This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 2, from 1991.
It is often said in skeptical circles that belief in the irrational has been increasing dramatically in recent years and has now reached unprecedented levels. Whether or not this is strictly true, there can be little doubt that belief in the paranormal and the occult is widespread and plays a not unimportant part in the lives of at least a significant minority of the population. Nowadays, such enthusiasms are often referred to under the heading of the ‘New Age’ and however one might disapprove of it – the social movement which feeds on and propagates such beliefs must be acknowledged as one of the more significant features of the contemporary cultural landscape in the West.
If the skeptical community is to develop the appropriate strategies that will enable it to challenge irrational or unsustainable beliefs effectively then the origin and nature of these beliefs must be thoroughly understood. This will only be possible by studying such beliefs in their proper historical and cultural context. Yet, so far as I am aware, the history and the sociology of the New Age Movement has received relatively little serious attention from within the ranks of ‘organised skepticism’.
As I am neither an historian nor a sociologist by profession it is not my intention to attempt to anticipate the details of what such an understanding might eventually take. But I do want to explore some of the issues involved, more with the aim of opening up discussion and debate than of arriving at some kind of definitive conclusion. In particular, I want to examine how the New Age Movement might be seen as being at least in part a response to what I shall refer to as the ‘crisis of belief’ that confronts contemporary Western societies. In analysing this crisis of belief I shall to some extent draw freely on ideas deriving from recent debates on modernity and postmodernity on the one hand, and from modern cognitive psychology on the other. My aim IS to show that these ideas can help deepen our understanding of the New Age Movement and of the social and psychological forces which have given rise to it.
The New Age Movement
The New Age Movement is notable for its confused and chaotic diversity, and for its tendencies towards eclecticism. Because of this, concentrating only on the paranormal and occult beliefs associated with New Age thought can easily distort one’s perception of it as a whole. In fact, the movement is broad enough to incorporate a great variety of themes, including not only the occult and the paranormal but also (amongst other things) alternative medicine, spirituality and mysticism, fringe science, alternative archaeology, various forms of psychotherapy, a concern with ‘green’ issues, together with elements deriving from feminism and the peace movement. It ranges from the most implausible beliefs concerning, for example, the healing power of crystals, to ideas (like those connected with a concern for the environment) which presumably deserve to be taken rather more seriously.
In retrospect, it has to be admitted that placing such a wide variety of beliefs under the single heading of ‘New Age thought’ may in fact be begging rather a lot of questions. Nevertheless, all these beliefs share a certain ‘alternative’ character in the sense that they provide an alternative to established knowledge and to conventional ways of behaviour.
Fundamental to the essentially ‘alternative’ character of the New Age Movement is the fact that it rejects many of the secular attitudes prevalent in contemporary Western societies – and yet it does so without turning instead to some kind of conventional religious belief. On the one hand, although the founder of Christianity is generally regarded with respect, the New Age attitude towards the Christian churches is largely one of indifference and is on occasions actively hostile. (Eastern religions generally get a much better press). On the other hand, the anti-secular point of view is displayed most clearly by the uniform hostility shown to what is often referred to in New Age literature as ‘scientific materialism’.
The New Age Movement is not, however, an anti-science movement as such, and its hostility does not extend to those often controversial areas of science – which include parapsychology, Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, and various mystically-inspired interpretations of modem physics, for example – which dwell on the fringes of accepted knowledge but which seem in one way or another to challenge the assumptions of philosophical materialism.
Nevertheless, the New Age Movement is opposed to what it takes to be the dominant scientific/secular view of the world which sees mankind as living in a random, mechanistic universe devoid of purpose. Instead it promotes a view of the world which is non-materialistic in nature, which allows a place for marvels and for magic, for imagination and creativity, and for a ‘spiritual’ dimension to life. In short, the New Age Movement is essentially quasi-religious in character – a point which has not been lost on those skeptics of an anti-religious persuasion who often see challenging belief in the paranormal and other New Age beliefs as simply part of a larger project directed against what is taken to be ‘religious superstition’.
The Decline of Belief
Although it is difficult to prove such connections, the rise of this quasi-religious movement is surely related to the decline in the status of conventional religious belief in the West over the past couple of hundred years or so: we no longer live in an essentially ‘pre-modern’ era in which Christianity is the dominant ideological force. The effects of this process of ‘secularisation’ should not, of course, be exaggerated: the influence of Christianity remains strong in many parts of the world, not least in the United States. But few would deny that there has been a lessening in the status and authority accorded to religious beliefs and institutions during this period. Christianity no longer commands the unqualified support of the intelligentsia and, more generally, no longer exerts the overwhelming cultural influence which once it did: Christian belief has come to be seen as ‘optional’ in a way which previously was not the case.
The decline of religious belief was accompanied by the rise during the course of the nineteenth century of new, secular ideologies – in particular, secular humanism and (far more influentially) Marxism. Despite their many differences these two secular ideologies shared a common, optimistic faith in rationality, science and progress, a belief which can be traced back to the Enlightenment and which formed one of the great themes of the so-called ‘modem’ period. But on the whole, the often bloody history of the twentieth century and the ever-present possibility of nuclear and/or ecological crisis have in fact tended to undermine such a faith and have made the nineteenth century belief in the moral and social advancement of mankind and in the unqualified benefits of scientific and technological progress seem in retrospect to have been rather naive.
For this and for other reasons the decline in the influence of Christian belief in the West has not been matched by a concomitant rise to a position of dominance of any alternative secular ideology. Of course, followers of the secular ideologies still exist, but generally speaking they are restricted to small groups which exert little real influence: the secular ideologies are marginalised in much the same way as Christianity often finds itself marginalised in the contemporary world.
The collapse of faith in both the traditional, religious and the modem, secular forms of belief characterises our era, an era sometimes referred to as the ‘postmodern’ age (to borrow the fashionable phrase of the gurus of culture). This is an age in which the old forms of belief are unable to sustain a consensus, an age characterised by fragmentation when ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Our culture offers no overall message, no larger vision or narrative which might enable people to see their lives in a meaningful way.
Instead there is the world, conceived as a collection of facts revealed by science. But these facts cannot be said to have been fused together into a view of the world and of mankind’s place in it that really satisfies the human need for significance and meaning. Thus, although the mechanistic conception of reality is by no means an inevitable implication of modern science (and is indeed seriously challenged by it in several respects), the overall impression of the scientific world-view presented to the general public is still predominantly a mechanistic-materialist one in which there is little opportunity for deriving any kind of metaphysical comfort.
For many people such a view of the world is extremely bleak, and all the more bleak for the absence of any generally accepted belief system (be it religious or secular) which might serve to ameliorate or modify that view. It is this situation which, I think, the followers of the New Age Movement are reacting against their rejection of ‘scientific materialism’ and why they are nevertheless sympathetic to those forms of fringe science that seem to have rejected some essential elements of the materialist view of reality.
The Search for Belief
Despite the fragmentation of belief which characterises our era, there remains a deep underlying need for belief. For, however incomplete and incoherent it might be, we all require some kind of system of belief with which to generate order out of the chaos of experience and to lend a degree of organisation to our lives. We all need to be able to make sense of the world. We all need to experience life through the meaningful categories of some belief system, whether that system be religious, political or philosophical in character. Indeed, for those who subscribe to it, such a belief system is the meaning of their lives! For all of us, our beliefs play an essential part in the construction of our personal world (ie, the world as we experience it).
Of course, our beliefs may not always immediately show themselves in an explicit commitment to a particular ideology but they nevertheless exist under the surface and undoubtedly play a quite fundamental role in our lives. In particular, what we believe (and whether our beliefs are basically optimistic or pessimistic) can have a profound effect on how we feel. Consequently, the belief system which we happen to accept has an enormous impact on the way in which we, as individuals, come to think, feel and act. Moreover, in the absence of any such relatively consistent and suitable optimistic belief system we are likely to experience considerable confusion and emotional distress.
Far from being a trivial or inconsequential observation, this notion concerning the centrality of belief systems to our mental and emotional life forms one of the key themes of modem cognitive psychology and systems of psychology based on this approach (such as Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory, for example) provide the theoretical underpinning for the view that belief systems are not just pleasant yet dispensable accessories but actually play an essential role in the proper functioning of the human organism.
It is this human need for belief that turns the contemporary situation consisting in the fragmentation of belief into a true crisis of belief. There is an innate human urge to believe to construct meaning. Yet our contemporary situation is not characterised by the ascendancy of any particular system of belief: both Christianity and the secular ideologies are to a large extent marginalised. The result is a large class of confused and alienated people who do not really know what to believe in, but who still feel the need to believe in something.
Is it therefore at all surprising that many of these people should respond to this crisis of belief by creating their own belief system from the materials that are to hand? Bits of modern science, the remnants of old religions and ideologies, fragments of superstition and half-remembered childhood fairy tales have been sewn together to create the confused patchwork, piecemeal system of belief that is the New Age. Its origins lie in nineteenth century movements like Theosophy and spiritualism, which can themselves be seen as a reaction against the advance of secularisation and as a response to the crisis of belief as manifested in that period. But the contemporary New Age Movement is a response to the more urgent sense of crisis and fragmentation which characterises our own postmodern era.
The ‘packaging’ (as distinct from the content) of New Age belief is also profoundly affected by the nature of contemporary Western societies, dominated as they are by the driving force of technological change and by the dynamic of the market. As we all know, peddling New Age wares (in the form of books, cassettes and courses, for example) can be a lucrative business. But is it surprising that here, in the capitalist West, New Age beliefs are regarded as essentially commodities to be sold and bought in the ideological marketplace? And is it surprising that, with the rapid growth in the technology of communications (radio, TV, video, mass-market publishing and so on), such beliefs should spread so widely and with such speed, with new fashions and crazes continually flaring up as old ones fade away? New Age belief has become a product, a consumer item, even an essential component of ‘style’: it has in fact become a form of ‘designer’ belief.
The Future of New Age Belief
Of course, as we all know, the problem with New Age beliefs is that most of them are extremely implausible when seen in the light of modern knowledge and, when explored further, can often be shown to be false (or at best unsubstantiated). This is where the skeptical movement in its ‘investigative’ capacity has such an important role to play in exposing such failings. But, if I am right and the New Age phenomenon is basically a result of an innate human predisposition to believe combined with the effect of certain long-term cultural changes which have been taking place in Western societies over the past hundred or more years, then I think it is doubtful that skeptics will be able to have much impact on the tide of New Age belief as a whole.
Nevertheless, one can speculate that the skeptical movement – in its ‘mission’ role of attempting to persuade people to adopt a more critical attitude towards such beliefs – may be more effective if it attempts to bend belief away from the more unsustainable and/or damaging manifestations of New Age thought than if it attempts to remove or eliminate such belief entirely.
In the long-term, however, New Age belief is only likely to fade when the cultural forces which produced it have moved on, when the present era gives way to a new era in which new forms of belief finally manage to establish themselves on the ruins of the old. It is far from clear what these new forms of belief might be.
Will one of the old religions or ideologies manage to revitalise and renew itself? Will the contemporary interest in green issues be transformed into a new ‘nature religion’ suitable for the twenty-first century? Will elements of science now located on the fringe eventually come to find greater respectability and more widespread acceptance in the years to come, and for the basis for a new scientifically legitimated system of belief? Or will in fact the present state of confusion and fragmentation endure into the indefinite future?
One can only guess, of course, but if it is the last of these possibilities which proves to be the case then I think it probable that the New Age Movement (or at least something very much like it) will be with us for a very long time to come.
References
- Basil, Robert (Ed). Not Necessarily the New Age: Critical Essays, (Prometheus Books, 1988).
- Boyne, Roy & Rattansi, Ali (Eds). Postmodernism and Society, (Macmillan Education, 1990).
- Ptadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century, (Cambridge University Press, 1975).
- Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s, (Paladin Books, 1980).
- Rowe, Dorothy. The Construction of Life and Death: Discovering Meaning in a World of Uncertainty, (Fontana Paperbacks, 1989).
- Stott, Martin. Spilling the Beans: A Style Guide to the New Age, (Fontana Paperbacks, 1986).
