June 06

Fear of Fun
by Jay Michaelson
p. 2 of 2

2.

First religion. Many spiritual types can't understand why, on the one hand, atheists just don't get it, and why on the other, fundamentalists are still tied to their fear-based system of authority and repression. Many skeptics, in turn, just can't believe how duped we religious people are -- and the spiritual ones worst of all: at least the fundamentalist is just believing what people told her, and buying into a system of thought which, while ultimately false, is committed to something. But the mystic? Having a pleasant experience and calling it union with God?

As I've written about many times in this magazine, there is certainly plenty to criticize about the fuzzy thinking of the New Age, not least its immediate leap from an experience which seems very certain to a claim about what it actually is. Yet I think the critiques of the skeptics are less about the truth-claims of the mystics than about the experiences themselves. In short, the mystics are having too much fun. Too much juice, too much energy, too much subjectivity and emotion. It's not that the skeptics are jealous; it's that they're suspicious. Something smells rotten.

And likewise the critics from the Right. Just as the skeptics do, the traditionally religious doubt the truth of mystical claims. But, also as the skeptics do, perhaps they recognize a fundamental difference between the traditional-religious impetus and the mystical one: that the latter, and not the former, is oriented toward "fun," again in the wide sense I'm using it here: to experience, to ecstasy, to sucking the marrow out of life. The traditional-religious may talk about meaning, but the mystic feels it. And this makes people suspicious.

These doubts and fears have been in even sharper relief in the past month, following the revelations that a well-known teacher in the Jewish renewal movement was carrying on multiple relationships with students and staff members in his organization. Particularly as this teacher had been accused of sexual misconduct in the past, many in the Jewish world have said that the problem is wider than this one man, but extends to everyone who believed he was innocent, and, indeed, to everyone who subscribes to a charisma-based, ecstasy-centered Jewish spiritual path. It doesn't matter that over 99% of Jewish renewal teachers have no blemish on their records. It doesn't matter that many non-charismatic leaders do. For both traditional-religious and anti-religious critics, it's the ecstasy that's the problem -- the juice, the fun.

What's going on? Clearly, it's not really about the facts. Of course, there are abuses -- but most mystics end up not as sexually-abusive cult leaders but working either within a traditional ethical system or creating a home-spun ethics of compassion and gentleness. It's not Waco, but Woodstock.

Yet even Woodstock represents an inversion of certain religious values. If religion is about rules, mysticism is about experience; if religion is about authority, mysticism is about subjectivity; religion is about mediation (by text, rabbis who are holier than you, or whatever), mysticism about the unmediated; and religion is about adherence to codes, mysticism about "fun."

These inversions can operate in subtle ways, or obvious ones. Do you linger an extra moment over the Shabbat candles, drinking in the moment in whatever way feels right to you? Would you, then, even light the candles if it is a minute too late, in order to have that experience? Would you even light candles at a different time in the week? These are all decisions of degree, not of kind; the important choice was made at the beginning, when the experience, rather than simply the performance, was valued.

In traditional and some progressive circles, there is a clear understanding of this anti-fun -- that is, anti-experiential and anti-subjective -- orientation. Progressives get uppity around the ethical, traditionalists around the cultic. For progressives, the subjectification of religion leads to narcissism; to the "flakes" I've written about before, and to those who "fetishize the trigger" of their own spiritual highs, at the expense of less-high ethical obligations. Whether flaking out on appointments (trivial) or engaging in religious violence (non-trivial), the disconnect is the same: away from boring ethical norms, and to the exciting thrills of spiritual fun.

Traditionalists, on the other hand, get upset by mystics' disruptions of cultic purity, in particular sexual purity. Where are "traditional values" when someone is meditating? All these hippie-spiritual types are smoking grass and engaging in free love -- that's not religion, it's witchcraft. And indeed, it may be; perhaps what we think of as evil is simply that which the orthodox have feared. Perhaps, when one tastes of the forbidden fruit, it's all a big joke, because it doesn't hurt you at all, and it's just people in authority who wanted you to think that it would. More on this, I hope, in a future column. Certainly, though, it's true that subjective spirituality can go hand in hand with a rejection of traditional morality, even though it needn't necessarily. And so, like the skeptic-progressives, the traditionalists are suspicious.

It's experience that they're suspicious of -- experience unmoored from pre-defined consequences. And they're right to be. Experience sometimes is life-changing, but sometimes it's just experience -- and other times the life-changes are in ways you can't expect. As Ken Wilber has explained, experience provide rich mind-states, but they don't necessarily advance one through any stages of development, and they are susceptible to wild, even dangerous, interpretations: one person's moment of inspiration is another's message from God, the same experience that can be interpreted as transcendence of ego can, for some, be the strongest expression of it.

And experience is centered on the present, on the "Now," without a particular outcome or history. It's the feminine principle, Kabbalistically speaking, the immediate, the Presence, the cyclical. No wonder both androcentric traditionalists and andro-liberal progressives don't like it very much. It doesn't get you anywhere, doesn't build anything, doesn't make anything. It just is, rich and juicy and resplendent... and who knows, possibly pointless.

Pointlessness is a problem for sexuality as well. Like religious experience, sexual experience in the traditional model is supposed to make something: a baby. Or at least the bonds of stable, familial life. Sex separated from this linearity is anarchic, dangerous, destabilizing -- and of course, lots of fun.

It's been well observed that the argument that gays and lesbians "undermine the family" is not about homosexuality at all, but about the regulation of pleasure generally. How could two men having sex possibly undermine "the family" as an institution? Because, as with a woman having an abortion, they shift the fundamental meaning of sexuality -- from instrumental to intrinsic, from linear to immediate, from functional to fun. In the traditional view, sex is a tool. Sure, it feels good, but that's because God in His wisdom, or natural selection in its, wanted to incentivize us to do it, so that we would populate the planet, and create stable societies based around the family unit. Never mind that the Bible's dominant mode of sexual-societal structure is polygamy and not monogamy, the point is that family is the bedrock of society, and instrumental sex, rather than fun sex, is the bedrock of the family.

In this way, any sexuality divorced from its traditional structure really does undermine the family. I recently received an email from someone who had lived as a gay man for several years, and then, after a bout of repentance, married a woman and raised a family with her for twenty years. In his view, homosexuality really does undermine the family, because, for some men, it distracts them from the procreative trajectory that they're meant to be on. For some other men, it may not be a problem, but for a large enough percentage, presumably, it would be. Once again: the fear of fun, here because the fun of free sex derails the train of procreation.

Well, having only limited experience with procreation myself, I can't offer much personal evidence for whether it really works that way. Certainly Greece and Rome managed to repopulate themselves, notwithstanding a bisexual (or bisexual-pederastic) sexual norm for men. But I don't think we're really talking about eugenics here. I think, once again, the question is one of fun: whether life is primarily about experience and "seizing the day" (no coincidence that the American Romantics associated with Dead Poets Society included free-love activists and gay men), or whether it is about the same anti-fun values from part one: responsibility, duty, and the rest.

This fear of fun, I think, underlies many of our societal paranoias. The insane criminalization of harmless drugs, for example, is publicly justified by a delusionary belief regarding their harmful effects, a willful ignorance in the face of the facts. But these arguments are so specious, and so ignorant of scientific fact, that they seem to be only the cover story for a subtler agenda of social control. Are we really worried about the pothead who drives stoned -- or the fact that your teenage daughter might smoke pot and have more sex than she ought to? Or forget the sex -- maybe she'll just smoke pot and become too focused on the present, no longer making a better future for herself and your unborn grandchildren. Her life will go off the rails -- just like mine.

It's fun that's the problem here. Fun over family, fun over tradition, fun over propriety, fun over achievement. Obviously, there is plenty of hypocrisy on the traditional right, which condemns some forms of fun but not others -- such as alcohol abuse, or indulging the id at the expense of the environment. But these religious and ideological debates, when seen from the perspective of fun, suddenly seem as familiar as Footloose.

As usual, I don't want to decide which side is correct. Really, the ideology of fun is nothing other than the pagan impulse -- toward experience, fun, presence, and sensuality -- has been with us for thousands of years, and has been ever at war with the contrary one, which has labeled it evil, Satanic, and wrong. In my Jewish theology, this is simply the movement of the downward-pointing star, the Shechinah, the body, and the now -- to be balanced with (not suppressed by) the upward-pointing, male, linear, spiritual-intellectual one.

But as with any system of "balance" and golden means, the calculation is all left for later. Maybe the conservatives are right that we've gone too far in the direction of fun, and we're falling into decadence. Indeed, maybe we'll become as fat and lazy as the ancient Romans, vulnerable to attack by 21st century vandals. Or maybe the libertines (spiritual, physical and otherwise) are right that what endangers the world is not too much fun but too little, and to save ourselves, we need to cast cynicism, judgment, and restraint to the wind, and let the sun shine in.

I don't know who's right publicly, and I don't know which is right for me privately. I'm 35 this week: old enough to know better, but young enough to pass. I still hold out hope that, in my own quirky and idiosyncratic way, I'll somehow get the treats that my ego still so desperately wants; Lord knows I'm working hard enough at chasing them. But as much as I check myself by calling them "fun," an deep stirring in my soul yearns for those precious moments of transcendence, and of immanence, the thousand rememberings of God.

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