Thank you for your excellent comments concerning the best-selling book The Secret [“A Little Secret About The Secret” by Julia Rickert, June 1]. I find the amount of positive public response to such a ridiculous work both astounding and tragic because it reveals the failure of many Americans to be able to think straight anymore and to recognize fraudulent expressions of spiritual principles when they confront them.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What are we to make of this phenomenon? As a teacher, I make a failure of American education out of it. I also make an enormous postmodern spiritual hunger out of it. I don’t know if you recall a novel from some years ago entitled The Celestine Prophecy that became a runaway best seller even though it was so bad literarily that no critic of consequence would comment on it except the one working for the Village Voice and he panned it. I submit that the public response to The Secret has the same roots as those which made The Celestine Prophecy such a best seller. The same goes for the TV series Lost, which, as an allegory, has all the nuance of a stunned water buffalo. The same is true for Harry Potter books and films, New Age and fundamentalist doctrines. And how about the explosive (no pun intended) growth in the attraction to terrorism on the part of Muslims as the path to their world domination?
Sixty years later, I don’t know the answers to those questions any more clearly than Miller did. As a teacher, though, I do know cognitive dissonance keeps students from changing their perceptions about some particular view of reality as long as their present perceptions of it have utility. In other words, I’m suggesting the situation of the American people’s vulnerability to spiritual and cultural quackery will probably get worse before it gets better. Instead, we’ve increasingly used materialistic and surface-featured yardsticks to measure our successes as individuals and as a nation. Some of the founding fathers feared this eventuality as their letters and diaries reveal and it seems their fears were well-founded.
