Russel Brand apparently has an autobiography out; I haven’t seen it, nor am I at all interested in reading it, but Nick Cohen has. It’s titled Revolution, and this sort of says it all about that.
His book tells us much about him and little about the rest of humanity. Brand says that he is qualified to lead a global transformation, not because of the quality of his thought, but because he has transformed his private life. “I may not have overthrown a government. But [I have] navigated myself from one set of feelings where drinking and drugs were my only solution to a state where I never drink or take drugs.” It is perhaps too easy to reply: “Well, bully for you.” I accept that freeing yourself from addiction and finding inner peace can have more beneficial effect than any political programme the powerful can implement. But Brand is offering his Beverly Hills Buddhism as a political programme, not a self-help guide. Everything is corrupt, his theory runs. All politicians are the same. Reforms won’t do, and no one can expect him to relinquish his fortune until there has been “systemic change on a global scale” (a useful condition that last one).
The systemic change that means the most to Brand is an embrace of meditation and pantheism. The greatest villain of Revolution is not a super-rich financier but Richard Dawkins. Brand denounces him as a “menopausal” proponent of “atheistic tyranny” because Dawkins denies the existence of the supernatural. He pulls a succession of shabby tricks to bolster his claim that religion does not authorise oppression. Anyone who claims that Jesus, Allah, Krishna or the fountainhead of any other religion endorses homophobia instead of the “union of all mankind” is “on a massive blag”, he says. Brand has to ignore Leviticus’s edict that the punishment for men who sleep with other men is death, St Paul’s hysterics about lesbianism and the hadiths that have Muhammad saying that the punishment for sodomy is death by stoning. In other words, he has to ignore several millennia of real and continuing religious repression, so he can make his spiritualism sound emancipatory rather than cranky.
You might disagree with Dawkins on many things, but he is not an “atheistic tyrant” — and neither am I, while just as ferociously anti-religious. I’m also anti-spirituality, so when I see a book by a minor celebrity (best known for his libertine life style) touting “revolution” while also praising spirituality, I see a deeply fractured set of incoherent contradictions. Spirituality is a force for complacency; it’s what our masters have always used to keep the people content. Don’t rock the boat, or you won’t get your reward in heaven! Find peace in your poverty — your suffering makes you a good person! Someday, the rising of the proletariat will make everyone’s life perfect.
Wrong. There is no heaven, no reward after death but oblivion. Pain doesn’t make you better — people are people, some good, some bad, most in-between, and we need to make it possible for everyone to live their lives with reasonable material circumstances. And don’t be fooled that great sacrifices now will lead to great rewards, somehow, in a distant future — work for a better world now.
And don’t be fooled. “Spirituality” is a tool much loved by your corporate masters.
When I go to yoga, I’m often surrounded by wealthy white women who can afford expensive classes and Lululemon threads. When I scroll through my Facebook feed, I see exclamations of bourgeois spirituality (“Staying at the Waldorf tonight! #gratitude #blessed #100happydays #livelife”). Moreover, my actor friends seem to use karma and positivity as tools to help them achieve commercial success.
We might call this a belief in spiritual meritocracy. The implicit idea here is that our professional and financial growth depends on our spiritual merit, not on the presence or absence of social structures and biases. We are told that if we are grateful enough, if we put enough happy energy into the universe, then we will be rewarded with material wealth and earthly pleasures. (Think “The Secret.”) We are told that we actually can have it all: a rich spiritual life, leading to a rich material life.
I’m no fan of Zizek, but he’s right on this one thing:
It’s times like these when I am reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s summary dismissal of “Western Buddhism.” Zizek cautions that while meditation may seem to come from an edgy counterculture, in fact Americans practice it in a way that is often consistent with consumerist capitalism:
“… although ‘Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement … One is almost tempted to resuscitate the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the ‘opium of the people,’ as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery. The ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity … ”
In other words, rather than helping yogis become more socially conscious spiritual warriors, Buddhist meditation can get hijacked by the status quo. It only brings us a shallow peace that makes us less likely to question what counts as normal.
I’m not just picking on Buddhism. All religions are foolish and dangerous, cultivating an unwarranted deference to faith and spirituality. Buddhism can be a salve for the comfortable and a rationalization for the uncomfortable, but so can Christianity. In fact, mainly what we see in modern Christianity is a lot of rich people telling poor people to be content with their lot, and give use more of your money — and the most galling side of the religion are pious businessmen.
I want to say upfront that I believe in God and that there is design to the world and the people in it. For those of you who don’t believe this, I am asking you to allow me to hold these assumptions temporarily for specific reasons that will hopefully become clear. The purpose of this article is not to convert anyone; it is to build some logic into why, for me, the Bible is the best business book I have read.
Jesus did not rise from the dead, but if any outrage could stir a resurrection, that ought to do it. The Bible is now a tool for capitalism. Why? Because when you rest your reason on a belief in things unseen, but devoutly to be desired, you’ve completely stripped your gears and anything goes, and everything is completely ineffectual.
But back to Russell Brand. He has a new cause.
Let's help @davidicke start a media network- it will be amazing! http://t.co/7CsFIEzyh4
— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) June 1, 2013
David Icke, lizard people from outer space Icke? This is where spirituality takes you.
Aw man, I’d almost forgotten about David Icke. Thanks a lot.
Russell Brand also has advocated refusal to vote as part of his “revolution”.
Refusal to vote is capitulation, not revolution.
Um, blockquote confusion?
Your blockquoting seems to be a bit messed up.
David Icke? If Buddhism leads to Icke Brand likely just scared some folks away from Buddhism.
It seems to be a time for British creative types to say stupid things. Richard D. James, aka electronic musician Aphex Twin, has revealed in recent interviews that he’s apparently a 911 Truther. I wonder if he and Brand could work on a project together.
I’ve been rather on the fence about Brand as he does seem to lean toward progressivism, but after hearing of this incoherent foolishness, I think I just fell off the fence.
Oh dear! The blockquote monster ate our atheistic tyrant in chief!
I’ve been kind of a fan, tentatively, of Brand for a while, but yeah… I would not turn to him for political or religious advice. I think he’s a passable actor and a fairly funny comedian, and that’s where I take him seriously. His ‘deeper’ thoughts are just too messy to pay attention to.
And, seriously, Icke? Does Brand just not have any idea about the whole “the Queen is a polymorphed lizardbeing” thing, or… what? I can conceive of no way for a person to take David Icke seriously if they know of his opinions on things like that.
Brand is singularly tedious, because whilst he spends an awful lot of time pointing out how awful everything is and how rubbish all our politicians are, he has not one single idea or suggestion more useful than ‘it’s all got to go’. He’s also quite arrogant elsewhere, such as his opinions on drug rehabilitation (“this way worked for me, therefore it is appropriate for everyone!”, sort of thing) and general disregard for tedious facts about the real world.
I don’t find him particularly funny or clever either, but I’m prepared to admit I may have missed something there as he does seem pretty popular…
After being bombarded with Facebook feeds with headlines like, “Russell Brand explains everything about _______,” I would click the link and watch the videos. They were mostly obvious sorts of populist political statements. I mostly agree, evil capitalists…etc.
Then someone asks him about 9-11. He doesn’t exactly say he thinks it’s an inside job, but he goes the “unanswered questions” route, evading by saying, “I’m not a scientist.”
Maybe he’ll say something agreeable every so often, but at his core he’s a conspiracy whack-o. Any questions that remained were answered by this post.
I don’t follow Brand; he sounds like another ego-driven recent-convert type to me. Still, I hope he’s using “amazing” as in “Comedy Value”, and not “Fact Value”, because DAMN… David Icke? Really? Damn…
Notice the “Che Guevara” pose in Brand’s gravatar. Not that I’m an admirer of Guevara – the reality was far from his representation as an icon of liberation – but Brand really is the poseur’s poseur.
Look mama! That man is wearing an idiot suit!
@7, Athywren – Social Justice Spellsword
It shouldn’t be difficult to understand. This Brand fellow is a whacko as well.
I found him while surfing for Venus Project videos O:
I’m not at all surprised by any of this…Brand is exactly the kind of person whose brain i would expect to be ripe to be colonized by this kind of narcisistic bullshit about being the harbinger of a supreme panacea. In other words…he is an idiot…
I can’t stand his rock-star of comedy wanabe act. Except it’s not an act, he really does think he’s like the Jimmy Page of comedy. And he never once thinks to deconstruct this image. To look at all the failings of people like Page, and the rest and to ask himself is that what he really wants out of life.
Brand’s “don’t vote” thing really puzzled me. It’s so stupid, how does not casting a vote change anything? If you’re actually concerned about the way things are run then the only reasonable choice is to vote for the least harmful option, even as you work to tear down democracy. The two things are not mutually exclusive.
What I was unaware of was his spirituality bullshit. In the light of that, well, of course you can’t vote. Because magical thinking says that the things you do have effects that extend beyond the actual act. It’s fucking new age bullshit all the way down. Foetid pile upon foetid pile getting re-polished by the credulous and those who prey upon them.
I chatted to Brand in a bar last year for a couple of hours. He came across as very intelligent and quite serious and yes progressive as we can generally expect from an incredibly rich celebrity mostly devoid of contact with the real world – he was quite complimentary about my atheism whilst professing (a bit like Stephen King recently) that his ‘spirituality’ worked for him on the basis that it had replaced the yawning gap left by drugs (a bit like Stephen King again). I found him pretty charming which I guess does tend to smooth out a lot of hidden problems when you talk to someone. I always thought his conspiracy leanings were a bit affected as a sort of humorously defensive, ‘well you can’t trust anyone so don’t discount anything!’ But then he didn’t really expound on his revolution at the time. I can only guess the David Icke link was a mixture of ego that he’s getting attention for his ideas and can highlight things way, way out of the mainstream (or basic reality) and a little bit of humour that people will go along with it. Given his comedy tour was The Messiah Complex talking about his egotistical nature mixed in with the egotistical nature of any messiah – I really hope it’s for ironic effect. Cos I’ve also met David Icke when I was a kid and that was frankly depressing…
Just for the ineluctable chuckles, I read through Amazon’s free sample of “Revolution”. It is fucking atrocious; much worse than I had anticipated.
If you manage to trudge through his horrendous idiom–itself a Sisyphean task–you are rewarded with all manner of moronic “insights” and gross misinterpretations of others’ work.
Quoting a “cultural anthropologist”, who turns out was a professor of religious studies, Brand asserts you can learn all you need to know about a society based on its biggest buildings. Our biggest buildings, he contends, are banks and shopping malls; so we’re all materialistic turds.
It is worth pointing out this “cultural anthropologist”–assuming Brand quoted him correctly–is just fucking wrong. If you want to know about a society’s values, you need to look at those items which occurred in greatest abundance, as the biggest buildings merely reflect the interests of that society’s most wealthy and powerful individuals (Cathedrals, I imagine, meant far less to the average German than they did to the Archbishop of Cologne). But even if that were the case, our largest buildings aren’t banks or shopping malls… they are airplane hangars and warehouses.
I realize research can be a daunting task, but for fuck’s sake, two minutes and access to wikipedia turned three or four pages’ worth of Brand’s drivel into Swiss cheese.
@18…you forgot the Pentagon…
Yoga and meditation are #techniques# to make your brain a better place. Yes, that is a fact, see the current issue of Scientific American. Those who believe that it imparts some magical force on the rest of the world have gone over the edge into loopyland. Don’t trash yoga/meditation as causing the loopiness. They just read too much into the good feelings the yoga/meditation imparts on them.
I guess I’m off-topic… don’t know Brand at all… back to meditation again…
confirmation bias. When he says “all the big buildings are malls and banks” doesn’t that mean he is only looking at malls and banks? They are the biggest buildings he sees. He just ain’t looking at bigger buildings with other purposes.
@18 When I went to Kennedy Space Center, they mentioned the Vehicle Assembly Building was the tallest single-story building in the world, because you needed to stand rockets upright in it. Some buildings are large because they need to be, rather than telling us anything about what our culture values. (And, as you said, the others are because it’s what those with deep pockets want. You could ask deeper questions, but it’s not as simple as malls versus temples.)
Besides, people can and do make smaller buildings that are more expensive than larger ones, in terms of money/labor/time/maintenance/whatever. (I know that’s really obvious, but often with idiots like Brand these sorts of things need to be said. That way he’ll blither about something else for a while.)
Of course, people can also spend more money/time/labor in or around them (apart from what the thing itself might be worth), think they’re doing more interesting/significant/meaningful/valuable things there, or whatever the case may be.
And as was already noted, that’s just buildings. No matter what society you’re in, humans do a lot more than construction projects.
Interestingly, Buddhists aren’t too impressed by Brand either. The writer’s core objection is that people making a real difference, especially women, minorities and people of color, are erased in all the focus on this rich, famous, white hairball, who is at best saying a few positive things. It’s a decent writeup.
I like Russell Brand. He may have had a few drug induced shaky periods and kooky ideas but he gets involved in protests at ground level and is interested in social justice.
Right wing war-monger Nick Cohen on the other hand…. ? not so much.
I prefer Ethan Brand.
He’s not a revolutionary, he’s just a very naughty boy.
I am in complete agreement on one thing. A David Icke run media network would be “amazing!” by most definitions of the term.
I believe that David Icke as The People’s Voice will have as much of an affect as Rik Mayall as The People’s Poet.
Brand merely shows that, once again, when some people “cure” themselves
of one kind of idiocy they merely adopt a different kind of idiocy. I doubt that
Brand has been ever exposed to any critical reasoning in his sequestered life.
That depends on what they’re smoking.
And in Brand’s case, it sounds like it’s something fairly exotic.
@microraptor, 31
Fair point… I have absolutely no experience with drugs (unless you want to get picky, in which case I have taken several painkillers and the odd glass of cider or shot of vodka or rum in the course of my life) so, yeah, my inability to conceive of a way to take Icke seriously isn’t really much of a statement except to my ignorance of mind-altering substances.
Saw Russell Brand touting his book on the Larry O’Donnell show on MSNBC a few weeks back. Very agreeable and charming narcissist. The world is completely corrupt and materialistic, so don’t bother to vote (Larry took gentle exception to that) or organize politically. But if by some miracle the people rise up and do a revolution, remember Russell knew it all along!
#12; correction. He’s not wearing the suit, he is the suit.
I suspect that people would learn quite a bit from a media channel run by David Icke. You can learn things from his YouTube, books, and media outreach, after all.
He IS amazing. You go in and wander around the labyrinthine twists and turns of Icktheology, and before you know it, Alex Jones is shouting at you about NASA, magicians run the world with gold, and the History Channel is Honest.
Why, if people wound up listening to con men and conspiracy theorists, they’d ignore the issues of the world, and vote for those people who solved the fake problems the best, and then where would we be? Buying stuff from our oppressors and hating the oppressed, no doubt.
Good thing he’s wrong!
My hidden inner conspiracy theorist always believes that your Ickes, Brands, and Joneses of the world are all in on the game, giving us laser pointers to chase instead of swatting the hands of the .02%
It’s a curious thing about professional comics: when they aren’t being paid to be funny they often have no sense of humour at all, as the fact that Brand doesn’t laugh at Icke’s opinions shows.
“I am rich, white, straight, and have many cultural privileges. This makes me feel uncool. But behold! I have many vaguely lefty, counter-cultural, spiritualish beliefs. How cool is that? And yet! If I hold to these beliefs, I should be working to undermine my own privileges. Conundrum! What to do? Solution! Fashionable nihilism! Even cooler than spiritualishness and discourages efforts that would lead to any reduction in my privileges. Huzzah!”
I don’t like Brand for multiple reasons, but when he started speaking out I could see the point that he had, and it’s a valid one – party democracy no longer representative and there is a lot of apathy around. I’ll give him that.
His answers are complete bollocks, though. Not voting helps no-one. His ideas on revolution are unhelpful to the same people who are unrepresented by our democratic system (he’s wealthy, and that irons out a lot of the problems).
I didn’t know about his thing for Icke. Jesus. That’s pole-vaulting the shark…
What makes Brand so difficult to debate is that when he is right is is very right (e.g. how to deal with drug addiction in a society) but when he is wrong…Oh boy! A very verbose train wreck hopped on self-righteousness that doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.
Still a good comedian. More for for comedy panel shows than political journalism.
cohen stuff fair enuf. sometimes though , when PZ gets cranky and irritated by irrationaility his writing is simply outstanding
devastatingly insightful.
I want to cut and paste some of his sentences directly into my brain
yeah, that.
jeroenmetselaar
Uhhh…no. ‘Let’s all meditate’ is not a viable society-wide solution to drug abuse.
I am deeply disappointed with this post, P.Z., because it conflates religion (and/or religious practice) with spirituality.
Genuine spirituality has nothing to do with either religion or religious practice or ritual. That religious memes have hijacked spirituality in order to legitimize themselves does not denigrate spirituality, nor does it lessen the importance of spirituality. But so closely have the two become intertwined in western civilization, that the conflation of the two is almost universal in the west.
Let us begin by understanding what TRUE spirituality really is and what it is not. It’s NOT hocus-pocus metaphysics in any way, nor is it religious practice or ritual related thereto.
Spirituality consists of several important components, which all hang together into a unified whole which I choose to call spirituality, and none of which have anything to do with ritual or religious practice. Some of the more important elements are: 1) a deep and abiding reverence for and appreciation of and respect for, even love for the beauty and magnificence of the universe in which we find ourselves. 2) A love for ourselves (not in a vain sense, but in a respectful, humble sense) and an appreciation for and love of others and a recognition of and respect for our dependence on them. 3) A deep humility and respect for our own limitations and the need to understand them. 4) A recognition that arrogance, pride and ego are the greatest enemy – and humility and the love it makes possible are the highest virtues. 5) A humble recognition and acceptance that no one has no moral priority over anyone else; everyone has the same right to occupy their space on earth as much as you do. 6) Acceptance that no matter how much you know about a given subject, there is always someone else among humanity’s seven billion who knows more about it than you do.
These are among the elements of genuine spirituality. As you can see, they have nothing to do with religion, though some religions may teach some of these elements of spirituality, and some more and better than others. You will see that it has NOTHING to do with metaphysical hocus-pocus.
And when I say that genuine spirituality is the most critically short commodity on earth, I hope you will understand that that’s what I mean. I am as relentlessly fearless a critic of religion as anyone else, but I am, at the same time, spirituality’s greatest fan.
The only insight I offer here is that there is not a whit of relationship between religion and true, genuine spirituality, and that it is a serious mistake to conflate them.
Scott Bidstrup
What a load of total bollocks.
Dalillama
tsk
You aren’t humble enough.
PARKLIFE
Considering that spirituality is null word, without precise meaning, your statement is nothing but spirituality. You know what it means, but to me, it means you have no idea of how to express and define your idea. BS all the way down.
Who cares about your inane and overlywide definition. It isn’t precise. Is what you want it to be, not something that everybody can agree on.
The state of Oregon just legalized something that ought to help with Scott’s spirituality.
Scott Bidstrup,
So…why would you call your vague, untidy excuse for a philosophy “spiritualism” when you do not posit the existence of any sort of “spirit”? Or are you using “spirit” in the sense of a high school pep rally?
Scott, #43
Are you sure that’s what people who talk about spirituality mean? Those seem too general to warrant being labeled by a term. Don’t things like secular humanism encompass all those. So secular humanism is the same thing as genuine spirituality?
I’m pretty much on board with those. Are you saying I’m spiritual or is there an important component you’ve purposely skipped in that list?
If you have a clear idea of what genuine spirituality is, you should be able to define it clearly, not by what it’s important elements are, but what it is, because those exact important elements are found in other forms of thinking.
Scott Bidstrup:
For fuck’s sake, you could have spared us all the pontificating if you had just fucking wikipediaed “spirituality” before bloviating about something you are obviously ignorant about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirituality
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
In general, spirituality is a word that is so overly generalized that it means nothing. But the same is true of religion. But, insofar as religion and spirituality actually have coherent definitions, both overlap. Significantly. There are non-spiritual religions, there are some spiritual people who aren’t religious, but most of the time, religions are spiritual and spirituality is religious.
Honestly, spirituality is itself a religious meme. In addition, allegedly non-religious spirituality often hijacks religious memes. Whether it is yoga and meditation, or even beliefs regarding spirits and souls, those are religious ideas taken from religion that people like you claim have nothing to do with religion at all once you have stolen it away.
What? Spirituality and religion are more often intertwined IN THE WEST? That strikes me as ass backwards. The cultures that are best at blurring the lines between religion and spirituality are not Western. Look at Japan and China, where people are often multiple “religions” at once. Or go back to the yoga example. Honestly, I think it is the opposite: the pedantic distinction between religion and spirituality is largely a Western invention, mostly to help describe the difference between a “spiritual but not religious” New Ager and a “religious but not spiritual” dogmatic fundagelical. Because at some point “spiritual” became a wishy-washy synonym for “good”.
You do know that all you are doing is pulling a No True Scotsman, right? That’s all that is happening here? You realize that? Hocus pocus and/or metaphysics is a form of spirituality. As are religious practices. As are rituals. You don’t get to define other people out of existence. You don’t get to dictate the definition of spirituality to your own special version that includes only what YOU want it to.
As I said before, “wishy washy synonym for ‘good'”. Love, humility, wonder, self-esteem, self-understanding, morality, and egalitarianism are all spirituality. You might as well call it niceosity or greatitude. At least that would be more accurate, because at least those have nothing to do with spirits .
@43: Oh good grief. “Spirituality” was not hijacked by religion, historically it was *invented* by religion. The fact that some moderns have managed to abstract out a few principles (of variable quality) and separate them from religion per se, or even from gods, doesn’t change that.
As for the list: I don’t feel like doing any deep analysis, but I suppose I’m on board with the gist of it. I just don’t see any good reason to call it by a word that requires so much explanation to distinguish it from its historical entanglements, and all the alternate content other people are packing into it. As far as I can see, all you’ve done is take the word “spirituality” because you like the sound of it, and it’s supposed to be a Good Thing, and arbitrarily defined it as all the things you like. If you want to call that *your* spirituality, go ahead — but claiming that’s the One True Definition is silly.
Jesus and Mo on this subject.
Seems Moses has a different definition of spirituality to Scott. I wonder which of them is right?
“Parklife……”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/parklife-emerges-as-the-internets-favourite-way-to-mock-russell-brand-9838182.html