Why are a lot of left-winger into new-age religions?

Oh Slumberjack, you're such a Capricorn!

Personally, I walked away from the whole business.  In fact my letter of resignation is somewhere on this board.

Having said that, I know a lot of people that I think you're describing, Apples.  My own opinion is that some sort of religion still fills a need for certain people who are thus psychologically disposed, and that has little to do with left or right.  The traditional religions however have largely been used as the tools of patriarchy and oppression, so lefties have to look elsewhere.

There are some expressions of this that have bothered me a bit.  An example of this would be what's referred to as 'sweet medicine', which involves a bunch of white people totally appropriating First Nations terminology and imagery and building their own organized spiritual framework around it.  I also think there's some out and out fraud involved here, but I would see the main objection as being cultural appropriation, and I think it's disrespectful.  I know a few people involved in this, and while they're sincere as hell, it's just something on which we've agreed to disagree.  None of my business anyway

On the more positive side of course, this does involve adopting some values which I would see as objectively pro social, but it still makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Others I know (I know a lot of 'new agers) have gotten more into a spiritual system leaning more toward ancient European - Celtic roots.  As white people, at least they're looking back along their own path for wisdom.

My theory about who is more likely to be "into" alternative, that is, non-mainstream, non-Western and non-Christian religions by "choice" is not about left- or right wing-edness but by those who had religious upbringing as children. Of course, many people raised in religious contexts become atheists, but many who are into the non-mainstream religions internalized the belief that there is some tangible (yet intangible) power over and above themselves, and can therefore switch fairly easily to other forms of hierarchal religions (at one point every woman I knew who was into "wicca" and "paganism" for example, identified as a former/recovering Catholic). Every "new age" store I've gone into has been filled to the brim with earnest white folks appropriating away with their visa cards.

I also think we can't separate this phenomenon, which again I've observed only in privileged, white and middle class folks, from the liberal cultural appropriationism in which we live. In other words, folks who feel they can "pick and choose" a religion that matches what they view as their radical political position, are merely replicating the dominant realities of entitlement to appropriation in a capitalist context. Please excuse my text, I've been at an academic conference for a day and a half. It's soaked in somehow.

And I just had to clip this, 500. Your biases are showing:

Quote:

 I couldn't believe people who get into graduate school could believe in such tripe even if it's the humanities.  

Do you really want to go there?

I think the problem lies in the fact that even if we were raised in non religious households, the idea that religion has a monopoly on spirituality has people cut loose from established religions trying to express their spirituality in more recently invented/discovered or fringe religions.   

I'm not sure why, but even before I read Carl Sagan, I knew that spirituality could be found in reality based pursuits.  In fact, the pursuit of knowing something is profoundly more spiritual than believing something.

I am not sure that our right wing friends are less given to "new age" religions.  What we see in right wing religions is "new age" compared to how religion was practiced a generation or two ago.  There is little fundamental about Fundamentalism.

Seems no matter what our political orientations, the post Depression generations have been cut loose from the way religion has been practiced for centuries before.

I've often wondered why, and thought maybe the Great Depression had a lot to do with it, or WWII.  But, I don't think those events provide a satisfactory explanation.  I think the deciding factor is communications, begining with radio, then T.V., and now this internet thingy I've heard tell about.

More or less homogenous religious cultures just don't stand up under competition of ideas.

Nope.

Religion has always played a roll defining the underlying moral framework upon which ideology is based. When the ideological constructs changed in the 20th century, moral concepts had to be reinstitutionalized in new forms. 

The idea for example that "enlightenment" was a liberation of ideas is a pretension peculiar to the ideological framework of western imperialism. The rejection of traditional western religions, such as Catholcism, is peculiar to the roll that the church played in asserting the hegemony of feudal social organizations in Europe. This "liberation" was hardly a universal event, with a world wide impact, except in as much as the European imperialists were able to assert the hegemony of their moral and ideological ontology world wide through force of arms.

From Terry Eagelton's Reason, Faith and Revolution:

"One place where so-called spiritual values, driven from the face of a brutally pragmatic capitalism, have taken refuge is New Ageism, which is just the sort of caricature of the spiritual one would expect a materialistic civilization to produce. Rather as those with hearts of stone tend to weep at schmaltzy music, so those who would not recognize a genuine spiritual value if it fell into their laps tend to see the spiritual as spooky, ethereal, and esoteric. This, incidentally, is what Marx had in mind when he wrote of religion as 'the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.' He meant that conventional religion is the only kind of heart that a heartless world can imagine, rather as embarrassingly broad humor is the only kind of comedy the humorless can appreciate. The religion Marx attacks betrays just the kind of sentimental, disembodied understanding of the spiritual that one would expect from hard-headed materialists.

"Romanticism, as Marx himself pointed out, is among other things the flip side of utilitarianism. Those who are in every other way worldly, cynical, and hard-boiled (Hollywood superstars and the like) reveal a truly bottomless gullibility when it comes to spirituality. Nobody is more otherworldly than the worldly, nobody more soft-centered than the hard-nosed.  Spiritual matters must naturally be as remote from their lawyers, minders, agents, and hairstylists as one could imagine, in order to provide some fantasy alternative to them. This is why people who are in every other respect urbane and streetwise believe that affairs on earth are being controlled from an alien spaceship behind a cloud. They would probably not believe this if they had $38 in the bank. Money is a great breeder of unreality. The idea that spirituality is about visiting the sick and fighting injustice would no doubt strike these Kabbalists, necromancers, and chiropractors of the psyche as intolerably prosaic. Even their minders and hairstylists can do that."

And these people are "left"?

Some people look for truth, some start with truth. I like to count myself among the former. I find no particular solace in answers. The quest's the thing.

So you are talking about nothing? No philsophy? No principles? Nothing? There is no objective standard upon which you could judge wether or not someone is left or right? How do you determine what is left or right then? It's just some kind of value judgement based on personal aesthetic?

In other words your entire political world view is just a miasma of impressions, personal testimony of "identification", and sentiments, and you have identified no conceptual principles of philosophies that distinguishes one group or another. What is it that they do say or think, that puts them on the "left-half". Left half of what? How do you distinguish that they are on "the left" of anything?

Because they attend art openings, and give to charity, or attend charity events, and don't vote Republican?

Your whole question is tautological therefore, since have essentially said, people who are into new age religion are on "the left", and are now asking "why so many people on the left are into new age religion"?

I think many of the "old age" religionists tend to be politically conservative and sometimes even those who sometimes identify as "pragmatic" centrists. A University of California study of political figures from history suggests that conservatives tend to have higher tolerances for vast inqualities in society.

And they attend church more often or more regularly. Some say it's due to having guilty consciences for their inability to reconcile cutthroat business practices with religious beliefs. One-time protege of William F Buckley's and former conservative, Michael Lind said that political conservatism in his country was born of the deep south a time when Democrats represented the hard right. In his book Up from Conservatism, Lind says conservatism in the south was based on religious revivalism and racism.

MLK Jr said that blacks were probably safer in the deep south at the time of the civil rights movement. Not all smiling white Liberals in the North accepted the idea of equality among all people in the beginning, and I dare say some them are still around. I've had the misfortune to have met some of them in my life time.

500_Apples wrote:

Cueball wrote:

In other words your entire political world view is just a miasma of impressions, personal testimony of "identification", and sentiments, and you have identified no conceptual principles of philosophies that distinguishes one group or another. What is it that they do say or think, that puts them on the "left-half". Left half of what? How do you distinguish that they are on "the left" of anything?

Because they attend art openings, and give to charity, or attend charity events, and don't vote Republican?

Your whole question is tautological therefore, since have essentially said, people who are into new age religion are on "the left", and are now asking "why so many people on the left are into new age religion"?

lol. So what's your "objective definition" of left? Agrees with cueball? That's what it usually comes down to when people "define" ideologies the way mathematicians define operators. Sociological concepts such as "left" or "pornography" or "normal" are not often best served by the approach you seek. Notice how you're the only person who got confused by this point. Let go of the minutia and focus on the main point. Maybe you're into new age stuff and you're offended. Hard to tell.

No. I don't think I am the only one "who got confused" on this point. I think I am the only one who is bothering to comment on your apparent total lack of even a cursory knowledge of political science, political philosophy or the traditions and founding principles of political movements.

You still have found no way to answer the question. By what standard to you judge wether someone is left or right, within any given political  context?

Because winning and losing is why Darwin put us here in the first place. But what did Darwin say about evolution of man once the chickenhawks takeover the world like they have now? There's no more red menace to compete with, and neoliberal capitalism represents the sum total of our achievements since laissez-faire collapsed in the 1930's. What does Darwinian competition promise for the future of this rock? Will mankind transform the earth into a farm for coackroaches in space in a hundred years' time, or will we advance to higher purposes?

I get what you are saying Apples. Thanks for clearing that up. The "default position" is spot on and in that regard you're right.

Have no idea how I would have handled the scientist who believed in creationism. Odd that one as I tend to think of most science people as being of no religion.

Unionist wrote:

  Also, Canadians reporting "no religion" increased by 39% from the 1991 to the 2001 census. We're the fastest growing faith, and we thrive in both prosperity and adversity. 

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  By Charles Mackay

Ah, a fellow Mackay fan.  I've been so (choke) lonely. (sob)

I came to a more reasoned based way of thinking, and by that I mean a reliance on scepticism and basic scientific method because, flying speghetti monster help me, I'm just shy of being a dullard and need all the help in thinking I can get. 

Catching up, I see Cueball's point.  I'm not sure, even casting a broad net (NPI) for lefties that I'd find Oprah or Madonna in the mesh.  On the other hand, I sympathise with half a thousand Apples that we can get bogged down in deffinitions here. 

"I don't think paganism is more irrational than christianity, per se. The difference between the two, *usually* around here, is that people are born into christianity, they're raised that way, so it's their default world view. The bourgeois trends for things like Feng-Shui, chinese medicine, wicca; the presence of horoscopes in a lot of magazines and newspapers is not something people are born into. They don't start off believing it, they choose to believe it without a predisposition."

Plowing through Cueball's terse "nope" I will continue my hypothesis by fleshing it out some more.  Exposure to different religious ideas via mass communication made it increasingly impossible for people to say, for example, that Presbyterians were "right" and Catholics "wrong"... and maybe, just maybe, all of them were wrong.

However, people are spiritual. I think it's a necessary survival mechanism.  Like you, twice 250 Apples, I may not believe as Stargazer does, that animals have "spirits" anymore than humans have.  (assuming I understand the word spirit the same way Stargazer does.)  On the other hand, I behave as if they do.  If for no other reason that it gives me comfort.  And, it's not cultural appropriation.  I don't doubt that it's a common approach to nature for all cultures at one time or another.  If you're out in the woods it's a necessary step in your attempt to grok your surroundings.  If I can steal a term from a right wing science fiction writter who spent most of his right wing life not only open to new ideas, but made a good living extrapolating them.

I digress.  Being freed from established religions did not make a spiritual connection to the scientific method, or the pursuit of knowing over believing into the default position. Like I said, spirituality is still seen as the perview of religion.  Any religion.  So, people gravitate to what appears to you and I as realms of magical thinking, like astrology, or Madonna's celebrity version of Kabalah, or the very funny "secret", or invent from whole cloth "Druid" rituals and dance around a non Druid artifact like Stonehenge.

Because no one ever told them that understanding something has a spiritual element.

Policywonk wrote:

Kind of off topic but survival of the fittest can mean best able to fit in i.e. cooperation not competition.

But certain gods of capitalism, ie. from John Locke forward, have attempted to justify their exclusive private property laws (and relying on the heavy hand of the state to enforce them) by association with natural laws. And in modern times, some billionaire capitalists have attempted to justify their vast concentrations of wealth by suggesting they serve a higher purpose for society as a whole, and news agencies make a big to-do of their occasional philanthropy.