Review of Waking Up #116.5: THE RUSSELL BRAND INTERVIEW

Program notes:

“This episode of the Waking Up podcast features an interview that Sam did with Russell Brand on the Under the Skin podcast. They speak about religion, terrorism, politics, meditation, psychedelics, and other topics.”

This conversation exhibits an interesting collision between Sam Harris and several typical liberal positions. Interesting, but hardly definitive, because though Russell Brand is eloquent, he is easily diverted. 

If you come at WUWSH as I do, from a liberal place, you may recognize many of Brand's objections to Harris' pronouncements and even some of his thought experiments. But Brand is incapable of digging in deep and really opposing Sam's positions. He’s more interested in a quick, entertaining response, which is often a non sequitor--whence Brand's brilliantly coined “giddy blur” which so dismays poor Sam.

Sam sidesteps Brand's questions of power and oppression with his thin argument that since Palestinian Christians don’t suicide-bomb, the problem is all about Islam. In my mind, this is as specious as saying, for example, that the racist underpinnings of the American ghetto are not the reason a higher incidence of black men in America are convicted felons, because, well, just look at all the black women who aren't felons.

Sam is too quick to disregard Brand's objections because he won't stick to them for long. I suspect that since this is Brand's show, the problem is exacerbated by a desire to keep things light and amusing. But I wish he'd been able to drive home better his key points, such as how the entire Muslim world feels under attack by an exploitative Western military-industrial complex, or that state run violence is morally just a scaled-up version of jihadism. But Brand never stays on point long enough to really land a punch. And that leaves Sam free to wallow in his monomaniacal narrative that Islam=bad. 

You can see the shadows behind Sam's veil here: to say that one religion is the "epicenter of bad ideas" makes you tautologically a bigot. Which then begs the question of whether being a bigot is really a bad thing. I'm not sure it is. Certainly a religion like the Aztec's, which required human sacrifice, would be pretty hard for even the Southern Poverty Law Center to get behind. And agreeing on that point makes us all, by definition, bigots.  So I leave you with this question : is it necessarily bad to be a bigot?