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Section 14 of 14
The Modern Landscape
New Age, manifestation, wellness culture and what spirituality became after the internet.
This section covers what happened to spirituality once it entered the market and then the feed:
the New Age, manifestation and the law of attraction, channelled teaching, wellness culture,
UFO religions, "spiritual but not religious", and the particular shape all of this takes online.
It is the hardest section to write fairly, for two reasons.
The first is that most of it is very recent, and recent things are easy to sneer at. A practice
that has been going for two thousand years gets treated as a tradition; the same practice with a
subscription and a podcast gets treated as a scam. Some of that difference is real and some of it is
snobbery, and this section tries to say which is which rather than assuming.
The second is that this is where the commercial and psychological harms concentrate. Not because
the people involved are worse, but because the structures are different. A village healer answered
to the village. An online teacher answers to an algorithm that rewards certainty, urgency and
scale. The relevant analysis is in
Discernment & Harm, and this section leans on it constantly.
Three things are worth saying at the outset.
Much of what is called "ancient wisdom" here is nineteenth-century American. The law of
attraction, positive thinking, the idea that thought produces material reality — these come from
New Thought in the 1880s, not from the Vedas or from Egypt. The
attributions are usually sincere and usually wrong, and knowing the actual lineage is the single
most useful thing a reader can take from this section.
The needs being met are real. Loneliness, grief, the loss of inherited religion, illness that
medicine cannot fix, a genuine hunger for meaning and for community. Anyone who explains this
territory purely as gullibility has not explained anything.
And the boundary that matters is not belief, it is what a practice asks of you. A person who
lights a candle and sets an intention is not doing something this site has any comment on. A person
being told that their cancer returned because their vibration was low is being harmed, and the fact
that both use the same vocabulary is exactly why this section exists.