Culture, Digested: The Perils of Inclusion

everything is a cult now

I had some lingering thoughts after writing “The Pleasures of Exclusion.”

The poet and artist Gabi Abrão recently posted about a trip to Lily Dale, New York. Lily Dale is a Spiritualist community, formed in southwestern New York in the late 19^th century. It’s a Spiritualist community in the sense that you must be a Spiritualist to move to Lily Dale – all prospective residents must be interviewed and assessed for their belief in Spiritualism and tested in your mediumship abilities and finally approved by a board. But still, when you do buy a house in Lily Dale, you don’t own the land under the house, giving the church ultimate control over the fate of the residents. Other than that, it’s a fully functional small town, or as functional as you can be when your residents are outnumbered by a factor of ten during tourist season.

In her assessment of the town, she saw a vision for how things could and should be. “I think the future is more small contained towns of shared ideology… I talked to a younger woman that moved to this town recently who said she loves it here because she doesn’t have to explain or prove herself to anyone.” Abrão dismissed the idea that this could be culty or lead to abuse. “Now that we have the internet and satellite wifi and a more global awareness of the world and all the ways you can live and think, being in a small town of like-minds isn’t as isolating or harmful or limiting, you can’t be cut-off and controlled.”

Abrão is not the only one to think this way, now that we’ve run the single-family dwelling into the ground by commodifying it, making it artificially scarce, building it in the least stable and most profitable ways possible, people are looking for alternatives. We have “intentional communities,” co-living communities, communes, big rentals with people crammed into every square inch. And with the death of traditional meeting spaces like churches and the privatization of parks and other gathering spaces, people are looking to find a one-stop-shopping deal: house, friends, and hobbies, all in one space.

your typical Bushwick intentional community

But how to decide on the mix of people? What are the standards for inclusion? Does it violate fair housing laws to announce Geminis are not wanted in your commune? And while we’re often more interested in people who are being excluded from the exclusive group – the people who are shunned, found inappropriate, cursed by god for having a late June birthdate – another way to look at it is, what a nightmare to be included.

Spiritualism is both sustained and diminished by their cloistered home. Having so many of its members in one place creates community and resolve. While there are a small handful of functioning churches across the nation, none of them seem to have created the kind of community in numbers or in devotion as in Lily Dale itself. A Spiritualist all alone on the plains of Kansas might be swayed into conversion or just resignation, as it is difficult to practice a religion all on your own.

But having all its members in one place also has kept it from evolving. There is not much to distinguish the Spiritualism of today from the Spiritualism of the 19^th century, except in the quantity and quality of its followers. As Jamie Loftus explored in her podcast series Ghost Church, the basic tenets of Spiritualism – that there is an afterlife and it is possible to communicate with the dead through mediumship and séance – are the same, but the tiny religion has not developed a theology or a philosophy or rituals beyond “hey let’s talk to this dead guy.” Lily Dale has been stuck in one place and one time for almost 150 years. And as a result, the religion has difficulty attracting new followers, and the town attracts mostly people who want the accreditation so they can charge more for their mediumship services. (Making modern Spiritualism less a church and more a professional association.)

But even beyond the stagnancy that often comes with exclusivity, what of the doubter? The person who wakes up one day with a small nagging voice, “Maybe this is all bullshit.” What becomes of them when their community, their housing, their livelihood is all dependent on them shutting that little voice up?

A friend of a friend was working at Google about a decade ago. It was boom times, and the New York headquarters wrapped themselves around him every single morning. The office satiated his every desire. He was fed in the canteen, he rested in spaces designated for napping, he formed longterm friendships with his colleagues. The office did his laundry and errands and shopping for him. And when he started to feel weird about some of the news about Google’s work with Israel or its collaboration with American intelligence or its violation of international law, he developed a pretty serious drinking problem. And what do you know, alcohol was just another thing his workplace was happy to provide, with happy hours and cocktail hours and recreational activities with a full bar.

When he did eventually leave Google, he didn’t just lose his job, he was evicted from the premises of his entire life.

When you are young and your primary passion is one little pop star, it’s hard to imagine a life that is not centered around that pop star. It’s hard to imagine you might want to travel internationally for any other reason than a concert. It’s hard to imagine wanting to talk about any other subject. Especially in a culture that has everyone hooked on this idea of their own authenticity. Your interests, your art, your job, your politics, your sexual proclivities, this isn’t something that will shift through time. This is your identity, this is who you are. It’s a firm foundation on which you can and should be able to build your entire life.

Allowing for the possibility of changing your mind in such a life means not just accepting the exciting and terrifying information that we are mysteries to our own selves, it means destabilizing your entire existence. It means disappointing the people whose stability was dependent on your own.

What was originally exciting about Spiritualism was the exit ramp it offered from Christianity. If its primary idea was correct and could be proven to be so despite the way it contradicted Christian teachings – that the dead not only survive in a new way but that they can be communicated with – then it could seed doubt through all of it, including the idea that only men can be priests or that going against the church would end in damnation or that the religious justifications for slavery or the persecution of homosexuals could also be wrong. And that’s why there are fragments of Spiritualism in abolition movements, in early feminism and suffragism, in Theosophy and paganism. Because the ideas were not trapped in one place, they circulated, through arguments and writing and adversity and proselytizing.

But now they are professionalized, hardened. Spiritualism is no longer going to change the world, but at least a couple hundred people get to make a lot of money off it. And by golly, at least there’s consensus.

Recommendations:

• Claudio Magris, Microcosms: “For some time you’ve done nothing but close doors, it’s become a habit; for a while you hold your breath, but then anxiety grabs your heart again and the instinct is to bolt everything, even the windows, without realizing that this way there’s no air and as you suffocate, the migraine batters your temples; eventually all you’ll hear is the sound of your own headache.”

• What if your brother was pretending to be a prophet??

• Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community is very good.

• My tarot card reader once expressed her frustration with mediums with the absolutely cutting, “Just because someone is dead doesn’t make them interesting.” It has been difficult for me to take Spiritualism seriously since.

• One of the other downsides of inclusivity is the kind of distorted view of reality it can give you. In a review of Sarah Manguso’s Liars in the New Yorker, Parul Sehgal criticized an online community devoted to the idea that infidelity in a marriage is tantamount to abuse. Members of that community are absolutely swarming Sehgal’s social media, including posting photos of her husband to speculate on which partner is or would be unfaithful to the other, to harass and chasten. The leader of this community posted a truly unfortunate response to the criticism. None of them seem as yet to realize that they are being perceived as unhinged, divorced from reality, etc etc. But they are definitely egging each other on.

• And finally, Jaimee F. Edwards wrote a wonderful review for us of Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time. I loved this part: “Laing’s output is imbued with a 20^th century grand narrative, logic, and sensibility. One that is particularly taken with individual actors. Laing is ontologically enchanted by artist-genius, their being-ness, their biography, to tell thematic stories about booze, freedom, art, gardens, whatever. From To the River (2011) to The Garden Against Time artists, writers, filmmakers are lauded as creating the weather of their time, and not the other way around. In Funny Weather, Laing asserts that art “shapes our ethical landscapes.” It’s a pretty clapped out static view on individual creative achievement over collective relations. Not to mention being more than a little unrealistic regarding the reach of art. Whether the concept of the artist-genius is a bother, is not so much the issue, as is Laing’s use of it over and over and over to rehearse learning, never unlearning, of ideas via singular mark makers.”