Saturday, January 29, 2005
I hate the New Age
Greetings.
One of my friends (actually my friend's mother) just called me up to tell me about this exciting new thing she's doing called Landmark Education. She didn't give me any details but it sounded a) New Agey, b) expensive, c) strange, and d) like a religion for atheists.
She didn't tell me anything about it except that it had radically changed her life and her conception of her place in the world (sounds like religion to me!), and invited me to some seminar thing (I declined because I had a class), then directed me to their website. Scary.
I was already suspicious, but the website made me even more so. These classes, which are supposed to be "educational," cost $575 for the first level, and $1150 for the advanced level. It sounds like a tremendous waste of money and an easy way to prey on vulnerable people by telling them they can miraculously improve their lives by studying postmodern deconstructionist psychobabble. In my experience, learning about deconstruction is a thoroughly depressing process and I am hesitant to apply its principles to literature, much less to my own life.
I also am extremely irritated by the pseudo-religious connotations of this sort of "education." There is a booth that has been set up at my university in recent weeks called something like "The Truth About Christ," and it offers answers to such burning questions (HA!) as "who was Jesus?" "what did he do?" and "was he the son of God?" My problem with this booth is its implication that such questions can be resolved using scientific and rational inquiry, which is both profoundly false and utterly misleading. There are many among us who believe that their lives can be improved by faith in an higher power. Fine. Just don't push it on me. EVER. And especially don't lie to yourself and to me about religion being an educational or rational medium. It's not. It's dogmatic, faith-based, and non-rational. At the VERY least, call it what it is.
The other thing that has always bothered me about religion and pseudo-religious organizations is that in a society like ours that promotes religious tolerance, the tolerance only goes in one direction: towards those with a religion to defend. Religious people are not accused of being intolerant by saying that atheists are infidels, stubborn, stupid, lacking in faith, cold-hearted, immoral, or trying to destroy the ethical foundations of society. If I, however, tell someone at the All About Islam booth at school that their display is offensive and ill-suited for a location at an educational institution, then I am accused of being intolerant. I wish that intolerance worked both ways.
I wish that I could write a letter to the editor condemning Stephen Harper -- Conservative Canadian politician and asshole extraordinaire -- because he offends my humanistic beliefs by campaigning against gay marriage. I wish that I could state my conviction that refusing to grant marriage rights to gay couples will destroy the moral fabric of Canadian society. But I can't. Because those sorts of public declarations are reserved for people with religious beliefs that they feel are being trampled upon, and are off-limits to those who wish quite simply to see human rights and human dignity upheld in a society supposedly based on rational and humanistic principles.
In short, I don't want any part of this New Age of evangelical Christians, reverse discrimination, the Church of Scientology, "educational seminars," and intolerance towards those who believe in actual rationality over neverending leaps of faith.
By the way, no one should be thinking that because I go on long rants and engage in occasional sarcasm or bitterness, that I am an angry person. I'm not. Ask people who really know me, who spend their days and nights with me, who've partied with me and have seen me in lighter moments. They'll tell you that I am actually -- underneath it all -- an extremely affectionate and generous person who's been hurt enough times to build a protective wall, but not enough times to be a genuinely bitter and twisted individual. I am not without a sense of humour, so please don't think I am.
And on that note, I had a hell of a nice evening last night. I went out and bought an orchid for my friend Soph who I knew in Switzerland. It was a really lovely moth orchid (phalaenopsis) with white blooms with pink centers, and I fell in love with it immediately. I would buy one for myself if I felt I could justify the purchase. Then I went to her birthday dinner at an Indian restaurant by my house, which was pretty nice. The food was not quite as good as I had expected, but that's quite possibly due to the fact that I never have Indian food and thus have no idea what it's supposed to taste like. It was not very subtle, but I'm not sure that's the intended effect. The mango ice cream was really good, this much I know for sure.
We then piled into cars and went ice skating, which is one of my most-loved activities in the world. I sometimes wish I lived in one of the icier regions of Canada just so I could skate for free in the winter. I had a figure skating coach when I was younger (though not young enough to have my parents push me into it) and last year I used to skate all the time at the outdoor rink in Switzerland, with K. and the Americans and my brother and my dad when they came to visit. K. turned out to be a natural at it, and we had a hell of a time whizzing around and around this little rink where we were usually among only a small handful of people. Last night was not as idyllic, because we went to the claustrophobic indoor rink at a community center I used to skate in, and there were so many people it was hard to do anything and the ice was crap after about ten minutes. It took me ages to feel like I was semi-competent on the ice again (it's not like riding a bike!), but after that I was pretty content, and managed a couple of decent single toe-loops, some spins, waltz jumps, edges, other basic stuff. I always regret not having started figure skating when I was really young and tiny, so I could have gotten good early-on, but I'm lucky to have never grown to hate it like many people who get pushed into it practically before they can walk.
After skating I headed up to UBC in the hope of some stunting, but all the cheerleaders were doing was finding large frat boys who wanted to lift girls in the air during their Greek Week tug-of-war competition. That was lame to say the least, particularly because of the girl yelling into a microphone that was about 150% too loud, and because I can't stand frats and sororities and their ridiculous events. Predictably, after it was all over, the girl with the mic yelled "Now let's all go get pissed!" This is just about all the Greeks at my school (and perhaps most schools) are famous for -- not charity fundraisers, not community service, not a sense of belonging at a big university, but for going out and getting insanely drunk and waking up hungover and then doing it all over again.
My favourite section of the Globe and Mail (excellent Canadian paper), Focus, said today that binge drinking among young people in the UK has reached epidemic proportions. The only Europeans who drink more than the Brits are (surprise, surprise!) the Irish and the Danes. Guess it can get pretty boring up north during all those cold winters. As for the Irish, well, they're Irish. An interesting section of the article:
"As a Canadian, you may think that you know a little about this business called drinking. But Britain is a whole other boozescape. One night, I met a friend at the tube station and he told me that he was nearly punched by a drunk who felt that my friend's knapsack had touched him. My friend walked away shaken, but not surprised.
The tube, at 11:30 on weekend nights, is like a cruise ship captained by Courtney Love -- singing, scuffling, beer cans rattling underfoot, the atmosphere is sometimes giddy, sometimes menacing.
It is not uncommon to see men drinking cans of Newcastle on the Underground first thing in the morning and last thing at night. The other morning, walking near Battersea Bridge, I saw a man coming toward me holding a baguette in one hand and swigging from a half-empty bottle of champagne with the other. Perhaps he was merely celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the entente cordiale, who knows? But it's not something you're likely to see in Paris."
Yeah, I'd have to agree. The stereotype is true: the French love their wine, but I've rarely seen them drink to vomiting and violent excess.
Tony Blair's mysterious solution to this drinking problem in England is to extend bars' and pubs' licensing hours past 11:00 pm and start handing out 24-hour liquor licenses. That's real dumb, even for the guy who signed a deal with the devil running the United States.
It should be noted that I don't have a problem with excessive drinking -- from time to time. But when it's ALL the time it starts to worry me. I personally cease enjoying myself once I'm too drunk to carry on a decent conversation. For some reason, it takes a lot of alcohol for me to lose outward lucidity, and so I usually stop way before that point. There was a lot of drinking on exchange last year, but since I got back I've scarcely done any drinking at all. I think I've been drunk less than a half-dozen times in the past six months. I've just been doing other stuff for fun, I suppose. More sports, more all-you-can-eat sushi, more movies, and less alcohol.
There's not much else for me to say at the moment except that the Boy wrote his last will and testament last night. I have no idea why. He was probably just tired. The scarcely grammatical and unsigned document reads as follows: "burned, lost, and told I went exploring the Himalayas."
And I thought I was an odd duck.
Salutations.
-N
