Category: The Bazaar

Is NPR Woke?

In William Deresiewicz’s article in the online service UnHerd March 8, 2022 “Escaping American tribalism” he says that he started to listen to contrarian podcasts including Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable in 2021, when he thought that American National Public Radio (“NPR”) has become partisan, on the “woke” side of the cultural divide:

“Moral clarity” became the new journalistic standard, as if the phrase meant anything other than tailoring the evidence to fit one’s preexisting beliefs. I was lamenting the loss, not of “journalistic objectivity,” a foolish term and impossible goal, but of simple journalistic good faith: a willingness to gather and present the facts that bear upon an issue, honestly and clearly, regardless of their implications.

For months, I felt trapped, alone with my incredulity. Was I the only person seeing this? Every time I turned on NPR, my exasperation grew — basically, I was hate-listening after a certain point — but what was the alternative? I literally couldn’t think of any. Then, by sheer dumb luck, I was invited on a podcast to discuss a book I had recently published. It was The Unspeakable, with Meghan Daum, and while I had never thought of myself as a podcast person, I so enjoyed myself, was so impressed with her intelligence and humour, that I became a listener.

UnHerd, March 8, 2022, Escaping American Tribalism

The implies that the audience, particularly in America, has become polarized, by identity politics, into “tribes”. Writers criticized, in the Atlantic:

Some academic writers – e.g. Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bevel in The Power of Us and in an extract in the Atlantic defend the social benefits of tribalism.

William Deresiewicz had been an adjunct professor teaching at Yale but after he was not granted tenure, he ceased to teach in 2008. He wrote articles and books as a public intellectual. He wrote Excellent Sheep in 2014, criticizing (1) the admission policies and curricula and (2) the high cost of attending of American elite universities. His book had a mixed reception. Some of the reviews – for instance by Douglas Greenberg and by Kevin Dettmer in the Los Angeles Review of Books – were harsh. The reviews insinuated – a common enough capitalist/competitive polemic strategy – he had not been good enough to get tenure, or had failings.

Meghan Daum’s book of essays, Unspeakable and William Dersiewicz’s books are good, but were not best sellers. Neither writer is a white supremacist, a Q-Anon supporter or an anti-vaxxer. They are worth reading and listening too.

In 2020, Deresiewicz published The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech on how artists sustain themselves in the Information Age. He appears to have turned to writing for contrarian platforms. In his UnHerd article, he suggests the publishing world became as censorious as the academic world. The publishing world rewards less of the few writers who attract and sustain large audiences. It extracts “content” from less popular writers and maintains – perhaps pretends – that writers are fairly compensated for content. The internet platforms prefer to publish unpaid content. Publishers say that writers are compensated by learning the business and creating a reputation that may, with luck. eventually earn advances and royalties.

Deresiewicz risks being labelled a right wing conspiracy theorist by woke academics and woke adjacent publishers – igf he is not woke, he must be against justice, or a deplorable. Attacking the writers, editors and publishers of competing media would be a way the established media would deal with dissenting and competing voices.

The effects of sectarianism along the dividing lines of ideology, religion and policy, affect writers and publishers:

UnHerd, after time and experimention, has found subject matter and material beyond Brexit, and British politics. As of March 2022 writes at UnHerd have been taking shots at Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbin, the anti-Semitism of the new Left, the new Labour leadership, woke activists, Green activists, Trans activists, the corporate leadership of the Church of England, racist immigation policies in the EU, Vladimir Putin and Britain’s embrace of Russian oligarchs.

The late George Carlin said: “It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for you.”

Parapsychology

Rupert Sheldrake still believes in and writes about parapsychology. Mr. Sheldrake had an experience in the late 1970s and became convinced that he had recognized something important about the relationship between ideas and reality. At points, Sheldrake takes the posture of a pragmatist like William James. But where James was soft on conversion experiences and mysticism, Sheldrake maintains that he is right because no one has proved (and no one can ever can logically prove) him to be wrong. In promoting his 2012 book The Science Delusion he complained that other scientists were making him a pariah and a heretic. See: Tim Adams “Rupert Sheldrake: the ‘heretic’ at odds with scientific dogma” in the Guardian February 5, 2012.

The evidence for parapsychology is anecdotes by people who postulate and believe in unknown natural or supernatural forces and and events. These people have theories about why supernatural events happen. In 2009 Adam Rutherford dismissed Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life:

In it, Sheldrake describes “morphic resonance“, which is the notion that there is a supernatural memory that is created, reinforced and inherited by repeated action. This, he claims, explains many phenomena including how newly synthesised chemicals become easier to make elsewhere in the world, how puzzles become easier once they have been done once, and paranormal powers, such as psychokinesis and telepathy. Alas, there is no evidence for morphic resonance. And as the phenomena listed are not real, no matter how real they may seem to people, there is no requirement for it.

Sheldrake is a sort of “God of the gaps” scientist. He sees gaps in knowledge, and inserts supernature as an explanation. There are three basic flaws with use of this tool. First is that it’s just not scientific. To invoke an unfalsifiable concept to fill a knowledge gap is not parsimonious. It’s much better and more scientific to simply say “We don’t know” and move on.

Second, history has shown us that it would be even better to say “we don’t know yet”, as invariably those gaps are filled in time with genuine testable explanations.

Finally, more often than not, the gaps invoked actually have perfectly good, scientific explanations, which are ignored because the protagonist is not disinterested. Thus, proponents of intelligent design, that pseudoscientific form of creationism, invoke a designer where evolution will happily suffice, because they wish to promote God. It’s impossible to establish exactly what Rupert Sheldrake is promoting, but one guess is that it’s Rupert Sheldrake.

Jung gave us a pleasant maxim which sceptics should always bear in mind: “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud”. Indeed, speculation is a key part of formulating an hypothesis, which then can be tested to destruction. Much of Sheldrake’s work can be explained with just a bit more rigour than he employs.

Adam Rutherford, “A Book for Ignoring”, The Guardian, Feb. 6, 2009

In late 2021 Mr. Sheldrake claimed in an article “Rationalists are wrong about telepathy” published by the online site unHerd on November 22, 2021, that scientists, including Stephen Pinker, label Sheldrake’s beliefs as pseudoscience on the basis of scientism which he considers to be an illogical or irrational belief. Most of unHerd’s contributors refer to science with more concern over verifiable evidence, but unHerd has an institutional commitment to freedom of speech, particularly in matters of “faith and meaning”?

Liberal principles accepted in “Western” countries have disestablished official religions and removed government support for particular religions, and allow freedom of worship and religious practice by allowing citizens to engage in worship and religious practices without government coercion or interference. Freedom of religion allows persons to refrain from following any religious practice and to be agnostic or atheist. Freedom of religion is the formal legal framework for religious tolerance or the institutional principle of religious pluralism.

Tolerance does not satify all believers and beliefs. Some suspect tolerance as condescenging or patronizing. They want equal economic opportunities and actual respect or recognition for their opinions. Modern thinking in political philosophy attempts to rationalize and reconcile tolerance and respect for diverse opinions and needs.

Cultish

I put a hold on Amanda Montell’s 2021 book Cultish when the local library acquired it, and read it when an ebook copy was available.

AuthorAmanda MontellWikipedia entryPersonal siteSounds Like a Cult Podcast
BookCultishHarperCollins
(Publisher) Book Page		Amazon listing

The focus in on modern cults as understood in the modern vernacular:

In modern English, a cult is a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or by its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. This sense of the term is controversial, having divergent definitions both in popular culture and academia, and has also been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study. The word “cult” is usually considered pejorative.

An older sense of the word cult involves a set of religious devotional practices that are conventional within their culture, are related to a particular figure, and are often associated with a particular place.

….

Sociological classifications of religious movements may identify a cult as a social group with socially deviant or novel beliefs and practices, although this is often unclear. Other researchers present a less-organized picture of cults, saying that they arise spontaneously around novel beliefs and practices. Groups labelled as “cults” range in size from local groups with a few followers to international organizations with millions of adherents.

Wikipedia entry “Cults” October 2021

This short book covers a lot of material. It discusses several 20th century cults that involved odd beliefs, exploitation and harm to members: the Peoples Temple (Jonestown), Heaven’s Gate, David Koresh (the Waco compound of Branch Davidian cult), Scientology, and the Childen of God commune(s) (later named the Family International organization). There are sections on Synanon and the bullying and sexual abuse in the NXIVM movement. It mentions the problems of Shambalha International based on the author’s conversations with a person involved in the movement in Vermont. It does not mention the coverage of the story by the Canadian magazine The Walrus, Canadian CBC coverage, or internet reports by concerned Buddhists. There is discussion of glossolalia in Pentecostal, Chrisian fundamentalist, and Christian evangelical religions.

It is a book by a well educated person on the young and affluent side of the age gap in the digital divide written for persons similarly situated. It explains well publicized recent events to persons who may be unaware of them. It uses terms like stan (a rhyming and disrespectful contraction of stalker and fan) as if this word had been published in a dictionary.

The book notes correctly that new teachings and groups within religious movements are viewed mildly by scholars of new religious movements, while cults can be seen as sinister in the popular imagination and in stories, or a desireably rare sources of resources or personal approval. Itrefers to a number of sources on new religious movements:

  • Sociologist – Eileen Barker in the Guardian May 29, 2009;
  • Culture Journalist – Jane Borden in Vanity Fair September 3, 2020;
  • Writer – Elizabeth Woollett in the Guardian November 18, 2018; and
  • Religion writer – Tara Elizabeth Burton in Vox April 19, 2018 and What is a Cult in the Aeon magazine. The book attibutes a statement in quotation marks to the academic and writer Megan Goodwin in a passage at ebook page 24. The (end)note attributes the words to Burton.

It isn’t a deep discussion – the book is not a dissertation or treatise. There is a discussion, based on the ideas of the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman of impulsive and deliberately rational decision making (Thinking Fast and Slow). In the podcast, the author and the co-host conclude discussion of individual cultish groups with an assessment of “Watch your Back” or “Get the F&%* Out” which is prone to the optimism bias. Tthe podcasters identify LuLaRoe as a harmful cult and the media personality and self help speaker Tony Robbins as a cult leader. However, the podcasts tend call out cults after there has been public criticism of the cult or person. They do not lead the story.

The book rejects the idea that cults appeal to only to persons with low cognitive ability or social skills. It points out that cults recruit persons with capabilities, appeal to normal aspirations and overcome the caution and skepticism or many persons with above average cognitive ability.

One line of discussion is the cult-like or cultish features of the organization and operation of:

MLMs recruit individuals to make direct sales on commission, and to recruit and administer a sales force. This system has drawbacks:

  • Direct selling is not a reliable way for an individual to earn income;
  • The responsibilities, costs and risk of the downline (sales force) fall on the earlier or “higher level” recruits;
  • Depending on the MLM, a recruit may face pressure to purchase unnecessary inventory;
  • Depending on the MLM, a recruit may be dumped or displaced if the recruit and the downline failed to produce sales;
  • The income of a new recruit is unlikely to progress and is often low or nil.

The cultish features of MLMs and the fitness businesses are said to be the uses of language and social techniques to persuade people to make irrational decisions about money, time, reputation, relationships and health. Some MLMs exploit existing social networks including churches, clubs and political organizations. The book discusses, tangentially, the way in which many sellers of goods and services use cultish methods to maintain their brands and influence workers and customers. Amanda Montel develops and explains in the episodes on SoulCycle, MLMs, LuLaRue and others in the Sounds Like a Cult podcast (link above). The podcast episode on LuLaRoe may have been inspired by the documentary series LuLaRich on Amazon Prime.

The arguments about MLMs are collectively persuasive. This isn’t the first book to consider MLMs to be exploitative. Robert L. Fitzpatrick has published the PyramidSchemeAlert web page and several books including Ponzinomics.

Other interesting lines of discussion in Cultish:

  1. the penetration of business language into social media and other internet channels,
  2. the role of social media in allowing grifters to become influencers,
  3. monied interests generating profits through cultish influencer marketing. The book discusses the promotion of personal advice and wellness services in the final chapter called Follow for Follow which addresses influencers exercising influence, and
  4. social media users to being influenced to their detriment.

Alt-right Thinkers

Benjamin Teitelbaum is an ethnographer, teaching at the Univerity of Colorado. He studies Scandinavian far right groups. Teitelbaum observed the role of the entrepreneurial activist Daniel Friburg, the principal of the publishing firm Arktos Media, in European politics. Arktos publishes the writings of traditionalist figures including René Guénon and Julius Evola. Teitelbaum wrote an opinion piece for Wall Street Journal about Friburg’s visit to America and the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville Virginia in 2017, suggesting the American organizers had staged a riot. A few modern public intellectuals who describe themselves as traditionalists, appear to have influence with some political figures: the Russian Aleksandr Dugin and the Brazilian Olavo de Carvalho. Steve Bannon, the alt-right American figure appointed as White House Chief Strategist by US President Trump, shares some traditionalist ideas. Teitelbaum got some interviews with Bannon, This was the basis of his 2020 book War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (The subtitle in America, was “Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers”). Teitelbaum relies on inferences and imagined episodes from the lives of Bannon and some of Teitelbaum’s contacts and sources. He is unable to portray the members of the circle as a a coherent entity There are people with heterodox, esoteric, right wing views with careers as teachers, speakers, consultants and entrepreneurs – an intelligentsia largely outside the universities and the academic world.

Teitelbaum’s effort to address the role of traditionalist ideology in the growth of the populist right is hampered by a lack of information and evidence beyond a few facts. The American academic Jason Jorjani co-founded the Alt-Right Corporation with Friburg and the American enterpreneurial activist Richard B. Spencer. That venture collapsed after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville when American conservatives and businesses, other than President Trump distanced themselves from the event. The same people and events also are mentioned in Anna Merlan’s Republic of Lies. The Alt-Right distanced itself. at the time, from the idea that it has been planning to undermine the American government.

Teitelbaum’s American sources mention the Swiss gnostic Frithjof Schoen, or Frithjof Schuon, another “traditionalist”, who presented himself as a Sufi and a practitioner of American First Nation (Lakota and Crow) spirituality, who lived in Bloomington, Indiana 1980-1998. The American sources also describe some of the practises and educational experiences of the American new Right, which include visits to India for spiritual teaching and other New Age practises. This part of the book would have been interesting – even more interesting after the riots in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. Schuon professed a non-religious spirituality bordering on neoshamanism. This version of Alt-Right spirituality resembles the New Age spirituality of many left leaning figures.

This illuminates the spectacle of Alt-Rightists who went to Washingtion dressed and painted like hippies to subvert the election of Trump’s rival. Pictures of Yellowstone Wolf, the QAnon Shaman were in the news after January 6, 2021.

His sources didn’t give Teitelbaum much and the publishers didn’t want a book on the radicalization of American youth.

Catching Up – Templeton and Positive Psychology

Having mentioned Templeton, the mutual fund manager turned patron of the spiritual arts, in passing in my entry Ruse on Evolution, and Seligman’s Positive Psychology movement in my entry Psychology in Recovery and Be Happy, I was interested in “John Templeton’s Universe” in the The Nation. Barbara Ehrenreich looks at the weirdness that happens when inspiration, large sums of money, corporate values, positive thinking, psychology and spirituality intersect.
Unfortunately, it appears that Seligman, who had said some interesting things in his books on positive psychology, has become another corporate inspirational performer, hyping his own line of coaching and positive thinking “products”.

Religious Shopping Tour

British writer Roland Howard went on a tour to meet people demonstrating the variety of religious experience in Britain at the end of the 20th century. Shopping for God, A Sceptics Search for Value in the Spiritual Marketplace is a travel narrative – he went, he saw, he listened, he wrote. In the telling of the story, he provides background, he discusses a few questions, he suggests he had an interesting inner monologue running during the journey. I haven’t found much information about him on the Web, but Amazon lists a couple of other books about religion.

Continue reading “Religious Shopping Tour”

Bliss Chronicles

The cover art on Don Lattin’s Following our Bliss is a Volkwagen Bus painted in the psychedelic style associated with the hippie movement, which goes with the subtitle “How the Spiritual Ideas of the Sixties Shape our Lives Today”. Lattin has been writing about religion or spirituality for the San Francisco Chronicle and an assortment of electronic media for a couple of decades, which gives him a wealth of material.

Continue reading “Bliss Chronicles”

Alien Abduction

Beam Me Up Godly Being, by Karen Olsson, in Slate, covers or reviews a book by psychologist Susan Clancy, Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens. The article contains this passage:

In a chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience called “The Reality of the Unseen,” William James attested to the existence of a “sense of reality” distinct from the other senses, in which “the person affected will feel a ‘presence’ in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual ‘sensible’ ways.” As evidence, James produces several firsthand accounts from people who were visited by “presences” late at night. These have a familiar ring: They sound just like stories from alien abductees, minus the aliens. Objects of belief, James says, may be “quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.”
… When it comes to the ambitious project of explaining the why and wherefore of “weird beliefs,” Clancy’s book doesn’t tell us too much more than James did: People believe in this stuff because it seems real to them, more real than any reasoning about sleep paralysis or the unreliability of memories produced during hypnosis.
… People’s imagined contacts with aliens, she speculates, arise from “ordinary emotional needs and desires. … We want to believe there’s something bigger and better than us out there. And we want to believe that whatever it is cares about us, or at least is paying attention to us. … Being abducted by aliens is a culturally shaped manifestation of a universal human need.”

Olssen disagrees with Clancy’s ideas about religious impulses. She prefers to think that people who believe they have been abducted by aliens are influenced by pop culture acting on their subconscious minds. That of course raises its own question – is there a subconscious mind, or is the subconscious an arbitary label for flawed perceptions and memories and an excuse for impulsive behaviour?
I think Clancy may be right. Stories of alien abduction are one of the modern variants of stories of miraculous, magical and mystical experiences. People experience something – it may be a random neurochemical event in their brain. They interpret it in a narrative way within the limits of their language and belief systems. They stick to their story in the face of doubts and scepticism. They find, eventually, someone who supports and believes them and shares their experience. They feel special. The event takes on its own meaning. And it becomes a miracle, a vision, a channelled message, an alien abduction.
The references to William James are interesting. He is one of the founders of modern psychology and a reasonably rigorous scientist, but he was always very tolerant of spiritualism – perhaps because he could never directly challenge his father who was a prominent proponent. His early version of philosophical pragmatism and his philosophy of religion seem to have been set up to cut spiritualists some slack.
Another way of looking at it is that James was inclined to speculative thought – but people didn’t like to argue with such a well connected and presentable member of New England Society.

Psychic

On Tuesday (Nov. 1) I flew back to Winnipeg from Victoria, through Edmonton and Saskatoon. I had a window seat. The middle seat was vacant. A passenger who got on in Edmonton took the aisle seat.
Last week a couple of Mormon missionaries wanted to talk to me on the street. What is it about me that suggests I am waiting to be proselytized?

Continue reading “Psychic”

Pet Peeve

From Spiked, a book review Self Help: More than just a Sham, reviewing SHAM: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless, by Nicholas Brealey. One of my pet peeves. The reviewer r mentions several fakirs including “Dr.” John Gray, who wrote Men are from Mars – a charlatan right down to his phony doctorate. Like Chopra, Gray is a graduate of the Maharishi’s scamming system. The Skeptic’s Dictionary has a longer entry on Chopra.