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Thirty-nine people killed themselves in Rancho Santa Fe,
California, last week. Did the Internet have some-thing to do with
it? The cultists ran a Wab-page design business. They may have
trolled for new members by e-mail.
They believed that an alien spaceship was hiding behind the
Hale-Bopp comet. They may have got the news over the Net, where
rumours spread fast.
This spaceship, they decided, would pick them up, but only if they
were dead. They took this in stride, and are reported to have been
"very upbeat" on the videotape that they left behind in lieu of a
suicide note.
It is tempting to blame the Internet at least in part, but it is no
more guilty than the rope industry is when people hang themselves.
More likely, the tragedy stems from the fact that as a nation we
Americans have never been more confused about good and evil,
righteousness and wickedness, God and man. Until last week, the
mass suicides of recent years -the People's Temple in Guyana, the
Branch Davidians in Waco, the 74 members of the Order of the Solar
Temple - were accomplished with no help from the Web.
The Internet, we are told, is a terrifically potent spreader of
rumours. Granted, but radio was more potent. One memorable night
in 1938, Orson Welles created widespread panic by broadcasting
blow-by-blow reports of an invasion from Mars.
Why not blame the movies? The cultists got their ideas about alien
spaceships from Hollywood. But you cannot really blame the movies.
Technology merely highlights and underlines the text it is given.
If you look at modern America and then at the Rancho Santa Fe
suicides, you cannot help but conclude that this story is about
religion, not technology.
Evidently, the cult's goal in recent years as to "overcome" any
attachment to money, sex and family life, and to live in a,
strictly authoritarian community -a recreation of the poverty,
chastity and obedience of Christian holy orders.
Its members seemed to reach repeatedly for traditional Christian
ideas and come up bare -their souls needed religion but their minds
were stocked only with Hollywood junk.
Granted, weird cults have been around for a long time. What is new
in today's America is that traditional religion has been suppressed
for a generation; "suppressed" in the sense that the public domain
has been vigorously swept clean of it by judges and opinion leaders
who are proud of what they are doing. A few highlights:
The US supreme court outlawed prayer and Bible reading in the
public schools (1962), forbade a public high school to display the
Ten Commandments (1980), barred "moments of silence" in the
classroom (1987), prohibited non-sectarian prayers at public school
graduations (1 992).
The old line Protestant denominations are in deep trouble today,
and both Reform and Conservative Judaism are falling apart. This
religious disintegration was symbolised in an article that ran last
year in The New York Times, headlined "One Holiday That Retains Its
Meaning." Thanksgiving. it was reported, is "the one day when the
perennial love of togetherness and festive meal still seems fresh."
Practising Jews and Christians apparently shrugged off this curious
report of the death of Christmas, Easter, Passover -the press has
been known to get things wrong. Yet the article is almost
certainly correct. Among the nation's elite, traditional religion
is indeed dead, and only Thanksgiving "retains its meaning."
The idea that suppressing religion in the public sphere could
actually mean anything or have consequences is, for the average
sophisticate, a proposition to snort at. Yet here we are as a
nation starved for religion, and the hunger is fiercest at upper
social levels, where people set up shop as Web- page designers.
The fundamentalist churches are doing fine, but they don't do much
business among the technological elite. When the old religions are
reeling, people cobble together new ones. In spiritually ignorant
times like ours the new ones won't be much good, generally
speaking, but people need something.
Environmentalism is a favourite religion nowadays; its leaders are
explicit about its spiritual side. You cannot display the Ten
Commandments in public school these days, but teachers are
encouraged to peddle recycling dogma.
Environmentalism is not for everyone, and it seems likely that the
tragedy of Heaven's Gate is the story of spiritually famished
people whipping up a religion like island castaways piecing
together, in their dire need, a semblance of civilisation out of
driftwood and spit.
So is the supreme court responsible for what happened in Rancho
Santa Fe? Of course not. Nor is the American Civil Liberties Union.
A person makes his own choices. But there is enough indirect guilt
to go around.
In the middle of this century, the air in many American cities was
filthy and made people sick. The smoke belching fro m factories
downtown didn't kill the dying man in the suburbs. It merely added
its bit to a mildly poisonous atmosphere that killed the weakest.
Today's crusade against religion has done the same sort of thing.
Most of us shrug it off. The crusaders keep hitting us, but we can
take it. The stronger among us remain Christians and Jews in the
old sense, or find satisfaction in America's new secular religions.
The weaker join cults. The weakest die.
(New York Times Service)
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