More cults, you say? Really?

About that NYT article, “The Cult Deficit” by Ross Douthat, which has been making its rounds on my social media feeds lately:

It’s a fun article; I quoted it on my own FB feed as well, along with a cheeky comment that I’d like to start my own cult because I’m tired of being poor.

Douthat’s thesis appears to be as follows:

The decline of cults, while good news for anxious parents of potential devotees, might actually be a worrying sign for Western culture, an indicator not only of religious stagnation but of declining creativity writ large.

And this is so because:

A wild fringe… is often a sign of a healthy, vital center, and a religious culture that lacks for charismatic weirdos may lack “a solid core of spiritual activism and inquiry” as well.

But the argument is really a load of flappery. The central problem of today is not “the decline in creativity writ large”, as Douthat thinks. Just browse through Kickstarter for ten minutes to see that the world is never at a loss for creative people.

The real problem is something like this. “Modernism”, the world view of capitalism, democracy, individualism, human rights, technological progress, and scientific rationality, promised us all a better life: a life of freedom, prosperity, scientific and cultural discovery, world peace, and social justice. But modernism delivered that better life only to some of us; the majority of modernism’s beneficiaries are the rich. Even the middle class hasn’t benefited overmuch from modernity, except that middle class people have bigger houses and more toys. Since the Great Depression, but perhaps most noticeably only now, the middle class has been disappearing. And as is now well known, most young people today cannot expect a material standard of life that’s better than what their parents had, for the first time since the industrial revolution. To most of us, modernity delivered the rat race, punctuated occasionally by bread and circuses. As well as wage slavery, middle-east warfare, religious extremism, global warming, misogyny, racism, you get the idea. These problems have always been with us, obviously; but the point is that modernism was supposed to eradicate them. Or seriously contain them. And it hasn’t. Not nearly as well as was promised.

I don’t think that starting a new cult is the answer. No one wants to go back to the days of guru “Osho” launching chemical weapons attacks on American towns. And I don’t think that re-writing the meaning of the word “cult” will help either. The public just won’t buy it.

The only point in Douthat’s nutty argument that seems sensible to me is the idea which he borrowed from Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, that people should recover the belief that “there are major secrets left to be uncovered, insights that existing institutions have failed to unlock (or perhaps forgotten), better ways of living that a small group might successfully embrace.”

This proposition, interesting as I find it, has a subtext. Thiel advances it because he wants to build a floating island city where he and his fellow Libertarians can live a government-free, regulation-free, moral-responsibility-free life. I don’t see how this is meaningfully different from any of the beard-and-sandals cults of the 1970’s, except maybe that his island will have corporate sponsorship. Perhaps this floating island techno-utopia is precisely the “cult” that Douthat has in mind. If Thiel succeeds, he’ll create another gated community for the rich, and more rat-race bread-and-circuses for the rest of us. It will certainly not be part of a creative “wild fringe” (Douthat’s words) because it will still presuppose important mainstream values of the “centre”: especially individualism, capitalism, and technological progress.

But we probably do need a radical re-thinking of what it means to be “modern”. We do need to take a serious look at why modernity hasn’t delivered the goods it promised, not to everyone. And we do need to imagine that there are new possibilities for human life that have not yet been explored, but which creative and thoughtful people might experiment with, and discover.

We don’t have to create new cults, nor build floating islands, to do that.

(Unless your cult will have me as its leader. Ha!)