culture wars on cruise control

Music: melotron: fortschritt The "culture wars," usually associated with "political correctness" and other forms of squabbling among layperson, politicians, journalists and academics on the television and in top U.S. magazines and newspapers, are being waged everywhere these days. No longer are the battles limited to "gay rights" or where life begins or the obfuscating prose of an arrogant professoriate. Today it seems that any issue somehow related, however remotely, to the question of Spirit will be yoked to a facile, Left vs. Right binary. Interestingly, the series of decisions handed down by the Supreme Court yesterday seemed to navigate this terrain fairly carefully and in an unexpected way: it is and is not legal to display the ten commandments, depending on whether religion or heritage is emphasized. Although dissenting opinions intoned the proper, Right-ist conclusions, in general the decision seemed to avoid the predictable in favor of balance.

Speaking of balance, then, I have been thinking more on Tom Cruise's recent unbalanced behavior and righteous statements regarding the mind, which are clearly within the terrain of a culture war that does not rest neatly along the Right/Left divide (that Cruise's assault on psychotherapy coincides with the promotion of Spielberg's family-bonding remake of The War of the Worlds is, of course, no mere coincidence either). Consider his remarks in a recent interview in Entertainment Weekly (courtesy of Karen McCullough at The Blogora):

EW: You are aware that your views about psychiatry come across as pretty radical to a lot of people.

CRUISE: In the 1980s, you were supposed to say no to drugs. But when I say no to drugs, I'm a radical? 'He's against drugs — he's a radical! He's against electroshock treatments — he's a radical!' [Laughing] It's absurd!

EW: Yeah, but Scientology textbooks sometimes refer to psychiatry as a ''Nazi science''. . .

CRUISE: Well, look at the history. Jung was an editor for the Nazi papers during World War II. [According to Aryeh Maidenbaum, the director of the New York Center for Jungian Studies, this is not true.] Look at the experimentation the Nazis did with electric shock and drugging. Look at the drug methadone. That was originally called Adolophine. It was named after Adolf Hitler. . . [According to the Dictionary of Drugs and Medications, among other sources, this is an urban legend.]

EW: Well, Freud wasn't a Nazi, but the point I'm getting at here is that expressing these views isn't necessarily a public relations bonanza for you.

CRUISE: What choice do I have? People are being electric-shocked. Kids are being drugged. People are dying.

It is curious how psychotherapy is lumped in here with psychiatry, that both are termed a "Nazi science," and especially that Jung would be associated with Nazism! It's also clearly fallacious to assume all things "psy-" share the same premises, except, perhaps, that there is this thing called the dynamic unconscious. Incidentally, Hubbard's Dianetics is about as close to a bastardized form of "the talking cure" as you can get, with it's own, dangerous depth-psychology techniques and bizarro-world abuses of the transference (including skin-conductivity tests) . . . the major difference between psychoanalysis in its many varieties and Scientology as it is practiced concerns the role of Spirit. As Cruise noted in his interview with Lauer: "Scientology is something you don't understand. It is a religion. Because it's dealing with the spirit --you as a spiritual being." The distinction drawn here is not between the Left and Right (remember, Billy Graham is a democrat), but "secular humanism" versus a faith in soul, or a belief in what Scientologists refer to as the "thetan."

So, Tom appears on Oprah, and the two are aligned along the same, pro-Spirit axis. Indeed, Oprah's philosophy of self-help therapeutics is in perfect keeping with Scientology's stress on self-soul repair: there is no chemical "imbalance" that leads to suicide. It's simply a matter of cleaning up your thetan, shedding the unsoulful, through individual effort. After all, Oprah's success is proof enough that there are no structural or systemic disadvantages for black women; Cruise's success--like that of George W. Bush--is proof enough that dyslexics can overcome tremendous "biological" obstacles.

If we reflect on the major, media events of the past year—-on Shiavo, on television series like Revelations and the Left Behind phenomenon, the recent Star Wars film and, of course, on the role of fundamentalist religious rhetoric in the current U.S. presidency—-the culture wars are clearly misread by those of us (often wrongly) assumed to be on the liberal side. The culture wars consist, increasingly, of battles over the existence of the Spirit and soul. It's time for secularists to wake the fuck up and get a clue. Laughable events like Cruise's misguided couch-jumping boot-strapism, here parodied as an Evil Cruise Emperor zapping Oprah, really point up the no-so-secret wagers too readily dismissed as pop culture trash. Cruise is really not so much concerned with the overprescription of Ritalin or electro-shock therapy as much as he, following Scientological dogma, is scripted to believe that the collective human soul is being deadened by the pharmaceutical industry and an ideology of secular healing. Now, my friend and student Roger Pippin has done a good job pointing out how the prescription of Ritalin is, in fact, a serious problem. My point here is that this really is NOT about drugging our kids: it's about the "State of the Union's Soul."

I predict that The War of the Worlds, unquestionably a rehash of the trauma of Nine-eleven, will be in-sync with this message. It will communicate the story of a people under attack from an unseen, evil force from beyond (e.g., demons, but with space ships) that find strength in family and, ultimately, faith. I will be interested to see how Spielberg reworks the church scenes from the classic original (faith in God is a major theme in the original)—I suspect, given his Jewish background, he will downplay the overtly religious aspects of the original screenplay, but amplify the role of spirit in some ingenious way that is in perfect keeping with the cultural march toward evangelism.

For many people, the culture wars are really the battles of a spiritual warfare. That's what's happening today in our courtrooms, in Washington, on our screens and in our papers. People are clamoring to define the proper form of the soul, and making arguments for rescuing it from the clutches of this or that evil secularism . . . . Whenever wars are waged over abstractions we should be alarmed. Just think about how our "war against evil" has changed our lives so far; the Left needs a rhetoric of religion and spirit, badly and now.