Today I woke up to the welcome news that Oprah Winfrey may be ending her TV show before long.
It may surprise you that I would react favorably to this development, inasmuch as Oprah has had good things to say about paranormal phenomena, and has sometimes used her show to spotlight books on the subject. And it's true that in this regard, she has probably played a positive role.
But to my way of thinking, any praise she's earned for being open to psi is more than outweighed by the dim-witted New Agery that is too often on display on her program.
There is a difference between having an interest in psi and being a New Ager. To me, the New Age movement (with some exceptions) is intellectually vacuous, empty of critical thinking, stupidly conformist, and, at times, dangerously naive. The whole cult of self-esteem - the encouragement to feel good about yourself just because you're you – leaves me cold. Self-esteem can be a good thing, but unchecked it can easily metastasize into narcissism. New Agery is grossly narcissistic, and for years Oprah has been the narcissist in chief.
The dumbness of New Agery is summed up by the stunning success of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, a pulpish action novel dressed up with pseudo-scholarly "revelations" about the secret history of Christianity. Though Brown's claims have been thoroughly debunked and his sources are no more reliable than Graham Hancock's "alternate history" tomes, millions of readers ate up Da Vinci, treating it as a religious experience in its own right. When something that silly can be taken seriously by so many people, we see clear evidence of the debilitating effects of New Agery on our culture.
One reason I'm drawn mainly to psi research from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is that investigators of that era were less likely to be infected with New Agery, and accordingly more likely to retain their critical reasoning skills. Today we have too many writers like P.M.H. Atwater, who seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. In 2005 I posted a reader review of Atwater's book Children of the New Millennium on the Amazon sales page. I titled my review "Deteriorates into Nonsense." An excerpt:
Atwater blends UFOs, alien abductions, genetic modification, folklore, channeling, and wacky predictions in a fruity melange of New Age craziness. Here's a typical quote:
"A contemporary voice on the subject of the new race aborning in our time is Gordon-Michael Scallion. He is known as an intuitive futurist and modern-day prophet … It was he who several years ago affirmed that the fifth root race [i.e., the alleged next phase of human evolution] is the blue race and linked it with the then soon-to-appear blue star, which he later identified as the comet Hale-Bopp. He associated the manifestation of both of these developments with Christian beliefs about the Second Coming of Christ, and also with the Native American prophesy of the White Buffalo and the portentous 1994 birth, in Jamesville, Wisconsin, of an all-white female buffalo calf …" (pp. 211-212)
… Atwater's silly book cheapens the field and undercuts the serious work done by others. Read it for amusement only.
Another Amazon customer, writing in 2001, felt the same way:
Essentially, the author contends that in order to bring on the next stage in human evolution, aliens are abducting children who have had near-death experiences and altering their DNA in order to create a human super-race….
[S]he asserts that globally, children born after 1982 are the most educated, smartest ever. And to support this she offers the following quote from a "Mexican Pediatrician": "The new crop of infants are coming in more aware…eyes focused and alert, necks strong, lying in bassinets no bigger than chickens and with a knowingness I can not describe. They are very special babies this new crop." …
Later she describes this "crop" of children as the "Blue Race", because they represent the 5th of 7 (why did I know there were going to be 7?) stages in human evolution…. To lend support here she quotes another author as follows: "All children born after '98 shall be telepathic at birth. The physical body shall change to reflect the vibrational changes of Earth under the influence of the Blue Star…All races of people shall have a bluish tint to the skin as a result." She goes on to say these children will have mastered multiple languages by age 2 and will live 200 years….
Ultimately this is just a terrible, terrible, jumbled discombobulated amalgamation of loony metaphysical yammerings – masquerading as research. The only thing "near-death" in this book is the author's reasoning ability!
Bingo.
Atwater is hardly alone. There is a plethora of dumb books aimed at the New Age audience – everything from Sylvia Browne to Erich von Daniken. Oprah may not have endorsed every nutty, scatterbrained New Age celebrity-author and would-be pop guru, but it's not for lack of trying. Instead of encouraging serious, intellectually rigorous investigation of the paranormal, she has promoted airy-fairy, feel-good emotionalism.
Bye-bye, Oprah. Like Shirley MacLaine, you've done enough damage for one lifetime.