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Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety - Hardcover

Kaminer, Wendy

 
9780679442431: Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 067944243X ISBN 13: 9780679442431
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Examines the dramatic growth of the irrational and supernaturalism in modern society, criticizing the fascination with paranormal and supernatural phenomena, exploring its roots, and detailing the irrationalism of the new digital culture

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wendy Kaminer is the author of five previous books, including <b>I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional</b>; her articles and reviews have appeared in <i>The New York Times, Newsweek, The Nation</i>, and <i>The New Republic</i>. She is a contributing editor at <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i> and a fellow at Radcliffe College.

Aus dem Klappentext

eping with Extra-Terrestrials</b>, Wendy Kaminer argues that we are a society intoxicated by the irrational: religion, spirituality, and popular therapies threaten to replace rational thought with supernaturalism and impassioned but unexamined personal testimony. Ranging from our fascination with angels, aliens, and near- death experiences to the rise of junk science, the recovery movement, and the digital culture, Kaminer points out the amusing and ominous effects of our deference to spiritual authorities and resistance to critical thinking. She questions conventional wisdom about the association of religious belief with virtue, identifying the sectarianism of efforts to establish religion in the public square. With both wit and empathy, Kaminer takes on what many people hold sacred.<br> <br>Kaminer is an eloquent and incisive critic and rationalist living in a superstitious, evangelical age. In <b>Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials</b> she

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Before I begin my critique of irrationalism, I have a confession to make: I go to a homeopath. Homeopathy may have about as much scientific credibility as reports of alien abductions and ESP; but I suspend disbelief and weather my embarrassment, because, somehow, homeopathy has helped me. When I first met with my homeopath she asked me to describe my greatest fears. Aside from being old and sick and infirm, I said, my greatest fear was that someone would find out I'd consulted a homeopath.

I mention this partly in the spirit of disclosure, partly to illustrate the power of any belief system that can make people feel better, and partly to explore our concept of irrationalism. When I go to my homeopath maybe I'm following one of the precepts of the recovery movement that I've always derided: I'm thinking with my heart and not my head. Or maybe I'm acting rationally after all. Believing in homeopathy may be irrational, but not using homeopathy if it works would be even more irrational. I care only if medicine works, not why. (I have the vaguest understanding of antibiotics.)

So I don't listen to scientists eager to tell me why homeopathic remedies can't possibly work, because they violate the laws of chemistry. Assuming that the scientists are right, and the remedies I've taken are mere placebos, why would I want to start doubting--and diminishing--their effectiveness? Why not be susceptible to placebos?

It would be irrational, however, for anyone to take my account of homeopathy's effectiveness at face value. Maybe I'm lying, or maybe I'm imagining that homeopathy has helped me. Maybe I'm confusing correlation with causation: perhaps I began feeling better coincidentally, for some unknown reason, at about the time I turned to homeopathy. If you're intrigued by my report, you should ask me to substantiate it, with some objective evidence. You should try to duplicate my experience.

The contrary willingness to accept untested personal testimony as public truth is at the heart of the irrationalism that confronts us today. Ours is an evangelical culture. So many people convinced that they've been saved by Jesus, abused by Satanists, cured by homeopathy or the laying on of hands, abducted by aliens, or protected by angels seek public acknowledgment that their convictions are true. Imbued with messianic fervor, or simply seeking "validation," they are not content to hoard the truth; they are compelled to share it and convert the unenlightened, relying on the force of their own intense emotions. Generally, the only proof offered for a fantastic belief is the passion it inspires in believers.

It is usually futile to ask for more. Once, I found myself engaged in a "debate" with a caller on a radio show who claimed that she and her family had been abducted and molested by aliens. I suggested that it was, perhaps, unrealistic of her to expect strangers to believe her story merely on the basis of her testimony. So she offered as evidence of her encounters "bodily markings," "bodily memories," and (in a stab at empiricism) "metallurgically flattened shrubbery" outside her house. I told her I was sorry for her trouble. Sometimes I think I'm sleeping with an extra-terrestrial too.

While only a minority of listeners may have found this story of an alien encounter credible, many would probably have believed a more familiar supernatural tale--the report of a visit from a guardian angel or a conversation with Jesus. In presuming that her feelings constituted evidence of historic fact, the caller had religion on her side, in addition to both high and low culture, which also promote belief in revealed truths. Popular psychologies assume the authenticity of subjective experience. Academic fashions locate truth in individual narratives, and falsehood in the quest for objectivity.

The celebration of subjectivity discourages demands for corroboration. Let someone testify with great vehemence to an after-death experience, a foray into past lives, or an abusive sexual encounter in childhood, only recently recalled, and courtesy compels us to listen deferentially. A lingering cult of victimhood lends credibility to tales of abuse, and the etiquette of a confessional society deters cross-examination. Equally vehement expressions of doubt or disbelief may even be considered abusive. The mores of personal development are naturally relativistic: Everyone has his or her reality. A fact is simply what is true for you.

Subjective perceptions are touchstones as well for religious traditions that celebrate direct, individual relationships with God, from mysticism to methodism--although religion posits universal truths, not disparate individual realities. The therapeutic culture borrows from religion's focus on sensation when it conflates feelings and facts. The truth lies in what you feel, not in what you know "in your head," much less in what you can prove, personal development experts say. In this culture, feelings of abuse become evidence of abuse, as if rape or sexual harassment were ineffable realities, like the mystic's sense of oneness with God.

Like fiction writers whose imaginings aim to reveal emotional truths, recovery movement gurus, experts on angels, and other aficionados of New Age, as well as adherents of mainstream religions, traffic in "feeling realities." They exhort us ultimately to rely on our hearts, not our heads, to heed the voice of our own experience, as well as the alleged experiences of others who testify before us, to ignore the naysaying of science or reason--except that, unlike fiction writers, the experts on God, spirituality, and personal development claim to be dispensing actual facts--about incest, reincarnation, or celestial civilizations, the utopian future of humankind, the coming of the Messiah, or the divinity of Jesus Christ.

There is some irony in this relationship between popular therapy, established religion, and New Age spiritualism. (I consider the latter a form of religion.) Popular therapy generally focuses on individual health or fulfillment and promotes belief in relative, individual realities, assuming that diametrically opposed perceptions of the same people or events may be equally true: generally, it resists choosing between conflicting accounts of siblings who experience and describe their families differently (although believers in the ubiquity of child abuse will choose the claims of accusers over the doubts and denials of other family members). Organized religion and diffuse spirituality movements represent the contrary quest for absolutes: individual experience is exalted when it leads us to a presumptively universal truth--like the existence of an omniscient, transcendent being, or inevitability of reincarnation.

In other words, to the extent that therapy focuses on self-actualization, it tends to imbue the subjective with normative value: it uncovers the self. For religion, the value of subjective perception tends to be primarily instrumental: it leads us to God.

Yet the relativism of therapy has become the handmaiden of religious or spiritual absolutism. The therapeutic culture teaches us to believe or at least take seriously impassioned reports of personal experiences, from the mundane to the miraculous. And, thanks partly to the recovery movement, the practice of therapy itself has become spiritualized, focusing on "care of the soul" as well as the psyche.

The marriage of psychology and religion is hardly new. William James presided over it, quite brilliantly, one hundred years ago. The coupling was inevitable. Images of God and various "spiritual entities" are inextricably bound with our own self-images, and as James observed, religions begin with "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude . . ." This...

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Verlag
Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
067944243X
ISBN 13 
9780679442431
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
278
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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