New York Times: The Gospel According to ‘Me’
The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being!
Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age
defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies
have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their
singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning
over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea
of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy
of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of
traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual
inhibition and the rest.
Unlike
the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the
world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar
existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you
are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish
conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal
growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that
required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality
defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this
New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require
obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt
must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated,
most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing
work.
In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself. The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma. ...
Spot on!!
Posted by: dora | Jul 07, 2013 at 09:44 AM