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James SireThe Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “A Separate Universe: The New Age—Spirituality Without Religion”
Although Eastern thought is attractive to many Westerners, it requires a readjustment of basic assumptions that many find too demanding. Instead, they have turned to the New Age worldview, a “new consciousness along more Western lines” (156).
While its roots have been traced to ancient Gnosticism and other non-mainstream Western thought as well as to Eastern spirituality, New Age thinking started to become influential in the 1970s because it was publicized through journalism. New Age thought has borrowed from “every major worldview,” presenting a “highly syncretistic and eclectic” face (168).
Sire writes that, early on, New Age was predicated on hopes for a coming transformation of humanity through evolution, characterized as the Age of Aquarius or “higher consciousness,” a utopian era in which peace and wisdom will prevail. The New Age worldview has since been adopted by a broad range of individuals in every field, including psychology, sociology and cultural history, anthropology, health, and the natural sciences.
According to Sire, New Age thinking “places great value on the individual person” (169), but it sees the self as the “kingpin, the prime reality” and the source of meaning (171). Everything that exists, exists for the self, and the self is “in control of all of reality” (171). This is because, for New Age thinkers, the individual is one with the entire cosmos; there is no separation between creation and creature, God and humanity, or the cosmos and the individual person. Human happiness consists simply in realizing this truth, in achieving higher (or cosmic) consciousness; in doing so collectively, humanity will create utopia on earth.
According to the New Age worldview, says Sire, there are two dimensions to reality: the visible universe (accessible through science and ordinary consciousness, including the five senses) and the “invisible universe (or Mind at Large), accessible through altered states of consciousness” (175). Historically, New Age proponents have used mind-altering drugs as well as meditation, acupuncture, and other means to achieve this state, believing that higher consciousness potentially has the ability to control and change the visible universe. This implies also that human beings can overcome death and transition to another state, as shown in near-death experiences.
Since the self is the center of the universe, New Age epistemology posits that “human beings can understand reality because in a state of God-consciousness they directly perceive it” (192). When evaluating historical events, New Age thinking is more concerned with the experience of the events than with the significance of the events themselves. The goal and commitment of New Agers is to achieve higher consciousness and thus contribute to the coming idyllic age of humanity.
Sire ends the chapter with a critique of New Age thinking. Although the New Age worldview claims to bring humanity beyond naturalism and nihilism, ushering in a new era of hope, it fails because of its weaknesses and inconsistencies. Like naturalism and pantheistic monism, it assumes a closed universe without a God who is transcendent and creates value. New Age is thus unable to propose a concrete goal or set of values for humanity to put into action. In fact, New Age seems to collapse distinctions between good and evil, thus destroying ethics entirely.
According to Sire, the underlying problem is that New Age thinking makes a king of the self, and this leaves much room for selfishness and immorality. Moreover, New Age thinking has revived elements of the occult (e.g., beliefs about demigods and demons, spiritualism, horoscopes, etc.) that are characteristic of animism—a vestige of “primitive” religion that civilization left behind as knowledge advanced.
A final, related problem with the New Age worldview is its relativism: It accepts all “systems of reality” and all personal experience as equally true and valid, thus rendering New Age thinking impervious to criticism from a rational standpoint. This is ultimately “epistemological nihilism” because it implies that “we can never know what really is. We can only know what we experience” (201). Essentially, Sire concludes, every person is the god of his or her own universe, and this closes him or her off from everybody else and from reality itself.
Chapter 8 Analysis
With origins in the counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s, although anticipated in spiritualism and other earlier movements, the New Age worldview was just coming into shape as Sire wrote the first edition of The Universe Next Door. Sire stresses that his book was among the first comprehensive treatments of New Age ideas. From the vantage point of the fifth edition, Sire remarks how large the New Age movement has grown; what was in its infancy in 1974 is now a huge phenomenon. At the same time, New Age has serious weaknesses and is presented implicitly by Sire as the worldview to be taken least seriously among all those profiled in the book.
What makes this worldview unserious, for Sire, is firstly its extreme subjectivity. New Age thinking shares with naturalism and pantheistic monism the lack of belief in a transcendent God who is the source of value and meaning. Instead, in the New Age worldview, each individual is his or her own god and source of these goods. This, for Sire, leads to intellectual and moral anarchy. Another weakness of New Age thinking is its utopian focus; it promises a glorious future for humanity, but no measure of whether this is being achieved or any rational warrant for its claims. As Sire comments, “the mañana argument is not reassuring” (196).
Another unserious element of New Age, according to Sire, is its revival of the occult. As was seen in Chapter 7 on Eastern pantheistic monism, Sire takes as normative the Western emphasis on reason, which he sees as embedded within the Christian theistic worldview. Originating in Greek philosophy, the rational heritage permeated Western thought as a whole, displacing the animistic beliefs of early religions, as did also Christianity with its narrative of Christ casting out demons from afflicted people. New Age has brought beliefs in demons, horoscopes, and the paranormal (as well as reason-destroying psychedelic drugs) out into the open again, thus attempting to bring civilization on a (for Sire) regressive path. However, it could be argued that this tendency was a natural reaction to modern scientific materialism’s denial of any supernatural dimension to reality.
Related to New Age’s anti-rational focus, the worldview dodges rational criticism by rejecting any standards of truth beyond the individual self. Indeed, contrary to Sire’s emphasis on The Need to Live the Examined Life, by Sire’s account the New Age worldview eschews any reflective examination, including the metaphysical and epistemological grounds for this examination. This again, for Sire, leads to intellectual and moral chaos—indeed, to insanity (201)—and destroys what little credibility the worldview has. According to Sire, the question comes to a stark focus: Either the self is God, or the self is subject to things other than the self. Sire implies that the final story of New Age remains to be told, but because of its basic bankruptcy and lack of discernable results, the worldview has less intrinsic weight that naturalism and theism, the clear “winners” in the worldview contest.
