Nick

There's a tremendous amount to unpack in the West's co-option of other belief systems. I haven't had my coffee or tea yet, but a couple of poorly structured thoughts:

I've complained previously about encountering "mindfulness" practices in anxiety treatment materials distributed by my HMO (Kaiser). It's deeply weird to see religious practices deployed in this context.

This is partly driven by a sizable tendency within social sciences to examine and embrace meditative practices and related stuff as a friendly object of study in order to legitimize it, often led by western converts. It's not an exclusively western thing by any means, however; such research (of widely varying quality) is conducted all over the world. And even in the west it's often related to activity of new religious movement/cult groups that originate abroad. (The transcendental meditation folks, for example, fund a lot of research.)

Part of the route to preventing cooption/cultural appropriation by the corporate world would be to combat these attempts to scientifically or, often, psuedo-scientifically, legitimize and endorse eastern and/or new age religious practices. There's a direct pipleine from bad social science to managerial class self-help books etc.

In a discord convo @Captn-Arrr posted a weird grave marking that turned out to be related to the "Order of Pendo," a mutual benefit (insurance, basically) society from the late 19th century. There's little information about them online, but @earthtopus found a reddit post where someone found a reference to this pendo thing in a book of "Progressive Men of the State of Montana", in a passage describing a judge as broad-minded, wide-awake, and "a genial ho."

Incredible. Love to list progressive men who are genial hos.

Anyway, that reddit post links to a newspaper article from 1898 which in its headline describes the Order of Pendo as "a lusty four-year-old of California birth", which is incredible journalism unto itself. The article also assures us that both men and women are accepted, as long as they are "socially acceptable."

Anyway, none of that is actually what made me want to post. Rather, the adjacent article did, which is about people using electricity to make plants grow for some reason, with the extremely fun name of "electroculture." It describes how "many gardeners have found it to their advantage to use electricity for promoting the growth of plants" and "there is no reason why electroculture should not be greatly extended in ordinary garden practice."

I have no interest in electrocuting plants, per se, but "electroculture" is a very cool name (and would make an excellent obscure electronic music subgenre, IMO), so I googled it to see if it was, like, a thing, and apparently it still fucking is, because there's a Washington Post article from August that apparently needed to be published because electroculture is trending on facebook and tiktok.

The term has surged on social media in recent months as growers with gardens large and small give electroculture a shot. A public Facebook group called Energetic Agriculture has more than 150,000 members. The search terms “electroculture,” “electroculture gardening” and “electroculture copper wire” have been spiking on Google since early spring, and on TikTok, the hashtag has racked up more than 97 million views. Tutorials abound, with users demonstrating how to create antennas by wrapping copper wire around long wooden dowels or bamboo stakes. And there are plenty of before-and-after testimonials from gardeners who say that adding electroculture antennas made their plants flourish.

Anyway, that's all just a fun reminder to me that is just part of the whole new age shtick, both in terms of pseudoscience (or however one refer less judgmentally to scientific propositions which do not currently have strong empirical support) and also in like spiritual and philosophical contexts. There is a timelessness to this stuff that is fascinating.