It’s So Hard to Be Goode
Jun 11th
This past Wednesday evening, I could hardly believe my eyes when I watched the season premier of The Goode Family, a new animated sitcom on ABC by Mike Judge (along with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky). The show, which chronicles the trials and tribulations of an environmentally-responsible, culturally-sensitive middle class American family, was absolutely hilarious. But it wasn’t Judge’s usual sense of wry cultural commentary that got me (see his other creations like Beavis & Butthead, Office Space, and Idiocracy for that). My amazement had more to do with the culture that he was commenting on. Let me explain.
Comedy shows, from SNL to The Daily Show to Judge’s own King of the Hill, have made a habit of satirizing the views and values of conservative America. But this new show has targeted a whole new demographic: the vegan, eco-conscious, politically-correct, ever-concerned-about-the-global-impacts-of-their-every-choice crowd that has made Whole Foods one of the most successful companies in the world and played a significant role in electing America’s first African American president. And while I found the show to be genius (I’m a green, Barack Obama idolizing kind of guy), it has received some pretty scathing critiques from reviewers of the more liberal persuasion who may not be able to handle it when the joke’s on them. Read the rest of this entry »
Out of the Swamp Radio Show (6/05/09): The Kosmocentric Perspective
Jun 6th
On this past Friday’s Howie Rose Show on Burlington, Vermont’s community radio station, The Radiator, EnlightenNext’s Diane Bensel and Joel Pitney spoke with their hosts about why it’s important to have a cosmology and described what the kosmocentric perspective on reality is.
“Is Narcissism Hurting America?”: Stephen Colbert pegs our postmodern disease
Apr 2nd
Narcissism–our postmodern cultural epidemic–is finally getting some press.
For anyone interested in spiritual evolution, narcissism has always been the issue at hand. As spiritual teacher and visionary Andrew Cohen explains:
“[Narcissism] basically means we see life and all of our experience through the prism of the separate ego. The way narcissism works is that the event of experience itself automatically creates, at a subtle level, the sense of being special—any experience at all. The experience itself, whatever it may be, is not a problem—the problem is what the ego does with it.”
And in our postmodern era, that separate, special, sense of self has become more inflamed than ever. As a 1979 baby, I grew up fully in this cultural milieu–a culture where your own feelings and experiences become the “great story,” your life’s guiding principle. Duty, religion, family, country–moral structures that have held society together for centuries–have all, to a great extent, become submerged in the anoxic swamp waters of a “my way or the highway” philosophy.
Beyond the spiritually aware pioneers, narcissism as a culturally recognized disease has not had much attention until recently. We had some early warning signals, such as when Christopher Lasch published a book called “The Culture of Narcissism” in 1979, or when the next year, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders first recognized the emergence of “narcissistic personality disorder”. But even as late as 2006, when Time magazine awarded “You” the Person of the Year award, the irony was lost on the masses. With a reflective cover, the magazine officially made gazing at your image culturally approved–no more mocking that “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all” business (circa 1938).
“This is the cultural moment of the narcissist.” –Emily Yoffe, Slate magazine
Then recently, Slate came out with an article entitled “But Enough About You … What is narcissistic personality disorder, and why does everyone seem to have it?”. The Slate article documents some recent accusations that it was America’s and Wall Street’s narcissism that got us into this financial crisis. They quote the researchers Jean Twenge (author of Generation Me) and Keith Campbell, for some scientific backup:
“Psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, authors of The Narcissism Epidemic, who obviously have a stake in proving there is one, estimate around 10 percent of today’s young people have clinical manifestations of NPD. They believe narcissism is a cultural virus that has spread throughout the population over the past several decades.”
But the real coup d’etat was Steven Colbert’s performance on his wildly popular late night comedy show, The Colbert Report (narcissism intentional). Enjoy!
Clip #1:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Me Time – American Narcissism | ||||
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Clip #2:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Me Time – Emily Yoffe on Narcissistic Personality Disorder | ||||
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(We apologize to our non-U.S. visitors for your inability to view this clip!)
Mother Knows Best
Mar 4th
In our last appearance on the Howie Rose Show, we described our experience of growing up as grandchildren of the sixties (that is, children of children of the sixties) and started to call into question the values that were birthed during this cultural explosion in light of the desire for something even more (dare I say) than Dylan, JFK, Joplin, and Jerry had to offer.
To our delight, we received a very heartwarming and enlightening response from none other than Christiana’s mother (my mother-in-law), a dyed-in-the-wool child of the sixties (she lived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district when it was cool and lived in India in the late 60s when the Beatles were there), about her reactions to the “swamp” that we described.
With her permission, I’ve posted her response here. I wanted to share it because her perspective on the cultural explosion that has defined our lives and ideas in more ways than many of us care to admit, carries the kind of weight that only someone who lived before, through, and after those times could really bring. Enjoy!
Dear Joel, Diane, Tom and Christiana,
This was a fantastic dialogue with the Radio hosts in Burlington! It was so great to hear all of you express, in different ways, how we, as humans, are leaping into the next level of consciousness. At least a few brave souls are charging ahead and articulating a clear vision of why it’s necessary to do so. I haven’t heard the other shows, but it seems, by the reaction of the the hosts, that you kind of surprised them with the direction you were taking. The evolutionary impulse was really bursting forth. I could hear it in your voices.
You have all clarified for me something that I was very aware of, but never put a name to— “neo-hippie” ism.
I remember speaking with Joel last August, as we sat on the “no cars allowed” street right in Burlington, watching all the young and not so young people walk by in hippie regalia. I said there’s something that is attractive to me about the way they looked and also something very repellent. The attraction part was identifying with my own past, (having spent a few of my college years in the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco in the ’60’s), feeling young and hopeful, courageous and rebellious, willing to break out of the old boundaries and create a new world. That was the “leading edge” at the time and boy, did we know it! It was an explosion of consciousness which rattled the powers-that-be and reverberated across the country and around the world. It happened so quickly and was out of control, but it was real.
But that was then. And when I looked around at the people, (okay, the neo-hippies) on the street that day last August, I could see that they had adopted a “life-style” which seemed to be very hip and cool, but it just a parody and had no real substance to it. It was ultra post-modern and reeked with narcissism. The crest of the 60’s wave had slid into backwards into a trough and what was once edge with a purpose was now sickening-mainstream-comfortable.
So, to hear you, (as offspring of the green meme, transcending the swamp), speaking from your own experience about some of the important issues of this age, with the all-important evolutionary perspective, is truly inspiring! Perhaps some of those neo-hippies who might be listening will hear something different in your voices, something very positive and think “Mmmm? What’s all this about?”
Out of the Swamp Radio Show – 2/20/09
Feb 26th
Here’s the latest episode from our weekly Friday morning spot on Burlington, Vermont’s “Howie Rose Show”:
Right-click here to download mp3.
And here are some thoughts about the show:
One benefit of our Burlington Radio Show on Friday mornings is that we are starting to bring out and make objective the strands of postmodern culture that shape our ideas, values, and actions, but that we aren’t necessarily aware of. One of these maxims that came out on last Friday’s call was our dependence on balance as a guiding principle–and how diametrically opposed balance and evolution can be.
We spoke about two of the sacred balancing cows of our generation: the balancing of masculine and feminine energy and the quest to balance humanity with our collective impact on the earth. The all too familiar idea is that the world has gotten out of balance due to our over emphasis on industry, consumerism, masculinity, and other modern sins. Now we need to (continue to) restore the balance by bringing in the opposite of those energies–local economy, living simply, femininity, and others.
That the world is suffering from ecological and cultural disasters is not in doubt. Thank God that movements to protect the environment, bring equality, respect cultures and peoples have become part of our value set! These are all movements that I have been part of, as most of us have, to some degree or another. I remember long nights sorting waste in my college’s Physical Plant to determine how many pounds of recyclables were getting tossed by careless college brats. Ahhh, the crusade against the non-recycling hold-outs was a Holy War and I was Earth’s knight in shining armor. With my Nalgene full of superiority juice, my friends and I would snatch discarded plastic bottles out of the trash cans and pile them into the recycling bins, glaring with contempt at the evil sinners–our dorm room neighbors–who we condemned as consciously plotting to destroy the world.
The desire to push back against the problems created by the previous generation’s stunning scientific, economic, and political development was very strong. But that structure of pushing back against progress, (in its own context, modernism IS progressive, least we forget), is in danger of getting in the way now that we are poised to move into a new stage of creative explosion. In this conversation, we are talking about aligning with the universe’s creative energy, as ourselves, a leap forward that will throw anyone off balance. I wonder if it isn’t the knee-jerk attachment to balance in life that is holding us to our postmodern moorings. Perhaps we need to speak about the fact that moving forward into a new value-sphere doesn’t mean giving up the good postmodern values– they will always be part of us. It means giving up our attachment to them, at the expense of adopting new ones.
We are talking about what comes next. As Diane so aptly put on the show (see audio, above), we are talking about the move from postmodern to an evolutionary worldview, not from modern to postmodern.
Looking forward to more!
Gen Y Reads Only 9 Minutes a Day
Feb 26th
…according to this article from Inter Press Service. But I suspect that doesn’t include reading IMs or txts.
Seduced by TV, the Internet, video games and text messaging, young people are famously reading less and less — 15-to 24-year-olds in the United States spend less than nine minutes a day reading for pleasure, according to 2008 U.S. Department of Labour statistics.
WWJGD?
Feb 26th
If you’ve never seen the superb 60 Minutes segment on Generation Y (who writhe about in the deepest, darkest depths of the postmodern swamp) titled “The ‘Millennials’ Are Coming,” it’s definitely worth checking out. And then you can watch this Gen-Y-made spoof of the 60 Minutes report, which poses the question that I’m sure is on many parents’ and employers’ minds: When it comes to Gen Y, what would Jane Goodall do?
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