MM#306--The Strange Rites of the 21st Century

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. If you were hoping for a much lighter and easier Mojo Minute today, after we had tackled the philosophy of Renee Descartes last time, if you were hoping for that much easier, light-hearted affair today, well, well, I am sad to say, you will be vastly disappointed, because we are indeed staying in the deep end of the pool today and we're going to be learning about the hard things, the things that make us uncomfortable about our world, about our culture. Today we're going to be covering a very I guess I should say interesting or intriguing book that I had just started reading and I just had to bring it to your attention. The title is Strange Writes New Religions for a Godless World by Tara Isabella Burton. It was written back in 2020. This book kind of flew under the radar screen for most folks at least, I believe but the trade paper back just came out in 2022. That's when I discovered it and I'm now just getting around to reading it. So, as we say, in terms of staying in the deep end of the pool, we're going to be looking and searching for those nuggets of wisdom and let's go right to the book for our first pull quote for our first nugget of wisdom, it's the end of 2018. It's three in the morning, in the middle of a rave. We're in the McKittrick Hotel Equal Parts Warehouse, performance, artspace, bar and Party venue in the heart of Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. 10 or 20 years ago this used to be a different sort of nightclub, populated by quote freaks and crackheads, as one regular put it, in the heart of New York City's Club Row, the sort of place where people did coke on the bathroom line, had sex in the stalls and ended up on page six Quote we'd find people passed out in the bathroom. One former employee of the West 27th Street Club said you would think it was a dead body. Passed out like scary. Passed out like smack them, pick them up. Like they're Jell-O, like someone took their spine out, passed out, and then on the street you would literally see people face down in the gutter. Someone else called the neighborhood quote a Disney land for drunks, but the place is different now. You might even say a little bit more sacred. It's still a party. People are still drunk. One or two may still be having sex in the bathrooms. Some are definitely making out on the dance floor. One of the performers on stage dressed in a Baroque costume that's equal parts. Marie Antoinette and diabolical siren is singing. God is a woman and everyone is screaming along and Joyce collective ever vessence because they and she really believe this. The theme of the party is vaguely inspired by the Odyssey and by the sirens, and they're called to self defeating decadence. Because of this, there is candy everywhere, streaming from false cobwebbed cattle bras for guests to eat a playful riff on the idea of ubiquitous from the Greek myth of Persephone to the book of Genesis, that eating something illicit traps you in the world of death. Almost every single person in this building and there are about a thousands is taking a selfie. Whoa, we have a lot there. There is a lot going on there, but as we are searching for the truth, let's keep our blinders on and keep our investigative reporter hat squared away on top of our head as we venture forward Going back to the book. But in the middle of all, this revelry is something profound. Whether its participants are fully aware of it or not, they are in the middle of a religious ritual. More than that, it's one of the most representative religious rituals of our so-called secular age, a place where faith and fantasy, art and irony, capitalism and creation converge. We are at the holy of holies for the religiously unaffiliated, the fastest growing religious demographic in America. The spiritual but not the religious. The religious mix. It matches the theologically by and tricurious. Who attend Shabbat services but also do yoga, who cleanse with a sage but also sing silent night at Christmas time. Throughout America already, the religiously unaffiliated make up about a quarter of the population. Almost 40% of them are young millennials. Here in the middle of hipster New York, those numbers are wildly higher. And now we're getting to our first negative wisdom. Let's go back to the book for that. But here, at this rave, we aren't just watching the rise of the nuns, as this phenomenon is often called. Rather, it's a collective celebration, what the sociologist Emile Amille Durkheim once termed the collective ever-vesence that defines religion of a new eclectic, chaotic and thoroughly quintessentially American religion. A religion of emotive intuition, of an ethicized and codified experience of self-creation, of self-improvement and yes, self-ease. A religion for a new generation of Americans raised to think of themselves both as capitalist consumers and as content creators. A religion decoupled from the institutions, from the creeds, from metaphysical truth, claims about God or the universe or the way things are, but still seeks in various and varying ways, to provide us with the pillars of what religion always has meaning, purpose, community and ritual. And there you go the nuns, the phenomenon of those religiously unaffiliated, those that are pushing back against authority whatsoever, those that are pushing back against any institutional religion or any creed or, as Tara coined the term, against any metaphysical truth. After all, who needs Rene Descartes or Aristotle or Augustine or, for that matter, st Thomas Aquinas, as the back of the book led me to believe? All human beings should be able to choose from a menu of choices. If you want your religion to be part soul cycle, part social justice movement and part burning man, who am I or anyone else to tell you that you're absolutely crazy and you're just simply acting as your own God? But I digress. After all, our Holy Father in Rome tells us who am I to judge? So who are we to judge that your soul cycle, sprinkled in with some social justice warrior, topped with that burning man whipped cream, is the perfect religion for you or for me? Now I hope you notice my sarcasm on this latest New Age sacrament. But let's not bail just yet on this book. Let's turn down another hallway to see more of what the Mechitrick party can give to us. After all, it's a religious ritual, and let's see what's more taking place. Whether you're a super fan or a novice of one of the Mechitrick parties, you'll notice a reoccurring theme embedded in the dance, numbers, songs, stories and exclusive one-on-ones specially designed for each event. The Mechitrick has a distinct and consistent ideological system underpinning its plays and parties alike. The world was a darkly magical place. Hecate and her witches were pulling the strings. They'd seduce uptight virgins and make them into mononades. They'd eat their hearts and lick their bones. The witches were evil, sure, but they were also fun, the way Milton's Satan was fun. Hecate's signature appearance, the revival At almost I'm sorry, the reveal at almost every party that she and her witches, witchy alkylights, were behind some incident or another, engendered applause, not offense. After all, hecate is cool. In the world of the show At least. She stands for personal freedom, for bodily atomity, for sexual agency and empowerment, for unabashed, unapologetic being. She doesn't just break the rules, she makes her own. She tricks that silly haunty Macbeth ironically, the actual Macbeth's feature little in the fandom into throwing away his life in a feudal power conquest. She wears a basket red dress with a black ostrich trim. She is sexy, she's living her best life. We're supposed to side with the witches, at least secretly. When we celebrate Hecate and her witches, when we scream along as confetti pours down from the warehouse roof, we're celebrating her agency, our agency to live freely. And then later we read about Shelly Going back to the book. From one vantage point, shelly's act was quite simple. She was a fan playing around with the themes of her favorite media property, not so different from dressing as a character from Star Trek or Buffy at Comic Con, although even these, as we'll see, are deeply imbued with religious significance. But seen another way, what Shelly was doing well was extremely 2019. At three in the morning, at the heart of a $100 ticketed rave dedicated celebrating the sexual subversion and empowerment, potentially of a witchcraft, at a theater space that started the national craze for experimental, enchanted and Instagramable performances, bolstered by an internet fueled fan culture obsessed with creating newer and ever more elaborate symbolic rituals in search of an intimacy and a meaning, in a homecoming flanked by a close-knit community of superfans who have devoted tens of thousands of dollars to uncovering the mysteries of this enchantment, shelly created a religious, but not really, but actually kind of yes ritual that spoke to what sinners. I'm sorry that spoke to what people really, really needed. She blessed the sinners in her words and the sinners embraced her. Thank you. So what about all this? Let's wrap up what we know from the book about Shelley and the McKittrick party. I went back to the book, but the story of Shelley and McKittrick and its super fans, however seemingly fringe and specific, is also the story of religious sensibility of a whole generation. It's the story not just of the religious nuns but of an even broader category those who aren't rejecting religion and here's our nugget of wisdom but rather remixing it. It's the story how more and more Americans, and are particularly how more and more millennials, envision themselves as creators of their own bespoke religions, mixing and matching spiritual and aesthetic and experimental and philosophical traditions. It gets better, the remixed hunger for the same things. Human beings have always longed for a sense of meaning in the world and a personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with and the rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable everyday life. But they're doing it differently, or at least I think they are. More on that in the coming chapters. Today's remixed reject authority, institution, creed and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling and experiences. They demand to rewrite their own scripts about how the universe human beings operate, shaped by the twined forces of a creative, communicative internet and consumer capitalism. Today's remixed Don't want to receive doctrine to assent automatically to a creed. They want to choose and more often than not, purchase the spiritual path that feels more authentic and more meaningful to them. They prioritize institutional spirituality over institutional religion and they want, when available institutional options fail to suit their needs, the freedom to mix and match, to create their own daily rituals and practices and belief systems. And there we go. Today's remixed, as Tara so coins the term. They reject authority, institution, creed and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling and experiences. They want to write their own script. Like we said earlier, they want their soul force sprinkled in with their social justice warrior and topped with a little burning man. And maybe, if you're into it, you could do some hot yoga too. You get to pick your own religion, your own rituals, your own practice. Hmm, when I originally picked up this book, I thought we would have a detailed investigative reporter objectively looking at all these new strange rights and help us to see what they see and what we're all seeing anywhere and everywhere. But I was wrong. No matter. Let's finish searching for what can be a salvageable series, perhaps of a nugget or two of wisdom and of truth. Let's go back to the book for some final quotes. From soul cycle to contemporary occultism, from obsessive fan culture to the polyamorous and the kink based intentional communities of our new sexual revolution, from wellness culture to the reactionary, activist alt-right, today's American religious landscape is teeming with new claimants to our sense of meaning, our social place, our time and our wallets. Listen to this If you've ever been to a yoga studio or a CrossFit class, ever practiced self-care with a 10-step Korean beauty routine or a Gwyneth Paltrow-sanctioned juice cleanse, ever written or read internet fan fiction? Ever compared your spiritual outlook to a Dungeons Dragons classification quote lawful, good, chaotic, evil or your personal temperament to that of a Hogwarts house? Ever challenged your sense of cosmic purpose into social justice activism? Ever tried to biohack yourself or use a meditation app like Headspace? Ever negotiated personal relationship roles be they kink or ethical non-monogamy with a partner? Ever cleansed a house with a sage or ever been weary of a person's toxic energy? You participated in some of these trends and there are more. Just you wait and we'll get to that, holy smokes. So, yes, as I got close to the end of this first chapter, I was I knew we were going down a cul-de-sac, so to speak, that this book was not going to end. Well, this is all. In case you haven't guessed it, this is all just old Gnosticism, pure and simple. Repackaged, has a different cover on the top, but it's all repackaged and it's just the new Gnosticism. You can become your own God, you can create your own rituals, you can live your life as you see fit, because you are no longer the creature you believe, you are the creator. That is what all these long, long run on sentences from somebody who probably went to an Ivy League university and probably took four or five English classes. When I read all these sentences, I'm just begging for a period to be put in somewhere, because they just go on and on and on with commas everywhere. Now, I'm not the most astute English major and I know I certainly don't write the best, but my Lord, somebody help her to put a period halfway through most of her sentences. So we have just one more quote, and this quote will bring it all home. It will tidy it up with a big bow on top. Let's hammer through this jungle of a paragraph. This book is, in large part, about charlatans. It's about capitalism and corporations in the new cutthroat Silicon Valley of spirituality. It's about people who want to sell us, meaning, brand our purpose, custom produced, community tailor, make rituals, commodify our very humanity. Yes, we got a period. It's about how the internet and consumer capitalism alike have produced experimentally satiating substitutes many, though not all of them poor for well-developed ethical, moral and metaphysical systems. It's about the denatured selfishness of self-care and the way in which call out culture at its worst serves as psychic methadone, providing us with a brief and illusionary hit of moral belonging. And if that doesn't sound like Kamala Harris with word salad on steroids, I'm not sure what does. Again, this is the new Gnosticism, and we do need to understand what the nuns are doing, what the nuns are craving. I'm not sure rave party at the 27th street, mckettrick hotel or party venue is getting us closer to the truth, but we now know that there is a subculture out there that is rivaling the late 60s and early 70s in terms of their decadence. So, in today's mojo minute, if you thought there were strains rights some 50 to 75 years ago in our American landscape. Well, you now have a second version coming that is rivaling the pagan cultures that we only read about some 2000 years ago.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at team mojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.