Regarding David Brooks's article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/09/opinion/09BROO.html?th

On March 9, 2004, which starts out:


"Who worries you most, Mel Gibson or Mitch Albom? Do you fear Gibson, the religious zealot, the man accused of narrow sectarianism and anti-Semitism, or Albom, the guy who writes sweet best sellers like "Tuesdays With Morrie" and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven?"

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Dear David

What worries me most is not Mel or Mitch, but David.

The very idea that you like "The language of good and evil" over "the language of trauma and recovery" and hang on to distictions of vice and virtue, as a "moral framework to locate the individual within the cosmic infinity of the universe" makes me wonder which century you are writing in.

Dissing the new age stuff in favor of Mel's tough guy religiosity is an interesting position, and you do not spare the Lasch, either, in castigating the new age therapeutic mentality for its liberation from "submission to a higher moral authority" or stint your own hammer blow of the need for the "rich moral framework of organized religion"

The fact is that these new ideologies of self development (and, I must report, a rigorous sense of taking responsibility for all individual experience) are here simply to replace the old saw of submission to a "higher" authority.

As IF "organized religion" can even be used in the same SENTENCE as the phrase "rich moral framework." AS IF!

Organized religion is dead. God is alive, all life, all being. But organized religion has long since lost it's moral authority because it simply exists, but does not actually accomplish a palpable connection, for the indiviudal, with the divine.

It is spiritually bankrupt, and in it's emphasis on outer ritual and precept does not empower the individual to find the spiritual dimension that is readily available through what you call a "narcissistic" portal of self development.

The rules you praise are there for the ignorant, to guide them in the dark. But a man who only has ten commandments that he can live by is a sorry creature, since there are millions of decisions to be made in a single lifetime, all of them in need of proper behaviour. And there he stands with only ten ideas to guide him. While your narcissist has learned to act properly every time, spontaneously, due to the guidance of an unerrring internal compass.

Get It? The laws of nature are innumerable. The laws of the Bible are a few simple thing that the most primitive mind can grasp.

Such religious rules are not really guidelines, for the enlightened individual. They are rough descriptions of a highly developed state of life lived in accord with natural law.

Your argument may have held water fifty years ago, but with what we know now, it's just a kind of sad iteration of retrothink.

I think that you'll be sitting alone on that pew for some time, while the proponents of the new self-referral approach to transcendence smile and laugh out at the picnic in the park.