The New Age as Seen by the Written Press in Quebec

The New Age as Seen by the French-Language Written Press in Quebec

An essay by Eric FORGUES

Reading digest by the CICNS

“In this book, the author wanted to please the young adult he was at the time when he was living through experiences of spiritual awakening in a world that had not mastered their alphabet. (…) If the press echoed what was then called the new age, it remained an external judge of this movement, which it did not manage to understand and from which it wanted to keep a certain distance (…) The author wrote this work so that the memory of the press’s treatment of the new age phenomenon might be preserved.”

Page 13

“This work has its roots in a feeling I had in the 1980s and 1990s that the press was marked by a bias in its coverage of the new age phenomenon… I wondered how one could thus sweep aside with the back of the hand a phenomenon that touched significant sections of the population. Was it the popular aspect of this phenomenon that so irritated the so-called intellectual point of view?”

Page 20

“Something irritated me in the media’s reaction of resistance to the new age phenomenon. The new age movement called into question a world the media defended. As if a whole world were threatened by what was conveyed in the experiences of personal awakening and spiritual exploration that an ever larger part of the population was living through… I referred to the alienation of a humanity that has built a world outside the link with the divine source in order to account for this closure. The new age announced a world that could compromise the foundations and the materialist values of the present world. At bottom, the media were only expressing this closure of humanity with regard to the divine, and expressing our situation of alienation.”

Page 27

“I place the New Age or new age phenomenon within what I call the renewal of the relationship to the transcendent. (Forgues 2006). The new age phenomenon designates a popular social phenomenon characterised by the renewal of spiritual and health-and-wellbeing practices and beliefs. As several observers have noted, this phenomenon testifies to an individual freedom and expresses itself through syncretisms that can take many forms. In other words, the individuals who give form to this phenomenon borrow elements from various spiritual traditions to compose them into a whole that makes sense for them, at their individual scale… It is composed of individuals who sometimes gather in groups which form and dissolve according to the various spiritual and ideological orientations to which they adhere.”

Page 45

“It seems that Quebec was a propitious land of welcome for the new age. The phenomenon is said to have taken on a greater scale here than elsewhere. This can be explained by the void left by the abandonment of religion in Quebec.”

Page 85

“As in music, new age literature will be presented as a catch-all category.”

Page 86

“The ‘catch-all’ label in fact translates a certain incomprehension, an ignorance, indeed a complete lack of interest on the part of journalists towards this literature.”

Page 99

“Despite this enthusiasm for new age literature, it should be noted that this literature receives little coverage in the press… This testifies to a closure of the press and the intellectual elite towards this literary phenomenon.”

Page 112

“Thus new ideas are a crime against reason. The rise of the new age marks the return to obscurantism and threatens the education system against critical reason. The new age is suspected of infiltrating even the schools, with the tacit consent of the authorities.”

Page 113

“So long as the new age presented itself as a somewhat eccentric spiritual movement, it could arouse certain questions, but when it influences even the education of children, it then constitutes a more serious threat. The tone changes suddenly and this event becomes the pretext for alerting public opinion and proposing active measures of awareness-raising against the new age. Five years later, there are even calls for awareness campaigns against the new religious movements.”

Page 117

“It is curious that a movement whose first aim is personal growth should be asked to defend democratic values. Shortcuts are quickly taken to pass the new age off as antidemocratic, tyrannical, authoritarian and reactionary. Indeed, several observers speak rather of an individualist movement founded on individual freedom in spiritual matters. Certainly, as we shall see further on, some observers will not miss the occasion to link the new age to certain dérives sectaires. Might the new age constitute, in a way, the return of the repressed of modernity and even of the religious tradition? Might it be linked in part to the shadow of a civilisation, a shadow it refuses to see, which it stifles and which returns to haunt it, announcing to it a possibility it does not dare to be? The shadow can also be ‘stifled light. The shadow is not only what a being does not want to be. It is also what it does not dare to be’ (Bauer, 2000: 148).”

Page 148

“Thus one returns to the old landmarks of Judeo-Christian culture, which appears more human compared with the new age. Faced with a freedom in spiritual matters, an institution is valorised which permits hardly any salvation outside the paths it prescribes. In a tone that brooks no appeal, the individualism running through the new age is called into question, with the assertion that the return to oneself characterising the new age is opposed to the concern for the other promoted by the Catholic Church, and that by definition any ideology marking a return towards the self is by definition egocentric. But one may wonder how one can love the other and be in solidarity with him if we are not authorised to love ourselves. How to make a ‘gift of oneself’ if that self carries the wound of not having been loved? If one truly loves the other, why make that love cease as soon as it is a question of oneself? What is this difference in nature between self and other?”

Page 164

“Not only does the definition of cults risk amalgamating groups that are in no way dangerous with dangerous groups, but proceeding to such a definition for the purposes of legal intervention raises questions on the plane of law. Whereas certain elements of the criminal law could have been specified/modified while remaining outside any spiritual consideration, in order to frame interventions in groups, spiritual or otherwise, that give rise to offences, an approach is favoured which harbours a potential for abuse on the plane of law. By entering the domain of beliefs to circumscribe spiritual groups held to be suspect, even before examining the practices of these groups, one risks infringing the right to freedom of belief.”

Page 187

“In fact, as regards the alternative modalities of healing, supposedly the work of charlatans, the official sciences strive less to evaluate their potential scientifically than to condemn them without further examination… This observer thus reminds us that it is first of all the researchers and the research institutions in place that have the material means, and the duty, to verify the validity of health treatments. Before concluding that they are ineffective, their ineffectiveness must first be demonstrated.”

Page 194

“The new age will thus little by little be limited to spiritual beliefs and ideologies. The good elements of the new age withdraw, and the new age comes to designate only the most superficial practices, the most tinged with trickery. The new age then presents itself as a shrinking skin that contracts more and more in one’s hands as the criticisms grow severe.”

Page 201

“If the new age worries the defenders of reason, of science and of the professions that claim them, it also worries the defenders of the faith, notably the representatives of institutions that claim a certain monopoly of truth in this domain… To put it simply, the claim of new age sympathisers to accede directly to the divine, to have personal experience of it and to formulate a knowledge from that experience, calls into question the position the Catholic Church occupies between the faithful and the divine, presenting itself as the obligatory passage for acceding to it.”

Page 227

“It is curious to see that these new spiritual currents are asked to answer political requirements, when their first aim is to answer the requirement of creating meaning and helping people to live their interiority. It seems that different interests are being mixed up, the one proper to life in society and the other proper to individuation. There is a refusal to see that the new age is indeed the product of modernity. It is reduced to practices of manipulation that charlatans are said to exercise on victims on a spiritual quest, whereas what motivates the sympathisers of the new age is the capacity to define their beliefs from their freely lived experience. The new age expresses itself through this quest and this demand for freedom in matters of spirituality. The sympathisers reject every form of authoritarianism in spiritual matters. Which does not mean that it is safe from certain abuses of which the newspapers have made a feast.”

Page 245

“As we have observed, a theme that returns often with the new age is the idea that this movement infiltrates several sectors of society, making the phenomenon still more suspect, indeed threatening.”

Page 246

“The tone is that of a fight waged by the partisans of reason and of established practices in matters of health and spirituality against the new age. The press becomes an instrument of that fight. Thus the new age, this ‘particularly virulent plague in Quebec’ or this ‘wind of foolishness and irrationality’, must be dammed up, all the more so as it is said to be infiltrating the highest circles of politics. As if Quebec society were being pulled at every level by a struggle between the partisans and the adversaries of the new age. The journalist underlines that the new age is spreading in ‘deep Quebec’, thus expressing an elite’s need to supervise the popular masses, who are on the way to sinking into foolishness and irrationality. The change of political party gives rise to a repositioning of the Quebec government with regard to practices of new age inspiration.”

Page 273

“Practices of personal awakening are suspect, while humanitarian practices are in favour. This allows us to take the measure of what separates the journalists of the written press from the readership. If the journalists are in phase with a certain readership, their point of view expresses a real gap with a whole section of the readership. We may ask ourselves to what extent the written press has alienated that readership by offering a single point of view on the new age and neglecting to express also the point of view of its readership sympathetic to the new age.”

Page 275

“The written press’s coverage of the new age phenomenon manifests an evident resistance to understanding this phenomenon from the inside and to accepting its existence. The journalists and observers remain outside this phenomenon, resisting it and retaining only its most negative or caricatural traits. We come out of this press review with a rather worrying idea of the new age.”

Page 278

“The fact remains that it is difficult to assert that the new age benefited in Quebec from a written press favourable to it. Quite the contrary, the written press’s coverage of this phenomenon demonstrates well the gap that exists between a significant section of the population, which is renewing the relationship to the transcendent in several ways, and the press, which defends the values of modernity (and of reason) and of tradition (religious tradition in particular). In short, the new age is thus opposed as much to what represents modernity as to tradition. The media make themselves the spokesmen of three quarters of society (the traditionals and the moderns) and forget a quarter of the population, who are in fact the cultural creatives and who are said to be the bearers of a new culture.”

A researcher at the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities, Eric Forgues obtained his doctorate in sociology at the Université de Montréal. His thesis dealt with the role of the State in the economic development of francophones in Quebec.

Since 1998 he has conducted research at the Université de Moncton on community development, health and well-being, and regional and sustainable development. He has taught sociology and environmental studies at the Université de Moncton. He has also been an innovation officer at the Université de Moncton’s Innovation Support Office. http://www.umoncton.ca/icrml/chercheurs_reguliers.html