134: Elon Musk, Buddhabro? (w/Ann Gleig and Brenna Artinger)
Elon, Elon, who are you? Where is your essential self? Where are you as you soar through your space fantasies, as you track and hedge and bet your billions, wondering if all those emeralds gave you an unfair advantage in life? What is the weather like on Mars? Have you found yourself yet, hiding in millions of lines of self-driving code? Have you found your own face as you surveil your quivering workforce, bunking in the San Francisco headquarters you stopped paying rent on?Is the real you playing endless video games, getting stoned with Joe Rogan, making an eleventh baby with a fourth partner? Do you feel you’re connected to everything when you post at the speed of light?As Musk teeters on the brink of ego death and financial annihilation, Matthew wonders about his inner life, especially after he dropped a Buddhist-type Easter Egg in a tweeted photo of his bedside table.Is Elon Musk a Buddha-bro? No surprise if he was. After all, a big chunk of American Buddhism lines up perfectly with Musk's reactionary centrism, performative transcendence, bog-standard conspiracism, and culture war shitposting.Here to help us understand this strange world—and what kind of Buddhism could make Elon Musk a better human, if he gave a shit—are Dr. Ann Gleig, Aassociate Professor of religion and cultural studies at University of Central Florida, and independent scholar Brenna Artinger. We’ll be focusing on their awesome paper, “#BuddhistCultureWars: BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas,”
Show NotesAdam Jensen | Deus Ex Wiki
THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY
Mindfulness in Silicon Valley | Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School
#BuddhistCultureWars: BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas
Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory
Why Are White Buddhists So Angry?
A Murky Scandal Involving a Powerful Punk Rock Dharma Teacher Is Dividing a Major Buddhist Community
Leaked Internal Report: Famous Buddhist Leader Noah Levine Was Accused of Rape and Assault
-- -- --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
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Piloting solo this week with episode 134, Elon Musk, Buddha Bro?
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She had never heard about all of the alien stuff.
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You see, Stan, there is a reason for people feeling sad and depressed.
An alien reason.
It all began 75 million years ago.
Back then, there was a galactic federation of planets, which was ruled over by the evil Lord Xenu.
Xenu thought his galaxy was overpopulated, and so he rounded up countless aliens from all different planets, and then had those aliens frozen.
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There are 704 end notes for the love of God.
Okay, here we go.
Elon, Elon, who are you?
Where is your essential self?
Where are you as you soar through your space fantasies?
As you track and hedge and bet your billions, wondering if all those emeralds gave you an unfair advantage in life?
What is the weather like on Mars?
Have you found yourself hiding in the millions of lines of code that govern self-driving?
Have you found yourself surveilling your quivering workforce bunking in the San Francisco headquarters you stopped paying rent on?
Is the real you playing endless video games?
Is he getting stoned with Joe Rogan?
Is he making an 11th baby with a fourth partner?
Elon, do you find yourself when you're shitposting on your personal social grievance network all through the starry night?
Do you feel like you're connected to everything, posting at the speed of light?
Are you self-sovereign?
Or does mass projection in this spectacle fever dream create your persona?
Do more likes and retweets add up to more musk or less?
When that crowd at the Dave Chappelle Stadium show booed you for 10 eternal minutes, did it hit something solid inside you?
Core values like anti-transness, or I'm just here for the lulz, or could you feel the ecstasy of all that misdirected energy blowing right through your no-self?
Or were all of those people bots?
Are your critics really out there in the world?
Or is banning them like muting negative self-talk?
Elon, are you happy with chat GPT?
Does it prove once and for all that everything has always already been said?
That all thought can be held in a single cloud?
That everything is recursive, reborn, recycled?
Are you an emotional accelerationist, forcing us to confront the ennui of our own self-references?
When you suspend top-tier journalists, accusing them of doxing you because they reported on you banning the account that tracked your private jet using publicly available information, are you really afraid for your safety?
Or are you saying something more zen-like, like, you are everywhere and nowhere, that the public domain cannot hold you, that you cannot be found?
What does it feel like when you are found standing next to Jared Kushner in a private box in Qatar, staring blankly at the pitch as you contemplate the ephemeral nature of money?
When you tweet to 120 million followers to follow the White Rabbit, are you pushing them towards Lewis Carroll?
Jefferson Airplane?
The Matrix movies?
Or QAnon?
Are you finding the middle way between joking and not joking?
between pacifism and stochastic terrorism.
Listeners, I'm asking Elon these very Buddhist questions because several weeks ago he hinted
he might be asking them too through an easter egg left in a twitter picture of his bro-side table.
So I'll post it in the comments and you'll be able to see it shows four dead cans of Diet Coke, about two inches of water left in a fancy drinking water bottle, and two replica guns.
One of them is Revolutionary War style and it's in a wooden case that's festooned with a painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware.
But the other is the 357 Magnum Revolver from Deus Ex, a dystopian role-playing video game in which organized crime gangs inspired by conspiracy theories vie for global dominance.
It's germane to note that the gameplay unfolds during a global pandemic caused by a nanovirus and that the characters in Deus Ex gain dominance through augmentation or cybernetic, pharmaceutical, or nanotech implants that you can unlock or purchase in-game.
The lead character is biosecurity agent Adam Jensen, exposed as an infant to a gene therapy by two scientists who are murdered by the Illuminati.
But also on the table is a Tibetan Buddhist Vajra.
And that set the Buddhist studies world aflutter.
What is a Vajra?
It is a ritual instrument that looks like a double-headed scepter with flared ends that join like the tips of tulips about to open.
The shape is said to symbolize the force of a lightning bolt and the indestructibility of a diamond.
When I practiced a tantric form of Buddhism, I had a Vajra just like that, and a bell, and they were both cast in brass.
And during the ritual liturgies, the Vajra is held in the right hand while the bell is held in the left, and both are swirled and rung while the prayers are chanted.
On a philosophical level, the Vajra is said to represent method, really logical method.
And the bell is said to represent wisdom.
But I mentioned that I was initiated into Tantric Buddhism, and when that happens, all of this stuff takes on other layers of secret meaning.
And when I say secret, I mean that I actually took a vow to never disclose what I'm about to tell you, which is that the Vajra is also phallic, and the bell is also vaginal.
And during certain rituals, you are actively meditating on sexual ecstasy as a proxy of spiritual enlightenment while waving and ringing these sublimated cast brass genitals.
Now I'm condemned to Vajra hell for having spilled this, but I think it's worth it because you need to know that in addition to the two guns on his bedside table, Elon is also displaying a kind of spiritual dick.
There's no bell on the table.
There's none of that wisdom part.
But what am I doing and what is everyone doing baking this goddamn picture?
Why is Elon Musk's inner life at all interesting to me or anyone?
Is it that he occupies this liminal space between being a person and being an event?
I mean, I do the same thing with Jordan Peterson.
What's going on in that quivering husk of a man?
What happened to you, Jordan?
But what's my goal here?
Do I really think that if I could figure these guys out, I'd feel better about what they're up to or be able to predict the future?
Would I be more empathetic?
Would I understand their appeal more fully when it comes to their devotees?
I mean, sometimes I feel like the fascination is really a little like Stockholm Syndrome, that there's nothing I can do in the shadow of my attention dominators but to try to understand them and their intentions.
But feeling that way means forgetting everything I know about audience capture, about how the algorithms function like a charisma machine.
About how the dopamine loop that these guys are trapped in is tight.
How they are basically animatronic zombies, and if you give them even more attention, their hurking and jerking obscures the systems that prop them up.
I dug into the rumors that Musk has an inner life enough to find no public evidence that he has any real interest in Buddhism beyond telling Joe Rogan that he wasn't very attracted to meditation.
Now, some commentators have wondered whether the Vajra was actually a Vril device from the Call of Duty video game.
This device is sought by a Nazi doctor who uses it to teleport to Shangri-La.
So, the connection to Call of Duty is plausible, given that Musk is a big gamer and it's sitting beside that gun from Deus Ex.
So, is Elon Musk a Buddha bro?
Maybe not, but his post has given me the opportunity, or the excuse, to cover a subject a long time in coming.
That picture could serve as a still-life shorthand to not only the Imaginarium of Silicon Valley, but for the research into right-wing Buddhist movements that we'll get into in my upcoming discussion with Dr. Anne Glaig and Brenna Artinger, right down to the caffeine-free Diet Coke, which I think promotes calmness of mind.
Politics aside, personal development and technological idealism have been like two hands in namaste for a long time, with tech bros from the 1970s onwards trying to calm and sharpen their minds with the best that countercultural spirituality had to offer, especially if it could advance their utopian fantasies and their bottom lines.
As Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron plotted out in their excellent 1995 essay, The Californian Ideology, published when Musk was only 24, quote, According to some visionaries, the search for the perfection of mind, body, and spirit will inevitably lead to the emergence of the post-human, a biotechnological manifestation of the social privileges of the virtual class, While the hippies saw self-development as part of social liberation, the high-tech artisans of contemporary California are more likely to seek individual self-fulfillment through therapy, spiritualism, exercise, or other narcissistic pursuits.
Their desire to escape into the gated suburb of the hyper-real is only one aspect of this deep self-obsession.
Emboldened by supposed advances in artificial intelligence and medical science, the ex-tropian cult fantasizes of abandoning the wetware of the human state altogether to become living machines.
Just like Virek and the Tessier ash pools in William Gibson's sprawl novels, they believe that social privilege will eventually endow them with immortality.
Instead of predicting the emancipation of humanity, this form of technological determinism can only envision a deepening of social segregation.
Now, Elon Musk refreshes these dusty fantasies with Neuralink and SpaceX and thinking he can run Twitter on vibes.
But that Vajra on his table points to something else.
That a secularized, deracinated, and monetized Buddhism is a popular mindfulness tech of choice in Silicon Valley.
Now there's a deeper reason why I think speculation over Elon Musk's inner life is important to pay attention to.
Because the spiritual but not religious techno-capitalist world needs its ascended masters.
This is at the root of the fetishization of the tech bro CEO.
He functions as an irreligious religious leader.
A disciplinarian who's also a libertine.
He can activate capitalistic exploitation to such extreme degrees that it takes on a cosmic dimension.
We may not have saints in the global north, but we do have avatars of transcendence and accomplishment.
We have spacemen and superheroes.
We have inventors and geniuses.
We have confidence men who show us that spirituality can be anything that feels expansive, ingenious, and above all, dominating.
So, about that Vajra on the bro-side table.
As it turns out, a big chunk of American convert Buddhism lines up perfectly with Musk's reactionary centrism, with his performative transcendence, his bog-standard conspiracism, and his culture-war shitposting.
Here to help us understand this strange world, and what kind of Buddhism could make Elon Musk a better human being if he gave a shit, are Dr. Anne Glag, Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at University of Central Florida, and independent scholar Brenna Artunger.
And we'll be focusing on their awesome paper, Hashtag Buddhist Culture Wars, Buddha Bros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas.
It's linked in the notes.
Anne and Brenna, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you, Matthew.
Thanks for the invitation.
I think both Brenna and I are excited to be here.
Hi, Matthew.
Good morning.
Excited to be here.
So, it's probably not true that Elon Musk is a Buddha bro, but would either of you be surprised if he was?
First of all, I wanted to say thank you for doing some homework on that photograph, which did indeed set a Buddhist Twitter alight, and I think probably appeared in a lot of undergraduate Buddhism classes that week.
I think, no, I was actually not surprised at all by the photograph.
First of all, you know, I personally think of Elon Musk as a kind of tech bro, And there are many famous tech bros who have identified or declared some type of interest in Buddhism.
Probably the most well-known is Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who talked about the influence of Zen Buddhism on his work.
He had a history.
He went to India and was part of the counterculture pilgrimages that happened in India in the 60s and 70s.
And then, you know, given Musk's kind of libertarian and increasingly right-wing political views, he actually really fits well into a network of reactionary Buddhists that Brenner and I have charted, made some initial charts of in our research.
So, Anne, not surprised?
Brenna?
I wouldn't be surprised as well.
And I think this is because, kind of building off of what Anne said, a lot of the things that we see Elon post on social media tie into more right-wing tropes and imagery.
He posts, like, a ton of memes all the time, which are, I think, really... I was looking at one the other day, which is one of the Pepe the Frog memes, which is very popular in kind of alt-right, right-wing spaces.
So to make the leap that Musk is a Buddha bro, that he's someone who holds both Buddhist and right-wing views, I don't think would be too far off.
The tech bro nexus is a primary connection here as we're thinking about Musk's hypothetical Buddha bro-ness.
So how does the internet itself, and especially social media perhaps, loom large in the type of global Buddhism that you have both studied and its political trends?
Most significantly, I'd say, for our discussion is that the internet has become a place in which Buddhist authority is both established, you know, teachers are kind of setting themselves up through online audiences, and also a place where Buddhist authority is challenged.
And this is in multiple ways, you know, you've done, I know that you've done a lot of work on sexual misconduct and abuse in yoga.
Yeah.
And, you know, we've really seen the internet to be a space in which Buddhist sexual abuse and misconduct has been kind of exposed.
So I think as well as the more like reactionary, you know, kind of manifestations, we also have kind of progressive kind of authority shifting on the internet as well.
So I just want to, you know, make sure that people understand there's really a broad scope of activity happening with Buddhism on the internet.
Yeah, and I also think that the internet is allowing, especially for more transgressive or non-normative voices to be amplified within Buddhism.
I think this is especially the case in places like online forums and social media, which increasingly provide spaces for right-wing Buddhists to gain traction.
This is something that We saw a lot especially in a lot of our work of seeing especially on forums of people really feeling like they could say more kind of like non-normative I guess more controversial things and have a safe space in a relative sense to be able to do that.
Your ethnography for this paper was all virtual and that comes with difficulties, it comes with advantages.
Can you say why it was centered on the virtual?
It wasn't entirely done by choice.
I would say, you know, ultimately ethnography is a relational activity.
There has to be some kind of mutual... I mean, ideally there would be a kind of mutual respect and trust, but at least there has to be, you know, a mutual feeling of, kind of, that both parties will benefit from the ethnography.
And we actually did try and do some initial kind of forays into trying to talk directly to some of the right-wing Buddhists to see if we could establish relationships, but it actually didn't, it wasn't possible.
And I think this was, you know, I think this was in my case was because I had become really identified with progressive Buddhists, Yes.
So I think that right-wing Buddhists, for the most part, were really critical and suspicious of me and actually saw my research as kind of part of the problem.
Brené, do you want to share the story of the Discord experience?
So this was one of, I think, the early experiences that we had when we first started doing this research together.
We had found someone on Twitter who seemed that they were kind of more of what we call a reactionary centrist, that they were a little bit more in the middle.
And we kind of asked if they would be willing to talk to us about some of their views and beliefs.
And so we went on Discord with them and they didn't want to use their camera, that kind of thing.
And it was, I think, an interesting conversation for sure.
We kind of, I guess, came away with it It felt a little bit kind of unclear where we were or if this is kind of a conversation that we could continue building off of.
And then it was sort of perpetuated more by the fact that then we're telling things to one of the alt-right communities that we were also researching.
And then we realized, oh, we probably shouldn't be having these conversations directly anymore.
Essentially the person that we talked to, just an initial contact to decide if we could then apply for IRB and do a formal interview, wrote quite kind of hostile and aggressive comments about us on an alt-right page and quite frankly I didn't feel safe to continue the research.
With that kind of hostility directed personally at us, which also included some negative comments about our gender and kind of sexual orientation.
I'm very sad to hear it, and I'm absolutely unsurprised.
And what I'm hearing is two things.
One of which is that, Anne, you come into a project like this trailing a digital footprint behind you that anybody can easily look up and see.
And it just seems like virtual ethnography really precludes the anonymity that we would find in other types of fieldwork.
like it's very difficult to go undercover if you're going to use your real name.
And then the other thing is that like, we're gonna get into this kind of distinction between,
on one hand, people are making very firm ideological statements in these spaces,
and some of them tend to be highly politicized, but they will pretend that they are actually
sort of canonical or spiritual statements.
And so there's slippage of meaning with regard to how.
I did find it disturbing.
language and how they're presenting themselves, which we'll detail, but what happens with virtual
ethnography is that you don't actually get the sort of human sit-down presence where maybe some
of those confusions might be worked out or might convey more nuance. Did you find that disturbing?
I did find it disturbing. It was a real conundrum for me as an ethnographer, and I will say that
there was a right-wing Buddhist teacher and we actually did talk.
We talked for about three... I think we had three informal conversations, so I probably spent like three or four hours with him.
And his kind of psychobiography, I, you know, just found really fascinating.
And so, you know, I think we say at the start of our essay that, you know, the problem, one of the problems with virtual ethnography is there is a flattening of the subjectivities.
Right.
And I think that, you know, we, I think, you know, there is work here to be done and I, you know, really hope that a colleague, I'd say a white male colleague, It kind of picks up this thread and kind of enters that kind of relationship and can really flesh out, you know, more of the factors that are happening.
What's the affect that's driving these ideologies?
What's the life conditions?
I mean, I think, you know, that is really important and that we, we couldn't really get to that in our, in our article.
So it is definitely a limitation of our article, but one that we fully, you know, we fully own up to and say, look, this is a springboard.
For somebody who can come along and pass in those environments.
Yeah, and also that might not feel afraid for their own safety.
You know, we had threats of doxing.
I've had several blogs written about me that are extremely homophobic and gender normative.
We had a podcast made of us, made against us, and so I've had complaints to UCF.
I mean, there's actually a real cost to doing this research, and I was also concerned about Brenner because, you know, Brenner's an independent scholar and didn't have institutional protection.
So, you know, there's a lot at stake in these kind of discussions, and I think You know, sometimes it's hard to realize, you know, sometimes people don't always see that side of things.
So, I'm grateful that you've given us a chance to bring it up in the conversation.
Well, maybe let's roll back to cover some crucial language issues.
We are talking about convert Buddhists today.
Who are convert Buddhists in general terms, and why are they so white and rich?
The early scholarship on Buddhism in the US basically delineated between different kinds of categories of Buddhism.
One form of Buddhism in the US that was delineated was white, majority, convert, meditation-based lineages.
So, we use meditation-based lineages with convert because there are convert groups like Sokka Gakkai that are actually not meditation-based and also have been much more successful in drawing multi-racial and multi-class demographics.
So, we're really looking at a very specific, narrow, and small form of Buddhism in the U.S.
Which has received a disproportionate amount of attention, which itself shows the power of whiteness.
I do want to remind listeners that Buddhism was brought to the US by Asian immigrants who suffered a lot of intense racial discrimination.
violence and persecution, you know, were mostly, you know, erased from the story of Buddhism in the US because, you know, we do kind of have scholars and also mainstream Buddhist publications have, you know, disproportionately focused on these white meditation-based lineages.
Why are they so white and rich, you say?
I think that, like, essentially, you know, they're drawn from, you know, middle-class, college-educated Boomers in the 1960s and 70s who were largely part of the counterculture and were really compelled by their idea of, in quotation marks, the mystical East.
So they're boomers with a lot of resources, both in terms of material resources and cultural resources.
But I think there's a stereotype, and you just referenced boomers involved in countercultural activities, becoming interested in Buddhism.
That gives, I think, this popular sense that if you are a convert Buddhist, you're probably going to be progressive in your politics.
Is it that counterculture sort of echo that gives us that stereotype?
It's also actually rooted in scholarship, because if you look at the first wave of scholarship on American Buddhism, it came out, let's see, like 20, 25 years ago.
That scholarship does categorise these meditation-based convert lineages as being liberal, politically being concerned with gender equity, being concerned with having a socially engaged ethos.
And I think it is because, you know, as you say, a large percentage came from the counterculture, and there is that assumption of the counterculture as, you know, a liberal kind of force that was pushing against the conservative forces of, you know, white normative Christian kind of culture.
Another is because a high percentage are university educated, And we do tend to find higher percentages of liberals within, you know, within university educated populations.
So I do think there's actually, you know, some legs to this kind of stereotype or demographic, but I think it was kind of over, it was kind of oversold in a way and I think that was, you know, a kind of, I think scholars kind of missed The conservatism of actual conservatives, you know, people who would identify as Republican.
And also just the conservatism in a way of liberalism.
So I think that's another part of it.
I think there are conservative strands to liberalism which don't really expose themselves until liberalism is challenged in a way.
So I think you really see that with people like Jordan Peterson, right?
He's always identified himself as a classical liberal.
Even James Lindsay at the start of his career, and I'm not sure what he identifies as now because he has really gotten increasingly radicalised, but they very vehemently insist that they are classical liberals.
But I would identify them as conservatives.
I think you would identify them as conservative.
So I'm kind of feeling that that was also part of this misconception of the liberalism, of meditation-based Buddhism.
Does that make sense?
It absolutely makes sense.
You say, Anne, that the scholarship oversold the liberalism of Buddhism, and I think I actually was one of the customers, because I actually thought that the modern Buddhism that I learned about was progressive, but that was because I was progressive!
I just wanted to tell you this story both and see if it resonated with you because my first contact with all of this stuff was through nice American lefties in Vermont.
They were organic farmers.
They had gotten interested in Tibetan Buddhism, including the politics of solidarity with the exiled government.
And this was the little group that brought Geshe Michael Roach to Montpelier, Vermont to give a few Dharma talks.
And I was immediately swept up into his group.
That's a long story.
Which I'm very tired of, but when I look back on what Michael Roach actually taught, it was actually politically vacuous to the point of almost advocating depoliticization.
I never heard him talk about politics, voting, justice, inequality, how Tibetans were oriented towards their political exile.
And I moved to Manhattan for about half a year and I took courses with him in a public school in Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.
Which is historically a radical politics hotbed, but the grittiness of that environment was just kind of like an aesthetic backdrop for Roach's own transcendence.
And so in hindsight, the Buddhism that we were learning about, it was kind of like an alternate reality above and beyond political considerations that I believed we already shared.
And somehow this depoliticization allowed me to assume that the underlying values of the group were my own, that everyone in the group was naturally anti-war, pro-union, anti-capitalist, all that.
And that started to crack open when I saw that Michael Roach was making money preaching a kind of prosperity gospel Buddhism to Chinese and Russian oligarchs while wearing the robes of a Tibetan monk, apparently, you know, happy with his contradictions.
And then looking more broadly, I started to see that the supposed neutrality of mindfulness and meditation was being mobilized by tech companies to discipline labor and so on, and make, you know, sharpshooters in the army more accurate, more calm.
I was really shocked.
Now, Brenna, I don't know if you're a scholar practitioner, and I know you are a scholar practitioner.
Does this story resonate with you at all?
Yeah, I mean, it definitely resonates.
I mean, I'm from England, I'm a Liverpudlian.
And so I, you know, encountered British Buddhism, which is actually, I would say, I'm going to make a really general claim, but I would say it, I think it does tend to be more conservative than, you know, American kind of Buddhism, North American Buddhism, you know, Vermont, California.
But certainly I would say that, you know, when most converts come to Buddhism, they don't get the history of Buddhism, they're not learning about Buddhism historically.
And they're not learning about Buddhism politically.
It's presented as an ahistoric, apolitical tradition, and often that's what they're looking for, right?
They're looking for a kind of form of transcendence.
I think with me it was a bit more complicated because I discovered Buddhism as a teenager and certainly I was interested in socialism, I was from a working class background.
I was also queer, so I was definitely someone who identified as non-normative and I did find a Buddhism that kind of mirrored these commitments.
And, you know, taking that hand, you know, the Dalai Lama, you know, I kind of fixated on, you know, those kind of public kind of faces of Buddhism.
But I actually went to university at age 18 to study Buddhism.
So I actually was introduced, you know, more than the average convert, you know, more to the history of Buddhism.
And so that was, you know, something of a counter for me, that I think that I was kind of fortunate in a way to get that a lot of converts don't get.
But I think in general, the picture that you present is very typical of white meditation-based convert lineages.
And I think it's a shock, often, for those converts when they see the many faces of Buddhism, including the conservative and the capitalist faces.
Brenna, does it resonate?
It does, doesn't it?
I was similar to Anne.
I kind of came into practicing Buddhism at a fairly young age.
I think I was probably 18 when I first sort of started watching YouTube videos and really kind of that was how I got into the Dhamma was through YouTube.
But no, it does resonate because I practice largely in Western Sri Lankan and Thai lineage monastic communities and there was definitely, I think, I didn't realize until you just said that that I had a similar perception of that there was all of these Right.
It was you.
of ideas embedded in the things that I was practicing. And I think this is one of the
reasons why I stopped practicing Buddhism. It's because I suddenly realized that there
wasn't this implicit kind of care for various issues like climate change, like queer and
gay rights, that kind of thing. And it was definitely a shock being like, oh, they don't
actually share a lot of these values that I do.
Right. It was you. It was you all along, actually.
Yeah, definitely.
Those were your values.
Yeah.
I mean, that kind of feels good.
Can I add something?
No, because I don't think it was just you, because there are communities of Buddhists, like there are, you know, communities of Buddhists that do share these values.
It's a sensitive discussion, right?
Because I think that for me as a scholar, There's a line that I'm trying to tread carefully.
So one side of the line is recognizing and acknowledging clearly the historic and present day forms of Buddhism that are conservative.
and at odds or at tension with progressive values.
That's really important to do that kind of honest historic work, which is often lost in contemporary, I would say, practice communities, progressive practice communities.
But on the other hand, you don't want to foreclose the fact that across Buddhist history, there's always been multiple Buddhists.
There's always been challenges to mainstream kind of dominant forms of more conservative Buddhism, you know, whether that be around gender norms or even caste norms.
There's more and more interesting work emerging on how caste has played a role in Buddhism.
And then there are lived communities of Buddhists across the globe, not just white Western Buddhists, that are really committed to more progressive ideals.
Early Chinese Buddhist modernism, for example, is just such a really rich site for socially progressive forms of Buddhism.
So that's also Buddhist too.
So I think that we've got to be really careful, you know, we've got to always kind of keep on reminding ourselves and the listeners, you know, of the podcast in this case, that there are multiple forms of Buddhism, you know, and, you know, there's really, you know, forms of Buddhism that we would find really, you know, hostile to our progressive ideals, but there are also forms of Buddhism that are compatible with our progressive ideals.
And I don't want to foreclose on any of them as like, not real Buddhism.
And let me just take a side note here to say that your own scholarship and then our email exchanges and like 7,000 Facebook messages back and forth over the past, you know, however many years has actually really softened my own approach with regard to this stuff because as somebody who considers themselves like a You know, a cult researcher and a cult survivor, activist, journalist.
I can get heavy-handed with, you know, everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer kind of approach, but I think what you are always reminding me is that when you say the word Buddhist, you're talking about a lot of different people in the same way that when you say the word Catholic, you are talking about Yeah, I love that.
administrators who engaged in sex trafficking and you're talking about liberation theologians.
Yeah, I love that. I'm really, I think that's really spot on.
It really doesn't serve anybody to erase the people who remain devoted within a particular
religious framework who are doing wonderful work because they are the ones actually who
are going to be the causes of the reform that you seek with regard to whatever oppressiveness
that you're calling out.
So I wanted to just thank you for that and then we can carry on, yeah?
Yeah, thank you, Matthew.
Apropos with your article, especially with the current political climate, is that you describe kind of right-wing Buddhism not necessarily emerging or beginning with, but certainly becoming more active and activated in reaction to trainings in various Buddhist communities around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And, I mean, that is a story that is very much with us in our culture war context today.
It's only accelerating.
When did those trainings start in Buddhist communities?
Why did they start?
Who is leading them to begin with?
The meditation-based convert communities that I study, you know, just that particular kind of lineage that I study, started in the 60s and 70s.
And then, you know, shortly, you know, shortly after they started, people of colour began to join them.
Um, immediately, I think, you know, experience the kind of whiteness of those communities.
Um, and so started to basically raise concerns about the whiteness of the communities and the way that they were harmful for, you know, converts of color.
Um, and so I would say that works probably the, the diversity and inclusion work probably started in the 1990s.
So, it's been going on for, you know, now nearly three decades.
And essentially it was, you know, Buddhists of color, you know, converts of color who joined the communities and through their own first-hand experience realized there was tremendous, you know, kind of possibilities for liberation, that the communities themselves were just kind of microcosms of, you know, American society.
You know, and had all of the same problems around race and class kind of inequities.
And so, you know, they were the people who started these trainings.
You know, they started to raise awareness of the whiteness of the lineages.
You know, they started to develop POC affinity groups.
They started to think about how can we change the teacher training models in the, for example, in the Insight community.
So the diversity and inclusion kind of lineages are very much grassroots lineages.
You know, they've developed in the communities themselves.
In some occasions, they've turned to outside organizations to kind of help bring diversity and inclusion
kind of trainings to the institutions.
But I'd say the outside consultations are rarer because obviously if you're bringing in an outside firm,
you have to pay them.
And so that's only really possible for the bigger institutions
like Insight Meditation Society or Spirit Rock.
You write that the reactionary backlash to the diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings
is a motivating factor in the growth of this demographic that you're studying.
When did that really get going and what price did the DEI proponents pay?
You know, essentially I really started to track it around the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
So I think I'd started the research on racial diversity and justice around my own research around, it was probably about 10 years ago now.
But I was recently working through some letters to the editor in the Tricycle magazine.
This was before the internet kind of Started to play such a big role in Buddhism.
And I was really struck by how, even in the early 1990s, that we're basically seeing the same rhetoric.
So, you know, essentially, Tricycle published a few articles on sexual abuse, sexual misconduct.
I don't even think they were using the word sexual abuse.
I think it was sexual misconduct.
Or sexual misbehavior, maybe.
Yeah, it was very, you know, what we now kind of problematize as very, you know, mild terms that themselves kind of, you know, whitewash the problem.
But the letters were like, wow, the letters were like jaw-dropping.
They were like, you know, what is this wave of hysteria?
You know, this moral, sexual morality police, you know, this witch hunt against Buddhist men.
And so I was just really struck to see, wow, you know, this has been happening from the very start, which as, you know, as soon as, you know, a Buddhist community or site like Tricycle is seen to be kind of advocating for liberal or progressive values, you know, there's this absolute uproar that's kind of, you know, coming from the, you know, the galleries, whether it be like the online galleries or letters to the editor.
So I think this is just really interesting.
And, you know, again, I want to thank Jeff Wilson for kind of directing my attention to, you know, this history is being here with us from the very start of these convert lineages.
But, you know, scholars have missed it, I think, overall.
I want to include them myself, you know, I'm only coming to it, you know, recently myself.
Yeah, you've been posting some of these cursed letters to the editor on Twitter.
We've got one here that is coming out of the 90s, and it's in reference to June Campbell, who wrote an amazing book about her experience of abuse within a particular Tibetan Buddhist lineage.
And here's the letter to the editor from a fellow named Lee T. Wallace.
He writes, June Campbell should be spanked and taught a lesson in gratitude for her interview about Kalu Rinpoche in your winter tricycle.
She should know that when a llama asks her to do or not to do something, he has a good reason that she may not understand, writing in from Central, Utah.
Incredible.
Not only that he's saying what he's saying, but that the Tricycle editors published it.
I mean, let's just point this out, because previously we've been talking about the frictionless quality of how anybody can leave any kind of trolling comment underneath your articles, Anne, or your article, Brenna.
But this, some editor had to take this in and say, yeah, I think it would be good to put in the magazine that June Campbell should be spanked.
Yeah, that's a reasonable reader position.
So, first of all, I think it's really important to note that Tricycle, you know, for publishing the article by June Campbell, which is, you know, an autobiographical reflection on her own experience as a secret consort of Kalu Rinpoche, you know, when she was in her 20s and he was in his 70s, Um, they received tremendous amount of critique, like how, you know, how dare they give this woman a voice who was, you know, how dare, you know, dare she critique this, you know, this great lineage holder.
So I do want to just say that I think Tricycle were quite brave and courageous and they did push against, you know, a kind of orthodoxy in publishing the article.
In terms of the letters to the editor, you know, as selfishly as a scholar, I'm like, thank you, Tricycle.
Because it really shows us, hey, there has been this lineage within this wider, you know, within the liberal convert community, there's always been a pushback to liberal and progressive voices.
And that pushback claims that these voices are not Buddhist, that it's an intrusion of, you know, liberal progressive values.
And I think that's really important to know and to document.
So, on the other hand, people said, well, the editor should never have given this guy a voice and that they're kind of legitimating his view.
So that's the other side of it.
I'm curious, what do you two think?
Should they have published this letter or not?
I'm not sure.
I mean, I think, like you said, it provides a really good example of what was kind of going on at the time in reaction to this.
And I guess the question is then, is it better to kind of hear these voices as opposed to them just not being brought up at all?
My perspective from a journalism point of view is that you can make an argument for transparency and sunlight and so on, and you can strategically choose opposing viewpoints to place in your publication, but somebody had to sit there and actually decide that this guy's invocation of sexual assault against the author Was an okay representation of an opposing viewpoint.
They had to pull the trigger on that and I don't know how You'd do that, actually, if you're running a Buddhist magazine.
I just don't know how you'd do that.
Well, I think it's quite interesting, because I think in our discussion about it on Twitter, we were trying to decide—and in a way, I kind of need to follow up with Tricycle, but it was, you know, 30 years ago, so maybe they wouldn't remember either—but we were trying to decide, did they publish it to show how awful this viewpoint was?
You know, like, was it a kind of expose?
Was it a kind of critical strategy?
Or was it some totally misplaced attempt at kind of both-side-isms, you know?
Like, oh, here's some support for Campbell, here is some, you know, critique.
Because there are some letters of support for Campbell that are actually really thoughtful.
You know, if you read the letters of support, you know, if you read all of the letters in response, you know, there's clearly a very different categorical feel to the letters in support of Campbell and that kind of really offensive, it's self-gender, you know, violent kind of response.
So I'm just kind of really, I'm still wondering, is it a both-side-ism or a look at, you know, this expose?
I think it's really generous to go back to Tricycle and see if you can grok any intentionality there.
But I think the long-term effect is that Lee Waters, or whatever his name is, actually probably gave permission for a bunch of his bros to go on and write similar letters.
And then, once they were completely unhinged from any kind of editorial gatekeeping, they could go on and do the same.
All over the internet.
I mean, I think it sets a tone.
It sets a tone.
It gives permission.
It gives permission for a certain type of discourse.
And, you know, it might have been well-meaning.
It's like, let's get these views out here so everybody can see what we're dealing with.
But I don't think that sunlight is the best disinfectant always.
Yeah, no, that's a good point, but I think for me also, because I'm currently working on a collaborative book project on sexual abuse and misconduct with Dr Amy Langenberg, it's interesting to see those letters because it gives you a sense, an extra sense of that is part of the culture, In the sanghas, in the communities themselves, those communities have many Lee's.
There are many Lee types in those communities that when there is some attempt to speak up about sexual abuse, that you have to face that Lee.
Lee is sitting next to you on a cushion, by the way.
You know, so I think it really does give a sense of, again, it kind of cuts through the romanticism that so many people have about Buddhist communities, convert, white, you know, when I'm talking about Buddhism here, I'm, you know, sticking to my own kind of research area, but there is a romanticism and I think voices like Lee's offer us a kind of wake up, a jolt in a way from, you know, these are Sangha members, these are community members.
Tell me about reactionary centrism, which is a crucial term in your research.
What does it mean?
Reactionary centrism is actually a term that we borrowed from the political theorist Aaron Huertes, and he defines it as, I'm going to quote him, someone who says they are politically neutral, but who usually punches left.
So, reactionary centrism, in other words, is a kind of conservative ideological stance that sees itself and presents itself as kind of transcendent of ideology or politics.
And, you know, for us it was clearly at work among white Buddhists who claimed to be apolitical while they were mobilizing conservative assumptions, values and strategies to delegitimate kind of anti-racist and, you know, LGBTQI friendly work in Buddhism.
What about performative transcendence?
So performative transcendence is our phrase, and essentially it's just, it's basically the spiritual version, the spiritual equivalent of reactionary centrism.
So it's basically when there's a kind of performance, you know, rather than actuality of political transcendence.
To transcend both right-wing and left-wing positions and be this kind of transcendent, non-dual, you know, middle way.
You mention that, or you argue, that performative transcendence functions to naturalize dominant social power.
What do you mean by naturalize, and what does that look like on the ground in the moment in which it's happening?
Yeah, no, I'm glad you asked about that because I actually think understanding naturalization is absolutely key to this issue.
To naturalize is to take a social, you know, historic situation that has been constructed through, you know, social and historic proceeds as actually not constructed but as natural, as kind of pre-given, you know, as above, you know, human hand or activity.
And I think that most people who naturalize things don't actually know that they are naturalizing things.
They themselves are not aware of what it means to naturalize.
And I think that's actually the power, in a way, of conservatism.
That it basically assumes and claims that existing social relations are natural and pre-given, and that they're outside of political and social orders.
And then, of course, you know, if something's natural, then is it, can it be changed?
You know, it's just, it is just the natural state of affairs.
So I think a specific example here is when, you know, if one would take racial inequities that exist, you know, that clearly exist, the data is, You know, there's massive data on different forms of racial inequities across different spheres of life, education, wealth and well-being.
And you say, well, that's just the kind of natural state of affairs, rather than look and see.
No, like if we look at, for example, you know, the difference in wealth inequity in the US, we can see that it's related to many factors,
but one factor that it's related to is home ownership, because property is a major way that wealth is generated.
So we can just look historically at the phenomena of redlining,
and we can see the way in which social and historic and political processes worked against black Americans
basically purchasing property and becoming homeowners and generating wealth.
So, if you naturalize inequities, right, then you basically,
it's basically an a historic and a political move.
But then, when you look at people who actually try and challenge those inequities, then you can say they are political, they are social, and they are historic, and you're simply, you know, this transcendent, you know, natural, you know, position.
And that's an accusation.
That's an accusation.
You're political, you're historical, you're operating beneath the ideal plane of discourse.
Yeah, I mean, that's basically the whole, you know, that's the fundamental move that is made against progressive Buddhists.
That's a gambit.
That's a gambit.
It all comes down to that.
So we can see this in somebody that you profile named Brad Warner.
He's running a number of online forums or he's in charge of a community.
Who is Brad Warner, just briefly?
So Brad Warner is essentially an American Zen teacher, I think a Soto Zen teacher, and he's also a popular author.
He's written several books.
I think maybe the most famous one was his Hardcore Zen book and essentially he, you know, is a white American.
I think he's from Ohio.
He went to live and work in Japan and he trained in Zen Buddhism.
And whilst in Japan and then he came back and kind of, you know, became a kind of, you know, a kind of popular figure in those kind of meditation based lineages.
He basically kind of presented himself as a kind of alternative to the counterculture hippie Buddhism.
And so when politics show up in his Sangha, you write that, for instance, he vetoed a Sangha discussion about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings because, quote, I feel like one of the important things a Zen center can provide is a space where we don't talk about such subjects, unquote.
Warner, however, has been anything but silent about such subjects.
certain academic writing goes really hard and really subtle at the same time. Between September
2018 and September 2019, he produced 15 public teachings in the form of blogs and YouTube videos
critiquing racial justice and transgender inclusivity. So this is sort of reactionary
centrism in situ, but also there's the performative transcendence with, you know, if it comes to Brett
Kavanaugh, really what we should provide here is a space in which we don't have to consider such issues.
Brad Warner has always struck me as a fascinating figure because he's always been an extremely opinionated teacher.
He was part of a backlash to attempts to bring in justice for sexual violence in American Zen Buddhism.
And then he, you know, so he had this earlier history of really kind of lashing out at these attempts at reform and, you know, saying that this was a, this wasn't real Buddhism and it was a kind of feminist intrusion and I was really fascinated by that because he himself is really an untrue, you know, He's certainly not traditional Zen Buddhist.
He kind of marketed himself as this Zen teacher who I think he wrote for a porn site for a while, and he wrote this book on sex and being sexually liberated.
So it was really interesting to me of how he saw himself somehow as not a kind of modern Buddhist, how he naturalized himself, but saw other people as having these political and social opinions.
So I was like, what's going on there?
Like, what's this?
What's this?
You know, what's happening here?
Then when the diversity and inclusion and equity stuff was kind of embraced more by the kind of Soto Zen Buddhist Association, they had a conference that they dedicated to on Zen racial justice and the Me Too movement.
Like, he really went bonkers about it.
You know, he wrote these really You know, intense Facebook posts saying that it was a Marxist takeover of Buddhism and, you know, basically started to articulate a lot of right-wing critiques of, you know, of these initiatives, but then also interlaced it with these claims that he himself was not interested in politics and was apolitical.
And I was like, again, look, there's a way in which you're only seeing your own position as natural.
I mean, it's a naturalization Of one's own position.
So if your position's natural, then you see other positions as political that are intruding on your natural position.
And I think, in a way, it's a parallel to identity politics, right?
I mean, certain identities, white, racially, male, you know, gender, they don't see themselves as identities.
They only see minority identity as identity.
They are the, you know, the universal, the human norm.
Yeah, so they couldn't possibly be doing identity politics.
Right, yeah, they couldn't possibly.
Well, when as we know that, you know, we all have identities and those identities are all shaped and socially constructed.
And so, you know, again, it's like you want to kind of encourage people to look at the ways in which they are products themselves of social, historical, and cultural forces.
And then I think it gets a bit complicated with religion, because religion itself, or religion's Buddhism in this case, makes claims to a transcendence of history, of the social, of the political.
And I, as a practitioner, I'm certainly open to that.
I'm not a materialist.
I think I'm really interested in the question of how many forms of transcendence intersect with social historical subjectivities.
But I think there's something happens with these folks who naturalize in which they almost apply a kind of transcendence to their social, historic and cultural identities as well.
You know, there's a kind of slippage that happens that, you know, you could just again spend like hours and hours trying to unpack it.
So around some of this discourse, you know, whether it's in Brad Warner's sphere or elsewhere, we wind up with comments in the feeds like, our opinions will be our downfall.
We have posts that celebrate the greatness of America that denounce Marxism, that deny climate change, that declare Greta Thunberg to be a prophet of a new apocalyptic cult, which, and it's always cool to see how projection works, like the young autistic woman pointing at climate apocalypse is said to be an apocalyptic cult leader as if she's not the messenger but the problem.
So, I wanted to ask about this because this seems extraordinary to me in a Buddhist context.
When I think about climate denialism in religion, I usually associate it with A very hard body-soul dualism of more conservative forms of Christianity where the earth is under God's control, but the earth is also always already fallen.
In other words, the world is kind of like a stage set for a cosmic drama and therefore nothing that really happens to it is all that real.
But my impression of Buddhist philosophy in general, and I'm generalizing, is that the focus on interdependence should offer less room for practitioners to break the world apart like that.
So how have you seen Buddhist climate denialists ignore human impacts on the environment or just forswear interdependence?
To the question of, you know, are they climate denialists or in that kind of way?
I think, especially for some of them, they are getting into that kind of climate denialist purview.
And I think this is something that we see, especially within And I'd like to note just briefly that, especially with the right-wing and the alt-right Buddhists, that a lot of this intersection between political views and Buddhist values don't necessarily make sense.
They're always kind of catching on something.
And I think this is something that we really kind of See, in this area, and we see in areas like, there are so many texts within Buddhism that talk about nonviolence, but yet they're still advocating for some kind of violence.
And this is something that is being shown in this question as well, is that there's so much value and text within Buddhism that talks about Not harm.
About not harming the planet, especially about not harming living beings.
But then there's still this capacity for coming and rejecting claims specifically because they might be more progressive or more left-leaning.
It might not seem like it aligns very well, but I think that's particularly part of where this kind of hinges on.
It goes farther to the right as you propose links or correlations between users of subreddits like r slash pua or the pickup artist subreddit and r slash the red pill and you see some crossover between these environments and what you end up calling the Buddhist alt-right.
Now how concrete are those links?
The correlation between users of subreddits, like you mentioned, like the pickup artists and especially like the red pill communities, exists more as a gateway to right-wing and alt-right viewpoints and communities overall.
So what we found in our work is that those individuals who refer to themselves as alt-right Buddhists or right-wing Buddhists were at times coming into politics through these online communities.
And this is something, going back to Angela Nagel, who knows this as well in her work, about how these communities are especially poignant gateways into radicalized belief systems.
So I think there are definitely those connections.
I think where it's maybe not so concrete is looking at how many alt-right Buddhists in particular are entering these spaces through those particular forums and kind of that intersection of it seems like some of them were coming to their political beliefs through these forums but through Buddhism as well isn't quite where those two come together isn't quite so clear.
Some of the hardest right Buddha bros that you write about say they came to their version of the Dharma through Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums.
So, can you unpack this for me a bit?
Because this would seem to be one of those clearly, you know, politically scrambled omelet pathways.
You know, essentially, we looked at, was it the Right Wing Dharma Squad?
There were four participants and in, I think, their first podcast, you know, they gave their personal, you know, stories about how they found Buddhism and two of them mentioned Kerouac's book.
What I'll say is, okay, this is really embarrassing, this is a kind of personal confession.
The Dorm of Bums was actually one of my gateways into Buddhism.
You know, I think someone gave me, I think my cousin gave me a copy when I was like 14 and I was, you know, a little Liverpudlian and I was like, oh my god, this is so cool!
You know, I was really into it.
And that's a bit embarrassing.
It's a confession I always make when I do my Intro to Buddhism class.
I am one of those really annoying white convert Buddhists myself.
But I wanted to mention myself because I'm probably the other extreme from the alt-right Buddhists.
So I wanted to show that Like, this text I think is being hugely significant for white convert meditation-based lineages and I think there's like different ways, you know, that you can go with this text.
So when I first read the book Dharma Bums, you know, I thought it was super cool, you know, I thought it was really like radical and Um, you know, kind of, like, liberatory.
But then I read it again a few years later as a feminine- like, more through a feminist lens, and I was absolutely horrified.
I was, like, so embarrassed that I'd ever, like, loved this book and I thought I- I think I bought, like, you know, five copies of the book for Christmas presents.
I read it through.
How does this book talk about women, essentially?
It's pretty awful.
Women are objects, they're completely disposable.
Brenner had mentioned Angela Nagle's book, Kill All Normies, that we actually draw on in our article too.
And essentially, you know, what Nagel says, which I find very convincing, is being counterculture was being liberal.
It was pushing against, you know, the kind of conservative front.
The counterculture figure was, you know, is, I think it's, is it Jaffe Ryder?
You know, it's this kind of like, you know, free spirit who, you know, this, I think he calls himself a zen lunatic, who, you know, makes all women happy, you know, kind of loves them and leaves them type of thing.
That was kind of cool.
That was cool in the counterculture and it was seen as, like, left-wing cool.
But Angela Nagle says, you know, in the current moment, kind of counterculture figure is really, you know, this kind of non-conformist figure who is more associated with a kind of You know Milo?
How do you pronounce Milo's second name?
Yiannopoulos?
It's like he's a non-conformist and he's pushing not against the kind of rigidity of conservatism but what he sees as the rigidity of social justice.
Now essentially I'm quite compelled by this analysis because I think that what is common across these lineages, right, is a kind of basically a bro figure that is not constrained by social mores.
So I think it's a kind of ego expulsive figure, right?
It's quite an immature, like, male, like, you know, F.U.
figure.
I will do what I want, I'll sleep with who I want, you know?
I'll post, you know, these, like, really gross sexist memes type of figure.
So I actually think the key To this kind of question about how does the Dharma but bums link up, I think the key is a certain type of masculinity actually.
I think it's a masculinity that feels that it is unanswerable to social norms and particularly to feminist norms.
So I'd actually, you know, thinking about this question, it really made me think about like, you know, how much the Buddha bros, they tend to love the Zen iconoclastic figures, you know?
So the Zen iconoclastic figures often say things like, you know, where is the Buddha?
Oh, you'll find the Buddha in the brothel.
I mean, it's this kind of feeling of we are not held by normal values of morality.
The theme is clear, and what it allows the devotee to do is to change the goalposts all the time.
It's also like these famous Zen masters who go, you know, they're famous for visiting brothels.
The theme is clear and what it allows the devotee to do is to change the goalposts all the time.
Like you could justify your transgressive behavior in terms of, you know, non-dual awareness.
You could justify it in terms of even anti-capitalism.
Like I'm going to not be faithful to a partner because that's part of monogamous norms and I'm going to break those taboos
as well.
You could fold your emotional avoidance into that as well and say I'm not going to be attached to anyone.
Yeah, I mean there are many ways to spiritualize being an asshole.
Exactly, I mean, well you put it really frankly then, but it's a kind of, it's an identification with being a rebel, but it's a rebel that's very, it's very a bro rebel.
You know, in each case, you know, if we look at these figures like the Dharma Bums, you know, it's really sexist.
I mean, I think there's a kind of, I think there's a consistency to the rebel-ness, which is basically a kind of male indulgence, basically a sexism, where women aren't really like full human subjects.
This yearning for freedom and transgression is also always yearning for And this is really highlighted in this amazing quote that you pull off of an alt-Buddhism, I think, forum in 2020 where somebody's writing, Western Buddhism is castrated, weak, corrupted by progressivism and rejects the original, thoroughly masculine, head-oriented, ascetic system advocated by the warrior aristocrat, Siddhartha Gautama.
offers an alternative to standard Western Buddhism for those with wisdom and strength to make
stronger people stronger. This is a place for promoting fearlessness, self-discipline,
and austerity with the acknowledgement that all suffering is self-inflicted.
Victimhood is for the weak." I mean, this is Manosphere bingo, right?
Like, and you.
And you point out that this demographic intersects, like this is really familiar, and it doesn't seem to be about Buddhism at all because it echoes so many other things, and you point out that this demographic intersects with fandom for intellectual darkwave types like Jordan Peterson, you mentioned before, and James Lindsay, you mentioned before.
It seems that when commenters get into these connections, they're not really talking about Buddhism at all, really, are they?
So first of all, I want to really emphasize, because you articulated it better than I did, that essentially I do think it's a manosphere bingo, but I also think that the Dharma Bums was a manosphere bingo, but I think it wasn't as clear because it was kind of clothed in a kind of, you know, liberal counterculture politic.
So I think it's, I'd say also the same for the Brad Warner and also actually Noah Levine, you know, the kind of hardcore Zen, the Dharma punks, like there's a kind of consistent bro-ness, you know, manosphere-ness to all of these expressions of Buddhism, like that's a constant thread, that masculinity, that androcentrism.
And I think that, you know, I think that sometimes when it shows up in a right-wing context, it's more identifiable.
But I think we also find it in the Dharma punks.
I think we also find it in the boomers.
So I want to make sure that, you know, listeners are really alert to what forms of masculinity are kind of articulated.
It just feels like as Manosphere bingo sort of ramps up, it feels like the actual consideration or concern with Buddhism itself falls by the wayside.
For instance, I don't really hear any difference in that particular comment between this vision of Gautama as the warrior and like a muscular Christ, or how muscular Christianity fantasizes about a ripped Jesus.
There's not really any daylight in there.
We don't really know what we're talking about.
I would just say, again, there's multiple Buddhisms.
Right now, even in our current political moment, there's nationalist, very masculine forms of Buddhism, and there's also feminist Buddhist communities.
So, I really see what you're getting to, and I think it's a really important point of what is the kind of That might make it more socially acceptable or more permissible for the person involved, but I want to come back to that in a moment.
a hierarchical masculinity and then it has this veneer of Buddhism on it, right?
That might make it more socially acceptable or more permissible for the person involved
but I want to come back to that in a moment and I wanted to first ask Brenna if when you
came across comments like this in your digital research, what was the pushback like?
Did you see any?
Yeah, so, and just to clarify, this statement is from the alt-buddhism subreddit, which had been pretty inactive for some time when we initially found the page.
And while there wasn't much pushback on this forum or page itself, there was quite a bit of pushback to the idea of the Buddhist alt-right in forums such as the artbuddhism subreddit, which is the main Buddhist subreddit.
But aside from anonymous forums, we haven't seen a huge amount of pushback to these ideas.
Which I think is fairly telling overall.
I think Buddhists, regardless of their political affiliations, are just really unwilling to talk about things like the Buddhist All-Right or right-wing Buddhists in particular.
And I think this is because there's this idea that It's impossible or unlikely or that they just can't justify the fact that there are alt-right Buddhists or that alt-right Buddhists could exist.
And so there's I think kind of this tunnel vision of if I don't pay attention to this then it will go away, which of course isn't going to happen.
Yeah, it sounds like they have a very skilled, no-true-Buddhist argument going.
But, you know, to come back to what we were just speaking about, Anne and Brenna, and to come back to this category of convert Buddhism, if we're talking about, like, what's the actual underlying structure here, I have a little bit of a judgy speculation.
You're John!
Go for it!
Alright, I mean, sometimes I really get the impression that these converts didn't really convert.
You know, they might have been alienated from their birth religions, especially the social aspects.
They might have, you know, frayed social relations.
They might have found that Buddhism or yoga in their modern globalized forms filled in some sort of social gap that allowed them to feel like they were part of something.
But maybe they didn't have the intellectual resources or the cultural curiosity to really invest in what would be a different paradigm, and I think this may have left some of them with little to do but simply reproduce their own stuff in a kind of Buddhist cosplay.
Do you think that's fair?
I've got mixed feelings about it.
I like the snazzy phrase of Buddhist cosplay and I think that actually, in a way, you're echoing some of scholastic critiques.
Is scholastic a word?
You're echoing, in a way, some of the scholarly critiques of Western convert Buddhism, that it's not real Buddhism.
It's just the kind of dressing of Buddhism.
I want to say yes, and I also want to push back.
So I'd want to push back, but the reason I'd want to... Because I've got the hammer out, and the nails are almost in.
I mean, I think it's just like, essentially, you know, we can't just apply this to right-wing Buddhists.
We'd also want to be applying it to, like, progressive Buddhists, that essentially they're just, they're basically driven by their own narrative of progressivism.
And then they just add some Buddhism on the top.
So I think that is one way of looking at some forms of convert activity.
I certainly wouldn't want to say that includes all converts.
I think about my Buddhist teachers, Anne Klein and Harvey Aronson.
They're both Jewish, They came to Buddhism in their twenties, but they have really immersed themselves in the intellectual study of Buddhism, relationally building strong relationships with Tibetan Buddhists.
The teacher of our Sangha lives still in Kham, in Tibet.
So, you know, there's different levels of immersion for convert Buddhists and so, you know, we have to be careful to qualify it.
Then another problem I think is just that, what is the nature of lived religion?
You're essentially I'm really asking, what does it mean to be a real Buddhist?
Do you need to be 10% Buddhist?
Do you need to be 12%?
In a way, if you come in as a convert to Buddhism, especially as white converts from, you've had no familiar context, then You know, that's not going to be the same as if you grew up, even if you're not a Buddhist, but you grew up in a Buddhist culture and the stories of Buddhism are, you know, what you've kind of like marinated in.
So I think it's just a really complex question and I think certainly that your critique is valid.
I'd just say that it's a slither of the pie, if that's okay.
It's absolutely okay, and I have to say that, once again, your scholarship is very Buddhist in the sense that it will always consider the next thing, and it will question the definitions, and it will move towards a middle path, I think, always.
Brenna, are you willing to be a little bit more hard-ass on these Buddhist cosplayers?
Probably not.
Take them down, Brenna!
Do not hold back!
I mean, I think I agree with Anne in a lot of ways, that we have to be really careful when we're talking about who is legitimately, kind of in quotes, Buddhist.
I used to moderate a Buddhist forum, I spent a lot of time online arguing about Buddhism, and I think one of the biggest things that people would say when someone was doing something that they felt was un-Buddhist is, oh, they're just not Buddhist.
And I think we have to be careful in that space, because We can't judge in any capacity who is Buddhist and we do have to be mindful because from all intents and purposes of us looking especially at all right Buddhists, they had a very clear understanding of what the Dharma was and they could quote directly from texts.
They had clear understandings of practice and so I think trying to critique that in some way really wasn't going to be meaningful in any way.
I mean essentially it's not really a sexy answer but Buddhism is multiple and the outright Buddhists, like progressive Buddhists, are selective.
They selectively draw on aspects of the tradition that align with their own political values and I think that's a really common strategy and they ignore or minimize or even might not know about in some cases.
Sometimes it's just literally people don't know about the vastness of Buddhist resources, both in terms of textual resources and also historic variations of Buddhism.
You know, but I think that's kind of, in many ways, that is religious behaviour.
You know, at the same time, I think it's also true that you can make some distinctions, right?
I mean, you know, you'll see that with, I think, the mindfulness movements being a really good site, you know, where there's definitely more dodgy, superficial adoptions of mindfulness.
than others so I don't want to say it's really hard I don't want to say that we can't make distinctions and we can't critique but often when we critique we are critiquing from an idea or an assumption of what we think Buddhism is and so I think that we have to really excavate To use a favoured academic term, what our assumptions are.
And as Brenna said, the alt-right figures go to canonical sources.
Those sources themselves are completely androcentric.
They were produced by monastic elites.
So I think that in some ways you could say they are more grounded in the monastic elite tradition than the liberal Buddhists.
In many ways, right?
So again, it's like you want to get that line, you have to be like historically accurate, but you don't want to foreclose on multiple Buddhisms.
And because historically we know there's always been challenges historically, traditionally, to dominant forms of Buddhism.
Those challenges get erased and normally the traditional Buddhism is claimed as a monolithic conservative tradition.
And that's not true.
As long as we're being selective, let's also be brave.
Think about Elon's Vajra again and finish up with some speculation here.
Let's imagine that he doesn't have good Buddhist resources.
In your view, that, you know, he's finished his fourth Diet Coke for the night.
He's tired of playing with the replica guns.
He was really interested in what that Vajra is.
What Buddhist teachers and thinkers would you want to put him in touch with that you would recommend to him?
You know, who are the thinkers who are doing the work of spotlighting another path that doesn't bend towards the right at all and might save Twitter?
Okay, well, first of all, I think I want to draw attention, not to individuals, but to Buddhist communities, because I do think there is a kind of harmful, kind of defensive individualism at the core of these, I think, more harmful forms of right-wing Buddhism.
So a couple of communities that I am excited about are one is the Young Buddhist Editorial and they are essentially young Jodo Shinsu and Shin Buddhists who are, you know, as I said the Shin Buddhism is the earliest form of Buddhism in the US that has been, you know, by and largely erased by white Buddhists.
Yongxin Buddhists are really forging, I think, a really exciting intersectional approach to Buddhism and I want to give a shout out to Chenxing Han's book.
It's called Be the Refuge and it's a kind of ethnography of these young Asian American Buddhists who are, you know, navigating multiple kinds of contexts and she talks about them forging this intersectional Buddhism Another community that I'm really excited about is the Dharma Datta community.
They are the largest Spanish-speaking Buddhist community that I know of.
They're run by nuns, they're Tibetan Buddhist nuns, and they've actually recently relocated to Virginia.
So I'm kind of interested to see, you know, what they're going to bring.
They teach now in Spanish but I'm hoping that they're going to offer some English speaking classes because I'm really interested in, they're a feminist and environmental friendly group of Tibetan Buddhist nuns and I'm really interested to see what they bring to the Tibetan Buddhist landscape.
And because it was a Vajra that, you know, that Elon had on display, I wanted to give them a shout out.
I am a little bit concerned of, I think it would be good for Elon to meet these two communities.
Would it be good for those communities to meet Elon?
I'm not sure, they're probably more Bodhisattva-like than myself, so I'll leave it at that.
Brenna?
I think a lot of this work is being done by communities that are combating these right-wing ideas through especially creating spaces of resistance in a lot of capacities.
And to this extent, I really appreciate the work of RAINBODY, which is a newer LGBT community founded by Vande Kraliko, who is in Australia.
And then Anne and I have done a little bit of work with the Buddhist Action Coalition in New York City, which I think is especially cool in the sense of elevating different people and organizations' voices.
So I think they would definitely be great for Elon to meet.
Dr. Anne and Brenna, thank you so much for your time.
This has been fascinating, and I'm really grateful that you've been able to shed some light on this very, very complex world.
Thank you, Matthew.
Thank you for letting me rant about the Dharma Bums.
It's obviously a... It's some history that I'm still working through of my own.
