Bonus Sample: Not All Conspiritualities Are the Same
Matthew responds to the robust feedback on the Sam-Harris-is-a-highbrow-conspiritualist bonus, and then stretches the terms around harm in the conspirituality sphere in another way, by looking at the spectrum of agency offered by different wellness/spirituality products. He interrogates the premise implicit in some of our reporting that the cognitive errors and magical thinking of alt-health and New Age paradigms are all on a slippery slope to ruin. TLDR: isn’t it always more about sociology than ideology?
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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.
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Not all conspiratualities are the same.
Hey everybody, it's Matthew here.
This is another straight-up audio essay, no music breaks or fancy stuff.
The three of us are working very hard on a special project, and for me some new time commitments mean fewer bells and whistles, so I hope that's okay.
I wanted to start by addressing some of the amazing feedback that came up over my last bonus episode, in which I stretched the definition of conspirituality to include somebody who many people find very interesting, inspiring, provocative, irritating, and dangerous from different perspectives.
That person is Sam Harris.
And I don't think we've produced an episode that has attracted such vigorous feedback and debate so far.
As of this morning, there's 123 comments, many of them essay-length.
And it's great that it all played out on our Patreon page, which is kind of like a haven of sanity and kindness within the larger social media sphere.
So thank you for all of that.
And so I'll start by making a few clarifications.
There's a difference between Conspirituality Podcast as a media project and the three of us as individual contributors, and I think most of you, if you're Patreons, you're aware of this at this point.
For as much as Derek, Julian, and I share with regard to our histories in the yoga and wellness worlds, And for as much as we share with regard to the disillusionments of spirituality in late capitalism, although even here I'm crawling into my territory of analysis, but I think they'd mostly agree, we also come from very different places.
We've been shaped by different forces and we hold some different points of view on various topics.
Now sometimes we draw the criticism that we are three white guys with all too similar opinions who are just creating an elitist bubble of smugness around ourselves based on putting other people down.
And I think for the occasional listener to the podcast, that's a reasonable assessment.
But I also think that we would get an awful lot more of that feedback if there weren't substantial internal tensions within the platform.
Tensions that can have us argue out particular points for literally hours on Slack.
Now, sometimes we let those disagreements show when we feel it really serves the material, and sometimes we sublimate them into the general tension of our conversation.
But I think they're there.
I mean, I know they're there.
So, that's all a very long-winded way of saying that I did not publish that bonus episode with the expectation that Derek and Julian would be entirely on board on how I was viewing Sam Harris, nor did I think that would be a problem.
And, as we've mentioned, we've scheduled a panel discussion between the three of us on my thesis in a couple of weeks where they'll be offering points of view and I'll be telling them just how wrong they are.
Okay, that's a joke.
Because actually, I would be very happy if I was shown that my basic argument is wrong.
And just to review it briefly, and maybe lose or gain more Patreon supporters.
My basic argument is that conspirituality, as a way of thinking about and interacting with the world, consists of two interwoven and contradictory and highly emotionally charged responses.
One is paranoid, and the other is aspirational.
One focuses on political anxieties, and the other focuses on spiritual aspirations and promises.
And so my very basic argument about Harris' content is that his two franchises, Making sense and waking up.
One is political punditry and one is mindfulness meditation, and these fit quite squarely into these two frameworks.
And the fact that he's publishing within these two franchises in an alternating and rhythmic fashion is significant.
In terms of content, the paranoid or cynical political orientation of Harris's punditry takes two main forms.
A strong and, I would say at times, extreme anxiety over the meaning and presence of religion in the world, with a special focus on Islam and Muslims and how he understands or stereotypes their relationship to liberal democracies.
Secondly, and more recently, Harris displays a clear tendency towards the promotion of moral panic through his reductive criticisms of what he and a growing number of center-right commentators call wokeism.
Now, over in the aspirational franchise, he offers respite from these worlds and their stresses through the claim that his form of mindfulness meditation, syncretized from numerous religious traditions and secularized through the discourse of neuroscience, provides an answer for the social alarms that he raises in relation to geopolitics and identity politics.
So here's the thing.
I would not have connected these two streams of content together as explicitly as I did if Harris did not do it himself in a nine-minute mini-episode of Making Sense in which he literally claims that his meditation practice has given him insight into the truth of political realities.
Namely, the truth that identity politics, and specifically identification with one's race, is a form of mental illness.
That totally shocked me, and it's haunted me since I heard it about a year ago.
What it amounts to is 20 years of political punditry that expresses deep concern over the influence of religion, mainly Islam, in the world, and then a parallel stream of content that says, but actually there is an answer related to religions and spirituality, but not quite really because it's better than both because neuroscience.
Now a number of people who offered really deep critical feedback on this argument said that making this connection was a stretch, and they had two main points.
Firstly, they doubted the connection between these two forms of content, how explicit it was.
And then secondly, they were also uncomfortable with the social connections it raises that tarnishes Harris with some kind of guilt by association with more obvious clowns like Mickey Willis.
And I understand those points.
I'll address the first one first.
I would not have had this idea, as I mentioned, and I certainly wouldn't have taken time to look at the basics of Sam Harris's output in order to find a connection between these two streams of content, if he hadn't made it for me, if he himself had not said it, and then not really retracted it when challenged on decoding the Gurus.
And in that particular train wreck of a discussion, it wasn't your fault, Chris.
He spent about 90 minutes disclaiming any connections with a pantheon of right-leaning or hard-right influencers whose careers he has aided or who he has defended over time.
And his whole argument there was, you know, I don't have any tribe.
And by the way, let's stop using the word tribe, because when we're talking about sociopolitical cliques in white culture, it has a negative connotation.
But for Indigenous people who have to use English, it's actually a functional administrative term.
So let's just use clique or something like that.
What I would say is that with that nine-minute mini-episode of Making Sense, Harris actually did identify his clique, which lies at the intersection between the intellectual dark web and the world that we typically cover, the world of conspirituality.
Because he basically said, I am sitting with crossed legs at the intersection of political intuition and meditative insight.
So, this relates to the second criticism that people felt uncomfortable with me, lumping together Sam Harris and the, you know, familiar assholes that we cover, Zach Bush, Sayer G, Sasha Stone.
Like, oh my god, you can't put those people together.
I get it.
It doesn't feel right.
But that criticism raises an important point.
Which might mean that I have to take some responsibility for a misperception that I've probably contributed to.
The demographic of conspirituality influencers is a group of people.
Definitely.
But much more than that, as I said up front, it is a way of interacting with the world.
