Caring about Truth When Talking about Russell Brand

Or about anything.

Photo by Valentin Fernandez on Unsplash

Today, the platform "X” (formerly Twitter) is awash with talk of Russell Brand ahead of the mystery Channel 4 Dispatches investigation which Mr Brand has claimed on his YouTube channel will contain serious criminal allegations against him. (Full transcript here). It seems very likely that these allegations are of sexual offences as Mr Brand asserted that his sexual relationships have always been consensual. He said: “I don't mind them using my books and my standout to talk about my promiscuous consensual conduct in the past. What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations.”

Nobody knows what evidence or testimony will be presented against Mr. Brand or even if the Dispatches investigation is to be about him. Nevertheless, there are very few people involved in the discussion who are advocating reserving judgement and awaiting that evidence before having any kind of opinion. The vast, vast majority of the comments are from people who are already certain that Brand is a sexual predator and people who are certain that he is the victim of a co-ordinated attack due to his “anti-establishment” views. (Brand himself asserted the latter). These assessments are based almost entirely on the speaker’s assessment of Brand’s character as a good or bad person, and whether or not they are on the “same side” as him politically and culturally.

Neither of these bases for evaluating guilt or innocence are at all helpful and both reveal the particular prevalence of unrestrained confirmation bias and tribal polarisation that are plaguing public discourse at the moment. As humans, it is very difficult for us to avoid falling prey to both of these and this has always been the case. What is relatively new, in my observation, is an increasing complacence about openly indulging in them and people feeling no responsibility at all to even present an appearance of trying to be fair and balanced and weigh evidence carefully. This is most glaringly apparent on social media but is also to be seen in wider society and particularly, media outlets.

I have spoken before about my concern that it is becoming increasingly socially acceptable for people to make no effort whatsoever to mitigate their individual or political bias in the service of truth. It even seems to appear to many that it is virtuous to pledge one’s allegiance to a certain truth claim as a matter of principle and/or tribal allegiance regardless of what evidence there is for that specific claim. In the moments after the first report of police shooting a black man, before any information about the circumstances are available, there will be people asserting unequivocally that it was an incident of racist police brutality against a harmless man and others that it was clearly an incident of an officer of the law protecting the public against a violent criminal. Often video footage will then emerge showing one or other of these narratives to be true, but the truth of that specific incident involving those specific individuals was not the point to the narrative maker. The point was to signal allegiance to a position on the prevalence of institutional racism, the police and the Black Lives Matter movement. The collateral damage of these warring narratives are the dead man and the shooting officer to whom justice cannot be served by being reduced to tokens in a culture war, but only by the truth of their individual characters and actions.

In the case of the anticipated accusations against Mr. Brand, the blatantly biased narratives go like this. “Russell Brand is a bad person who uses his platform to spread dangerous misinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories so the allegations of rape must be true” and “Russell Brand is a brave person who challenges establishment narratives and expresses the kinds of views that get people cancelled so the allegations of rape must be false.” Again the victim of this war of narratives is likely to be the truth and consequently a denial of justice for either the women if they have been sexually assaulted or Mr Brand if he has been falsely accused of sexual assault. Nor will making such assertions help any political cause. As I have argued before, “Addressing Important Social Issues Requires Caring About What is True.”

It is absolutely essential that we are able to assess the content of Mr. Brand’s social and political commentary for factual accuracy and ethical integrity separately from that of the anticipated information about his alleged criminal sexual conduct. These two things are simply not connected no matter how strongly positive or negative you feel about his political views. The psychology of a deranged conspiracy theorist is not the same as that of a rapist so denouncing someone as the former does not mean you must believe him also to be the latter and denounce him for that too. Similarly, the psychology of a brave anti-establishment rebel does not preclude him from also being a sexual abuser. If you want to defend his political views which you can clearly see, you can do so without automatically defending his sexual conduct, which you cannot.

We cannot know what we will learn later on Dispatches (if Brand is even correct that it is about his alleged criminal conduct) but, if you intend to watch it and potentially form an opinion, take some time to think about your own tendency to confirmation bias and political tribalism and mitigate against it. My own opinion of Mr. Brand is negative and I would be inclined to be more openly critical of his views if it were not for the fact that I find his voice and persona too irritating and his reasoning too poor to spend any time listening to him. Therefore, I must be careful not to be biased towards finding negative claims about him more plausible than the evidence warrants. Brand says he feels this to be a dishonest concerted attack on him due to his political views. While some are ready to dismiss this as yet another paranoid conspiracy theory, we know that dishonest smear campaigns against controversial political figures happen all too frequently so this possibility cannot be dismissed so easily. He says he has witnesses who can refute the claim so I shall hope he does and then I can just criticise his politics, epistemology and ethics.

Those of you inclined to think positively of Mr Brand and his stance on various political and cultural issues must be careful to mitigate your own bias and not simply dismiss any disconfirming evidence of him being the all-round good person you believe him to be. Be open to the possibility that he might not be and then, if there is clear evidence that he is not, you can maintain your integrity by denouncing his abusive behaviour as a person without having to relinquish any of the political and cultural views you share with him. This is the benefit of being able to separate political views from personal behaviour and being an individual thinker. It is what enables you to be confident that you are part of the drive to fix a society that currently values self-serving narratives over truth and justice.