"Cults are in style again. Or at least it's trendy to call things cults... America has always been haunted by cults...."

"...because modernity and then postmodernity have been disrupting American institutions for centuries. But in certain periods the disruption has been particularly potent. One was the Jacksonian era. Another was the upheavals of the 1960s and '70s. A third is the moment we're living through now. Each of those periods saw scads of new species germinating in the cultic milieu, and each of them gave us cult scares.... A decay in a society's dominant institutions can produce... an 'authoritarian reflex'... xenophobia and the desire for a strongman. Both are on display in the MAGA right. But secular centrists are also capable of longing for old certainties and for the institutional power that protected them—of looking at those unfamiliar alternatives sprouting around us, fretting that we've entered a 'post-truth era,' and calling for controls meant to herd everyone into the 'common reality' they imagine we shared in the past. That past never existed. The human race has always lived in a patchwork of sometimes drastically different mental worlds. But as those worlds mix and multiply, the old authorities become more anxious; and anxious people often project their fears onto an external enemy with a name. One of those names is that traditional American demon, the cult."

From "Cult Country/Is this a new age of cultism—or a new cult panic?" by Jesse Walker in Reason.

"There is the surge of interest in cults, likely driven by the fact that for four years America was run by a sociopathic con man with a dark magnetism..."

"... who enveloped a huge part of the country in a dangerous alternative reality. And there’s a broader drive in American culture to expose iniquitous power relations and re-evaluate revered historical figures. Viewed through a contemporary, secular lens, a community built around a charismatic founder and dedicated to the lionization of suffering and the annihilation of female selfhood doesn’t seem blessed and ethereal. It seems sinister." 

From "Was Mother Teresa a Cult Leader?" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT)(drawing attention to a new podcast, "The Turning," that portrays Mother Teresa in a negative light).

Viewed through a contemporary, secular lens, is anything blessed and ethereal?

This "surge of interest in cults" — if you want me to take it seriously — needs also to include looking inward, at yourself. What cults do you belong to? I ask this of Goldberg and of everyone who's choosing to characterize other people as belonging to cults. Some people — notably Rose McGowan — say the Democratic Party is a cult. But Goldberg, unsurprisingly, brings up Trumpsters as the cult here in America as she critiques a woman in a culture that is foreign to her.

What's the difference between "cult" and "culture"? Whether you look at other people through your "lens" and react to them as alien and defective? To be a serious thinker, you must critique your own lens. 

FOOTNOTE: According to the Online Etymology Dictionary entry for "cult":

1610s, "worship, homage" (a sense now obsolete); 1670s, "a particular form or system of worship;" from French culte (17c.), from Latin cultus "care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence," originally "tended, cultivated," past participle of colere "to till" (see colony).

The word was rare after 17c., but it was revived mid-19c. (sometimes in French form culte) with reference to ancient or primitive systems of religious belief and worship, especially the rites and ceremonies employed in such worship. Extended meaning "devoted attention to a particular person or thing" is from 1829.

Cult. An organized group of people, religious or not, with whom you disagree. [Hugh Rawson, "Wicked Words," 1993]

Cult is a term which, as we value exactness, we can ill do without, seeing how completely religion has lost its original signification. Fitzedward Hall, "Modern English," 1873]

Here's the entry for "culture," which comes from the same Latin root and originally referred to cultivating the land and growing crops.

The figurative sense of "cultivation through education, systematic improvement and refinement of the mind" is attested by c. 1500; Century Dictionary writes that it was, "Not common before the nineteenth century, except with strong consciousness of the metaphor involved, though used in Latin by Cicero." Meaning "learning and taste, the intellectual side of civilization" is by 1805; the closely related sense of "collective customs and achievements of a people, a particular form of collective intellectual development" is by 1867.

For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect. [William Butler Yeats, journal, 7 March, 1909]

"I went to England and in the course of us meeting the Beatles, I became friends with George. He was a very nice cat, very open..."

"... a very decent human being. Invited me over to his house for dinner, that kind of thing. Hung out with us. Later on, he tells me that he’s gone to India and met this teacher, this guru. George is smitten by him. I listened to what he was saying and I wanted to say to George, 'That’s great, but take it with a grain of salt,' because usually when somebody comes on that strong that they’ve got the answer, it’s bulls—. I wanted to say, 'Have some skepticism.' But I was too chicken to do it, because I had too much respect for George. So I wrote him that song. 'I thought I met a man who knew a man who knew what was going on.' And I ended it by saying, listen, I don’t think he does know what’s going on. I don’t even know if George ever heard the song."

Said David Crosby, in an interview with the L.A. Times. 

Here's the song, "Laughing":

 

That's from Crosby's 1971 solo album that the critics "just didn’t understand," as Crosby puts it. "They were looking for another record that was full of big, flashy lead guitar and blues licks and screaming lyrics. It was not where everything else was going, so they thought it was irrelevant." 

Lester Bangs called it "a perfect aural aid to digestion when you’re having guests over for dinner." In 1971, that was a worse kick in the head than being told your music makes me want to vomit.

ADDED: Not only do I have a tag for Lester Bangs, the Lester Bangs tag appears on a post written on the first day of this blog, January 14, 2004. There is no other tag for a specific human being until the next day, when Herbert Muschamp and Dennis Miller appear. Interestingly, George Harrison shows up on January 17, 2004.