Transcript
Sam Harris
Who is Sam Harris? From his website, samharris.com, quote:
Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers and the host of the Waking Up Podcast. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
Harris’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.
Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.
Why bring this up? Well, I wrote this out months go, then shelved it, but currentaffairs.org recently published a long, well-written piece by Eli Massey and Nathan J. Robinson. They wrote a 11,000 word article that calmly and clearly takes Harris to pieces (with a further 9,000 words in endnotes to answer anticipated objections). It’s a long read, but well worth it. If nothing else, because Harris is so clearly a piece of shit, and so thoroughly representative of a lot of the problems facing the US today: a huge current in modern atheism, the failures of intellect on the right, and white people.
So, who is Sam Harris?
Harris was born to Hollywood producer Susan Harris (née Spivak) and actor Berkeley Harris in 1965. His parents divorced in 1969, and his mother remarried in 1983, to Paul Junger Witt, with whom she had been working since 1977. Witt and Harris were successful as writers and producers, mostly in television through the early 90s, with notable hits including The Golden Girls. All that is to say, Sam Harris grew up in a fairly wealthy home.
During his sophomore year at Stanford in 1986, Harris played around with 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, aka MDMA aka ecstasy, and he had what he has since described as spiritual experiences. This inspired him to try and find the same sorts of experiences without the drugs, so he dropped out of Stanford and spent time in India and Nepal studying meditation with Buddhist and Hindu teachers. You could be forgiven for thinking this sounds like the stereotype of a child of wealth going to the brown countries and engage in religious tourism. Because that’s exactly what it is.
Harris returned to Stanford in ‘97 (that’s ten years of bumming around, for those trying to keep up with the timeline) and finished his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 2000. He wrote his first book, The End of Faith, a year later, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He eventually matriculated to UCLA for his doctorate, earning a PhD in cognitive neuroscience under advisor Michael S Cohen in 2009, with a thesis titled The moral landscape: How science could help determine human values.
Harris has not continued to contribute to neuroscience since earning his doctorate. He is listed as a contributor on one paper that I can find, and that appears to be based on work he did prior to earning his doctorate rather than ongoing contributions. That is to say, Harris doesn’t appear to be a researcher, nor in any way a scientist.
Rather than a dedication to scientific advancement, Harris appears to use his doctorate to advance his primary vocation: right-wing atheism. He gets to call himself Dr. Harris and an expert in what religion does to the brain. His work in neuroscience functions as a shield against criticism as he makes sweeping claims about unrelated fields, unsupported by evidence and dismissed by experts within those fields.
Harris’s willingness to be dramatically ignorant and dogmatically incorrect in the face of compelling argument and evidence is well documented. In 2012, he proposed racial profiling as a way to counteract extremist Muslim terror. Security expert Bruce Schneier weighed in, pointing out that 1) “Muslim” isn’t a race, 2) racial profiling doesn’t work (it generates too many false positives), 3) any system like that can easily be gamed by terrorists (generating false negatives), and 4) would be counterproductive (by pointlessly pissing off the 99.999999% [6 9s] of muslims who aren’t terrorists).
In spite of his conversation with Schneier, Harris has continued to support racial profiling, just as he ignores criticism from experts in the many other fields his essays touch on. He tends to view any criticism of his errors and inconsistencies as personal attacks. For example, following his discussion with Ezra Klein regarding Harris’s discussion with eugenics apologist Charles Murray, Harris’s response was so petulant that even his legion of fans, who ordinarily support him unconditionally, were taken aback.
Harris has defended other indefensible positions as well, including torturing suspects for information about terrorism and pre-emptive nuclear strikes against muslim nations. Are you noticing a trend? Because there’s a trend. It’s a trend against muslims, against Islam.
As I’ve said elsewhere, Harris was part of the surge in movement atheism that occurred in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. His first book was written and published after 9/11. He became famous as a blogger and speaker after that, and didn’t start his podcast until 2013.
Harris was something of an outlier among other prominents in the atheist and skeptic communities. He was far younger than the other “horsemen”, with no established career or credentials. He had no science background, and he was never particularly interested in skepticism. Instead, he talked far more about his practice of martial arts and meditation. And the need to eliminate Islam. He defended torturing muslims. He defended nuking muslims. For Sam Harris, muslims are the boogeyman.
He’ll attack other religions, to be sure. He debated William Lane Craig, and he’s no fan of catholicism. However, he’s the right’s darling for a reason, and it’s not because of his passionate defense of libertarian free will (which he doesn’t believe in).
It’s because Harris is a far right wing clown. Don’t make the mistake of thinking his love of eastern mysticism makes him a hippy. Harris is a right wing authoritarian, he’s deeply misogynistic, and he’s racist as hell. Look at some of the recent (as of writing) guests he’s had on his podcast:
- Tamler Sommers: author of “Why Honor Matters”, a “controversial call to put honor at the center of morality”
- Bart Ehrman: an atheist who defends Christianity
- Robin Hanson: economics professor at George Mason University (GMU was recently in the news because the Koch brothers have spent years turning its economics department into a far right wing super-PAC to give themselves legitimacy) (Oh, and this conversation was before Hanson made the news for arguing in favor of “redistribution of sex”, aka rape, in order to prevent more terrorist attacks by incels. But well after he asked whether a woman being non-violently raped, because the violence is what makes it really bad, is worse than infidelity).
- Niall Ferguson: a pro-imperialist writer of “controversial” history (“controversial” = politically motivated and false)
- David Frum & Andrew Sullivan: arch-conservative politicos
- Eric Weinstein & Ben Shapiro: arch-conservative economist and arch-conservative politico
- Bret Weinstein: Eric’s brother, former biology professor, paid to resign after being racist as hell.
- Tom Nichols: right wing academic
Yes, Harris has others on his show to discuss other topics, but there is a long and consistent theme of bringing in right wing or far right wing personalities (who Harris describes only as “controversial”) to defend right wing policies and beliefs. Harris then fails to play the devil’s advocate, which he’ll happily do against the liberals he brings on his show. Instead, Harris helps these right wing figures attack liberal positions, decrying identity politics and political correctness.
Harris brought Charles Murray on his show in April of 2017. In April of this year (2018), Harris described the interview thusly:
Almost exactly a year ago, I had Charles Murray on my podcast. Murray, as many of our listeners will know, is the author of the notorious book The Bell Curve. It has a chapter on raising IQ and differences between racial measures of IQ that was extremely controversial. Murray is a person who still gets protested on college campuses more than 20 years later.
While I have very little interest in IQ and actually zero interest in racial differences in IQ, I invited Murray on my podcast, because he had recently been de-platformed at Middlebury College. He and his host were actually assaulted as they left the auditorium. In my view, this seemed yet another instance of kind of a moral panic that we were seeing on college campuses. It caused me to take an interest in Murray that I hadn’t previously had. I had never read The Bell Curve, because I thought it was just ... It must be just racist trash, because I assumed that where there was all that smoke, there must be fire. I hadn’t paid attention to Murray. When I did read the book and did some more research on him, I came to think that he was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime. That doesn’t really run the risk of being much of an exaggeration there.
The most controversial passages in the book struck me as utterly mainstream with respect to the science at this point. They were mainstream at the time he wrote them and they’re even more mainstream today. I perceived a real problem here of free speech and a man’s shunning and I was very worried.
To describe Murray’s book as “controversial” is false. To describe it as “mainstream” is a contemptible lie. To say that Murray is unfairly maligned is wrong to the point of absurdity. Charles Murray is a nazi. Not even a neo-nazi, just a nazi.
Murray said he was surprised that people called his book racist when it was first published in the 90s. He has also said he was surprised people thought it was racist when he and some friends burned a cross on top of a hill when he was a teenager. Charles Murray is a disingenuous piece of shit, and a member, erstwhile if lapsed, of the klan. His book was funded by the Pioneer Fund, a non-profit established in 1937 to “advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences”. Did you catch the goal, there? It’s a eugenics organization intended to “breed the badness out of humanity”.
And because it was founded in 1937, when a whole lot of America was utterly charmed by the German Workers Party, it’s just a nazi organization, not a neo-nazi organization. They paid for the “research” that went into Murray’s book, and they paid Murray to write it. The purpose of the research and the purpose of the book was to push the fascist agenda here in the US that would end the few scraps of semi-socialism we managed to push through in the 1930s. Because fascists want poor people to be desperate and scared, and they fucking hate it that brown people were able to get on food stamps and social security.
Murray’s book is filled with terrible science conducted by godawful racists with the end goal of destroying the few safety nets we have left. The pseudoscience in the book was conducted in order to provide a smokescreen justification for the elimination of those safety nets, namely that poor people are poor because they’re genetically inferior, and keeping them alive just lets them breed to make more inferior people.
That’s what Harris describes as “controversial” and “mainstream”. That’s who Harris describes as “unfairly maligned”. In what way does Charles Murray, whose book’s central message has been adopted as central to the Republican party platform, need defense? In what way does he deserve defense?
And, side note, you may have noticed the right-wing talking point of attacking colleges and college campuses. Harris described Murray’s de-platforming as an instance of a “moral panic that we were seeing on college campuses”. The right has long been attacking colleges and universities, seeing them as hotbeds of communism, leftism, jewism, liberalism, and gayism. Of course, they can’t just come out and say that. Instead, they adopt the tactic of claiming to be defenders of a fundamental liberty, in this case free speech.
Fox News and the alt right have long been spreading the propaganda that our college campuses are shutting down free speech, that they prevent any conservative or right wing “truths” (heavy sarcasm quotes there) from being heard. This is a talking point you can hear being parroted by other exemplars of white mediocrity on college campuses, like Stephen Pinker, Brett Weinstein, and Jordan B. Peterson. In fact, far from stifling free speech, college students are the population most broadly in support of free speech in the United States.
Harris has also been openly misogynistic.
“There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”
Along with his essentialism toward muslims and brown people, Harris also believes in an essentialism toward gender. This is reflected not only by the above quote, but also by one of his conversations with Douglas Murray (another far right wing bigot, not related to Charles Murray), where D. Murray goes on a rant about trans people and Harris just chuckles along. In 6 minutes of conversation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04sSvofgWTg, an excerpt grabbed by a pro-Trump right winger calling themself Patriotic Populist), Murray whines about trans folk and throws in some anti-muslim bigotry for good measure.
Harris’s response? “That is hilarious.” He then goes on to… ask if Douglas Murray is more free to attack trans people because he is himself gay. He doesn’t open with criticism of Murray’s bigotry, but with criticism of Murray’s opponents for daring to criticise Murray. He then goes on to attack the left for “anti-intellectualism”. Why doesn’t he challenge Murray’s bigotries? Why is his ire instead immediately raised in defense of Murray against hypothetical criticism?
He’s also had Jordan Peterson on his podcast. Peterson rose to fame for criticizing a proposed law (which has since been passed) regarding trans people’s rights, declaring that he would happily go to prison for being a bigot to trans people (the law wouldn’t have done that, doesn’t do that), and that he would happily pay a fine (wouldn’t, doesn’t). Peterson now earns tens of thousands of dollars a month on patreon, and in return he routinely goes online, or gives talks, or gives interviews where he combines the most vacuous, empty truths he can think of with the most inane garbage he can think of, all so he can imply (he very carefully never states anything outright) that women belong in the kitchen, men belong in charge, and that everyone has to have a fixed role to play.
And instead of going over Peterson’s odious, false, and “controversial” beliefs, Harris spends an hour arguing about the nature of truth.
Who knows how Harris came to his atheism. It’s clear his approach to life isn’t built on compassion or understanding.
From what I can dig up on Harris’s past and life, he’s a child of wealth and privilege who’s never faced a challenge he didn’t personally select. He’s never had a boss or a job he could lose. He’s never had to work for shit. He had a weird trip in college, then fucked off to the India for a decade. He shared our collective trauma on 9/11 and wrote a book, which allowed him to coast for years as a public speaker. He spent a few years doing the minimum necessary to get a Ph.D., which work he abandoned entirely so so he could get back to earning royalties and start a podcast.
So who is Sam Harris? He’s a spoiled kid who’s spent the last 17 years defending the status quo and attacking whoever the hateful white kids thought it was cool to attack. Harris is yet another example of a mediocre white kid with rich parents who succeeded in spite of, or even due to, his faults rather than due to his merits.
Afrocentrism
Our next skeptic topic: Afrocentrism. This one caught my eye, because I wondered why the hell it was a topic in the Skeptic’s Dictionary. Then I read it and wondered if I was getting the whole story.
What skepdic.com presents is… not the whole story. According to the dictionary:
Afrocentrism is a pseudohistorical political movement that erroneously claims that African-Americans should trace their roots back to ancient Egypt because it was dominated by a race of black Africans. Some of Afrocentrism's other claims are: the ancient Greeks stole their main cultural achievements from black Egyptians; Jesus, Socrates and Cleopatra, among others, were black; and Jews created the slave trade of black Africans.
The main purpose of Afrocentrism is to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride as a psychological weapon against the destructive and debilitating effects of universal racism.
Clearly, if this is what Afrocentrism is, then it’s a complete pile of crap and should be ignored when absent, scoffed at when present. Unfortunately, that’s not what Afrocentrism is. I went ahead and did a bit of googling to see if I could find other perspectives.
Let’s go ahead and start with wikipedia. No, it’s not a great source, but wikipedia’s bias is toward white, male, conservatives. It’s dominated by college bros, engineers, and programmers, except for the niche page that only ever gets edited by the two people who are the only two people in the world who will ever read that page. That is to say, wikipedia isn’t likely to be biased toward something called “Afrocentrism”. So here’s wikipedia’s summary:
Afrocentrism (also Afrocentricity) is an approach to the study of world history that focuses on the history of people of recent African descent. It is in some respects a response to global (Eurocentric) attitudes about African people and their historical contributions; it seeks to correct mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history. Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a Pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.
Afrocentrism is a scholarly movement that seeks to conduct research and education on global history subjects, from the perspective of historical African peoples and polities. It takes a critical stance on Euro-centric assumptions and myths about world history, in order to pursue methodological studies of the latter. Some of the critics of the movement believe that it often denies or minimizes European, Near Eastern and Asian cultural influences while exagerating certain aspects of historical African civilizations that independently accomplished a significant level of cultural and technological development. In general, Afrocentrism is usually manifested in a focus on the history of Africa and its role in contemporary African-American culture and Greek philosophy among others.
What is today broadly called Afrocentrism evolved out of the work of African-American intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but flowered into its modern form due to the activism of African-American intellectuals in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and in the development of African-American Studies programs in universities. However, following the development of universities in African colonies in the 1950s, African scholars became major contributors to African historiography.
Wow. That. Is. Different. Very different. Like, the difference between “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter”? Maybe not that far.
I have heard a lot of things over the years that aren’t great about black nationalism, of course. To be honest, I don’t care for any form of nationalism. I have sympathy for any movement among oppressed peoples that attempts to fight back against oppression, but issues that carry strong emotional impact and that focus so strongly on something central to a person’s identity? That can lead to woowoo, myths, pseudoscience, and pseudohistory.
On the positive side, we can absolutely state that Afrocentrism has done good work, establishing departments for African American studies in universities, countering the racist assumptions built into decades or centuries of academic work coming out of those very, very white universities.
On the other hand, Afrocentrism also contributed to black nationalism and built up a lot of nonsense beliefs that are still present in a number of communities. Just as you’ll occasionally see nonsense about “How the Irish Saved Civilization”, you’ll see nonsense about how ancient Egyptians were black and were the heart of all civilization and so on.
Africa is a huge continent, with the largest amount of linguistic and racial diversity you’ll find anywhere on the planet. The black population of the United States came largely from a small region of western Africa, and represent only a fraction of the continent’s diversity and heritage. There many excellent reasons to celebrate what black people have done in the United States in surviving, overcoming, and battling the horrific conditions white people forced upon them and many excellent reasons to fight the deep currents of racism still built into American culture and academia, but this shouldn’t be used to foster false beliefs.
The Pan-African movement that forms part of Afrocentrism is probably an excellent and necessary thing in itself, as part of the effort to combat the neo-colonialism of the modern west. It would also be necessary to unite or ally that movement with a pan-Latin or pan-American movement which would allow (does allow?) Central and South American peoples to fight that same neo-colonialism.
But we can’t extend it in the past, and we can’t pretend that there’s some sort of genuine unity there. When I said that Africa is huge, I meant huge. It’s 20% of the Earth’s total land area and contains 16% of the world’s population. And it’s old. Remember, that’s where humanity started! That’s why you get more diversity in language and race in Africa than you do anywhere else. We shouldn’t really talk about Africa as a single place or people any more than we can for the Americas.
Just to maintain absolute clarity: I support Afrocentrism as a movement intended to fight back against racism in society and the academy. I support the study of black American culture and history, the contributions and developments and struggles of black people in the US. I also support an anti-colonial movement, a decolonization of Africa generally, and the study of African culture and history. But I urge all those involved in that project to not fall prey to black nationalism, or any nationalism, or any movement that ties identity so strongly to the field of study that they allow myths and falsehoods to creep into their work.
I also urge the Skeptic’s Dictionary to provide a little nuance to their article. I mean, damn. Afrocentrism was and is a large and vital movement that has grown and changed over the decades. To call the whole thing just the pseudohistory and pseudoscience of some portions (significant portions, I’ll admit) of the whole? That’s not good skepticism.
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