Nothing Lasts Forever takes a look at synthetic diamonds and how they are rapidly undercutting real diamonds. The documentary features giants and experts of the industry, including a De Beers insider, which we are repeatedly told is a rare occurrence. According to Raden, the appearance is even a sign of weakness for a company that has until now refused to talk to the press or entertain any criticism. De Beers is single-handedly responsible for inventing the industry by selling the romantic myth: “diamonds are forever,” an enduring symbol of love and commitment.

Until the late 19th century, no one was interested in diamonds. They are actually the most commonly available gemstones on the planet and have little intrinsic value, unlike gold. Even the ones that have exotic origin stories attached to them, like the Queen of Kalahari, are mined in generic mines, amidst the dirt and pickaxes or, in modern times, bulldozers. However, thanks to the genius of marketing and salesmanship, the diamond industry today is valued at $28 billion, with more than half of the demand coming from the US.

An “eternal” diamond could’ve been made two weeks ago

While creating an industry out of thin air is par for the course in the age of capitalism, it’s worse when it leads to reverberations of the very same falseness that is at the heart of it.

Synthetic diamonds, or lab-produced diamonds, cost a fraction of the “real” ones and take about two to three weeks to be manufactured. However, they are often sold at the price of the real ones. Synthetic diamonds, as the documentary shows, can be manufactured in China, get mixed up with the real ones and there is absolutely no way to tell the difference between the two. The majority of China’s output is directed to India and polished in Surat, from where they might be sold locally or supplied overseas.

To counter this threat, De Beers and many companies launched portable machines that can act as your personal gemologist by testing whether a diamond is natural or lab-made. It’s a gimmick, of course, because—as most people in the industry would tell you—there is absolutely no way to tell the difference. In terms of their chemical composition, they are exactly the same. But it was a new way to make money in this chimera of a business.

Soon enough, a cottage industry of fake licenses for real vs. lab-made diamonds was set up as well. And if that wasn’t enough, De Beers and vehement opposers of synthetic diamonds like Martin Rapaport are now in the business of selling and pricing synthetic diamonds too. Despite all of this, diamonds remain amongst the most expensive gemstones available to the masses.

All to make a buck

The story of diamonds has been a story of the worst aspects of capitalism. From the “blood diamonds” of Africa, which led to civil wars in regions where diamonds are mined for sale to Europe and the US, to high-level financial frauds like that of Nirav Modi, the lure of owning something apparently exclusive has perpetuated bloodshed, strife and dishonest trade.

Even in the best-case scenario with natural, conflict-free diamonds, the diamond business is effectively a scam that ultimately punishes the average consumer more than anyone else. It’s one thing for the rich to play status games within their networks, like collecting expensive artworks, but for an industry to willfully sell worthless stones at high prices to people who spend their hard-earned money is a whole different ball game. As far as scams go, this one is legitimized in the name of luxury and special occasion purchases, but a scam all the same. 

While what is said of diamonds could be true for many other things—luxury accessories, designer clothes, and the like—none of these markets are as normalized as the one for diamonds. It is for this reason that the chorus calling out the falseness of diamonds being rare, precious or wonderful needs to be louder.

Diamonds are valuable…as a material

Diamonds would be better redirected towards industrial use, such as in diamond transistor technologies. It turns out that even though close to 95% semiconductors make use of silicon, diamond is a much better alternative to it.

Being the hardest natural material, diamond stands five times more heat than silicon, cools faster and, according to the latest experiments, can carry several orders of magnitude more electrical current. The semiconductor industry, currently valued at over $500 billion, is expected to more than double by 2030, something which is clearly far more significant than the diamond jewelry market.

It’s an unlikely arc for a product to move from being the king of jewelry to a semiconductor material, but it might be the only way diamonds may actually become special. For this reason, synthetic diamonds need to be promoted in a way they can be actually useful, bypassing the De Beers cartel that seeks to control an unethical market for its own interest. At the same time, it calls into question the ethics of mining vast stretches of land, a practice that not only disrupts the natural ecology of a place but also leads to pollution and further consequent harm.

On the other hand, Stephen Lussier, the insider featured in the documentary and a former De Beers executive, jokes that, had they not bored a 2 km-wide hole into Botswana to mine for diamonds, there would probably have been a few cows in its place. He believes that his company provided economic development to a country that was otherwise poor. But perhaps it’s time for De Beers to reckon with the true market for diamonds instead of the smokescreen they created.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post How Special Is a Diamond, Really? appeared first on Fair Observer.

A cultural divide

There are aspects to the case that are mostly personal in nature, but it also raised questions about the Norwegian authorities’ right to intervene and scrutinize immigrant parents for raising their children according to the parents’ native culture. 

For example, though it’s normal for Indian parents to feed their children with their hands or sleep with them in the same bed, such practices may be stigmatized in Scandinavia because they are believed to compromise the autonomy and safety of children. 

The Norwegian Ambassador to India, Hans Jacob Frydenlund, criticized the movie, saying that a mother’s love in Norway was no different than in India. According to Frydenlund, cultural differences such as these would not amount to such an escalation that would cause children to be taken away from their biological parents.

Whatever the truth, there are examples from the movie that stand out. These include a scene where Debika and her husband visit their children after they have been taken away and placed in state custody. Debika runs to hug her toddlers, crying her eyes out, but the public official assigned to their case asks her not to do so, lest the child build an emotional bond with her. The implicit assumption is that once the child has been taken away by child services, he or she is as good as an object until placed in the care of guardians approved by the government. 

When the parents visit the children after they have been placed with a Norwegian couple, their son fails to acknowledge his biological father. 

While the intention of saving children from potentially unstable parents is noble, it merits serious consideration to ask if this Scandinavian project of rupturing biological families and building artificial ones in their place is conscionable or can create kind and compassionate human adults. Even if one truly believes in such modernized social engineering, must it not be carried out with utmost care—not like the botched-up job that was given to the Chakrabortys?

Individualistic “modernity”

This adoption process isn’t as modern as Scandinavians might believe. The reason lies in Scandinavian beliefs and values.

Michael Booth, British journalist and author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind The Myth of Scandinavian Utopia, writes about the increasing discomfort towards immigrants in the country, most notably evident in the 2011 terrorist attack by Anders Breivik. He outlines several complexities in how immigrants from Africa and Asia, often Muslims, are perceived and, more importantly, how these complexities shape the political discourse in the Scandinavian countries. 

He quotes several experts from different countries, including Norway, who remark that most immigrants would have been able to integrate better had they arrived in the 1950s, i.e., “before we became so egalitarian and individualistic.”

But who defines what is truly egalitarian and individualistic? Let’s look at what Booth writes of the Swedish worldview of modernity:

Swedes were encouraged to cast off their old ways and move as one towards the light. If something was deemed modern, it was good. A rational, enlightened country such as Sweden had no need for folklore and buckled shoes, for rituals and community customs. Trade unions were modern. Collectivism was modern. Neutrality was modern. Economic and gender equality was modern. Universal suffrage was modern. Divorce was modern. The welfare state was modern. Eventually, multiculturalism and mass immigration were deemed modern.

To achieve this, Sweden resorted to a host of measures. In the post-World War II era, it maintained neutrality in the face of conflicts between its neighbors while also becoming one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world.

A Swede whom Booth quotes in his book points out that Sweden was also set up differently. It was the state’s goal that everyone should be self-sufficient by the time they turn 18 and should not be dependent on their family.

“In Sweden, self-sufficiency and autonomy is all; debt of any kind, be it emotional, a favor, or cash, is to be avoided at all cost,” Booth adds.

In the Swedish worldview, the goal of life, then, is to maximize one’s individual autonomy, which is ensured by the state in the form of free healthcare, education and state-of-the-art infrastructure, in exchange for higher taxes. 

In other words, it was the vision of Swedish leaders that one shouldn’t have to depend on anyone except the state in what seems like a purely transactional relationship. What this shows is a glaring misunderstanding of human character and relationships.

While the state may provide for all of one’s material needs, one’s emotional needs are fulfilled by their biological and communal bonds. In Scandinavia, the idea is not merely to save children from harmful domestic environments but to eliminate the idea of mutual dependency, accountability, and bonding within a family unit. 

To do so at a societal level feels counterintuitive, especially for a country that seeks to encourage multiculturalism. How is one supposed to respect and make space for someone of a different culture, religion or language if they haven’t learned to do that for their family or community members?

What is normal in Northern Europe can be bizarre to the world

It is no wonder, then, that when #swedengate hit on Twitter last year, many Swedes were taken aback by how the world judged them. It started when a user posted about how, if you are a child hanging out at your friend’s place and it’s time for the family’s dinner, you will not be asked to join the dinner.

Many Swedes defended the practice as part of their culture. However, children of immigrants in Sweden pitched into the conversation, saying that they too had found it strange growing up.

People from the rest of the world responded that they would never let their guests go hungry. In fact, many people from countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East even said their families would feed their guests too much in a show of their warmth and hospitality. 

As trivial as this example is, it does show how an over-emphasis on individual autonomy can make human beings self-centered and self-absorbed to the point of being ridiculous. No responsible state should overlook that building interpersonal relationships right from childhood helps us navigate a multitude of varying social contexts as per our internal emotional needs and is vital for our survival. 

The Scandinavian ideal of modernity is often foisted on the rest of the world as something to aspire to. Should that be so? To take nothing away from Scandinavia’s success, it behooves us to inspect its utopian zeal more closely in our yearning to be modern.

[Erica Beinich edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Should Scandinavians Give Us Advice on Modernity? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Crime, intrigue, and journalism

Five months before the arrest, Dey had been shot to death by unidentified assailants. Because Vora and Dey both reported about the underworld (most notably on Dawood Ibrahim and Chota Rajan) the case quickly became a very high-profile one enveloping top cops, journalists, and India’s most wanted criminals. Vora was charged under the dreaded MCOCA, i.e. the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, and was jailed for nine months. She had to fight a seven-year-long legal battle to clear her name and be acquitted of the charges. In 2019, she published an account of her experience, The Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison. 

Directed by Hansal Mehta, Scoop is a riveting watch with stellar performances by Karishma Tanna, Harman Baweja, and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub. The names of their characters are changed, but they play Vora, Himanshu Roy and S. Hussain Zaidi, respectively. At the time of this case, Vora was the deputy bureau chief of Asian Age, where Zaidi was her editor and mentor. Roy was the Joint Commissioner of Police in Mumbai at the time, and died by suicide in 2018.

The three actors, each essaying a complicated and significant part, play their roles with equal parts subtlety and urgency, just what their characters require. The show moves along slowly, but consistently reveals a deeper and more intricate web between the police, underworld, and crime reporting in Mumbai. If you don’t pay attention, it can be difficult to tell who is working for whom and why. 

What is a journalist’s mission?

The central character at the heart of the conflict, Jaideb Sen, is a veteran of crime reporting who is believed to be close to Dawood and sometimes publishes stories against Rajan. Jagruti Pathak, Tanna’s character, manages to get a phone interview with Rajan—in full view of her entire newsroom—and is ultimately nailed for this as supposed evidence of her links with the underworld and role in Sen’s murder. What a layperson may easily miss here is that journalism, especially crime reporting such as this, is essentially all about access. If you have the access, you have the scoop. And if you want to write about the most wanted gangsters, you need to be close to them and their aides. In this case, what does a journalist actually do and how do you make sure that their intentions are not compromised?

Bombshell: The Life and Death of Anna Nicole Smith

This is where Ayyub’s character, named Imran in the series and representing the phenomenal journalist and author Zaidi, becomes important. The journalist is known for his reporting on Dawood Ibrahim—indeed, a joke on the show is how badly he wants to see Ibrahim caught and put behind bars. He published his book, Dongri To Dubai: Six Decades of Mumbai Mafia, in 2012. In the show, it is Imran who never loses sight of what he and his colleagues are doing: reporting about crime to inform the public, rather than making front-page bylines and getting kickbacks for mouthpiece articles. Imran is the anchor that often restrains the highly ambitious Pathak in her never-ending quest for fame, without compromising her ability to get verified and fact-checked exclusive scoops. Sen, also mentored by Imran, works for a rival newspaper, and the rivalries of gangsters reflect the professional rivalries of the two reporters as well. So, when he uncovers something deeply disturbing, he asks Pathak to stop digging and stay away. But Pathak receives it as a threat rather than a warning.

It is in the last episode that the story truly comes together. While talking to a fellow inmate, Pathak recounts this exchange with Sen and goes into what drives such journalists: the adrenaline rush of mingling with high-profile people, the fame, and the power. Her monologue is poignant for what the case did to her not only as a journalist but also as a single mother and a woman. She remarks that all of the influential people she brushed against, whether a police officer or an influential inmate, functioned in essentially the same way. Their ego and power helped her get ahead, but, when push came to shove, she was also crushed under their weight when it suited their objectives. From a star journalist to an accused murderer, she is humbled (and broken) to the point of criticizing her own journalism.

But outside Pathak’s arc, the show raises several important questions. What truly is journalism, for one? Is it about protecting the business interests of media houses, or informing the public? The two can often be at odds. If it is the first, to what extent must a journalist go to get a scoop? If it is about the public, does the fraternity of journalists have the wherewithal to stand by individual reporters in a collective show of upholding truth at great cost? Both Sen and Pathak are subjected to intense character assassinations by their own colleagues and peers. Pathak is accused of illicit relationships with her editor, top cop Shroff (Baweja’s character), and even labeled Rajan’s girlfriend which also gets her targeted by inmates in prison. The implicit assumption is, “How could a woman ever get anywhere in life, if not for men showering undue attention on her in return for romantic or sexual favors?” Her ambition may have made her a bit reckless, but in their schadenfreude and self-interest, most of her fraternity members conveniently forget the endless hours she put into her work, sacrificing her family and personal life, and her ingenuity and patience in getting the intel that helped her rise in her career.

It is not something that she is subjected to only by men, but also by women. Pathak’s rivals who were also women did not pull punches in contributing to her trial. A female intern she was mentoring at the time of her arrest actively turned against and used her to build a career for herself. Played by Inayat Sood, Deepa tries to mimic Pathak in her ambition and drive but with none of her ethics and judgment. In one scene, she even remarks about how boring print media can be and that she’d like to be in broadcast media because they understand that news is “entertainment.” On the other hand, one of Pathak’s main rivals as an inmate turns out to be a woman she had reported on years ago, Rambha Ma. The woman had killed off her husband with the help of her boyfriend and was in jail for the same. She lords it over her fellow female inmates and, when Pathak shows up, leaves no stone unturned in making her life worse. From making sure she cannot eat, bathe, or spend her time in peace while in jail, Rambha Ma subjects Pathak to a personal vendetta for her journalism too.

Caught in a system

While in jail, Pathak also realizes that many inmates are there mostly because of a lack of information. In one instance, she remarks that judges should visit the premises and see how inmates live without basic human dignity. It isn’t just she who is innocent, but many others, except they had none of her will to fight the case, her awareness of laws and court procedures, family and community support, or, finally, good lawyers.

The show also tugs at the deep nexus between the Mumbai Police and the gangsters which it claims it wants to nab at all costs. Pathak was used as a convenient distraction in an effort to toss away Sen’s murder case due to a lack of real evidence as well as the protection of certain top cops. In this view, the work of a journalist becomes even more important and fraught with dangers, requiring more and more protection and support not just from the media fraternity but various stakeholders in the state as well.

India’s Police: An Instrument of Injustice

That Pathak (like Jigna Vora herself) is eventually acquitted is a testament to the adage that truth alone triumphs—even though in its march to victory it can sometimes fall prey to the selfish interests of the very people that seek to fight for it. Scoop is a must-watch both for its compelling portrayal of a real-life story and for the questions it raises.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post “Scoop”: the Fight for Truth in a Corrupt World appeared first on Fair Observer.

While Kondo’s approach was limited to organizing one’s stuff, the protagonists of Netflix’s The Minimalists: Less Is Now (2021) go into why our societies are becoming increasingly consumerist and why minimalism is their motto. Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, childhood friends who grew up poor, had wanted nothing more than to be able to afford things they didn’t have—a good house, luxury cars, designer clothes, savvy electronics, and the like. By their 30s, they had acquired everything but the feeling of satisfaction that they were after. Minimalism became their way of taking back control of their lives. Their motto wasn’t to live in less, they say, but to make room for more. That is, to take the focus away from material consumption to creativity, relationships, community, and more. Much like Kondo, their approach too proved to be wildly successful. They started out with a blog, The Minimalists, but now also have a book, podcast, a Netflix show, interviews, and, of course, an online course where they help people declutter their lives. Ironically, the course, Simplify Everything, purports to give you as many as 135 decluttering solutions to 45 clutter problem areas.

Living in a culture saturated by marketing

However, while the duo have indeed made a virtue (and a business) out of the very problem they seek to avoid, they offer compelling insights into America and the modern world’s increasingly consumerist tendencies. For starters, it’s worth noting that with the advertising industry’s shift to online platforms, Amazon remains America’s top-most advertiser, and the ad-industry made over $300 billion in revenue in 2021. By contrast, most of the ads in the 1950s US played on TV and the industry generated about $40 million. 

According to the documentary, this has led to a crisis of attention in which each advertiser is constantly pulling in a potential consumer not only by bombarding them with their ads but also by manipulating their insecurities and aspirations to goad them into making the purchase. Between online shopping, credit card purchases, and same day deliveries, the feedback loop has never been more instant and gratifying for a consumer.

Money Can’t Buy Me Love

Before the American consumer realizes, he or she has lived a lifetime of unchecked consumerism, with the average household hoarding up to 300,000 items. It’s no wonder, then, that in the last few years many have turned to saviors such as Kondo, Millburn, and Nicodemus to help manage this pathology. So, when their houses are decluttered and emptied out of stuff they didn’t even remember they had, it feels like they have been given a new lease of life. The newly freed space, both literal and metaphorical, gives them a renewed sense of hope about their life.

What the minimalists leave out

Where Kondo teaches people to value what they have and keep only what they value, the Minimalists want to help people in turning their focus away from buying stuff to make themselves feel better. In both cases, the idea is to live more mindfully. However, what neither addresses is why large swathes of people find all of this difficult to do in the first place. While it’s tempting to paint consumerism as the evil which must be resisted with a missionary zeal, it is worth asking if getting rid of one’s stuff in a Netflix show is all it takes to take back control of one’s life. After all, there is a reason why instant gratification is the flavor of the present times.

For one, putting in the work in your relationships, profession, and community takes far more time and effort—with no guarantees for positive results and a near certainty of disappointment and failed expectations. This is why these seemingly different aspects of life, whether online or offline, are all alike rife with constant anxiety. Not only does the modern consumer want quicker promotions at work, they also want their LinkedIn posts to go viral. Not only do they want the picture perfect relationship, they want the most Instagram worthy shot of their time together too. Not only do they want their communities to accept their identity, they seek to become Twitter activists by opining on every other controversy.

In other words, it is not only our attitude towards our material possessions that suffers from compulsiveness, but our entire lives. While the anti-consumerist narrative may feel meaningful to those who feel suffocated by the amount of stuff they own, it would be worth our while to be cautious to not let it become just another fad in our attempt to feel good about our lives as quickly as possible. Minimalism as an approach to life only works if we understand that, ultimately, fulfillment doesn’t lie in more, but in making do with less once we have fulfilled our basic needs in every aspect of our lives.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Popular Anti-Consumerism Crusaders Have Got Right appeared first on Fair Observer.

But to gauge whether AI can really write or not, we first need to understand why we write and read at all. That is a question that has been elegantly tackled by the American journalist and author Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Having grown up in an age before the Internet, he found that he was rapidly becoming more and more incapable of reading articles online because he simply couldn’t hold his concentration for long. He writes of peers who grew up reading books in libraries, enjoying the process of hunting for the right book for years, but now find it difficult to read books at all. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore, I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it”, one of these peers say to Carr. 

While it may be reliably argued that the vast majority of humanity would anyway never have the patience to read War and Peace cover to cover, it is a cause for concern when devoted readers who want to read more find it difficult to do so. Carr makes the point that it’s because the Internet has now made it possible for us to skim through a truckload of information in a much shorter span of time. We can now get a sense of a narrative on a topic that seems to be rooted in facts but is ultimately as vacuous as it comes. In the case of Carr and his peers, this hunting for information online and stringing it all together for a narrative is done by humans themselves. But what we’re seeing with the advent of ChatGPT and the like is that from now on, even that will be done by an algorithm.

What seems to be lost on AI evangelists are the internal stages of questioning, processing, and resolution that are associated with good writing. A reader in love with the elegance of literary writing may think that the writer’s talent lies in being romantic but there’s a whole lot more to enduring texts. A text of any nature— literary, academic, religious, and so on— if it endures through the years does so because it answers some of humanity’s most persistent questions, processes, and resolutions. We do not talk about the Bhagavad Gita or Phaedrus (or even a Pride and Prejudice) today out of religiosity or idle philosophizing but because they encode within themselves universal challenges and solutions to being human. But why do such texts come into existence at all?

To understand that, Carr takes us to ancient civilisations of Egypt and Greece. He writes of a dialogue between the Egyptian god, Theuth or Thoth, who invented writing, and one of the kings, Thamus. Theuth obviously has all the good things to say about writing but Thamus disagrees with him, saying, “should Egyptians learn to write, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. It is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance. Those who rely on reading for their knowledge will seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing. They will be filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom”.

This ancient story resonates louder than ever before in the age of writing bots. But that’s not all. For Carr now moves the proverbial mic over to Socrates. He writes that unlike his prodigious student Plato, Socrates was more of an orator than a writer. While the teacher acknowledged the benefits of writing to capture one’s thoughts, he also argued against a dependence on the technology for he thought it would alter our minds and not for the better. By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, Carr paraphrases Socrates, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers and prevent us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness. 

And so, it follows that anything worth writing and reading about comes from deep within us. Any text is a repository of our inner life— our fears, confusions, aspirations, dreams and more. When a writer captures them, he or she does so by tapping into both their inner life and its conflicts with the external world. Through this difficult and sustained churning we get a writer’s insight, which can be literary, philosophical, or moral, but which is nevertheless intrinsically human. Ancients, then, understood the importance of an inner life that was constantly questioning, processing, and resolving the external environment in creating wisdom, whether idealistic or practical, that was necessary to living a good life in a given age and culture. 

The emphasis on memory is found in many cultures around the world with the underlying reason that it helps us build and sustain an inner life. This inner life helped us tap into universal and eternal ideas of a good life through which we could deal with changes in our external environment in a more meaningful way rather than becoming herd-like.What artificial intelligence contributes to is this continual erosion of an inner life. While technology was only meant to make our physical lives easier, it is now coming for our emotional selves. Carr writes how much of this has seeped into modern academia, journalism, and arts as well as the ordinary life with most of us following “scripts” or algorithms laid out by search engines like Google or even online academic journals. ChatGPT and artificial intelligence tools may still help us become more innovative and creative, helping us chart new horizons in understanding the world around us. But we must heed Carr’s The Shallows in the disadvantages that these tools may cause us in near future as well.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can ChatGPT Really Write Now? appeared first on Fair Observer.

While astrology never completely dropped off from the face of earth, it was decidedly out of favour with both science and religion by the early eighteenth century in Europe. As we have noted before, Western society was undergoing two radical changes at this time. In addition to the shift of the model of the Universe from a geocentric one to a heliocentric one, the rise of Roman Catholic Church had a part to play as well. Astrology threatened the Vatican’s authority to shape public discourse on God and the cosmos and so, astrology came to be regarded as not only technically unsound but also immoral. It didn’t help that the astrologers of the time had begun to venture out of their remit and would make increasingly bold and politically dangerous predictions. All in all, irrespective of Brahe and Kepler’s explorations of astrology, most of intellectual and polite society decided that it had to go. So, astrologers went underground. That is, for a century or so. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, astrology began to see a momentous revival. The stage for this was set up by four astrologers in particular, whose work would go on to change the very face of astrology.

The first of these was William Frederick Allan, who can be termed as the only salesman astrology has ever had. Born in 1860 in the United Kingdom, his upbringing was marked by his mother’s devout Anglican beliefs and a father who left the family when Allan was nine years old.  In his mid-twenties, he was managing a grocery store in Manchester when he fell ill. But instead of going to a regular doctor, he visited a Dr Richardson who was both an herbalist and an astrologer. The doctor not only cured him of his kidney ailment, but also set him on his life path by introducing him to astrology. After that, Allan studied astrology as an enthusiast for years and even wrote articles for the magazine of an occult society, Celestial Brotherhood, of which he was a member. His new-found beliefs were reflected in his identity when he changed his name to Alan Leo, as he is better known today, to correspond to his own astrological sun sign. 

He subscribed to many astrology-related journals and through one of those, The Astrologer, he met his future business partner Frederick Lacey who would further lead Leo to the biggest influence of his astrological journey, the Theosophists. Soon enough, he started spending a lot of time at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in London while still working as a travelling salesman. 

Theosophy and Astrology

The story of Theosophy is vital to the revival of astrology as we know it today. Established by the Ukraine-born Helena Blavatsky as a society in New York City in 1875, it brought the ideas of Karma and Reincarnation to the West for the first time. Before she set up the society, Blavatsky had spent two decades travelling around the world, including India where she stayed for two years. But while her stay wasn’t all that remarkable, she would later meet a Hindu man named Morya in London in 1851. She claimed that she had had visions of him as a child and so when he instructed her to visit Tibet, she attempted to travel there, and there are reports that claim she did manage to make it out there even though it was virtually impossible for a woman to do so. In any case, by the end of her travels, she had developed Theosophy as a religion. It was a synthesis of Indian, Platonic, Hermetic and Kabbalistic thought. 

According to her, there was an absolute first cause in the Universe and the potential of that first cause made human life possible. The goal of life, then, was to realise that potential over a period of many lifetimes and unite the soul with the absolute. While this is in line with the Hindu view of soul’s ultimate aim of Moksha or liberation from the cycle of life and death, there is an offshoot to this that was proposed by Christianity-oriented Theosophists. For them, the realisation of potential or the awakening is really ‘Christ consciousness’ which would be felt by everyone living through the Age of Aquarius, which pointed to revolutions in the areas of government, technology, and industry,  in the twentieth century. But whatever view one subscribed to, the final aim was to achieve the unity of the individual soul with the absolute until the entire cosmos dissolves into the Pure Spirit. For this, every individual must do whatever it took to awaken their spiritual awareness, including astrology, yoga, and aromatherapy among other practices. At its peak, the society had 45,000 members with more than hundred lodges in the Indian subcontinent. In 1882, the society’s international headquarters shifted from New York City to Adyar in Madras (now Chennai). 

Theosophy gained relevance in the Western world because it emerged at a time when religion was becoming private and a lack of spiritual communion was felt in the public arena. Leo was highly impressed with Theosophical thought and would go on to form his own ideas about how astrology could help with the core mission as outlined by the religion. He became privy to Blavatsky’s inner circle through her astrologer and became a member of the society in 1890. In August that year, his business partner Lacey and he decided to launch a publication, The Astrologer’s Magazine. 

The magazine featured articles on astrology but it was the offer to readers to send in their birth details for a free reading that really changed it all.  People were soon writing to them with their time, date, and place of birth, for short, personalised horoscopes. In the next four years, the two sent out about four thousand such readings. While Lacey had to bow out of the venture, owing to other work commitments, another significant person entered Leo’s life at this time. This person was Ada Burch, often called Bessie, also a Theosophist. She had written in to ask for a reading and had found the final product to be impressive enough. The pair met in person in early 1893 and discovered that they enjoyed each other’s company. Burch was married at the time but her husband had been unable to keep up with her condition of a platonic relationship and the couple had separated. Leo, on the other hand, was happy to oblige. They married soon after and as practising Theosophists, the couple gave up meat, alcohol, and smoking. His marriage made his religious convictions even stronger and it reflected in his now renamed magazine, Modern Astrologer, which often carried articles written from a Theosophical perspective. The Theosophists too started publishing Leo’s articles and helped spread his astrological ideas through their lodges across the world.

In 1903, one of his employees suggested to Leo a way to organise his material in order to streamline the free readings. Doing that proved to be more than just efficient. Leo essentially assembled a production line for all possible placements of the Sun, Moon, and the planets in different signs and most of his written material was plagiarised from various astrological books. Kim Farnell, Leo’s biographer, quotes from the works of Edward Harold Bailey who was his staff member and was opposed to Leo’s approach towards astrology, ‘The whole of the mimeographed sheets comprising his test horoscopes were copies, in many cases verbatim, from Sepharial’s Prognostications from the Rising Sign and H.S. Green’s Planets in Signs and Houses, while the greater part of the other sheets of his system were copied and paraphrased from Butler’s Solar Biology.’

But he had no compunctions about this and filled up his office with hundreds of sheets of such written material. This was a newer and improved form of reading and so this was advertised as a ’test horoscope’ or a ’shilling horoscope’, since these horoscopes were priced at a shilling. The idea worked because in the next three years, Leo did over 20,000 such readings. For 25 pounds, readers could get an even more detailed analysis. An unintended and far-reaching consequence of this was that many copied this idea and soon enough, there were scores of opportunists giving out these readings to make a quick buck. Astrology was officially a business now. 

Leo’s test horoscopes, then, were quite the turning point as these would later come to define what most people would understand as astrology. However, astrology since it was ‘fortune-telling’ was illegal in the Christian world. By 1912, there were about six to seven hundred fortune-tellers in London and this was a cause for alarm. Astrologers, palmists, and clairvoyants, were all ordered to remove their signboards from place of work and halt advertisements. Questions had already been raised in House of Commons the previous year about the growing menace. 

So, when Leo was slapped with two cases, he had to pay a fine for one of them but managed to wriggle out of the another one on the basis of a legal technicality. However, the atmosphere around him was risky and he decided to make some changes. It was at this point that astrology began to metamorphose into a tool of psychological analysis. This would later become the basis of psychological astrology. 

But despite the controversial nature of his work, Leo left behind several enduring legacies. First, he domesticated astrology for the first time in human history by taking it to people’s homes. One didn’t have to seek out an astrologer in person any more for a basic reading and this helped make astrology far more accessible and widely known than it had ever been before. Second, he brought the placement of the Sun in a birth-chart to the centre stage. Explaining it in his book, Esoteric Astrology, he wrote, ‘In the physical man the Sun governs the vital energies and has much significance in connection with the father and the positive side of the nature generally.’ Third, he ushered in a New Age astrology which was greatly inspired by Theosophy and the Hindu concepts of Karma and reincarnation. His understanding of the latter was influenced by his own research and personal experiences, including two trips to India. Writing in the same book, he remarked, ‘On the surface, the Hindu astrologer is apparently a fatalist, but individually he had a firm belief in free will within certain well-defined limits. The very well-established belief in reincarnation and transmigration makes him a fatalist so far as the rewards and punishments of past lives are concerned, and it is to causes set in motion in a former birth that he traces the inevitable fate of the present life; for he has a wider comprehension of the laws of Karma than the Western astrologer.’ But while he realised that there was a specific cultural and philosophical context behind the idea of Karma, it didn’t stop him from propagating his version of it. Of all his books, Character is Destiny, which focuses on these ideas still remains his best-known work. This means that Karma, as it was and is perhaps still popularly understood, in the West is quite different than its intended Hindu interpretation. 

Leo, then, gave astrology a superficial sense of meaning and profundity that made it ripe for easy obfuscation and commercialisation. Besides Leo, there was also Evangeline Adams in the US. Born in 1868, she was introduced to astrology serendipitously by J. Heber Smith, a Sanskrit scholar and professor of medicine at Boston University. Smith used to employ astrological methods in his medical work and taught Adams much of what he knew. She had also been attracted to the Hindu Vedanta philosophy after Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago speech in 1893. The philosophy, among other things, was rooted in a belief of the cyclicity of life as well as an interconnectedness of life on earth with the cosmos. Three years later, she would start her life as an astrologer in New York City when she and her assistant put up at Manhattan’s Windsor Hotel under the patronage of its then proprietor, Warren Leland. That year, she predicted a terrible fire accident for the hotel and when it came true, it solidified her position as an astrologer. However, her biographer, Karen Christino, shows that it is possible that Adams never predicted it but was enterprising enough to claim that she had, immediately after the fire broke out. And so, like Leo, her legacy lay in showmanship rather than skill. But both of them were at the forefront of reviving astrology in the UK and in the US respectively. 

Working out of a studio she rented at the city’s Carnegie Hall, Adams often had high-profile and rich clients, including J.P. Morgan, Joseph Campbell, Charlie Chaplin and many others. In 1930, she became the first astrologer to host a radio show which was broadcast thrice a week, with listeners sending in requests for readings in huge numbers. In addition to that, Adams’ sponsors, at one point, would receive 4,000 reading requests a day and she employed over twenty-five assistants for her work. She also made predictions for public interest, including the election of Calvin Coolidge as US President in 1924. Like Leo, she too was slapped with cases for ’fortune-telling’ and even arrested thrice. But unlike Leo, instead of trying to escape, she fought the trial head on and won it. Bobrick Benson, in Fated Sky, notes that ‘she came to court armed with reference books, expounded the principles of astrology to the judge at some length, and illustrated its practice by reading a blind chart that turned out to be that of the judge’s son’. The reading proved to be correct and the judge ruled in her favour, remarking that ‘she had raised astrology to the dignity of an exact science’ by her work. 

Horoscopes Arrive on the Scene

The stage set by Leo and Adams was then occupied by R.H. Naylor and Dane Rudhyar in their respective countries. The former of these, Naylor, started out by accident. The Daily Express, one of the Britain’s most widely circulated newspapers at that time, wanted to do something new for the recently-born Princess Margaret, the daughter of King George VI. The editor, John Gordon, thought it might be a good idea to publish an interpretation of her birth chart and the paper sought to enlist the popular palmist and astrologer Cheiro for the job. But as it turned out, he was too busy and instead sent his employee, Naylor, for the job. 

The princess was born on 21 August 1930 and the newspaper’s sister publication, Sunday Express, carried the horoscope three days later. The feature was titled, ’What The Stars Foretell For The New Princess’, and predicted an ‘eventful’ life for the young royal. One specific prediction said that in her seventh year, the Royal family and the nation would be impacted by a significant event. That event came to pass when Edward VIII (later the Duke of Windsor), caused a crisis in the country by proposing marriage to an American divorcee. Eventually, he had to abdicate the throne and his 326-day-long reign came to an end in December 1936. 

However, the horoscope feature captivated the British audience right from day one. To capitalise on their readers’ interest, the newspaper decided to repeat it and carried interpretations for those born on each day of a particular week in September 1930 in this new feature.  Naylor followed this up with a prediction of a British aircraft accident in October and lo and behold, that came true and cemented his reputation as someone who knew what he was doing. The astrologer was then signed up as a regular and his column came to be known as ‘Your Stars’.  While he started out with predictions based on birth dates, he switched to the twelve sun signs in 1937. Such horoscopes were soon being published by many publications across Britain. 

Fleeing wartime Europe, Daniel Chennevière, who was born in Paris in 1895, arrived in the United States in 1917. He changed his last name to Rudhyar, fashioned out of Shiva’s Rudra form, because he was fascinated by the mythology of Rudra as the god of death, transformation, and rebirth. It was in tune with his personal inclination towards the idea of self-growth that comes from personal challenges. Perhaps he also knew of the Nakshatra of Ardra, which is ruled by Rudra and is indeed a marker of inner turmoil and the resultant emotional growth, as we read before. Like Leo, he also picked up astrology by his association with the Theosophists. By 1933, he was writing articles for the magazine American Astrology regularly. He suggested the twelve-paragraph daily horoscope version to his editor and the idea was well-received both by his editor as well as the American audience. In time, it became so popular that it was replicated by other publications across the country. 

But Rudhyar’s true legacy lies in the introduction to astrology the theory of depth psychology, which looks at the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in our minds. He remains to date the most prolific astrologer who wrote about psychology and astrology. He was inspired by ideas of psychoanalyst Carl Gustave Jung in particular and his work revolved around bringing together Jungian psychology to astrology. It caught on well because his work coincided with the New Age movement in Western societies that needed something more than the capitalistic and atheistic way of life. One of his most prominent books, Practice of Astrology, was published by Penguin Books in 1970. Other book titles by him include Astrological Study of Psychological Complexes and Emotional Problems (1977) and Astrology of Personality: A Reformulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals In Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy (1987) among others. 

By the mid-twentieth century, the face of astrology had changed in the Western world. Traditional Greek and Islamic astrology had been relegated as a relic of past. Astrologers did not focus on predictions and were not trying to understand the world around them through planetary movements like their predecessors. Instead, astrology was now about understanding the self and the personality, mostly at a superficial level. In his book Hindu Astrology and The West, the renowned Indian astrologer B.V. Raman, on his travels to the United States in 1959, noted that there were close to five thousand astrologers in the country by that time. He described a meeting with one who introduced himself as a psychologist, astrologer, and a thought-reader. Raman wrote, ‘(He) handed over to me a copy of Your Daily Astrological Guide (that) was brought out regularly by a publishing firm in the Midwest and (said) that he was connected with several such firms which manufacture such stuff as “Dream Interpretations”, “Hollywood Horoscopes”, “Stellar Dietetics”, and so on.” He further remarked that while the astrologer claimed he could cast birth-charts, his knowledge of predictive astrology was limited to sun-sign readings. When questioned, the astrologer defended himself by saying that “in order to create serious interest in astrology in the minds of the common public, it was necessary to give them something light and non-technical”. Another astrologer claimed that his investigation into planetary transits revealed how the “bell-shaped skirts used by women today would give place to a bustle type of skirts by 1970 or so”. According to him, the changes in fashion corresponded to a 36-year cycle of movements of Jupiter and moon’s nodes.’  

The Linda Goodman Phenomenon

This initial stage of popularisation of astrology was merely a preamble to Linda Goodman and her book, Sun Signs. Published in 1968 in Britain, it became the first ever astrology book to make the New York Times best-seller list. At the time of her death in 1995, her books had sold over 30 million copies in 15 languages, which was the highest for books on astrology. What she did with her books was nothing short of revolutionary because she personalised the zodiac in a way that had never been done before. 

In her introduction to the sun signs book, she wrote about the importance of analysing a birth-chart in entirety to get the full picture of an individual and pointed out how Sun’s transits into twelve zodiac signs were not as precise and orderly as most people believed. It was for clarity’s sake that even astrologers must pretend otherwise because laypeople cannot be expected to understand such intricacies. Despite this, she believed knowing a person’s sun sign was akin to understanding them more deeply.

The book expanded upon each zodiac sign, with prose that was engaging and fun. With about forty pages dedicated to each sign, it had verses from Lewis Carroll’s works introducing each portion. So, if she was writing about how to recognise an Aries person, she quoted Carroll, ’They would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that, if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds.’ This is followed by a lengthy description that feels like she knows what she’s talking about while also being easy to read. In similar fashion, she goes on about various ways in which one may encounter an Aries individual. 

The Aries man, then, is a ’natural rebel’ who thinks he was born smarter than rest of the world and for that reason, ’those in more powerful positions will teach him frequent lessons in humility’ and a woman who can handle his shattered ego with love and compassion gets to have him forever. The Aries woman, on the other hand, is likened to Gone With The Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara and like her, Mars women are ‘tough enough to defy convention, face an advancing army, or even shoot a man through the head with icy calmness, if he threatens her loved ones’.  In this way, the Aries child, employee, and boss are also described. The pattern is repeated for all the twelve signs, each of them treated with similar wit and prose.  

In her book Love Signs, published in 1978, every chapter was preceded by verses from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, much like her previous book. The Aries Lover, then, was literally an infant in love as the first sign of the zodiac. This individual was here to teach his or her partner the innocence of love while they had to learn the lesson of trusting people. Goodman then explores compatibilities of an Aries lover with all the twelve zodiac signs. This incredibly detailed, creatively interpretative, and public-friendly way of looking at sun signs took off like nothing else before. This was also a decisive departure from astrology’s image as a tradition that, like all traditions, could be orthodox, ridiculous, and a superstition of the past. Her model of astrology, even more popular than what Leo, Naylor, and Rudhyar did, was replicated in publications across the world, and soon it would become impossible to find any newspaper or magazine that didn’t carry daily, weekly, and monthly predictions for sun signs. These predictions were not always based on regular inputs from actual astrologers and were more creative writing than astrology. 

But what made the system of ‘Sun Signs’ so enduring? For one, these were far easier to popularise than birth-chart astrology. One could now have an element of the spiritual or the psychological without getting their feet dirty. But more importantly, this was due to a phenomenon known as the Barnum Effect. The term was coined by Paul Meehl, an American psychologist, in the 1950s. According to him, vague personality descriptions or statements felt accurate to people because of what their brains did subconsciously—fill up the material with real details that only they are privy to. This, many believe, explain the popularity of sun sign horoscopes.  While reading about these sun signs were harmless fun most of the times, the mainstreaming of these ended up being counterproductive. Not only did a market emerge out of this, many ’believers’ also tend to excuse their bad or unhealthy behaviour by blaming it on their sun sign. This is akin to perpetuating ignorance over and over again because most people still do not understand the distinction between these sun signs and astrology. While this has prevented many from looking at astrology critically, there have been some in the past who have taken up that mantle.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The Netflix series also examines the advent of psychedelics in Western science in the 1950s, their unlikely but important role in the American public’s perception of the Vietnam war and the psychedelic ‘renaissance’ in recent decades. In the foreword to his book, Pollan explains the term “trip” is used to describe a psychedelic experience because of its potential to make users feel transported to an unfamiliar environment. Similar to traveling to a country where we don’t speak the native language and find our senses sharpened to sucessfully navigate our stay. Pollan also explains that he grew up suspicious of psychedelics but still felt pulled to investigate if there was more to psychedelics than just moral panic or frivolous excitement.

Pollan had heard of teams at New York University and UCLA working on using psychedelic drugs to help relieve emotional stress in terminally-ill patients. However, it was a research paper by a team at John Hopkins University that truly grabbed his attention.The paper titled  Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance published in 2006, noted the results of a randomized controlled trial where 30 volunteers were either given doses of psilocybin or a placebo. Those in the former category reported having an experience of the “beyond” and rated it as one of the most significant experiences of life on par with the birth of a child or the loss of a loved one.

While he mentions some of the risks associated with psychedelics, he believes these findings challenge modern science, which is often dismissive of anything deemed too “spiritual”. This evidence also challenges our notions of consciousness, reality, and how humans deal with difficult and traumatic emotions. A self-proclaimed philosophical materialist, Pollan embarked on a well-intentioned journey to understand psychedelics and what they can do to the human mind.

Powerful Evidence for Psychedelic Healing

The Netflix series features several poignant examples supporting Pollan’s beliefs. A man in Switzerland, who took a high dose of LSD in a controlled study, reported experiencing the feeling of being in his mother’s womb as a baby with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. He said he could experience the fear of death, the choice to push the cord away and the relief afterward. Experiencing these memories allowed him to discuss his feelings with his mother and held great meaning for him.

In another case, a woman who had lost her brother to a drug overdose and her mother to suicide, participated in a study about MDMA in an effort to process her memories and emotions connected to these two events which were otherwise blocked. The drug made it possible for her to confront these events that were so deeply painful and shocking for her conscious mind, they had been repressed in her subconscious. Finally giving voice to her fear, pain, and sadness, she was able to move on and build a new life for herself.

Another beneficial substance that shows promising healing benefits is Mescaline.This substance is acquired from a plant called Peyote Cacti and is typically used by Native American communities. The show details the story of a man who struggled with substance abuse for 15 years and had requested a formal ceremony to help him overcome his addiction. This involved ingesting the drug but in a more religious and ritualized manner. After the ceremony, he reported feeling more grounded and clear about himself and his life.

Using these real life examples illustrates that psychedelics can help people process their emotions and manifest more refined realities for themselves that they otherwise were unable to envision because of the limitations of their conscious mind. While there is promising evidence to the benefits of psychadelics, there are still questions to consider. 

Opportunities and Questions to Explore

First, what does it really mean to change our mind? Is it merely the clearing of psychological pathways? Many people would argue that it is impossible to remove or edify certain imprints in our subconscious. Often, when we feel afraid or fearful, we recognize the feeling as a stomach ache or even shortness of breath. When we are happy and joyful, our body language becomes much more open and relaxed. Whatever our mind experiences subconsciously, our bodies experience it consciously and we are often aware of it.  Working through emotions and recognizing our subconscious thoughts, in our minds and bodies, might require meditation and therapy and psychedelic studies should incorporate these measures in near future.

Additionally, can the majority of such experiences genuinely lead to a deeper meaning in life? Even though we may be able to game our way out of certain mental blocks through psychedelics, can we change the societal realities that persist around us? If anything, this has the potential to widen the conflict between the mystical insights of such experiences and the hard materialist worldview of Western societies. There has to be greater acceptance of the spiritual and mystical aspects of life rather than just psychedelic drugs in the West.

Finally, while it sounds exciting to expand our scientific understanding of consciousness, does a more democratized use of such substances have the potential to destabilize societal conventions? Ayahuasca ceremonies are now notoriously commercialized and there is the risk that an excessive use of such substances can lead to disastrous consequences which may lead to the barring of these ceremonies. In their original contexts, such practices are carried out with utmost secrecy and the knowledge is held by a select few. This approach prevents exploitation and irresponsible use of psychedelics.

How To Change Your Mind, the book and series, provide valuable insights on the future of psychedelics in mainstream healing and medicine. Although Pollan’s optimism about the use of substances to change the human mind is inspiring, it is important to balance these findings with curiosity and caution. 

[Lane Gibson edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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When NPR wrote about a yoga guru in the US who also turned out to be a QAnon believer, a far-right conspiracy theory cult, it seemed odd that the writer and experts critiquing the controversy should have made the above claim. Because after all, what does the instinct for paranoia or delusional thinking have to do with the themes of interconnectedness that one encounters in Eastern thought as well as quantum physics? As far as apparent correlations go, this is tenuous at best except if the writer too was subconsciously biased against a non-Western line of thinking. 

NPR’s blasé mischaracterization begs the question—despite the popularity of New Age capitalism under which the modern wellness industry in the West exists—can the West and East truly ever meet? A sizable portion of this industry includes Eastern practices such as yoga, ayurveda, qi, mindfulness, gua sha, essential oils therapy and more. However, the way in which these practices are understood, performed and articulated in the West for their audience leaves much to be desired. 

Shreena Gandhi, an academic who researches yoga and its history of appropriation, in an interview to Vox said, “The thing about the spiritual ‘East’ or the ‘Orient’ is that there’s a history of Westerners cherry-picking customs, traditions, and practices to serve their needs, that they can tie to a particular political agenda.” 

An example of this phenomenon can be found with the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Here, corporate America found it fit to appropriate it as a productivity tool for all sorts of issues at the workplace—responding to an angry email, tuning out workplace noises, and, of course, firing employees without any guilt. Companies like Google, Aetna and Goldman Sachs instituted programs that gave their employees mindfulness training. Yet, there were experts who were concerned that practicing mindfulness may make people passive and defeatist in their lives. “Meditation wasn’t originally designed as a secular stress relief technique,” said Catherine Wikholm, the author of The Buddha Pill, a book that explores the unexpected side effects of mindfulness.  

We see that the practitioners in the West repeatedly import practices from the East, package them into something easy and secular for their audiences, and then crop up criticisms that the particular practice is harmful, unscientific, and conspiratorial. This import is more often than not without the consent of or context from voices from the East where such practices originated. 

Spirituality as Consumption

While the intermingling of thought and practices is unavoidable in the globalized and online 21st century, it bears investigation if the Western import of Eastern spirituality is a true meeting of minds. What we now understand as Western culture has its roots in the Enlightenment, the 18th century movement also known as the age of Voltaire. This movement promoted a way of life that was decidedly secular and rational. Eventually, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions ushered in a new way of life. Accumulation of material resources and empiricism became the driving force in Western, especially Anglo-Saxon, society.

In recent decades, having achieved their ideal of materialistic excess, many in Western countries found that the answer to life did not, in fact, lie in secularism, rationality and consumerism. The spiritual and emotional void that came with living one’s life to fullest materialistic potential had to be filled and, true to its material nature, it had to be quick, easy, and affordable enough. Thus began the industrialization of spirituality, except it had to be mostly Eastern spirituality, which could be sold as a fresh product to Western audiences looking for “answers.” The product worked because Eastern spirituality was seen as exotic, legitimate and, most importantly, it was inaccessible enough for an average Westerner to verify from the original sources in the East. Hence, this spirituality was ripe for cultural appropriation. Notably, the new gatekeepers weren’t people who were true believers. Instead, they were true entrepreneurs.

Many of the Eastern practices, then, come into direct conflict with the Western way of life because they are often meant for aspiring ascetics and monks. Even when they are meant for the householder, Eastern practices foster a balanced, frugal and ethical life. In either case, the idea is to let go of worldly attachments and possessions that the modern Western individual accumulates and accentuates painstakingly over the course of a lifetime. How, then, could a yoga mat-toting and athleisure-clad New Yorker feel comfortable with the idea that their “self” is nothing special or unique but a drop in the seemingly infinite ocean of souls living through endless cycles of life and death, going through their share of good and bad karma, just like every other person on the planet? 

There is nothing wrong with an entirely materialistic existence. However, misunderstanding and misappropriating forms of philosophical, metaphysical, and traditional thought systems to deal with the petty frustrations of daily life is not quite kosher. Western salesmen of Eastern spirituality are guilty of cultural misappropriation as well as preying on vulnerable people looking for solace in their own societies.

Therefore, NPR and Western media are unfair when, time and again, they criticize Eastern spiritual practices. Instead, they must shine the light on the ignorant, dishonest and greedy self-proclaimed prophets of the modern wellness industry. What we need is an honest appraisal of two distinct approaches to life, one of which can be broadly said to be located in a Western or materialistic way whereas the other in an Eastern or spiritual tradition. To conflate the two is to understand neither and malign both.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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