The Chimeras of the New Age
Black & White by Shiva Naipaul
I found this book in a dusty old bookshop in Vashisht. I’d never heard of it before, or the author. Turns out he was the brother of the renowned Nobel prize winning author, V.S. Naipaul.
It was published in 1981, four years before Shiva Naipaul died. It focuses on the Jonestown massacre that occurred in Guyana in 1978 and connects this tragedy with the preoccupation with self realisation, ecology and life-style that emerged in the aftermath of the white radical and Black Power movements of the 1960s.
‘They often call it the twenty-first century. California, in this view of things, is something more than merely the richest and most populous state of the Union, the first among equals. It is a state of mind; a state of being. The dogma has it that what California is doing today, the rest of the United States will be doing tomorrow; and, of course, whatever the United States is doing tomorrow, the whole world will be doing the day after.’
In an excellent chapter of his book, Black & White, Shiva Naipaul recalls a visit to the New Earth Exposition in San Francisco in 1980, a place where he describes:
‘The ideas float like ghosts. So do the men and the women who cling to the ideas. A swirling vapour of ‘idealisms’ — ecology, feminism, heightened consciousness — clouds the brain.’
The chapter begins with Naipaul referencing a flyer that was circulated to promote the New Earth Exposition:
‘The handout spoke with the unique accents of California. I had been living in San Francisco long enough to become almost inured to the singular blend of eco and ego, of technologically minded worldliness and etherealism, of over-ripe self-consciousness and opulent complacency.’
Approaching the exhibition hall, Naipaul encounters ‘muddy vans that spoke of their owners’ closeness to the soil.’ He goes on to describe the assorted attendees:
‘Out had come the bearded and pigtailed with their backpacks, fecund-eyed girls with babies in slings, shaggy feminists, liberated homosexuals, earnest, mustachioed teachers worried about Energy, divorcees with allergies and lower back pains.’
Stalls at the convention were staffed by ‘solar panel salesmen, herbalists, therapists, the purveyors of wood-stoves, windmills, and earthworms.’
At a section dedicated to Energy and Appropriate Technology, Naipaul converses with a wood-stove salesman:
“Wouldn’t getting wood be a problem?” he asks.
“Not if you live in Oregon,” the response comes. “They have one hell of a lot of trees up there.”
“I thought it wasn’t a good idea to be cutting down too many trees.”
“Yeah…I guess that’s right. I hadn’t thought of that. But I reckon they’ll develop some quick-growing ones.”
At Shelter and Habitat, Naipaul is introduced to the New Earth Self-Reliant House. This residence used earthworms as a basis for a self-perpetuating eco-system that would mean residents would never need to leave it and disturb the fragile ecological balance of ‘Spaceship Earth.’
A new and revolutionary yogurt was on show at Food and Gardening. It was claimed that the yogurt, which was made using discarded whey, could feed the starving millions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Changes in the ‘planetary diet’ were widely promoted, with tofu burgers and tofu cheesecake on display and wheatgrass juice highly recommended. Naipaul recalls sipping a ‘cosmic herbal cocktail’ whilst listening to a group of feminists on the central stage. They had a variety of rules to drill home for journalists, including:
- Pronouns were intrinsically sexist and deeply offensive to women.
- Women were never to be referred to as ladies, gals, chicks, girls, the fair sex, co-eds, divorcees, career girls, housewives, or blondes.
- Any references to the sexual preferences of persons in the news were to be abolished.
- Stereotyping words, like ‘mother,’ ‘feminine,’ and ‘husband’ were to be abolished.
- The age of ‘man’ was finished. There would be no more talk of ‘man-hours’, ‘man-to-man talks’, or ‘the man in the street.’
Naipaul goes on to meet a Dr. of Wholism who claims, to his bafflement, that:
‘Anything which is Whole, Whole within itself and working in harmonious conjunction with all the components of its world, is, by definition, healthy…Aliveness is to be at one with oneself, with one’s inner being, with one’s dreams, with the world. True healing is the process of making Whole.’
The Dr. later states that conventional medicine ignored the ‘awryness’ at the root of most medical conditions.
At Schools and Communities, Naipaul encounters Brother Jud and Even Eve, two ‘Energy Forces’ who had met and coalesced around the founding of Kerista Village, a utopian community pioneering a new spirituality, a new family structure, a new economic system, a new psychology, and a new sexuality.
At Kerista you could be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, just as long as you accepted the necessity of group sex, engaged in ‘encounter therapy’ — a technique of re-education, or psychic surgery, carried out by the group mind — and worshipped a pantheistic essence called Kyrallah. Kyrallah was an “It”, not a “Him”, which manifested for everyday purposes as Sister Kirala, who, Naipaul is reliably informed, was Jesus’ liberated older sister.
Naipaul characterizes Kerista, a recognized institution that benefited from tax exemptions and other constitutional guarantees, as:
‘An eccentric, recycled ragbag of many of the temptations characteristic of the New Age. They were absurd, these men and women; they were also, most probably, quite harmless — as harmless as the germs that go to make up a common cold. But a common cold, given a suitable twist of fate, can turn into bronchial pneumonia. In this hot-house atmosphere of pampered self-consciousness, ideas — or what passed for ideas — floated like viruses. They were a disease you caught; a contamination of the intellect.’
Finally, Naipaul is struck by a bold banner that announces:
‘An Idea Whose Time Has Come.’
It hangs above the stall of the World Hunger Project. A volunteer asks Naipaul for a donation, to which he responds by asking for more information:
‘We plan to rid the world of hunger by 1997. The ending of hunger is an idea whose time has come.’
‘That’s nice to know. But what does the World Hunger Project actually do?’
‘It makes each person realize that he or she can make a difference.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that if you decide you want to end world hunger you can.’
‘I still don’t understand. How does my deciding I want to see world hunger end make world hunger end?’
The volunteer ruffled, goes to find a colleague who can explain the idea more succinctly:
‘Quite simply, we feel it’s an idea whose time has come.’
‘I’m aware of that. What I’d like to know is how you plan to implement that idea.’
‘Well, if you and millions of other people like you want to see world hunger end, you can make it happen.’
‘All I have to do is want world hunger to end? Nothing else?
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘But what does the World Hunger Project itself do with all the millions of dollars it has collected? Has it actually helped to feed anyone?’
‘You’re missing the point, it’s not our aim to actually feed anyone.’
‘Then why do you need to collect money.’
‘Our job is to spread the good news. That’s what we use the money for…The good news is that hunger can be ended by 1997 if millions of people like you decided that they wanted it to end. We collect signatures of people who have made that commitment. We spread the idea — the good news.’
A third volunteer then gets involved and writes Naipaul off as ‘a negative type hung up on logic and all that kind of bullshit.’
Naipaul decides to leave the expo:
‘Fatigued by the chimeras of the New Age, I went out into the gloomy San Francisco afternoon.’
Also by Mystery Train:
