Character Analysis of Derren Brown in “Tricks of the Mind”
Derren Brown’s book “Tricks of the Mind” opens its part one with an irrelevant statement, “The Bible is not history.” This statement contradicts what many readers know as a book about magic and illusion. Many have known Derren Brown from his various television programs, and most famously maybe for the routine where he played Russian roulette with a gun loaded with one bullet. With his traits as a magician, psychological illusionist, mentalist, and skeptic of paranormal phenomena, Derren seems to predict future events and read minds with uncanny accuracy while manipulating individuals to do his bidding through direct hypnotism or imperceptible suggestion. Being a semi-autobiographical book, “Tricks of the Mind” claims to reveal some of the secrets behind Brown’s performances. The book gives some fascinating insights into how our minds work and how they can sometimes play tricks on us. Along with these, Brown also evokes some more serious discussion of what he terms as “uninformed strong opinions,” including religious beliefs, which he puts in the same class as the belief in alternative medicine, psychic phenomena, and spiritualism. Throughout this essay, I will focus on the character analysis of Derren Brown by illustrating the specific moments that show his disconnect between perception and reality and how he deals with these tricks of the mind.
Derren Brown’s disillusionment is well captured in part one of his book’s opening words when he illustrates how he lost his teenage Christian faith. Not only does Brown appear to be incredibly sad at the loss of his Christian faith, but it is the beginning of the process of skeptics about many different beliefs. Having developed an interest in psychic and spiritualist claims, Brown conducts investigations which convinced him that these beliefs are based on circular reasoning and selectivity in what evidence one is prepared to consider. Thus, Brown fears that his own belief in Christianity had a similar origin and was likewise false. Brown gives a fair amount of personal background to support his interest in the ultimate dismissal of Christianity. In his book, he describes himself vividly in his teens as “a bouncing, clapping awfulness” of a Christian trying to convert anyone who would listen to him. This is regret because he views it as an unpleasant result of childhood indoctrination supported by years of circular belief. Therefore, Brown views his ability to accept that the Bible is not history as a fiddle. As a spiritual challenger, Brown claims that Christians are never encouraged to study facts and challenge their own beliefs. He claims that he had thought that being skeptical and challenging his beliefs would make Christians stronger. He says, “I always imagined that challenging my own beliefs might make them stronger” (Brown, 7). To support his argument, Brown gives us a recap of how his faith was challenged and finally destroyed by the fear that his belief was centered on a circular system of belief. However, some of Brown’s arguments about Christian faith are ambiguous because he uses the extrinsic evidence. For instance, he claims that if Jesus was resurrected as the Bible says, then it is all true regardless of what one thinks about Christians and their behavior, but if he did not, then it is all nonsense, and Christianity is a delusion. While he is skeptical about the Christian faith, Brown fails to reference what gave rise to his beliefs in the historical inaccuracy and the late authorship of the Bible.
Brown is ignorant. He acknowledges that his presumptions can expose him to reject any arguments for religious faith. He claims that “To look at things objectively and step outside of our beliefs can be almost impossible. For any of us, that is, not just believers in the paranormal” (Brown, 279). Brown acknowledges that he wanted to apply the same standards to his atheistic beliefs to his earlier religious beliefs. However, a straightforward question that we are left with is how anyone ever changes their mind on anything? One wonders how we can achieve the almost impossible and decide that our beliefs are false and need to be changed. When we look at how Brown lost his faith, he had not attended church for a couple of years. Therefore, it appears that his faith grew weak, and so he no longer sought spiritual reinforcement or saw it as desirable. Many reasons can make faith to die. One of them is that lifestyle demanded by its moral values is not compatible with the lifestyle the person wants to adopt. Secondly, faith can die because it was not based on a solid foundation in the first place. When good reasons have been thought through for why certain beliefs are true, it is more likely that those beliefs hold firmly even when challenged by emotions. Important beliefs like religious one should be adopted with explicit consideration of the evidence for and against. Accepting a view based on evidence put forward by its strongest advocates can be dangerous. A reasonable belief comes about by considering the strongest arguments for and against and accessing that evidence to draw a valid conclusion.
Darren Brown’s faith is a blind one. “Tricks of the Mind” does not provide anything indicating that Brown’s faith was based on a rational examination of evidence. As shown in his book, Brown is aware of some of the arguments for the resurrection truth, but he rejects them because documents of the New Testament are unreliable as historical documents (Brown, 15). Like many other skeptics, Brown has a problem in that they start by believing that the available evidence indicates that the scriptures of the New Testament are of the late origin or that the stories in it were contrived from thin air. Whatever the reason for his atheism, Brown should consider whether he has felt the full weight of the case for the trustworthiness of the gospel or left unaddressed the full range of arguments to maintain his claim to intellectual integrity in his beliefs.
In conclusion, we can learn lots of lessons from Brown’s disillusionment apart from improving our memory. It is unfortunate that when Brown met the arguments disapproving of the Bible and his Christian faith, he conceded. We all are met with arguments that we cannot answer, but that does not mean there is no answer. What we need to do is to meet such arguments with further investigation of the counter-argument. The critical message that we learn from Derren Brown is that Christian faith is based on fact, and we have good reason to trust the historical reliability of the Bible.
Works Cited
Brown, Derren. Tricks of the Mind. Random House, 2007.