The single-page list of possible terms circulated to contributors to the Frequencies project on a genealogy of spirituality has the clean feeling that comes courtesy of the alphanumeric. All those capital Hs in a row; all that happy cacophony, from Horatio Alger to LSD to the White Dog Café (Philadelphia, PA), contained by the stuttering letter. Jarena John John John Johnny Jonathan Joseph. One is enjoined widely—“what comes to mind when you think of spirituality”—while sensing that one’s flights of association will be easily contained. You left out (speaking of them) John-John.

One could say that this is what spirituality itself does. It is elastic, while expressing common rules of order. It contains everything, while conforming to strict limits. As the curators note in their invitation, with some understatement: “Few incidents or characters in the history of spirituality can be contained within national borders.” But do we—yet—know what contains spirituality? Do we yet know if anything does, and thus whether there can be history (or genealogy) here, rather than simply classification?

These questions are not intended to threaten the project. One would be hard pressed, I suspect, to advance a preemptive critique of a history of spirituality—of the very idea of such a thing—that was not already considered in the Frequencies conference room. Of course such a history is impossible. That is why it must now be attempted.

I would like to contribute to this attempt, if not a preemptive critique, then something like the question of whether or how one could be disobedient to its terms—the question of the project’s concept. Like the question to spirituality itself, one asks: is there really anything that could not go on the list? This might seem a playful or obnoxious intervention. It is playful in tracking the spirit of the call while taking its investigative thrust to potentially absurd lengths; it is obnoxious in pretending serious engagement while revealing the project itself to be absurd. I mean the question in neither sense.

In elucidating what I do mean, it is instructive to bring to mind the late metaphysical work of spirituality connoisseur William James. James spent the better part of his career as psychologist and philosopher attempting to debunk metaphysics of its spiritualist pretensions, while also, not incidentally, carrying on with theosophists and occultists. After achieving notice for his essays on religion, pluralism, and belief, and at the same time as he was honing his pragmatic theory of truth, James developed his own metaphysical theory, which he called radical empiricism. Fascinating as a historical document, radical empiricism is distinguished mainly by the claim that the world is composed—not of mind and body, or temporality and eternity, or indeed any of the other famous dualisms in the metaphysical water, then and now. Radical empiricism was to be a monism, whose basic unit is experience.

James’s theory has the advantage of cohering with his pragmatist commitment to make truth something we can see, feel, taste, practice, do. His rejection of standard (in his view, “Hegelian”) metaphysics was that it posited a world (“Spirit”) subject to none of these things, a world therefore useless in providing a framework for the investigation of what really does exist and matter, among which James’s empiricism stressed the relations between things as much as things themselves. It is also worth noting that the “incident or character” of James’s philosophy always toyed with, and was consistently received in the light of, a fairly explicit nationalism. America would be the land of a properly grounded, empirically contained, pragmatic philosophy, cutting itself loose from the decadence of an ethereal European spirit forever spilling out into tyrannical and sloppily conceived social and political projects. James’s solution, a radical empiricism, makes such a spirit subject to the containment of American knowhow: experiment, revisability, and an overall temper of constructive, this-worldly optimism. Dams and railroads would be built; souls and their sicknesses studied, diagnosed, and allayed, if not cured.

I call James to the task of considering the nature of a history of spirituality since he was himself so aggressively interested in the spiritual—in both fertilizing and disciplining it. But I also call on him for the scope of his philosophical ambition. James’s metaphysical system, unlike those of the Idealists he loved to lampoon, has as one of its features that, as with our list of terms concerning spirituality, everything, presumably, can be contained within it. It is a theory of everything.

Is this a problem? First to the task of what it means. A thinker like Spinoza has often been called a monist. By this, readers mean that he sews up all of life’s particularities into one, single, existing substance. This reading can still afford to acknowledge that Spinoza understood substance to be infinitely modified. For the point, so it goes, is that its modifications are nevertheless, finally, of this one thing. James was against such pictures of the universe. His appeal to experience was precisely meant to give us the “blooming, buzzing” confusion of life—the smell of a dog’s nose, the angle of a roof as it is about to collapse, the agony of guilt over a failed connection with someone, the moments of longing for death. Finally, American readers have always felt, in turning to James after a spell in the archives of the Germans and the French: someone to give us the sense and taste of the damned gorgeous springtime in Cambridge MA, and not merely, as Schleiermacher vaguely promised, the sense and taste of the infinite.

And yet. Does James really get around the problem of how to have, while also theorizing what it is to have, experience? Does James really give us a theory of everything that marks what that everything shall smell and taste like? To do this question justice would take us deep into the bowels of modern philosophy—into, at the very least, the curious logic of an apriori worldview centered elsewhere than in the mind. Kant thinks, for example, that we meet up with the world of blooming experience with a mind that already orders it; James thinks we meet up with singular objects in the world with a self that is already experiencing, or better, a self that already is experience. There is a critical difference in the shape of the two positions. For Kant, we are limited to experience, and the work is to make this limitation and its structure as pellucid as possible. What it leaves out. What it leaves in. For James, we are limited by nothing, whose name (the thing, the nothing) is experience. It is noteworthy, then, that James’s theory of experience, in leaving nothing out, has a harder time than Kant’s at specifying what is left in—what it is, in short, that we are having an experience of.

It is enough in this context to suggest something like the following about James, concluding with some questions to a history of spirituality. What James was evidently after with his concept of a radical empiricism was a way to resolve the call of spirituality. As a sick-souled, genealogically-stressed denizen of the Cantabrigian beau monde at the turn of the twentieth century, James was fascinated by the more colorful of spirit’s possibilities. But in his philosophical commitments, he was a critic of spirit, Hegelian, Bradleyian, Blavatskian, and otherwise. James wanted to give us the real, and he felt sure that this real was both empirical and absolute—that the empirical was not simply the place of experiment and Baconian habit, but was also mind. This might seem a surprising claim in the light of James’s insistence that the turn to the empirical saves us from all forms of rationalism. But it is one that makes sense both of his various personal commitments and of his inheritance of a Kantian seriousness with respect to the integration of the person. James, like Kant, felt it important to admit that there were cracks in existence. He simply thought he knew how they could be philosophically, which for him meant empirically, resolved. That this resolution in a thinker like James comes couched in the language of open-endedness only serves to underscore the maddening sleight of the apparently decisive thing that nevertheless has no borders.

So again: is this a problem? The problem I want to draw attention to is that James comes up with a theory of the way things are that—by virtue of the decision to resolve dualisms before they arise—gives us no insight into its logic of inclusion. This would be as if a moral philosophy or psychology proposed a theory of what to do or how to live without reckoning with the obstacles (psychical, social, intellectual, animal) to doing so. James’s theory of radical empiricism cools our desperation over being split—mind from body, higher from lower, Jew from Greek or male from female, if you want to go that route. In doing so, however, it abandons us to a different problem. Put simply, everything can count as experience. But what is the concept of everything? The problem is not that everything can count. The problem is: what is an everything? What do I have when I have it? What are the grounds of distinction within it, or between it and itself, if not some other? How might everything (or anything) fail (to be everything)? What is or what could be failure? I scramble for the simplest of images here: a queue for a roller coaster, say, in which the gate keeper is checking that the prospects meet a list of qualifications, a list of qualifications that everyone happens to meet. Who is that gate keeper? And: must she keep checking?

The list supplied for the genealogy of spirituality has this quality of an itemization that requires continued checking even as everything could be included in it. This is not to say its curators imagine themselves gate keepers. Just the opposite. The call makes clear that the charge is to roam as far and wide as possible. Still, those possibles would—I suggest—be exceedingly unlikely to fail inclusion on the list. Let me amend. They could not do so. Like James’s reading of the metaphysical tradition, the list excludes only what it does not desire (what does not exist); of things desirable, all are present. Everything is—however implicitly—present. And yet there is no account of what this everything tears itself loose from. Experience—or spirituality—as opposed to what? In this silence, James ironically mirrors the logic of his own bête noir, an otherworldly spirit struggling to make the world fit reason (the monistic Spinoza, the benighted Bradley), while evading the logic of his ostensible quarry, an immanence of spirit, which is present, pace James, in the dialectical Spinoza, who locates spirit in creaturely life, in the pragmatic Hegel, who culls reality redolent with smells, in the mechanic Kant, who knows the difference between an engine we make and our fantasy of one. James confuses the universal (all) with finite inclusion (everything), failing both spirit and its histories, both what spirit is and what it isn’t. With a universal, one could say, the gate keeper is the position that founds the all on a primary exclusion (choice); with an everything, the gate keeper is simply the delirious confusion of not having to choose—the confusion of redundancy. Although James’s radical empiricism promises to subordinate spirit to experience, it yields what looks like nothing so much as spirit augmenting itself infinitely through the undifferentiated logic of its suppression.

Is the Frequencies list a sign that its call is caught in this same confusion?

I pose the following final questions:

What is the relationship between the call to consider spirit and the provision of a list of spirit’s projects, the implication being that this list, like the alphabet, could come to an end while being, in its inner nature, expansive to infinity (JJJJJJ…)?

What has this gambit already decided about spirit in imagining its projects alphanumerically, and not in substance and subject?

What is a history of the alphanumeric if history is already (is it not?) the alphabet’s undoing—the decision (expository, creative, poetic) to count Jarena and not John-John? What is the nature of such a decision in this project? Would it, like the list itself, get its own line on the list?

The project of Frequencies hints—against conventional wisdom—that spirituality can be contained by its manifold histories; by a history of the manifold. Might there also be a value in ascertaining whether spirituality is not already contained, a list of lists, a theory of when and where its own decisions make distinctions, apriori, as it were—before we assimilate it to the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, PA? Might there not be something in spirit itself—and not simply in our alphabets—that finds it(self) everywhere? Might this not be spirit’s own creative history of us?

I grew up by the shores of Lake Michigan. We used to play a game in the summer time. At the beach we would try to smash through the waves that crashed upon the shore. For some reason I really enjoyed the body-shaking feeling of a wave reverberating through my bones. As I think back on it now, I was communing with the superhuman force of ocean currents.

Much later in my life I was exposed to the more gruesome power of such waves. I was part of a team conducting an ethnography of a series of coastal villages in Northwestern Papua New Guinea that were wiped away by a tsunami. We were trying to understand how people in the community dealt with the trauma of that event.

In the short story, “The Seventh Man” Haruki Murakami describes a wave as a doorway into the “other world” that characterizes many of his stories. The other world is the world of thought, dreams, death, and imagination. The story is about a man whose childhood friend was swept away by a giant wave. Two waves came; the first one swept his friend K away. Then, the narrator admits, something slightly unbelievable or counter-intuitive happened when the second wave hit:

In the tip of the wave, as if enclosed in some kind of transparent capsule, floated K’s body, reclining on its side. But that is not all. K was looking straight at me, smiling. There, right in front of me, close enough so that I could have reached out and touched him, was my friend, my friend K who, only moments before, had been swallowed by the wave. And he was smiling at me. Not with an ordinary smile—it was a big, wide-open grin that literally stretched from ear to ear. His cold, frozen eyes were locked on mine. He was no longer the K I knew. And his right arm was stretched out in my direction, as if he were trying to grab my hand and pull me into that other world where he was now. A little closer, and his hand would have caught mine. But, having missed, K then smiled at me one more time, his grin wider than ever.

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I don’t know what spirituality is, but when I think of the word, I think of waves—thought waves.

Because I am interested in the materiality of thought and its medium, I often ask myself: what is thought made of? What is its material?

Perhaps thought is like a sound wave.

Certainly one medium of thought is sound waves. Thought travels in sound waves.

Sound waves are waves of pressure. Like most waves in nature, sound waves must propagate in a medium, for example air or water (sound traveling in such media has different properties depending on the medium).

Perhaps thoughts, like sound, need to travel in a medium. Or maybe they work differently, like light, and do not need a medium at all.

In former centuries physicists looked in vein for the medium in which light traveled; they called this imaginary medium aether. Then physicists discovered that light can travel in a vacuum, that light does not need a medium. Indeed, light was its own medium. Here was a paradox on many levels: light as both matter and wave, a matter-wave. Sometimes light has properties of matter—photons can move other pieces of matter like a billiard ball. And sometimes it has properties of waves—it can be refracted, reflected, interfered etc…

Perhaps thought has this dual nature too.

⁂

As William James said: “our brains are colored lenses in the wall of nature, admitting light from the super-solar source.” James was giving a lecture at Harvard on the subject of human immortality. When James spoke of spirituality or the spiritual he meant consciousness. James was trying to deal with the problem of consciousness, the so-called “hard problem” about how the brain relates to consciousness. We are not that much further along now than we were 100 years ago when James gave his speech.

Image provided courtesy of all-about-pyschology.com

James thought sense could be made of the idea of immortality, that some version of consciousness could be thought to survive death. Or at least he thought that brain death was not necessarily the complete death of consciousness. Perhaps there was some general form of consciousness, one consciousness, that beamed like light. James speculated that brains were lenses that changed the nature of that light and created individual consciousness. Brains, then, did not cause thoughts or consciousness (in what he called a productive function); instead brains had a transmissive function, akin to how vocal chords constrain air to produce a voice but do not themselves produce the voice.

James challenged those puritans of science who thought that the brain produces consciousness. “’Thought is a function of the brain’” for them– just as, “’Steam is a function of the tea-kettle,’ [or] ‘Light is a function of the electric circuit,’ [or] ‘Power is a function of the moving waterfall’.”

In contrast, those who thought the brain had a transmissive function saw the brain as an apparatus for letting consciousness loose upon the world.

James looked to Shelley’s Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc in order to make his point: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,/Stains the white radiance of eternity” (stanza 52). The brain, according to James, was a threshold like this many-colored glass.

The Greek subtitle of Shelley’s poem is from the Epigram on Aster, which Shelley was translating at the time of Keats’ death: “Thou wert the morning star among the living,/Ere thy fair light had fled;/Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving/New splendour to the dead.”

⁂

I live in Europe where the frequency in which power utilities transmit electricity, that is, waves of electrons, or electric charge, is 50 Hz. In most places, in other words, a wave of electrons cycles 50 times per second.

If an ocean wave hit the shore 6 times every minute, its frequency would be .1 times per second, or .1 Hz.

A heart with a pulse of 60 beats per minute is 1 Hz.

The US transmits electricity at 60 Hz. The waves hit 10 times more times per second than in Europe.

In either case, the pulses are coming too fast to perceive consciously. But, if you record your TV with a video camera, in most cases you will observe a pulsating, flicker effect due to the difference between the frequencies of the recording device and the 50 or 60 Hz. pulse of the television.

⁂

I had a student last year who was allergic to “electricity, electromagnetic radiation, and wireless internet.” She lives in a home completely free of electricity, except for an old computer she uses for limited periods each week. I never saw her; we communicated exclusively by email.

James would have appreciated the situation of my former student. Her example suggests not only that thoughts are embodied, but that thoughts are physical things—or at least, that they exist at a physical level. This example also suggests how human thought is closely bound to technology, that it is connected to our electrified universe. In the case of my former student, the most likely culprit is the technologically produced electrical energy interfering with the electrical and chemical pathways that regulate homeostasis in her brain and body, in her psyche and soma.

Some of this may sound strange, until one considers that waves themselves also carry energy. Photons, for example, are the fundamental unit of light; they propagate with different frequencies that are characteristic of different forms of electromagnetic radiation or energy.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum by XKCD

Unlike light, utility power is transmitted by moving an electrical charge; that is, a wave of electrically charged particles. Such a wave generates a magnetic field.

⁂

Neuroscience is a young field, just at the beginning. The physics, nuts, and bolts mechanical processes of the brain are pretty well understood. Signals within the body and brain are composed of chemical variations and electrical changes. Though there are many types of communication within the brain, a most basic one is composed of neurons. Neurons create electrical potentials that “fire” and propagate throughout the brain. The patterns of firing in the brain can also be described as “waves”. Unlike the electric wave that is transmitted on a power line, the medium of transmission of brain waves are cells, biological material. However, as in the case of my former student, it is possible that such biological material can be destabilized by electromagnetic energy from other sources.

We know a bit more about what is going on inside brains today than we did in James’s day because we have more reliable ways of locating and measuring the electric waves and magnetic fields noted above, the core media of the brain’s activity. For example, the best and most recent brain scanning equipment, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), measures the magnetic properties of oxygen molecules in the brain. It works because hemoglobin, the most important blood protein, changes its magnetic properties depending on how much oxygen it contains. The body delivers oxygen molecules to parts of the brain that need to do more work. So fMRI does not actually measure brain activity directly but rather blood flow in the brain (changes in oxygenation).

Instead of oxygen flow, another type of brain scan called Electroencephalography (EEG), measures electricity generated by the brain. While fMRI is good at scale (spatial dimension) it is not as good as EEG at time (temporal dimension); that is, fMRI technology is too slow to capture neural processes (because it measures them indirectly by blood flow). EEG, by contrast, captures electrical signals in real time. However, EEG is limited because it only captures electrical energy at the scalp—it does not reach deep into the brain.

So EEG captures the wave pattern of firing neurons. In popular understanding these are called brain waves, but scientists call them neural oscillations. The terminology is probably reflective of the fact that brain waves are associated with the unverified notion that such waves travel outside the brain (that is, between brains). By contrast neural oscillations only apply within brains.

The patterns researchers have found in humans are usually localized (meaning they take place at characteristic places in the brain) and tend to take place during certain types of activities. For example, delta waves are characteristic for adults in slow wave or non-REM sleep and in some attention tasks; theta waves are characteristic of encoding and retrieval in memory and inhibition; alpha waves are associated with focusing of attention. A rhythmic firing pattern of up to 4 Hz. (4 cycles per second) is a delta wave, then there are theta (4-8), alpha (8-13), mu (8-13), beta (13-30), and gamma (30-100) frequencies.

Recent theories suggest that the “neural correlates” of various conscious states are not particular neurons but rather these patterns or waves firing in synchrony. The excitement over the recent discovery of mirror neurons—a type of neuron that fires both when an action is observed and when an individual performs the same action—is that they suggest such synchrony of firing is not confined to individual heads. Brain waves might not move between brains but people may still share patterns of neural activity.

Such an idea was probably first proposed by Gerald Edelman who argued that the “dynamic core” of consciousness is synchronous firing occurring globally across many brain areas. Local waves become part of consciousness when integrated into that global synchrony. Gamma waves in particular have been a focus of attention in this regard.

So like James, Edleman’s is a holistic conception of consciousness, but grounded in neuroscience.

One’s perspective on consciousness, of course, is a politico-historical subject.

To be sure, James’s view is thoroughly modern. However, counter to a neo-liberal view of consciousness, James’s “downward” view suggests that the purpose of thought is not necessarily to help human beings transact or trade. Thought does not exist simply to help singular human beings get the best deal out of things. Indeed, James’s version figures brains as getting in the way of consciousness.

Catastrophic waves, electromagnetic allergies, and brain scans are part and parcel of the present moment when we are recognizing the dual nature of thought: its physical and “spiritual” nature. Our conception of consciousness should follow something like James’s model. A conscious self is physical, and yet not necessarily some kind of automated machine. Like my former student, such selves are deeply affected and implicated in the material world, identical to it, yet paradoxically outside it.

“Always have a deep sense of connection to the past, a subversive memory that constitutes wind at your back. You are who you are because somebody loved you, somebody cared for you, somebody attended to you. Make sure that love flows through you, that’s what it means to keep love on the one.”
– Cornel West and Bootsy Collins, “Freedumb,” The Funk Capital of the World (2011)

Sometime in 1886 a woman named Myrtle Fillmore attended a lecture by the Christian Science practitioner Eugene B. Weeks. Myrtle suffered from numerous physical infirmities, including tuberculosis and incessant hemorrhoids, and it was in part these maladies that brought her to Weeks’ lecture. Her husband Charles, a Kansas City real estate man, left the event unimpressed, but Myrtle was inspired by this affirmation: “I am a child of God and so I do not inherit illness.” After several months of prayer and repetition of that affirmation, Myrtle believed that she had healed herself of her afflictions. She used a new form of knowledge to recreate her relationship with the divine and, consequentially, to recreate her relationship with her body. Scholars of American religion now usually call that knowledge “New Thought.”

Eventually Myrtle convinced Charles of what she had learned. He would then use the techniques to heal himself of the long-term effects of a childhood hip and leg injury. Together with Myrtle, he would begin a healing practice, treating people in the Kansas City area with their New Thought techniques. By 1890, Charles’ real estate business had begun to decline, and their healing practice had experienced some success. They decided to publish a magazine, first titled Modern Thought but soon becoming Unity Magazine, and with that act of print culture they inaugurated what would soon be known as the Unity School of Christianity. Unity claimed, at least in its early years, that individuals possessed spiritual union with the divine if and when they possessed physical well-being in the material world. It became Myrtle and Charles Fillmore’s mission to create and propagate a community focused on such a union. And their mission worked, as prayer groups begat churches, which begat associations, which begat the denominational structure that Unity operates by today.

The Fillmores were also especially able to align their emerging Protestant community with market forces, and to that end they quickly institutionalized their healing experiences in order to have the widest reach possible. The magazine started as a sort of Reader’s Digest of the New Thought movement. In their thought the Fillmores incorporated many early-twentieth century Protestant practices and norms, including prayer meetings, educational facilities, and a focus on the Bible as a source of religious authority. As the movement continued to develop, other people involved with Unity created a ministers’ association to authorize ministerial licensure and standardize the movement’s teachings. Other early bodily practices, such as vegetarianism and (briefly and obliquely) sexual abstinence, focused practitioners on recreating the material body as a spiritual body. While Unity was not unique in any of its recommendations, its fusion of metaphysical ideas and Protestant practices was. Myrtle and Charles Fillmore were American spiritual seekers who recognized and appreciated their past, their culture, and the role of community in authenticating experience.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James insisted that the individual’s feelings were the root of religion and that the tenets, rituals, and institutions of religion were but later additions that could only echo the true experience. For James, the real religious experience is ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive, all characteristics that could only be verified by the individual claiming the experience. What is fascinating about Unity is the way that it connected individual rituals with community contexts, how it conjoined the priesthood of all believers with a highly individuated metaphysics. In some sense, Unity sought to institutionalize the kinds of experiences so celebrated in James’ diagnosis of the healthy-minded.

The making of community is to me a fascinating and complicated element of any description of spirituality. Do contemporary American spiritual seekers enact spirituality by forming communities? I think one can make a convincing argument that the various new paradigm communities foster a contemporary American spirituality not unlike the Fillmores. Unitarian Universalists and liberal Mennonites qualify as spiritual seekers who are concerned with their communities and their relationships with the surrounding culture. In fact, I suspect that many of the members of more conventional religious groups would insist upon the very spiritual nature of their religious lives. Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals (2010) demonstrates how even those seekers who most disavow institutional life do so on the premise of previous institutional conceptions and organizational structures.

The popular understanding of American spirituality is the claim that the authentic discovery of one’s relationship with the larger world is a project entirely undertaken by an autonomous individual who freely chooses any philosophy or practice that seems to fit their particular life journey. For many spiritual seekers—those religious “nones” who confuse sociological survey—community itself is anathema to authentic religious experience. One need only observe the continuing use of the extremely problematic concept of “brainwashing” in reference to religious communities with which a person disagrees to understand the extent to which Americans believe that authentic religious experience can only be had or adjudicated by an individual independent of social pressure or community ritual. Spirituality is a proxy for our vision of who we wish to be, and today autonomy seems to be the superior ambition. Yet even as this is so, communities do perpetuate themselves, on terms not merely religious but also spiritual.

Today, Unity churches might house Protestant-style Sunday services, complete with choirs and sermons, Buddhist meditation groups, self-help practices, youth groups, community service initiatives, singles’ nights, and ad hoc discussion groups on any number of spiritual topics, frequently all under the same roof and under the auspices of a trained and licensed Unity minister. A sophisticated web site allows individuals to explore Unity on their own, while also presenting opportunities for community interactions. For most Unity adherents, the spiritual life is one of seeking and exploration, but one done under the aegis of a community of faith.

The real question is: why are you reading this?

I’m just the writer here, someone else will provide the headline or the title, but chances are that headline or title lit the fuse of your imagination. A curiosity was ignited. You now have the impression that herein “the fringe” will be explained. A kind of light will be shined on something a little weird, and probably a little “spiritual.” It will be well outside the mainstream, a thing hot with danger, with a warmth that has drawn you in just as the candle pulls the moth. That’s why you started reading, or scrolling down, or clicked.

So here goes.

As Heraclitus wanted us to believe, the fringe, like everything, boils down to fire.

A few decades ago, to burn something—a flag, say, or oneself—was a measure of righteousness. Passionate flames registered indignation at ideals betrayed by power. Long before then, of course, burning had a completely different meaning. It was a kind of punishment—of witches, books—a literal fire that stood for hellfire.

Not long ago, when a zany small town pastor attracted international attention with a threat to publicly burn a Koran, the misguided hate of the latter masqueraded as the conviction of the former.

All of this was quite openly a stunt. Pastor Terry Jones said plainly that he knew nothing of the Koran, and that he was only doing it for attention. The most remarkable thing was that it wasn’t even a stunt—yet. It was talk of a stunt. The “narrative”—to slip for a moment into journalese—flopped back and forth. The burning was on, then it was off, then it was off “for now.” From the perspective of the zany pastor, it didn’t matter if he actually burned the Koran. The goal of the stunt was achieved long before he reached for the matchbook.

Which returns to our original question: why did you read that story? And why are you reading this one?

In other words, the story is as much about you—presumably, the norm—as it is about the fringe. What is the basic attraction of the fringe and the extreme for normal people? Why do fringe religions fascinate us—why can a tiny movement command the international stage—while, at the same time, one can level no greater political criticism than that something or someone is “extreme.”

Some kind of door has opened. Long gone are the days when fringe movements or ideas had to resist blanket charges of godlessness, or dodge anti-witchcraft laws, or struggle for time on public television. It’s not particularly shocking to suggest that the Internet has created an unruly egalitarianism of information. But is the fringe always bad? Maybe not. With no fringe, arguably, you have no variety, no diversity. Like sterile conformity? Abolish the fringe. It’s the fringe that gives us fringe festivals, and it’s the extreme that gives us “extreme sports,” which have been around for more than a decade. The fringe is where curiosity leads us. The fringe is the first name of the new. Without the fringe we have no idea what normal is.

Nevertheless, sociologists who study religions prefer the term “new religious movement” to “fringe religion” or “cult.”

Back in the nineties, two fringe religions in Southern California heralded the imminent arrival of friendly aliens. They weren’t the same aliens, and neither arrived. One of these movements you’ve never heard of: they confronted their failed prophecy with introspection and went on with the quiet self-help work of their “Star Center.”

The other, Heaven’s Gate, performed the stunt of all stunts. That’s why the name alone raises the hair on the back of your neck.

But now we’re past even that. Even a chess player can tell you that the threat of a good move is more powerful than its execution. If we’re honest we should acknowledge our complicity in the Koran burning episode. Our talk of Pastor Jones’s stunt left us stunted.

In 1903, the philosopher and psychologist William James, having just produced what is still the go-to book on fringe religions, wrote to a former student of the media coverage of his moment: “Our American people used to be supposed to have a certain hard-headed shrewdness. Nowadays they seem smitten with utter silliness. Their professed principles mean nothing to them, and any phrase or sensational excitement captivates them. The sensational press is the organ and the promulgator of this state of mind, which means … a new ‘dark ages’ that may last more centuries than the first one.”

The fringe tickles our imagination. It fascinates because we either hope or worry that it will become the mainstream. In the best of cases, we entertain the fringe to knead and stretch our sense of the possible; in the worst, as with the attention paid to the would-be Koran burners, we try to tell ourselves a cautionary tale about what the future may hold.

This time, however, the tale backfired—and our attention transmuted into a kind of Heisenberg propulsion system.

When the New York Times beefed up International Burn a Koran Day into “a bonfire of Korans” (there were fifty members of the pastor’s flock; at one Koran each, a campfire, at best) their readers’ curiosity fanned the flames of the very blaze they would have preferred extinguished. When Pastor Jones at one moment called the burning off, the Times asked whether the media might have contributed to the problem, quite as if the Times were not the media itself, as if they were not the country’s paper of record.

What even Pastor Jones knew is that the media is only an organ, and, like fire, organs remain silent if nothing breathes air into them.

Fire represents change, the way things shift from one form to another; and the mainstream, like actual streams, also has a tendency to change. The Koran burners, whose rhetoric was as incendiary as their stunt, would like to instigate change, to fight fire with fire, and we unwittingly armed them. It was a “norm” that got burned.

Ablaze with information, we have yet to figure out what we ought to ignore.