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Nov. 22, 2021 - Conspirituality
09:26
Bonus Sample: Sam Harris: High-Brow Secular Conspiritualist

Bonus episode, piloted by Matthew.There is a subtle form of conspirituality that rides on the familiar dialectic of political cynicism and spiritual promise—but it's dressed for a button-down salon dinner in Harvard Square. No crystals in sight, no essential oils wafting through the room. Sam Harris isn’t sounding the alarm about the Cabal or the Illuminati: his bugaboos are Islam, or “wokeism,” or “cancel culture.” And he isn’t saying that starseeds will save the day, or that a Great Awakening is upon us. He’s not so low-brow. His salvation product is meditation, which he says can validate his political insights. And hey, there's an app for that!Show NotesCelebrity Crusaders For EmpireTowards a geopolitics of atheismWhy the arguments of the 'New Atheists' are often just as violent as religionHarris daydreaming about a nuclear strikeMeet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark WebWill the "University of Austin" ever actually exist?Sam Harris & Charles Murray Harris. “A Few Points of Confusion.”Decoding the Gurus: Sam Harris & Meditation is all you needGurometer— Kavanaugh and BrowneBuddhist Studies Has a Whiteness Problem -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
Sam Harris, highbrow secular conspiritualist.
Hey everybody, welcome to this bonus episode.
This is a little bit less scripted, more bullet pointy for me.
I didn't have a lot of time to put this together, but I have a lot to say and I'll just get into it.
But no high production here, no music breaks.
I'm just going to go for it.
So I've mentioned before on the podcast in several different places that there's a power dynamic behind what we do here that I think we always have to be aware of and take care with.
We are three middle-aged white guys pumping out long-form podcasts in a skeptical vein, and we spend a lot of time debunking the bad science and philosophy of conspirituality.
And because the wellness demographic is mostly women, this can put us in the position of perceived arrogance of the mansplaining variety.
And to the extent that we criticize the public health implications of alt-health practices associated with non-white cultures like traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture or Ayurveda, our whiteness in the eyes of listeners can glisten a little more brightly.
Now, these are all reasonable concerns as we live and grow and I believe we try to be careful with them, but I also believe that we can be as careful with these dynamics as possible and yet still not escape the shadow of a deeper oral history of men criticizing spirituality into microphones, white men specifically.
And in our own agnostic to atheistic zone, that history behind us is made up of two interconnected movements.
On one hand, we have the Skeptical Society, founded by Michael Shermer in the late 1980s, and then the New Atheist Movement, early 2000s and going forward, which centered Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, the subject today.
Now, there's a lot to say about these groups, including the fact that many people who felt stifled and stunted by religious upbringings found in their relentless deconstruction of faith systems some kind of freedom and relief.
And for a while, I counted myself within those numbers.
Because reading The God Delusion by Dawkins or Missionary Position by Hitchens, these books gave me big cathartic feels around my need to have closure with the Catholic Church that I was brought up in.
But at the same time, I also felt a little bit greasy while reading these books.
And as I learned later, there was a good reason for this, because neither of these guys had the generosity of spirit or interest in learning much about the complex cultures that they were strawmanning for points to really have those platforms at all.
And then I, of course, was just grossed out to read about the rampant misogyny and also assault allegations that are just baked into the skeptical movement cake.
But I also had this suspicion that something else was going on, something more geopolitical That throughout the early 2000s, this groundswell of talking head anti-religious sentiment in the manosphere was in some ways mirroring US foreign policy and creating an apologetics for it.
Now, while on the face of it, these guys were critical of all religions, they did seem to reserve their most bitter opprobrium for Islam.
They would focus on terrorist attacks and suicide bombings to extrapolate and homogenize the character and culture of a billion people, usually without referring to a shred of sociological research.
Now, religious devotion has got to be a factor in these major events, but it can't be disconnected from geopolitical marginalization and centuries of global inequality.
And these guys could pretend to be funny about it, like Bill Maher in that film Religulous 2008.
And also in a fire hose of his other media in which he depicts Christians and Jews as kind of like dumb schleps but Muslims are singled out as dangerously irrational.
Or guys in this group could pretend to be serious policy analysts, as when Sam Harris actually fantasized that a preemptive nuclear strike on a nuclear-armed Islamic country might be not only a strategic necessity but a moral imperative.
And all of the new atheists voiced full-throated support for the War on Terror, and now Sam has a meditation app.
How nice.
Now, my brief takes here are well-supported by legitimate researchers who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, and so I'm going to link to them in the show notes.
Of particular interest is a crushing episode of Citations Needed.
It's called The New Atheists, Celebrity Crusaders for Empire, and it shows how these movements filled this convenient gap in U.S.
imperial discourse.
Because if it wasn't going to fly that the U.S.
should simply control the oil economy for the good of the world, the argument could also be made that Muslims would benefit from American liberalism.
And if that framing turned orientalist and the focus was on the intractable, irrational beliefs of faraway people who happen to be brown, we wouldn't really have to focus on economic imperialism and the manipulation of foreign governments.
So making religion the problem on Bill Maher further obscured the material brutalities that the American Dream is built on ignoring.
So, okay, how does this background relate to our project?
Well, adjacent to and sympathetic with the skeptical movement and the New Atheists is the later emanation dubbed by Barry Weiss as the Intellectual Dark Web.
Now, So there is not complete coherence politically within these groups.
The overlap is not always consistent.
There are definite Venn diagrams that connect these groups together, but it's kind of like, I don't know, the ball and cup game where they're all kind of moving around and you don't quite know where anybody actually is.
But they're all in the same zone, the same table.
And This is what's important for our podcast.
They influence the conspirituality scene from two directions.
Content and then method.
So content-wise, to the extent that the Weinstein Brothers, Heather Haying, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson are purveyors of or apologists for COVID pseudoscience couched in culture war bullshit, they are conspiritualists in function.
Because on one hand, they're braying about authoritarian censorship to millions of followers, and on the other hand, they're promising scientific hipster redemption.
And, in Peterson's case, even moral salvation.
But it's the method of these figures that I think is more important and is actually the big tent, because each and every one of them are charismatic personae with no guardrails.
And while their politics are not always coherent in a kind of like ideologically detailed sense, They also all drift together towards the right through an emphasis on solitary heroism, the kind of evasion or avoidance of the public good and notions of civic responsibility, and generally libertarian attitudes towards everything.
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