Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures: A former New Age author writes about slowly coming to realize New Age is mostly bunk and that the skeptic community actually might have a good idea about keeping people from messing themselves up. Also about how hard it is to open a genuine dialogue with the New Age culture, which has set up pretty formidable defenses to perpetuate itself.
Hah, was just coming here to post this. This article sort of meanders, but it’s definitely worth skimming at least for the following two paragraphs:
One of the biggest falsehoods I’ve encountered is that skeptics can’t tolerate mystery, while New Age people can. This is completely wrong, because it is actually the people in my culture who can’t handle mystery—not even a tiny bit of it. Everything in my New Age culture comes complete with an answer, a reason, and a source. Every action, emotion, health symptom, dream, accident, birth, death, or idea here has a direct link to the influence of the stars, chi, past lives, ancestors, energy fields, interdimensional beings, enneagrams, devas, fairies, spirit guides, angels, aliens, karma, God, or the Goddess.
We love to say that we embrace mystery in the New Age culture, but that’s a cultural conceit and it’s utterly wrong. In actual fact, we have no tolerance whatsoever for mystery. Everything from the smallest individual action to the largest movements in the evolution of the planet has a specific metaphysical or mystical cause. In my opinion, this incapacity to tolerate mystery is a direct result of my culture’s disavowal of the intellect. One of the most frightening things about attaining the capacity to think skeptically and critically is that so many things don’t have clear answers. Critical thinkers and skeptics don’t create answers just to manage their anxiety.
Excellent article, thanks for the link! Let’s keep in mind that she also wrote about how inflammatory and combative language is counterproductive, and the need to communicate with people in ways they have some chance of understanding.
What she said wasn’t that simple—she also talks about trying to get her ideas across while being completely inoffensive, and having them not noticed at all. When we’re talking about a call to change deeply held premises, getting some chance of being understood is quite a hard problem.
Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures: A former New Age author writes about slowly coming to realize New Age is mostly bunk and that the skeptic community actually might have a good idea about keeping people from messing themselves up. Also about how hard it is to open a genuine dialogue with the New Age culture, which has set up pretty formidable defenses to perpetuate itself.
Hah, was just coming here to post this. This article sort of meanders, but it’s definitely worth skimming at least for the following two paragraphs:
Excellent article, thanks for the link! Let’s keep in mind that she also wrote about how inflammatory and combative language is counterproductive, and the need to communicate with people in ways they have some chance of understanding.
What she said wasn’t that simple—she also talks about trying to get her ideas across while being completely inoffensive, and having them not noticed at all. When we’re talking about a call to change deeply held premises, getting some chance of being understood is quite a hard problem.