Another cursory book review:
The scholar in me loves to follow the chain of ideas backwards from books I enjoy, reading the books that inspired and informed those authors in turn, finding new threads and ideas to explore.
I picked up the recently published Conspirituality by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker without knowing that the authors have a podcast on the intersection of New Age spirituality, conspiracy theory, and health. Rather, I came to the book via a citation in Christy Harrison's The Wellness Trap. And as that book drew heavily on the work of my friend Mike Caulfield — who, incidentally, has lately been penning some very interesting thoughts about misinformation and "reasonableness" — I figured it was probably worth my time to think a bit more about how wellness technologies fit into all this.
Conspirituality is a bit of an awkwardly written book — perhaps that's simply what happens when three people try to write a book together. The authors' different first-hand experiences pop up here and there as one or other (or the other) admits their own participation in various cult-y, conspiracy-laden groups. Their research draws a lot, I reckon, on their podcast, and it feels as though they’ve attempted to weave together lots of episodes and lots of threads. In places, it works well. In others, the arguments feel as unwieldy and tenuous.
The authors draw, in part, on the work of Michael Barkun to explain how the conspiracy mindset works: "Nothing happens by accident. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is connected….'Because the conspiracists' world has no room for accident, pattern is believed to be everywhere, albeit hidden from plain view.' The calling of the conspiracy theorist, therefore, is to eternally connect the dots." This is useful. It helps make sense of the “do your research!” command one hears from those deep deep deep in COVID denial, for instance.
The authors spend part of the book listing out the people they see as the main perpetrators of "conspirituality" and its associated misinformation. I guess it's worth knowing the cast of characters (I guess?) — and the book is deeply researched into who these folks are, how they monetize their ideas and manipulate their followers. It's worth noting that, while the Internet has certainly given these folks a stage and a market, they are connected to older snake oil salespeople and older fascist movements.
The book traces what seems to be, in so many cases, the yoga-to-COVID-denier pipeline — and yes, yoga seems to be the doorway to soooo much of the health disinformation we’re facing. It's worth, as such, in thinking about why that is — what is it about yoga in particular that makes people susceptible to this thinking. The wellness industry, including its cousin the fitness industry, they argue, functions as a form of "'soft eugenics." And yoga, in particular draws on "a kind of (now-depoliticized) body fascism that was over a century old, … laundered through aspirational consumerism so that its sexist, racist, and violent implications were almost invisible." And from here, I've now got books to read on the invention of two activities I enjoy: bodybuilding and yoga. Eugen Sandow, "the father of modern bodybuilding" and the "world's perfect man," is a stage name quite literally chosen to reference "eugenics." And Sandow apparently inspired Bhavanrao Pant Pratinidhi, the rajah of the state of Aundh in the early 20th century, and (re)inventor of yoga's sun salutation.
What gets obscured in this churning transcultural whirlpool is that while European and Indian physical culturists approached their passions from opposite sides of the colonial wound, they both tried to dress it with the salve of fascism. Their shared beliefs—which also carried and mingled religious histories from both West and East—echo forward into our own lives: that through discipline, purification, restoring virility, and weeding out all sickness, disability, and sexual deviance, a transcendent identity would emerge.
I have a lot more reading and thinking to do on all this. And I guess that's always one of the best things to say about a book when you’re done with it: it’s prompted you to keep reading.
