It's kind of not really any of those things, though occasionally it turns up as a feature of a movement that can be identified as one or the other.
But you're right: as the article notes, the New Agers of the 70s believed all the same stuff about conspiracies and secret ancient races, the goodness of sex and health food, the badness of technical society.
True but Glenn's "a quip and a link" format from back in the day has given way to some longer expositions (and cut-n-paste diarrhea but that's a different topic) from various posters in the PJ Media era. I'd seen the post there but not read the linked article and was trying to figure out where some of your quotes came from since I was pretty sure but not positive they didn't appear in the Instapundit commentary.
If I recall correctly from Prof Hutton's talk, he made the observation that it's not uncommon for reformers to claim that modernity has corrupted whatever it is they are examining and their efforts are directed at reclaiming an earlier purer form, as opposed to the reformers who want to junk everything old and start over. Reformation/Enlightenment vs French Revolution.
I read the Intelligencer article and concluded that the author was determined to draw a conclusion that reinforced her priors regardless of the data. The reasoning was incoherent.
There are specific psychiatric conditions associated with Wicca and others with spiritual grandiosity among women. Men with similar conditions have different psychiatric profiles. I am not going to make my thoughts public on this. I have hinted to a few people who have treated the same sort of patients I have what I mean, with mixed results. Some reply with either Christian or psychological cliches (or both) and I know there is no point in going further. Others have nodded quite seriously and gave hints back that said they knew exactly what I meant but were never going to be caught dead saying it out loud.
To complicate this further, the people who do say it out loud fall into two neat diagnostic c ategories themselves and have little credibility.
All this is not to tease so much as to note that when cliche-dominated thinkers, as in this article, try to explain what is happening they are unable to even make a start at understanding it. It's just phrases leaking out everywhere. I used to say "Not enough fence to keep the sheep in" about such people.
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