Barcelona Metropolis

However, sociologists such as Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann have highlighted the paradoxical nature of this hypothesis. On the one hand, the widespread dismantling of major religious systems entails a dissemination of the sacred through the fabric of modern institutions that demonstrates the self-refuting nature of the hypothesis of secularism: only when religions relinquish their political agenda (unattainable missions are ruled out, the claim of veracity and universality is relativised, an end is put to the education monopoly, etc.) can they reappear, in the context of the “supermarket for buying and selling meaning”, as available spiritualities. On the other hand, religious pluralism enables the spread of subjective crises of meaning: the rationalisation and individualisation inherent in modernity entails the general isolation of individuals, who are insecure and paralysed by the range of possibilities that a free market of beliefs presents.

Consequently, if the end of the monopoly of the sacred by certain institutionalised religions is to be understood as a metamorphosis of the forms of religiosity and not as their abolition, the emergence and spread of the mystical-esoteric nebula must be seen as part of this transformation. We cannot go on repeating the simple story of the “return of the sacred” in the West, as if before the proliferation of new-age books in the late 1960s, religion had actually disappeared from our societies. In fact, considering it from this perspective only reinforces the neoconservative account of the disasters that technological and social progress has generated for Western societies. Only from that traditionalist worldview can it be argued that the fascination for horoscopes, Reiki or so-called Spiritual Response Therapy are the result of the need for comfort and the security of the transcendent.

Pop spirituality and self-help culture

So, if all these neo-religious products are not just fast food substitutes that have come to replace the old ways of relating to transcendence, how should we interpret them?

Perhaps one of the most interesting interpretations comes from sociologist Eva Illouz, for whom the mystical-esoteric nebula will be part of self-help culture, and although she will understand it as a response to social uncertainty under late capitalism – financial insecurity, deinstitutionalisation of subjects, disappearance of the division between public and private space, rationalisation of private life and the introduction of feelings in production logic –, she will adopt a pragmatic perspective that will set her approach apart from the other interpretations, insofar as she will consider that neo-religious discourses, however commercialised they may be, guide and define individuals’ practical action, helping them to tackle social contradictions and the uncertainty to which they are subjected.

Consequently, we are at the antipodes of the interpreation of the phenomenon by intellectuals like Ulrich Beck, for whom pop spiritualities are nothing but a catalogue of narratives, values and rituals from which to choose those that suit us best and project them in a “God-teddy” that is the negative of our fears, desires and hysteria: an à la carte religiosity that reflects our narcissistic concerns on a metaphysical level. The archetypal example that would support this interpretation would be the horoscope, which seeks to explain on a transcendent level the variability of personalities, social moods and collective states of malaise (justifying our sad state of mind on account of the “retrograde mercury season”). Thus, for the author of Risk Society (Sage Publications Ltd., 1992), the insecurity generated by rampant individualism, the decline of great narratives and growing social instability would lead individuals to seek a symbolic resolution of their malaise through this personalised spirituality that promises well-being and harmony, but that does not have a practical translation in the lives of these people. The mystical-esoteric nebula would then be a form of false consciousness that, albeit comforting at first, would not allow us to achieve greater well-being or happiness, to the extent that it would not change our material conditions. Again, the horoscope predictions would serve as a paradigmatic example of an ideological mystification that has no practical translation, since its formulae are described as empty or too general to determine a specific course of action.

Illouz’s perspective, on the other hand, assumes that subjects do see a transformation in their relationship with themselves and with others when they accept a series of therapeutic self narratives such as those put forward by the mystical-esoteric nebula. To return to the case of mindfulness apps: as a person begins to perform daily concentration exercises, they monitor their weekly evolution, understand their well-being and mental health on the basis of the principles of mindfulness (whether metaphysical, ontological or moral) and acquire a series of their own techniques to relate to their surroundings, especially in difficult or stressful situations, they are already transforming their relationship with the world. In Illouz’s words: “Self-help has indeed become the core of modern subjectivity, because self-help stands at the juncture between the ideals of autonomy, psychological techniques of self-making, and the vast economic interests of various industries assisting and shaping such process. […] Self-help is not only a market segment, it is a whole new modality of culture; that is, it constitutes a new way by which the individual connects to society ”.

Consequently, the mystical-esoteric nebula is part of the arsenal of therapeutic repertoires by which many people interpret themselves and interpret the world. Precisely because secularisation never absorbed the world’s disenchantment, but transformed the ways in which we related to religiosity, these ways have been engulfed by self-help culture. Thus, in the same way that business management manuals offer tools to guide us in an unstable and increasingly precarious labour market – for instance, the self-help bestseller Who Moved My Cheese, by Spencer Johnson (Putnam Adult, 1998), promotes an ethic of hyper-individualist effort and self-improvement that dovetails nicely with the concern of workers in a system of neoliberal competition –, we can say that pop spirituality products (whether books, workshops or applications) allow us to express our relationship with the transcendent to make sense of our being in the world.

Therefore, rather than challenging the very existence of these neo-religious products, or bemoaning the return of a set of superstitious beliefs removed from science (“the spectre of religion”), perhaps we should begin to wonder why they are so successful in guiding people and offering them tools to contend with their religious concerns. Can we not imagine different forms of relating to the transcendent and the sacred that do not undergo an individualistic ethic? Why should spiritual self-awareness techniques serve discourses of betterment of the productive subject? In other words: the problem is not so much that spirituality occupies a central place in our culture once again, since it never stopped occupying it, but that it does so within the framework of self-help culture, as another tool that serves the neoliberal logic of the entrepreneur of the self.

References

Beck, U. El Dios personal. La individualización de la religión y el “espíritu” del cosmopolitismo. Paidós, Barcelona, 2009.
Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning: The Orientation of Modern Man. Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers, Gútersloh, 1995.
Estruch, J. (ed.). Les noves formes de religiositat. Cruïlla, 2001, Barcelona.
Griera, M. M. and Urgell, F. Consumiendo religión. Nuevas formas de espiritualidad entre la población juvenil. Fundació “la Caixa”, Barcelona, 2003.
Illouz, E. Erotismo de autoayuda. Katz, Madrid, 2014.
Sloterdijk, P. You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2013.