The New Calvinism
It’s interesting that the manifestation movement became mainstream around the time that the great rug-pull of globalization began to seriously affect the economic stability of millions of Americans.
The prevailing ideology in any culture is one that serves its reigning economic system, concealing the truth of its power relations and its real aims, veiling them with a so pervasive that it seems to be objective, undeniable truth. So the enterprise of empire, for example, is cloaked in an ideology of liberation and development. So, the British ‘civilized’ India, and the French ‘enlightened’ Africa. The Chinese ‘liberated’ the Tibetans from feudalism, and the US is ‘bringing democracy’ to Iraq. These myths of charitable endeavor hide the real thuggery and resource-grabbing.
Today’s American population has grown up with an ideology of meritocracy, and the sticky carrot of the American dream: thin lies varnishing the truth, which is that our jobs are managed by self-interested, over-paid CEOs who slash at an already demoralised workforce, in the abstract interests of the ‘bottom-line’. Eager and poorer populations in cheaper countries will do our jobs for a fraction of what we are paid, and we have no corporate ethics other than money, so outsourcing and lay-offs are logical. However well you do your job, you’re still in a position of ever greater insecurity. In fact, as Barbara Ehrenreich has shown, doing well in your job is a great way to terminate your career. The more you get promoted, the more expensive you become, and so…the closer you are to the next round of layoffs.
Our pensions are not secure. Nor is our healthcare. Now we have the Meltdown, and on a global level, the death of the planet looms. It is in this climate that the myth of manifestation has emerged. The ultimate ideology of denial. It’s no surprise that this new Calvinism has emerged in the US, where in these end-days of Capitalism, the gross bubble of endless expansion is about to burst.
In the old days, if you were fortunate enough to enjoy wealth and health and happiness, you felt grateful to God or good luck Nowadays however, with the new Calvinism, if you are well off, it’s because you manifested it. People who haven’t been so lucky have only themselves to blame–clearly they have sabotaged themselves with their own negativity. They didn’t believe. Or they didn’t let go. Or they had an unconscious fear which attracted exactly what they were scared of. It all comes down to lack of faith on their part.
But you don’t want to spend time with them, since focusing on the negative will bring down your energy. Don’t think of the unpleasant, don’t linger in their misery, do not look at their unhappy state. It’s too dangerous for your personal prosperity.
Ah, it fits so well with our situation. It presents a mirror-image of the truth: that here simply is not enough to go round, not at the rate at which we have been consuming the planet’s resources. Our US lifestyle will get downscaled dramatically now that other major economies have started to drain equivalent levels of resources. Which is a truth we don’t like to look at because we are scared of what we’ll see if we do.
So instead, we turn to magical thinking, clinging to a new fairytale of entitlement, in which we have the power to make anything happen, just by believing it. In which we need never lack for anything, and in which we will not suffer any loss.
This ideology is not only dangerous, occluding as it does the real state of things, but it is also offensive to those who have seen their lives swept away through no fault of their own. I do not believe that the Jews of Europe manifested concentration camps, or that the people of Rwanda manifested the deaths of their families and friends. I do not believe that the people of New Orleans, who have been ripped off in the full light of day by their own government, lacked the ability to imagine the life they would want.
It is true that without faith and effort, you will get nowhere. But it is not true that your thoughts create the world, and that your reality is merely a function of your mind. Politics and prejudice and dice stacked in advance have their part. There are realities in this world which are fact, and which cannot be got round.
There is something insufferably arrogant about the manifestation lobby. Something smug and self-grooming and revoltingly entitled. It is simply not true that those who have been damn unlucky have had less faith, and tried less hard, than those who are rich, healthy and well-married.
I prefer the way of my parents’ and their parents’ generation, who thanked their lucky stars when things went well, and quietly helped out their neighbors when they were down on their luck because there, for the grace of god, went we.
Tags: business, culture, economics, misc, politics, spirituality
Nov 05, 2008
Your article could also be titled “choices”. As you have illustrated at the end of the day it is the choices we make which determine much of what we experience. Clearly if you can choose between driving an gas guzzling SUV with the understanding that fossil fuels are a limited resource you are making a choice. The net effect of many such choices creates the conditions we experience as a society.
Is it possible that the things which manifest in our lives are simply the end product of the choices we make?
The idea that we create our own reality by the manifestation of positive or negative thoughts may have some merit when seen from a certain point of view. Positive or negative perceptions can have powerful influences on reality as is illustrated by the reaction of stock markets to actual news or even rumor. The manifestation of emotion is a real and practical thing.
The bigger question always remains, what drives us to make the choices we do? How it it that certain perceptions continue to manifest themselves as positive or negative behaviors throughout time, across cultures over and over again. Is the principal question we need to address something as basic as are we fearful or optimistic? Could the idea of manifestation be nothing more complicated than a self fulfilling prophesy – I wonder?
Nov 05, 2008
With regime change has come a new challenge, to speak to the good in individuals in the hope of signing up cooperation on a smaller scale, as opposed to coercion on a larger scale.
I am part of a group in Portland called ReCode Portland. Our first priority is to make gray-water recycling more practiced and legal. Portland has combined sewer overflows (CSO’s) which put horrific stuff including raw sewage directly in the Willamette River.
A big pipe project, which has cost huge amounts, was mandated by the federal government. It has not solved the problem and the sewer system could break in an earthquake anyway, as could water mains.
We need people out in the neighborhoods who can explain how to cope should an emergency happen, and who are saving water they could share in such a time. Doing this is good for now, even if an emergency never happens.
This would be an example of distributed wealth, as opposed to a monoculture-convenience outlook. Often from a huge government point of view, monoculture is less trouble. Important people don’t want to be bothered by pesky little people and details.
Monoculture-convenience looks tidy and neat to some (boring to others), but it is subject to boom-and-bust and all sorts of inconvenience over a long term.
Monoculture is convenient for the insects that like one kind of plant and who adjust quickly to toxins. It can be inconvenient to other kinds of insects often called beneficials in the permaculture world.
Encouraging water-saving on site makes sense and saves money for the individuals who do this. It also means water may be saved for emergency use on a block-by-block basis, accessible for daily necessary use and for fire suppression, should fire be a contingency.
Initially, a local weekly labeled ReCoders as Rogues of the Week, because diaper water might get used on somebody’s back yard. This actually brought us a pretty large group, initially, some of whom sort of drifted off. Diaper water on a daisy or on a pine, or feces in a river where some proudly fish–tough choice, eh?
I’m not going to give up chocolate until my last buck, I don’t guess. However, I am learning to grow more of my own stuff, to love winter squash without any sweetening, to compost as much as I can, to buy cooperative-farmed chocolate, to exercise at 58 rather than buying pharmaceuticals. I would rather not have unpleasant side effects in dealing with arthritis and with the consequences of being a double amputee of what so often in this culture defines femininity.
I am not as good at exercising on my own in private as I might aspire to be next year, so I reach out rather than isolating with my exercising. I want the endogenous feel-good biochemicals from exercise, and I want side benefits as opposed to side effects. I am not yet evolved enough to not need being shamed into moving around.
Also, I needed to get a new career after being dumped out of my social-work jobette (Steinem) after 9 years and out of my 28-year wife job. I went back to school for a certificate in fitness technology. The AARP site has said this is something of a pattern for women my age, the running around and working out part.
I am blessed to live in a place where growing your own, scavenging, and running around has so much support, but as a faithful permaculturist, I also try to cross boundaries judiciously. I shake it up with people who think differently, as much as I can without getting too sick.
As green as Portland has a reputation for being, we have our token Hummer-drivers, race-car fanatics, gun-show enthusiasts, tobacco-smokers, and assorted mystifying subcultures.
Re-Coders, when called on it, acknowledged most of us don’t know from guns and given current conditions, maybe we should make friends with some who do, even if their response to the idea of Re-Coding might be a shocking, “Hell, yeah!”
When ReCode looked around for good gray-water legislation in the country, Arizona had a code accessible for retrofitting and ordinary people. But the climate there is so different, it was decided by a lawyer in our group that their code wasn’t right for us. California’s code is complicated and more bureaucratic than we could do here. Washington’s code was thought to be more appropriate for us, and that is the direction where our research is going now.
It isn’t just the relationship of arrogance between the U.S. and the world that we need to address, but also the relationship of the U.S. and its particular places. We need to let places explore what they need based on their ground and not what huge multi-state contractors may want. FERC should not be able to force liquified-natural-gas pipelines on anybody, against local sentiment.
A thorny issue for the new political leaders is that of telling our people that they must take individual responsibility for their personal health and for the health of their land and neighborhoods.
Expecting taxes to subsidize less than best-practice consumption of pharmaceuticals should become less of an entitlement. We have accepted what basically constitutes assisted suicide by legal medications, while some of us have lambasted the idea of compassionate relief of pain.
Relieving pain properly relieves depression and in the end can lead to longer lives, an irony that needs to be explained better by our responsible medical professionals. Relieving pain properly does not mean allowing people to stay on medications beyond the timelines cautioned about in product inserts, and we will need auditors to determine this.
Social workers have a phrase, excess disability. Legions of people are taking so much more medication than they should be, that they cannot even walk unassisted. In some states, a patient or client would be more likely to have lineworkers risk official disdain by pointing this out than in some other states. In fact, this varies from institution to institution as well, within states.
In the law, timing in contracts can be changed because of Acts of God (which has a complicated definition including weather and strikes by labor unions). An individual’s idea of what is best for everybody else is also affected by what is outside the control of that individual (Acts of God, say).
For me, a trick to living healthfully is finding some balance.
I am not as good at detecting when others are being polite rather than honest as I would like to be. I work at figuring out how to speak to the parts of individuals where the yearning to be healthful resides. It’s a challenging business.
Nov 05, 2008
You said,
“So the enterprise of empire, for example, is cloaked in an ideology of liberation and development. So, the British ‘civilized’ India, and the French ‘enlightened’ Africa. The Chinese ‘liberated’ the Tibetans from feudalism, and the US is ‘bringing democracy’ to Iraq. These myths of charitable endeavor hide the real thuggery and resource-grabbing.”
Despite the mythos prevalent in the western US and in left-leaning circles, the US war in Afghanistan and Iraq was a response to:
9/11
the Taliban
Fear of WMD
But, don’t worry about “resource grabbing” yankees in Iraq — Harry Reid I understand blew the US chance to purchase large amounts of Iraqi oil… So the Iraqis, wanting a solid deal, decided to sell their oil to China. By the way, as of November 2008, the surge worked and we are winning the war against insurgency in Iraq. I’m sure that the idea of the US winning a war is pretty disgusting to the left, but it does happen despite the mythos.
***
Now, for the ReCoders in Portland — Good luck to you. I don;’t get what you mean by “monoculture” but iut sounds like neighbors can help each other solve the water problem, and big government (no surprise here) has only expensive and unworkable solutions… As far as the legality, one problem is the bacteria build up that comes with the kind of waste you are talking about and the spread of disease… go back to what people did before, classify which types of waste are safe for the backyard and which types need to be quarantined away from your water sources… then for the heavier waste, come up with a ‘organic’ solution for your organic, and bacteria-laden waste.
Nov 05, 2008
“New Calvinism”?
“Manifestation Movement”
Sounds a lot like the old Calvinism (without the divine intervention on behalf of God’s elect, and without the elect being virtuous) and simple *Blame the Victim* psychology — the same behavior you describe was documented back in the 60’s and 70’s. as for what you call “Manifestation” that you experience the reality that you imagine, yeah this is perfect poppycock. Do you know people who actually believe that?
As far as the ‘gas guzzling SUV’ thing… how does my neighbors gas guzzler hurt me? He’s paying for the gasoline and the taxes on it… and it is, after all, his money to do with as he pleases, isn’t it?
Nov 05, 2008
By monoculture, I meant the growing of vast swaths of the same thing, e.g., wheat for miles and miles, or corn for miles and miles, then shipping the products for miles and miles.
Another choice is to grow gardens with the diverse needs for households, close to where the households are. Within a neighborhood, there will be better niches for this and others for that, but neighbors can trade off with each other for the things that grow better on particular spots.
A goal in Portland is a 20-minute neighborhood, where a person can walk within 20 minutes to get to necessities. A neighbor chose his bank this way, and one day he walked in with a worried look on his face in response to the news. They laughed and said, “Are you worried we wouldn’t be here?” He tentatively said yes, and they reassured him they were OK. A guy at the credit union where I go told me how to check Bankrate.com to see how the credit union stacks up. Without being carefully watched, credit unions can succumb to bad management because most members are too busy to assert the eternal vigilance that is supposed to be the price of freedom.
New levels of caution are needed for taking care of things, but new ways are evolving, I think.
Cuba is a pilot project, to some degree, for ways of growing food. When the Soviets stopped shipping oil there, centralized, fertilized, pestacided ways had to change to back-yard gardens like the victory gardens of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Michael Pollan has urged that we have a Farmer in Chief who will turn White House lawn into garden. I would like to see this.
Some Americans and Australians went to Cuba when the oil stopped there. A movie was made about it. I believe it is called How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. You can buy it on the web.
I may have written some of these stories before here. I don’t want to be unnecessarily repetitive, but I often have to tell myself hopeful things more than once to counteract the other stuff I hear. Skip over if you’ve heard it all before. m