In the arts, the 1950s saw a revival of Romanticism.  The Beat poets: Ginsberg, Ferlingetti, Snyder, and Kerouac all preached and celebrated life, spontaneity, and creativity.  They urged America to reject the white collar world of purpose and discipline, and to live life in the now, becoming open to the whole spectrum of human experience, and recognizing the ineffable spur of creativity, the intuitive, and the unexpected.  Like the Romantics of the nineteenth century, the Beats were experiencing the transition between blue and orange consciousness.  Like the nineteenth century Romantics, these sons of the bourgeoisie cried “Down with Rules” and proposed to replace rules and roles of blue consciousness with pure intuitive orange creativity.  Later, in the 1960s, this movement metastasized into “The Sixties” and the counterculture, and encouraged millions of young educated middle class Americans to transcend the safety of middle class suburbia and try a life of artistic adventure.  The advertising industry reflected the times in its “creative revolution” that celebrated brilliance and originality rather than methodical market analysis.  The new creative geniuses of advertising began selling the Sixties generation on the idea that they could demonstrate their rebelliousness by purchasing mass market products that communicated a cocky irreverence towards conventional society.  Ivy league mythologist Joseph Campbell explained the new cult of creativity as Creative Mythology, and the creative artist as a modern novice entering on the ancient Hero’s Journey.

But not all young people wanted to embark on a hero’s journey of the creative ego, trying to win at the art game or the university game.  Many young people wanted to get beyond ego, and find truth in a genuine community of caring and sharing.  They entered communes, or, in the New Left, tried to rescue the socialist dream of peace and justice from its descent into Stalinism.  Later, after the failure of the communes and the New Left, the survivors moved in on the nation’s universities and powered a movement to radicalize the nation’s faculties with the ideas of French neo-Marxists.  Their movement represented an attempt to create a purely green consciousness by extinguishing the poison of blue rule and role, represented by the worship of the logos of reason, and the corrosion of orange ego represented by the mythic narrative.  They reacted against the egoism of Eurocentrism, embraced the traditionally marginalized Social Other, and demonstrated that every historical narrative was a crude apology for power.  The persistence of the project of the left, even after the horror of the hundred million victims sacrificed to Marx-inspired political regimes in the twentieth century, demonstrates that the desire for universal community is a human aspiration that transcends its vulgar human prophets and their cosmic crimes.

There is another spiritual movement that constitutes a major current within the Awakening, the major explosion in non-traditional belief, generally referred to as New Age.  Because the term “new age” is generally used by journalists, both of left and right, as a free-floating pejorative, meaning lightweight or flaky, the term requires definition for the purpose of this book.  It is used here to refer to any belief system, excluding traditional Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and left-wing and right-wing secularism, as practiced by non-hyphenated Americans in the United States.    Thus Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, meditation, yoga, and eastern martial arts, as practiced by fully assimilated Americans are considered “new age,” as well as astrology, channeling, dowsing, crystal work, dream work, est, scientology, and shamanism.

A typical treatment of New Age is Alan Jacobs’ “The God of the Bestseller List” in the Weekly Standard in 1999.   In Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul phenomenon Jacobs found nothing but self-flattery and self-congratulation: “no Day of Judgment, just immediate admission to the Place Where Everyone Is Nice.” (Jacobs 1999)  Of course, such patronizing is a common way of belittling other peoples’ religion, and not far from the comment of Stanley Hauerwas about the mainstream Protestant churches: “God is nice and we should be nice too.” (Carter 2001 p5)  Yet New Age religion is a solidly middle class phenomenon, setting out, ever so gingerly, for something more spiritual than a good job, a pretty wife, and a dream house in the suburbs.

The Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs, a project of the Christian Right, does not experience New Age as a joke, but as a challenge, a competing way of seeing that threatens to abduct the Christian faithful away from the traditional dualistic western world view.  In the Christian view, people “are separate and distinct from God, and they are sinful.” But “in the New Age way of seeing there is a strong aversion to harsh dualisms.” (Ankerberg, Weldon 1998 ix)  For New Age, dualisms are extinguished in the union of opposites as in the yin and yang of the Dao.  Rather than being separate from God, New Age encourages its adepts to believe in an eternal union with God.

But New Age also includes the drift of Americans and people of European origin generally towards eastern traditions, a secular trend that has been gathering speed for two centuries.  When the British encountered Hinduism in India they generally regarded its culture as backward and in need of muscular Christian improvement.  But some of them studied the Indian culture, and became more respectful.  Schopenhauer was the first Western philosopher to read the Hindu scriptures, and marveled that Kant had already intuited Hindu concepts.  The Boston transcendentalists developed a long distance acquaintance with Buddhism and Hinduism, and William James acknowledged in his Varieties of Religious Experience that he wished he knew more about the East.  But by 1950 Zen masters had set up in San Francisco, and by 1960 Alan Watts had popularized Zen.  By 1970 Frijtof Capra had written The Tao of Physics, and by 1980 Gary Zukav had written The Seat of the Soul.  The East had gone mainstream.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill