Decoding The Gurus patreon

Zoom Link for Lecture Today

🕑 Added 2024-02-22 09:23:56 +0000 UTC

Comments

Peter Moon

I would also love a link to the recording :)

Christopher Kavanagh

Problem with this is when you see the post.

Paul Bowman

In fairness, I don't know if he has really made a concerted effort to promote himself into the guru space. He may just be another case of someone on Twitter having an over-inflated sense of their ability to make ill-informed judgement calls (lab leak, etc, iirc) outside of their specialist field. He may be just another Dawkins-level bloviator. Chris would probably have a better grasp as he follows the covid-contrarian and lableak conspiracy area more closely

Artemis Green

How funny that you mentioned Nate Silver, Paul - I was going to use him as a 'pundit' example but then I realised I hadn't thought about him for years and didn't know what he was up to! And it seems the answer is 'no good'. That would be an interesting case study indeed, perhaps naively, I thought there wouldn't be as much of a pundit -> guru pipeline as there would be a public intellectual -> guru pipeline.

Paul Bowman

An interesting case study would be Nate Silver - originated as a psephological pundit and then has diversified into galaxy-brained, conspiracy-curious hot-takes on Twitter. I don't know if he's gone as far as to acquire a long-form podcast and followers (for his social views, as opposed to opinion poll analyses), so he may be more a wannabe than getting anywhere near secular guru status

Artemis Green

Yes - I think the colloquial, secular use of the terms are something like: - A pundit: a public figure who is of interest because of their predictions about what will happen about fairly specific real-world events (election outcomes, polls etc). - A guru: a public figure who is admired by a cohort of people because those people perceive the guru as having special wisdom or insight regarding how the world works and/or how one should live one's life. I would say that pundits can have viewers, readers, fans of their work etc - I suppose you could call these followers, in the twitter sense. But to be a guru, one needs 'actual' followers - people who apply the guru's perspective in their own lives somehow, or are inspired by the guru's persona. I would say there is a third category of the public intellectual - a person whose perspectives on a range of social matters are considered to be of popular interest. This can overlap with the guru role or the pundit role - I would describe Christopher Hitchens as both a public intellectual and a guru, and the Australian political commentator Malcolm Mackerras as a pundit and a public intellectual. I like your point about gurus leveraging anti-insitutitional, anti-expert sentiment to cement themselves as experts. And then some of them, like Jordan Peterson, have gone on to found alternative institutions... Chris if you're reading this, I annoyingly got interrupted during the part of the lecture where I think you outlined *why* you think secular gurus and techno shamans play a similar social role to the people who might have been given that title in other societies... I'm not convinced but would like to hear more. But wouldn't it be more accurate to argue that gurus play a similar role to spiritual teachers in various traditional societies? I may just not know how the term is used academically because it's not my field etc, but I associate 'guru' pretty specifically with Vedic culture, Indian religions etc.

DrWallabong

Thanks, didn't see that.

Roland Weber

See the response to the very first comment... > No idea!

DrWallabong

Will a recording be available for those of us who missed it?

Paul Bowman

Good lecture. To recycle what I said in the zoom chat, in response to a Q on whether the term pundit was equally valid as guru (given similar sanskrit origins): I think in contemporary use, pundit is more associated with "expert". Specifically someone who has secular expertise based on, not knowledge of religious scriptures (vedas), but secular sources, such as past football scores, or pseuphology (voting patterns), opinion polling, etc. In Weberian terms, pundits qua experts, are representing bureaucratic authority and gurus rely on charismatic power. Given the anti-expert bias of populist discourse, it's an interesting trick of secular gurus is that they leverage the anti-expert prejudice ("the're all corrupt, the institutions/broadcasters are all captured...") while presenting to have superior (or transcendent?) reserves of knowledge themselves. It's a neat trick to present yourself as the anti-expert expert

mobitobi

Lecture will start when this comment is 10 minutes old 🚨

mobitobi

Best time format is: in n hours from this post. I now it as reddit time. Super easy for the poster and saves lots of innocent succulents by preventing a bajillion time zone conversion google searches 🔥🌏