The term New Age works somewhat like the term weed. A weed is a flower in the wrong place as they say. New Age is what the other believes. It's what you, the smart scholar, don't touch with a bargepole.
In particular, there's an intellectual assault on self-care, eudaimonism applied to the self in particular. Who knows how long this has been going on, but I suppose it's probably a post-Reformation reflex.
We were talking in my undergrad class last week about how elegy works through grief, and we got into this area of self-care. I guess I probably said something like “ ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ means you have to know how to love yourself.” You could quite easily see tears in some of the students' eyes. I think this is because in our Puritan culture (yes folks even now during maximum consumerist wipe-out) some people in the class had never heard of such a notion.
Quite a lot of intellectual issues, which appear to be to do with the other, dissolve once one begins some kind of appropriate feedback to oneself. The technical term for this feedback is narcissism. Only wounded narcissism would use the term narcissist as a weapon.
Remember that in a sense OOO objects are narcissists. They turn inward, hardly touching other objects except through the sensual ether. Yet we are intimate with this narcissists, they are under our skin—they are our skin.
No comments:
Post a Comment