4.1 New Age Movements
Last modified 05/26/2008
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One of the orphans of modernity is the flood of New Age movements that has
entered the secular sphere in the wake of the modern transition. We must be
wary of passing snap judgments on this cultural phenomenon, but at the same time
note the curious light thrown on this by the analysis we have given of the eonic
effect, hence of the Axial Age. As noted the attempts to posit a second Axial
Age, and then proceed with an eclectic set of recombinations of Indian religion,
while perfectly legitimate logically, is not likely to foot the bill. The reason
we begin to see is obvious. They lack the first stage rocket thrust given by the
frustratingly anomalous or seemingly ad hoc character of the modern transition
which produces a Protestant Reformation and then proceeds in another direction
altogether. Nonetheless this reserve potential from antiquity does, despite its
often wrong self-evaluation, is a phenomenon to be reckoned with, because it
often carries the memory of religion prior to the ossified formats yielded in
the great religions.
We should say at once that the disparate character of the New Age movements is a perfectly good example of the secular at work! The narrow character, at first sight, of the modern transition at first seems to condemn these movements as some kind of remnant pool of superstition. But this misses the point. The secular is simply a sphere of dialectical discourse, and a sort of Grand Central station wherein the streams of greater antiquity are challenged to reconsider themselves and their claims on the future, a 'sorting out of one's affairs'. The secular is more than an 'ism' and the outstanding complexity of world history and its cultures is not resolved in the rapid fire thrust of the modern transition which sets a stage and then stops. The point for this discussion is that these New Age movements correctly sense the 'new age' effect of modernity, but then in a quirky 'postmodern' mood seem to react against that 'new age effect' with a frequently retrograde effort to restore the religious mindset of antiquity, frequently that of the immense tradition of Indian religion. The question of Indian religion is a huge one, and we see that it has a solid anchor in the Axial parallelism of the classical period. Thus one of the oddities, at first sight, of modernity, is the way it seems to bypass that, with a dangerously Eurocentric focus. In fact, a more detailed study of the eonic effect will suggest merely that the eonic sequence having done one thing will never repeat itself, and the hopes of second Axial transformation of the Indian stream after the fashion of the Axial Buddhism is not likely to occur. That says nothing about the future of Buddhism or anything else, save only that the thrust of the modern transition will not grant its extra momentum to any renewal of the phenomena of Axial religion. That leaves the issue to spontaneous efforts, sui generis, outside the eonic sequence. What the fate of such will be is simply a question for the future, but we can only suspect chaotification to be the result. Later we will look at the figure of Schopenhauer (a direct descendant of Kant!) whose writings almost instantly solve the philosophical or metaphysical issues that confound the lore of Indian religion. This sudden, almost evanescent, philosophical gesture shows, once again, how our modern secular transition is full of surprises and resolves the question of religion and secularism at an almost subliminal level. New Age indeed! |
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