(This review has been rewritten since it was first published. A more extensive review appears in my own Web log).
Wendy Kaminer's book, "Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety" is interesting. She says that her objective is to write against irrationalism but I see this book more as an examination of how the New Age is becoming, in effect, a significant minority religion in America.
Wendy Kaminer was a lawyer in New York, and a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly. She seems to be a writer and a social critic. She appears to be a fairly typical Eastern liberal intellectual. Her writing is rich and dense. I have the impression that she has reworked magazine articles and essay into a more coherent form, and I think she hasn't completely succeeded. She repeats some ideas, and some of the arguments are a bit disorganised.
She doesn't come across as a hardline atheist or enemy of religion. She seems to be more of a free-thinker and skeptic. She seems to be concerned to promote a secular public space in which religious values are respected but kept private except to the extent that they coincide with broadly accepted values that support a peaceful secular society. She does clearly say several times that she finds that New Age gurus and the priests, ministers and rabbis of organized religion tend to profess equally irrational beliefs.
She skewers the writers and readers of come-and-go bestsellers like "The Celestine Prophecy" and "Mutant Message from Down Under," and writer-lecturers like Neil Donald Walsch and Marianne Williamson. She points out that these writers are cashing in, big-time by spiritual teachings that make people feel good about themselves. She also deals with the relatively incoherent, vaguely Hindu ideas of the New Age. She points out that many New Age writers encourage people to accept and tolerate evil in the world as part of karma or destiny. She points out that some writers have condoned murder because murder victims are in agreement with their murderers on an eternal, cosmic level!
She goes on to look at the lecture and training programs for personal growth. She asks the question about why Americans appear to be ready to place their trust in this stuff so easily. She nails the renegade ex-Catholic hippie priest Matthew Fox for his vague and rambling theories and his efforts to sacralize New Age values within the Christian tradition. Some New Age writers like Neil Donald Walsch make grandiose claims of direct communication with the divine. Some New Age gurus, in her experience, are very sensitive about their own teachings and react very badly to criticism. She says "In a culture preoccupied with self-esteem, megalomania is a virtue, I guess."
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Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
She seems to be more concerned to promote a secular public space in which religious values are respected but kept private except to the extent that they coincide with broadly accepted values that support a peaceful secular society.
Where is this society located? At some Atheist Disney World? The whole idea of Kaminer and her tiny troops deciding which religious values are acceptable and which aren't -- particularly in a country as super-religious as this one -- is so presumptuous as to be repugnant. What's the matter with religious values which grossly offend the secularists who have wandered into the public space? This is a democracy; ideas, tastes and values are SUPPOSED to clash, and should. Kaminer is a witty writer, but she represents a kind of smug, we'll-tell-you-what's-good-for-you strain of liberalism.
2 - Tony Dalmyn
Rodney Welch, you make it clear in comment number 1 that you disagrees with Kaminer's liberal perspective or her smug tone. Are you saying that in a "super-religious" America, liberals can't criticize religion? Kaminer treats the New Age scornfully, but she isn't burning witches.