Wendy Kaminer

I have long been frustrated with the self-help movement. To me, all those books out there are saying, "You aren't good enough." And they are written, for the most part, by people who have a limited experience with the wide range of people who might be looking at their book. Writers, in other words, who don't really know what they are talking about.

So I loved finding this book. Although written in the early 1990s it holds true today. Kaminer examines several types of "recovery" movements, show more then moves into other self-help movements. She examines what the authors are saying and determines that most of them contradict themselves, are not based on clear thinking, and, worst of all, encourage a status of victimhood and dependency. "You can't help it." "You need help." "You can't do it alone".

Kaminer is especially ruthless when she discusses how this movement has muddied the waters of what is really abuse. Now any kind of difficulty can be labeled as abuse, as traumatic, "as bad as being in a concentration camp". The notion is absurd but I happen to know someone who has bought exactly this argument about her own childhood, that it was worse than being in a concentration camp. Come on! It's so ridiculous. And Kaminer is not afraid to say so, often with laugh-out-loud humor.

More people need to read this book. It might shake them loose of that feeling that they need someone else to approve what they do, to tell them what to do. show less

Reviewed in blog at http://www.sea-of-flowers.ca/weblog/sea/archives/2004/07/20/sleeping-with-a.php and Blogcritics at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/19/213121.php

This review has been rewritten since it was first published. A more extensive review appears in my own Web log).

Wendy Kaminer's book, "Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety" is interesting. She says that her objective is to write against irrationalism but I see this book more show more as an examination of how the New Age is becoming, in effect, a significant minority religion in America.

Wendy Kaminer was a lawyer in New York, and a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly. She seems to be a writer and a social critic. She appears to be a fairly typical Eastern liberal intellectual. Her writing is rich and dense. I have the impression that she has reworked magazine articles and essay into a more coherent form, and I think she hasn't completely succeeded. She repeats some ideas, and some of the arguments are a bit disorganised.

She doesn't come across as a hardline atheist or enemy of religion. She seems to be more of a free-thinker and skeptic. She seems to be concerned to promote a secular public space in which religious values are respected but kept private except to the extent that they coincide with broadly accepted values that support a peaceful secular society. She does clearly say several times that she finds that New Age gurus and the priests, ministers and rabbis of organized religion tend to profess equally irrational beliefs.

She skewers the writers and readers of come-and-go bestsellers like "The Celestine Prophecy" and "Mutant Message from Down Under," and writer-lecturers like Neil Donald Walsch and Marianne Williamson. She points out that these writers are cashing in, big-time by spiritual teachings that make people feel good about themselves. She also deals with the relatively incoherent, vaguely Hindu ideas of the New Age. She points out that many New Age writers encourage people to accept and tolerate evil in the world as part of karma or destiny. She points out that some writers have condoned murder because murder victims are in agreement with their murderers on an eternal, cosmic level!

She goes on to look at the lecture and training programs for personal growth. She asks the question about why Americans appear to be ready to place their trust in this stuff so easily. She nails the renegade ex-Catholic hippie priest Matthew Fox for his vague and rambling theories and his efforts to sacralize New Age values within the Christian tradition. Some New Age writers like Neil Donald Walsch make grandiose claims of direct communication with the divine. Some New Age gurus, in her experience, are very sensitive about their own teachings and react very badly to criticism. She says "In a culture preoccupied with self-esteem, megalomania is a virtue, I guess."

She says that the New Age is intolerant. It treats the established organized religions as unenlightened and authoritarian. Also, while the New Age seems to have room for all kinds of beliefs, it does not accept skepticism and science. New Agers dismiss skeptics as "witch-hunters." In theological terms, one would say that the New Age believes in selective pluralism. It claims tolerance for itself against other religions and against government scrutiny, but it preaches that it is a more enlightened religion than mainline Christianity and Islam.

She discusses feminism and the New Age. She says that many women today try to have it both ways. They want equality, but they also want to be intuitive and emotional and to have all the other stereotypical feminine attributes. She calls this female chauvinism and argues that it has flourished within the spirituality and alternative-healing movements. She points out that while in earlier generations these ideas empowered women by giving them a particular area of safety and personal authority, today they hold women back.

She examines the New Age's obsession with justifying itself scientifically, or at least explaining its beliefs by faith in new and innovative science. She deals with the unjustified popularity of Indian medicine as presented by Deepak Chopra and mentions the various New Age ideas that try to tie spiritual beliefs into someone's half-baked understanding of the quantum physics.

She discusses false claims of sexual abuse, and her discussion spins off into a fascinating discussion of the way in which subjective reports of personal experience, no matter how ludicrous and incredible, have become elevated into unassailable truth in post-modernist philosophy, in certain styles of therapy, and in popular culture.

I found a theme running through the book. The New Age preaches freedom and innovation in theory but in practice it encourage subordination to the pronouncements of predatory and self-serving writers, lecturers, teachers, coacher and gurus.

I thought that her general premise that organized religion and the New Age are equally irrational led her to overlook a couple of criticisms of the New Age. There are intellectual differences between the major religious traditions and the New Age.

The major religions have systems of personal and public ethics and are concerned about justice. While the Christian left thinks the Christian right is overly focussed on sexuality, and right thinks the left are all commies, they all have strong ethics and willingness to work in the world to change it. The New Age is all about self-esteem and feeling good. As for justice - remember what some New Age writers said about murder. That may not be completely fair. Some New Agers have a sort of non-violent, tree-hugging anti-corporate ethic but they can't seem to stop meditating and navel-gazing long enough to do anything. They dream of changing the world, but they won't live in the real world.

Kaminer would seem to agree that the adherents of the New Age tend to be self-absorbed and grandiose, and out of touch with the real world but she can't seem to make the other points I've mentioned.

It is a good little book to read and think about. It doesn't try to catalogue all the New Age writers and lectures or their theories. It doesn't try to examine the evolution of the ideas of the New Age and their circulation in popular culture in depth. It has enough factual observations and evidence to support the main arguments. It raises real concerns about the role of the New Age in popular culture and it should make people re-examine language and concepts that we tend to take on board, ignorantly, from the media and popular culture. It is written forcefully and with wit and elegance. show less

“The contrary willingness to accept untested personal testimony as public truth is at the heart of the irrationalism that confronts us today. . . Generally, the only proof offered for a fantastic belief is the passion it inspires in believers.” Kaminer’s new book decries the influence that irrational belief has on public policy. In the introduction she humorously ridicules her going to a homeopath, recognizing that it has no scientific validity, and she knows the result is due to the show more placebo effect, yet that effect is real to her. She argues, however, that others should not take her testimony at face value. Objective evidence should be required.

Kaminer discusses the public’s eagerness to join in the hysteria over satanic ritual child abuse, mass mourning for celebrities, how junk science and personal prejudice have influenced public policy decisions related to drugs, school vouchers, and classroom prayer. We are in danger of losing our skepticism, she argues, and that is dangerous for a democratic society. She acknowledges the personal need of many for divinities, but she suggests that a society that wears its piety in the public square craving for angels and alien abductions, not to mention Saint Diana, is more likely to look for miracles than face the challenges of living in a pluralistic society.

And she comes down quite hard on religious faith as feeding the irrational. “What’s the difference between crossing yourself or hanging a mezuzah outside your door and avoiding black cats. Believing that you’ve been abducted by aliens or that Elvis is alive is, on its face, no sillier than believing that Christ rose from the dead. . . People who believe that God heeds their prayers have probably” waived the right to mock people who talk to trees and guardian angels or claim to channel the spirits of Native Americans.” One man’s superstition is another’s sacred.

Kaminer blames the media for much of this, they quail in the face of the supernatural. Skepticism is edited out of journalistic reporting and she doubts H. L. Mencken could publish many of his antagonistic remarks about religious silliness, arguing that we risk becoming less religiously free than during the Victorian era. She is a fervent advocate of religious freedom. “Separation of church and state does not desire, much less mandate, the banishment of religious faith from public life, as right-wing rhetoric sometimes suggests. . . .The right of religious people to organize and mount political protest is, in par, a right of private association, which the government is bound to accommodate, but not support.” But she cites numerous instances of religious viewpoints appearing in work and school settings, almost universally those of Protestant Christianity.

Kaminer’s examples are witty and eerily disturbing. Together they present a rather disturbing vision of the future and she ends with a plea for a return to science, skepticism, reason, and freedom of inquiry.

“The rights and interests of individual believers clash with religious institutions when the institutions seek sponsorship of the state. Crusades to breach the boundaries between church and state constitute a much greater threat to religious tolerance than any number of evangelical atheists. Theocracies throughout history have made that clear.”

As I was reviewing some of Kaminer’s magazine articles I stumbled upon a very recent commentary which I quote in its entirety:

“Sometimes I put my faith in sectarian rivalries, which helped derail the most recent proposed school-prayer amendment to the Constitution. Last year, an organization in Arkansas, Put God Back in Public School, decided not to press for the introduction of school prayers in Arkansas (instead, they demanded state funding for special Christian schools). The group reconsidered the value of school prayer after its founder Kathy Smith, consulted with God: ‘I asked God, “Do you want me to change the law to put prayer in the schools?” He said no. If you do that, kids would have the right to pray to other gods, too. They could pray to Buddha. God doesn’t want that. There is only one God.’

What more can I say but ‘Amen’.” show less

Many people would admit to a certain scepticism when it comes to religions or beliefs other than their own. For some, the mere idea that another person's point-of-view is equally valid to their own would be seen as ludicrous, even blasphemous. But Wendy Kaminer posesses no such qualms. She fully realizes that every belief system has inherent illogic qualities. What she can't understand is why others have a hard time when it comes to a rational discussion on the topic.
SLEEPING WITH show more EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS is Kaminer's ode to the irrational, a witty and incisive commentary on irrational beliefs of all kinds. Not merely content to stick to established religions, Kaminer examines New-Age Mysticism, Reincarnation, Feminine Intuition, Self-Help Books, Repressed Memories, and Cyberspace. What she discovers, at times, can be alarming.

In a series of essays, Kaminer disects the recent North American trend to believe ANYTHING. In researching healers, mystics, and gurus, Kaminer presents the reader with one simple truth: If someone says something sincerely enough, or loud enough, we will believe it, no questions asked. If someone has talked to angels, we believe it. If someone has a repressed memory of child abuse, we believe it. If someone has talked to the spirits of our ancestors, we believe it. All without one single shred of evidence of any kind.

Kaminer does not dump on religion. She fully realizes the value a belief system can provide the average individual. But the apparent willingness of the public to adhere to anyone who proclaims something forceful enough can be an eye-opening experience.

In one precise example, she cites a 'study' presented by Pat Robertson, which showed that the crime rate in America has risen steadily ever since prayer was removed from public schools. That, Mr. Robertson proclaims, is proof positive that a lack of prayer in school leads to criminal activity. The flaw in this logic, as Kaminer astutely points out, is that the crime has also been on the rise ever since man first walked on the moon. Therefore, space travel has directly contributed to the rising crime rate. The ease with which the public accepts one statement without any thought to alternatives is frightening.

Kaminer is simply saying, "Ask questions." Don't be content to blithely follow the teachings of someone without examining that person first. Rationality is in ever decreasing supply these days, as people are more and more prone to 'jump on the bandwagon' of anything presented with apparent authority. In her section on 'Junk Science', Kaminer exposes the irrationality of scientists as well, who jumped aboard the 'Cold Fusion' debate, despite the fact that no hard evidence was ever provided. Simply seeing it on television was enough to convince scores of people that cold fusion (a pipe-dream) had been created. In another very telling moment, Kaminer tells of how she was greeted with boos and hisses on a talk show, when she asserted that a father who yells at a child is not the same thing as a father who assaults a child. Despite no evidence being presented, the audience would rather agree with the 'victim', rather than think it through.

Kaminer may be preaching to the choir. While her presentation is a breath of fresh air for some, there are others who would not see the value in this book, dismissing it as mere nonsense, or hatred. But of course, those who would be quick to dismiss the book without reading it, are precisely the sorts of individuals that Kaminer is writing about. Think about that. show less