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Whether leftist, rightist or none of the above, the New Age has attracted a fair amount of criticism on philosophical and ethical grounds. "A lot of it is a cop-out, an escape from reality, an anti-intellectual movement denying rationality," says Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. "The New Age movement reflects anxieties of one sort or another -- the threat of nuclear warfare, the President running a vigilante action out of the White House, nurses accused of killing patients. People look at all this and say, 'If this is the Establishment, then I don't want this. I want something else, something I can trust.' It's people latching onto a belief system to get certainty where there is no certainty."
"It's a religion without being a religion," says Robert J.L. Burrows, publications editor of the evangelical Spiritual Counterfeits Project in Berkeley. "Humans are essentially religious creatures, and they don't rest until they have some sort of answer to the fundamental questions. Rationalism and secularism don't answer those questions. But you can see the rise of the New Age as a barometer of the disintegration of American culture. Dostoyevsky said anything is permissible if there is no God. But anything is also permissible if everything is God. There is no way of making any distinction between good and evil."
Douglas Groothuis, a research associate at a Christian think tank called Probe Center Northwest and author of Unmasking the New Age, raises a similar objection. "Once you've deified yourself," he says, "which is what the New Age is all about, there is no higher moral absolute. It's a recipe for ethical anarchy. I see it as a counterfeit religious claim. It's both messianic and millennial."
Though Groothuis is now writing a second book, Confronting the New Age, about the movement's inroads into business and education, it is probably wise to remember that phenomena like the New Age have to some extent been a part of the American scene ever since there was an American scene. Remember the 18th century Shaker leader, Mother Ann Lee, whose followers believed she represented the second coming of Christ. Remember Mary Baker Eddy, severely injured by a fall on the ice, who became cured while reading a passage in St. Matthew and thereafter taught the unreality of all physical ills. Spiritualism was the rage of the 1850s, and a heroine of Henry James' The Bostonians went into mesmeric trances to gather recruits for the cause of feminism. Walt Whitman believed in transmigration of the soul -- "And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,/ (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)" -- and so did the practical-minded Thomas Alva Edison.
Remember Madame Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society and revealed the secrets of the universe in Isis Unveiled. There were sightings of spaceships in the 1890s, at a time when no American had ever seen an airplane, much less an Apollo rocket, but then as now a century was coming to an end. Mars was once widely believed to be inhabited by little green men, so when Orson Welles declared on the radio in 1938 that space invaders had landed, much of the nation went into a panic. And do not forget The Search for Bridey Murphy. Or the fad of talking to plants. Plus ca change . . .