Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris of the podcast Making Sense talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about rising Jew-hatred in the West and what Harris sees as the dangers of radical Islam and Jihadism.
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| 0:37 | Intro. [Recording date: July 2, 2024.] Russ Roberts: Today is July 2nd, 2024 and my guest is neuroscientist, philosopher, and author Sam Harris. Sam is the host of Making Sense and creator of Waking Up. This is Sam's second appearance on EconTalk. He was last here in February of 2023 talking about meditation, mindfulness, and morality. Sam, welcome back to EconTalk. Sam Harris: Thank you, Russ. It's great to see you. Happy to be back. Russ Roberts: Our formal topic for today is an episode you did making sense on the situation on U.S. campuses. I'm sure we'll get into other things along the way. I want to warn parents listening with children: This episode may touch on adult themes or language. |
| 1:13 | Russ Roberts: So, let's start with the protests. Although it's funny, here we are in the end of June. Campuses are so quiet it feels like, is that, like, a historical event, those camp encampments? It seems like it's just ancient history. But I think we learned something important. But you could argue that they're not so significant. It was a small vocal minority, a lot of outsiders swelling the crowd. Do you find it worrisome what we saw at the end of the school year? Sam Harris: Yeah, I do. I take your point that by sheer numbers and by a percentage of the students on campus, the actual details might not justify too much concern, right? But, the problem for me has always been that this far-left moral confusion that goes by many names--we often call it wokeness or a social justice, moral panic. I mean, it's identity politics in its most strident form on the left. All of this, and the reason why it's such a concern--even if it's maybe 8% of left-of-center activist types--the problem is it has captured our most elite and heretofor influential institutions, right? So, we're talking not about just random colleges: we're talking about Harvard and Princeton and Yale and Stanford. I mean, just go from number one to number 30, and they're all captured, right? When we're talking about media, we're not talking about, you know, random blogs. We're talking about the New York Times. We're talking about--just the most important properties. In culture we're talking about Hollywood, from Netflix on down. It's elite institutions. And that worries me because I care about these institutions. I think we should all care about them. It is important that the New York Times, perhaps above any other paper on Earth, get its head screwed on straight. Right? So there are obviously two ways of looking at this. You can always say that it's a minority--in this case of American society--which is true. A Harris Harvard poll done when those protests were at their height suggested that 75% of Americans wanted the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] to go into Rafa, right? Seventy-five percent. So, we're talking about--and yet our politicians were being bent not by the 75% near-consensus. They were being bent by what they were seeing on college campuses. And, I think we saw support for Israel visibly erode almost on an hourly basis from the Biden Administration in response to what we were seeing on campuses. |
| 4:16 | Russ Roberts: I'm not sure how significant it is that the so-called best colleges in America saw outbreaks of protests that were not just anti-Israel, but pro-Hamas. Which was kind of shocking for me. And I think you've alluded to it, as well, in your work. It was the response that these institutions had. Whether they're captured or not, they're slow to turn. To me, they're like large ocean liners. There's a lot of people hoping that they'll be different going forward, either because donations are down or other reasons, but it's clear that their response to this challenge was feeble. Now, you could argue it should have been feeble. You could have argued--you could argue, and let me make the case and let you agree or disagree. Okay, I'm living here in Israel; of course, I think Israel has a right to exist. But, suppose you do think that Israel is an oppressive, apartheid, genocidal place and country? In which case, nonviolent protesting--blocking people on campus, supporting people who have fought against Israel--would be an honorable thing. And, a college campus is a place for that debate to take place. And so, why is it a problem that that extreme view, but defensible at some level, was tolerated? Sam Harris: Well, with antisemitism, it really always seems to come down to the double standard. Right? And I think that's the thing we detected in those Congressional hearings. It wasn't that you couldn't make the case for something like free speech absolutism on a college campus wherein you could entertain any idea: No matter how apparently odious, you should be able to have a seminar on whether we should burn people for witchcraft, right? I mean, that's totally fine, from my point of view. But what was so obvious, glaringly so--and this is what many of us found so galling in those testimonies--is that the double standard was there and totally unacknowledged. I mean, we all knew that, had the analogous protests in their extreme political orientation and moral obtuseness been launched against the black community, or the trans community, on any one of these campuses--if you had white supremacists--I mean, just imagine the day after Dylann Roof murders a bunch of black parishioners in--I think it was Charleston, South Carolina. Imagine you had white supremacist students at Columbia on the quad that day celebrating it as a victory for their ideology. We know exactly what would happen. Right? I mean, these kids would be kicked out of school. It's so far outside the bounds of what that institution wants to be associated with, that--I mean, to say nothing of them actually, obviously breaking the stated policies of demonstration, I mean, they're violently harassing people. You can't spit on people. You can't prevent people's movement. You can't chase people through the corridors of a building so that they barricade themselves in fear inside of a library. Right? I mean, that's just not the kind of demonstration that any one of these institutions supports. And, yet they did tacitly support it because they pretended to just be infinitely open-minded as to the legitimacy of this whole project. And, what was so clear is that they wouldn't have been, had the targets been really anyone other than the Jews--right?--and Israel. So, it was that double standard that I think was just unsustainable. Russ Roberts: And you gave the example in your episode about the Chinese, which put the Uyghurs in concentration camps. They're worthy of being protested. But the idea that a Chinese American or a Chinese national, even, on a college campus should be harassed for that would be unimaginable. |
| 08:41 | Russ Roberts: Now, for me, the hypocrisy isn't the worst part. I mean, it's alarming as a Jew, but it's not the worst part. For me, the worst part is the toleration of physical intimidation. You gave the example of chasing people through the streets, through the corridors of a building. What we're seeing in North America right now, and to some extent in Europe, is a slow--very slow, a boiling-the-frog kind of slow--uptick in antisemitic activity. It starts with slurs, yelling at people on the street, making them feel uncomfortable. And then, it's an occasional--what's happened a lot in Canada over the last few weeks is the shooting out of windows in synagogues, Jewish schools, when no one's there. I mean, it's--so on some level it's just a protest. It's just a bit of vandalism in the name of a cause. But, and then it's roughing somebody up on the street--but not killing them or bludgeoning them or kicking them and harming them. My worry is that that's what will happen next. I was just in the United States for two weeks. People said, 'How was it? Did you feel antisemitism?' Not at all. None. I was in New York. I was in Washington, D.C. I was in Memphis, Tennessee; was in Huntsville, Alabama visiting family. I[?] didn't feel anything. I did wear a hat. I did not wear my kippah out on the street--which I've done in the past. But I didn't imagine--it really was kind of silly--there wasn't any feeling of a presence of anti-Jewish or anti-Israel sentiment. But, I worry it's coming. And I'm worried that--and maybe I'm being paranoid. I don't know. Sam Harris: Yeah, well, I think we are wise to be alert to how this slow abridgment of liberties and the encroach of double standards just accumulates, and it gets normalized. An example of this just came to mind. I was in New York recently, too, and I was walking down Fifth Avenue. And I passed that great Temple--I forget the name of it, maybe it's Temple Emmanu-El--but it's on Fifth Avenue, around 66th Street, somewhere around there. And, I've walked past that temple many, many times in my life. And, this time I noticed that there are these giant blocks of stone on the sidewalk. I mean, each block is maybe the size of a dishwasher, something like that. It probably weighs 2000 pounds. And, there's a bunch of them just ringed around the entrance to the Temple. And, I bet most people who walk past those blocks are not alert to their significance. Right? I mean, what is their significance? If you take 30 seconds to think about it, more or less, everyone can figure out that what is intended there is to prevent someone from intentionally driving their car on the sidewalk for the purpose of murdering people who are gathered out in front of that, the entrance to that building, who can be safely assumed to be Jews. Right? I mean, that's normal life in Manhattan, which has to be one of the most, one of the safest cities in the world for Jews. But, there happen to be many of them there. No one else has to do that in American society. This is completely standard in Jewish culture to have a level of security==to have metal detectors in your buildings--right? That no one else does this. No one else thinks to do this. And, there's a reason for it. I mean, for every year after September 11th, 2001 in America--even the very next year, 2002, right?--Jews have been a greater target of hate crime than anyone else in American society. Including Muslims. Including African-Americans. I mean, there's barely anyone in second place, right? It's like a five x [5 times] difference in most years. Now, since October 7th, it's probably a 15 x [15 times] difference, right? Excuse me. And, I was always someone who discounted the significance of this. The big change in me since October 7th is that I'm finally taking antisemitism seriously. I really felt that it was behind us in some significant sense. Certainly in any Western city and in open societies I just felt that there's just no reason as a Jew to worry about the significance of antisemitism. And, the thing that October 7th changed for me, and for many of us, is that no safe assumption. And, there is this ratchet effect that you're alluding to, where you just see this incremental change in the wrong direction. Which, if you are alert to the historical echoes of that--if you imagine what it was like to be a Jew in Germany in 1930, right? If things look bad--but they didn't look so bad that people packed their bags and left, right?--which obviously they should have--but it's easy to see that they couldn't see it. Right? And, you read these heartbreaking editorials from the time where, in Jewish newspapers, they would talk about how Hitler is never going to do what he says he's going to do, and there's going to be this moderating effect on society. And, it was, in retrospect, pure delusion. But, no one could imagine such a thing as possible. Well, now we should be able to imagine it, because it happened, right? We know how--and it happened, again, not merely because there was some unique evil born in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, which created this killing machine that was rolled out to the rest of Europe. That's not how the Holocaust happened. I mean, that's half of the story. We have the concentration camp system, and we had what the Nazis themselves did both within it and outside of it with their killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen. But, that's 3 million of the 6 million deaths of Jews in the Holocaust, right? The rest were killed in a wide variety of other ways, and many, many were killed by their neighbors. Who were not German. Right? They were Lithuanian and Latvian and Ukrainian and Polish and Croatian, and even Greek. Right? I mean, this is what happened. And so, we know that it's possible from one day to the next, as a Jew, to discover that your neighbors want to kill you. Right? And they want to kill you, not because the Nazis came from outside and are forcing them at the point of a bayonet to kill you. No, they want to kill you all of a sudden because they realize it's possible, right? That no one's going to hold them accountable for it. And, again, that sounds completely paranoid in the context of the life in which I've lived, which I lived prior to October 7th. But, when you look at --in Los Angeles people beating Jews up for trying to enter a synagogue just last week in the most densely Jewish neighborhood in the city, the Fairfax area, that's not far from--I mean, that's an explicit historical echo that we shouldn't, we should have absolutely no patience for as a society. And, as people have pointed out, we already have too much patience for it in the sense that no one's talking about it. If there were--this is a point that Noah Pollak made in the Free Press--if you change the complexion of that situation, if you imagine MAGA [Make America Great Again] Republicans ringing a mosque in Los Angeles and not letting Muslims enter and then beating them up if they tried to enter their mosque, in Los Angeles, we would never hear the end of this. This would be wall-to-wall coverage. There would be a Presidential Commission to investigate this. But this happened to Jews 10 days ago, and it's completely fallen out. It's been completely memory hold. Yeah: It's not totally irrational to worry about society suddenly becoming fundamentally hostile to Jews even in the West. |
| 17:47 | Russ Roberts: I'll just add a few comments to that. You and I have corresponded via email about The World of Yesterday, which is Stefan Zweig's memoir, his autobiography. It's really a remarkable book. I recommend that everyone read it, for a hundred reasons. I mean, it's a incredible garden of delight, intellectual delights. But, one of the things that he writes about is the rise of the Nazis and the role that physical intimidation played. The way that a truck would pull up to a peaceful gathering and brown shirts would pour out of it, and they'd beat up a bunch of people and get back in and go away. And the other folks who were the victims, plus the bystanders, would go, 'Well, that's too bad. That's unfortunate. It's a bad thing. Thank God they're a small minority, and their leader is an insane man who, of course, will never come to power.' But, there's an incredible asymmetry of influence and power when you have a group willing to use force and violence to get their way in a group that's uneasy about confronting that violence because they're civilized. Sam Harris: Yeah. Russ Roberts: So, the uncivilized have a tremendous advantage there. Now, that's the bad news. The good news, as a friend of mine points out when I start getting worried about Kristallnacht--which is what Toronto feels like lately with a synagogue's windows being blown out, shot out--the police remain pretty much on the Jews' side in America. England, don't look so much. But in general, the police are pretty clearly not so sympathetic to thuggery against Jews or anti-Israel or pro-Hamas protesting that turns violent. So, that's somewhat comforting. But, I think you have to be kind of vigilant about it from the very beginning. And how you do that, how you stand up to it--we talked--I've probably mentioned in the program before--but when people were tearing down the signs of hostages in the early days of the aftermath of October 7th and the Hamas kidnappings, I found it infuriating that people would photograph, video, with their phone, these people tearing them down and try to identify them and shame them, but no one tried to stop them. And, there was a viral video of a construction worker somewhere in New York--I want to say Queens, I don't remember--who stood up to a guy and said, 'You're not doing that.' And the guy got terribly uneasy and ran away, basically. And, no one wants to be that guy. Most people don't want to--he did, but most people don't want to be that guy. They don't want to put their body on the line. They don't want to take a group of people and say, 'This is our campus. We're walking across. I don't care what you say about Zionists. We're Zionists, we're Jews. We love Israel, and we belong here. You can't stop us.' That just generally didn't happen, other than UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] where there was a physical confrontation, which I think had complicated backstory. Anyway, any thoughts on that? Sam Harris: Yeah. Well, obviously you take a significant risk, not just physical, but legal, whenever you engage in any kind of use of force. I mean, we have created a monopoly on the use of force in society for good reason, right? And, when you decide to reclaim that right for yourself, things can go haywire in lots of ways that are unintended, right? I mean, we know this from encounters where, on a subway in New York, not that long ago, you had a mentally ill person harassing everyone in sight. And finally, some bystander who quite rationally thought he was in a position to solve this problem--I think he'd been a Marine--decided to choke this person unconscious in front of everybody. And he got the help from other people--like, the other people were helping him subdue this person. But, he didn't know enough to know--this guy was not a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, and he choked him unconscious for too long and the guy died. So, unless this is really your wheelhouse--which is to say you're a highly trained combatant of some sort--you don't know what's going to happen. If you punch someone in the face and they fall down and hit their head on a curb and die, you're probably going to prison unless you can prove that you were in fear for your life imminently, and that any rational person would have been in fear for their life imminently in that moment. And, that's not the usual situation you're in at a protest where you have a bunch of people with signs and bullhorns and they're shoving each other. If you shove someone too hard or you punch them in the face and you really harm them, the rest of your life can be spent untangling that mess, at best. And, so, yeah, restraint is--to say nothing about the wisdom of de-escalating situations whenever that's possible. But, it is kind of a game-theoretic problem here because it is rational for each individual to avoid violence and to avoid conflict. I mean, that's just: your life is better that way. It's far less unpleasant at a minimum, and you're not open to legal jeopardy, etc., etc. So, just drive away from the protest and ignore these people with signs who are not letting you get into the building you thought you were going to go into that day. And just avoid the whole thing, right? But, of course, that is to cede society to the thugs. And, if you're just--if you just replace the windows of the synagogue every time someone throws a brick through it and you do nothing else--right?--well, then maybe the problem will go away. But, I think at a deeper level, we have to convince the rest of society--I mean, certainly to speak from a Jewish point of view now--I think we have to convince the 98% of, in an American context, the 98% of American society that's not Jewish, that there's much more at stake here than just conserving the concerns of yet another beleaguered minority--now the Jews, right? I mean, this is why I'm not especially a fan of looking at this exclusively through the lens of a rise in antisemitism, because I think it's a much bigger problem. The fate of open societies are at stake here. It's not just that there's this global rise in Jew-hatred. |
| 24:46 | Russ Roberts: In your comments on the campus situation on your podcast, you made the observation somewhat similar to what you did a minute ago, but you said it more dramatically. You said: 'Basically, Jews at some point in their history and various countries have been driven out.' And, certainly that includes the countries of the West: Spain, England, Germany, etc. And, it certainly includes most of the countries in the Middle East, in the aftermath of establishment of the state of Israel, other times before that, Jews become--after for a variety of reasons, sometimes religious, sometimes political--they become the scapegoat. They get--they are persona non grata, whatever the plural is. And they get driven out. And on the way they're often killed and treated badly. So, one response to this moment--and I direct at you because I'm a so-called religious Jew, and I think you're not--you're a very famous non-believing Jew, a famous atheist--wouldn't it be a better thing rather than standing up and risking all the violence we've just been talking about, wouldn't be a better thing to just say: 'Look, nobody likes us. Let's just stand down. Let's take off our kippot. Let's change our names. Let's mingle even better and assimilate even more. And, this little country in the Middle East where we have this little tiny bit of land: true, we have this historical connection to it, but they don't like it. The Muslims don't like it that non-Muslims rule there. It sticks in their craw--theocratically it sticks in their craw; emotionally. I should just move out of here. I should leave Israel and I should become a citizen of the world. I should become a Nova Scotian or wherever I decide to settle. And, while it's true that Hitler didn't care whether you were religious or not, I think we could probably assimilate pretty effectively. And, let's just stop--let's just give up on this.' I'm curious. That doesn't appeal to me. That doesn't appeal to me. I'm curious-- Sam Harris: I get it, yeah-- Russ Roberts: why it doesn't appeal to you. Sam Harris: Well, it did at one point, and I could be argued back into that position again. I've said as much in the past that I thought it would be a fitting final chapter to all of the secular gains and secular wisdom that the religion of Judaism has produced or the tradition of Judaism has produced, to have the Jews be the first to recognize that the end game for civilization can't be all of our separate tribal loyalties vying for dominance or inclusion. Right? That we need to unravel our religious tribalism finally. And, for the Jews to say: 'Listen, we're done playing this game. We're human beings and we have a common project, and we're not going to bang on about the significance of our sectarian ideology anymore, much less our chosenness as a people, because we don't believe these things anymore. Humanity has got to choose itself at this point, and we're going to fight, we're going to evaporate. We're just going to disappear into the rest of culture.' I could--I can still get behind that project. The problem is that it doesn't solve--and it might well solve the problem for all the Jews that are alive, and their descendants. Right? They'll just be people. And, honestly, that's pretty much the way I've lived my life. So, I speak as one who has a very tenuous connection to the Jewish tradition. And, while I've gone to my share of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, it's not--I know what it's like to live a radically secular, deracinated life from the perspective of religion. And, I recommend it. I mean, it is not without certain problems. So, there are things that I think we need to reinvent, and we haven't reinvented them in secular culture, but it does not have the downside that many religious people would imagine, or at least not all of the downside. But, the problem is that if you just imagine what would happen if Israel--if all the Jews of Israel woke up and had that epiphany tomorrow, and they said, 'We're out of here. We're moving to America. We're moving to Europe. We're, we're going to take all of our wealth and our intellectual property and just have fun in New York and LA [Los Angeles] and etc.' What happens? Well, I think in the Muslim world, you get an instance of Islamist and jihadist triumphalism of the sort that we have never seen, right? This is yet another victory for the one true faith. Reclaiming Jerusalem for Islam will be a block party of a sort that we have never seen the world over. And, what will that signal to 2 billion Muslims? Will it signal that now it's time for the lion to lay down with the lamb and we're all going to get along? No: It will signal the coming triumph of Islam. Right? And so, when you look at the radical core of that faith, how big that is is anyone's guess. But, it's not 5 million people and it's probably not even just 50 million people. It's a very large number of people who view the course of human history as tending toward just the final triumph of Islam. This would be Data Point Number One that that is imminent. That it's just--it's going to be the best thing that has ever happened for Jihadism and Islamism globally. So, it wouldn't solve the problem. It would just move the problem to every border of every open society. Do you think Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would be alive if Jerusalem had been ceded to Islam in the 1970? No. This is not--the wind in the sails of Jihadism and Islamism would be that much stronger had they won their contest over that land. Russ Roberts: Salman Rushdie would still sleep poorly at night, I think. |
| 31:58 | Russ Roberts: So, this is consistent with the view--and I want to turn to this now--that somehow, Israel is on the front lines of the West, defending the West, not just itself in this current moment. We're under attack by Hamas in the west, Hezbollah in the north, the Houthis in the South, Iran in the northeast. It's a frightening moment for Israel and our existence is actually at stake, which is, I think, unappreciated by most people other than those who live here and some who live elsewhere. But, before we get to the question of whether this is we're bulwarking for the West and saving the West, I want to get to one small thing you mentioned that I think bears mentioning, that you mentioned in your episode: which is Qatar. You just mentioned in passing in that episode, that when we think about what's going on on campuses, we shouldn't miss sight of the fact that Qatar has donated, I think, billions of dollars to American campuses-- Sam Harris: Yeah. Yeah: tens of billions, yeah-- Russ Roberts: Part of me says: Well, I guess, it's not unusual that people who give money want something in return. That's normal, as an economist, to assume that. But, until I was listening to you, it never really crossed my mind: Why is a country giving money to a university? It's such a strange thing. It's bizarre. Sam Harris: It's not just--they give more money to American and British--I mean, Western--universities than any other country on earth. I think they've got something like 300,000 actual citizens in Qatar and they have something like a million foreign workers or 2 million foreign workers. But, that's just an amazing fact. And it's accomplishing something. If you're paying attention to the intellectual exports of Middle East Studies departments--if you've been paying attention for the last couple of decades--you can see what it's accomplishing. There's an Islamist obscurantism that comes out of those departments that exonerates the truly peaceful religion of Islam on all counts at every opportunity and seems to move in lockstep with organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, which is a none-too-stealthy front group for the Muslim Brotherhood. There's a theological agenda clearly evident in what purports to be, on the one hand just academic scholarship, and on the other hand, benign social activism meant to protect a minority group in the United States. The stench of Islamism is everywhere to be seen--and by Islamism I mean the political agenda of theocrats, essentially, within Islam. Russ Roberts: It's also worth mentioning that Qatar is the host of the leadership of Hamas, which is one of the stranger things about this moment. That somehow, we pretend Qatar belongs along with other nations in the civilized world: They're helping us with negotiating and try to get some of the hostages out. They are the hosts of these people's leaders. They're not objective. They have an agenda. And, you know, they bought the World Cup, the last World Cup. And they seem to be just like a normal country, but they're not. They're a strange--they have an agenda. |
| 35:50 | Russ Roberts: Anyway, let's move on to the least pleasant part of this conversation, which is--I apologize, I don't listen to you every week, but I listen to you occasionally, and you make me jealous. Your eloquence and clarity on many, many issues is, I think, unparalleled. And, in addition to the episode on campuses that we'll put a link to--we'll put a link up to your episode, The Bright Line Between Good and Evil. In that episode and in the second one as well that I mentioned, you lay out the case against radical Islam. And, I have to say: It makes me uncomfortable when I hear it. It is blunt. It seems uncharitable. It is really, actually, totally unacceptable. When you brought it up again in the campus conversation, you said, 'Now, I know you're sick of hearing about this from me, but trust me, I'm even more sick of it than you are.' And, I'm thinking, 'Well, that's because you're an obsessive, strange person,' Sam Harris. You've got this bee in your bonnet, which has got to be the least appropriate metaphor for how frightening radical Islam is to you. It's--emotionally, even to me as a Jew living in Israel, it creeps me out. But, when I heard it the first time, which--no one has the courage; very few people have the courage alongside your intellectual vitality and credibility and care--no one else says this. No one. What you say is unmentionable. And I'm sure it's cost you many listeners and many friends because you don't sugarcoat it. So, I want to give you a chance to lay it out here why the West is at stake here--not just Israel--because of the nature of radical Islam. Because, as you point out, it's very easy--and most people fall into this, what you would call a trap--they look at the Middle East right now: 'The Arab-Israeli conflict is a standard political fight over land, just like Ireland had it. It's a zero-sum game and it's hard, but eventually there's a compromise because most people want to live better lives. They want their children to live better lives. And let's stop this ridiculous posturing. And although I really like my narrative, I have to accept the narrative of the other. And let's sit down and live together.' I think most Israelis very much want that. I like to believe most Palestinians want that. I don't think you agree. And you certainly don't agree that many parts of the Arab world don't want that. So, go at it. Sam Harris: Yeah. Well, I should say that there are many people--there are not enough of them--but there are many people who have quite a bit more courage than I have in that they're making the same sounds on this topic that I make, but their lives are much more in jeopardy as a result. And these are ex-Muslims. Right? So I mean, these are people who are officially considered apostates within the faith. They were born in Pakistan or in Saudi Arabia or in Gaza or wherever. And I know many of these people--and people like Yasmine Mohammed and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and "I've Become a Christian," but, you know, Yasmine is an atheist. But, the penalty for apostasy everywhere under Islam officially is death. Now, whether or not people--any given community--wants to carry it out, what's the fine print on that, we can argue about? But, no one can tell you that you're perfectly safe in the Muslim community worldwide changing your religion--because you're not, right? And, there's a Hadith that covers that explicitly. I just recommend to your listeners to spend some time listening to ex-Muslims. Because one thing that that will accomplish that I can't accomplish for you is it will cut through any intuition you might have about the role of identity and the fact that I don't have direct exposure to the culture. I'm not an native Arabic speaker. I'm not an Arabic speaker at all. I can't read the Quran in the original; therefore, etc., etc. Just take the list of complaints you might hear from someone about why I should be disqualified as an authority on this topic. You can't do any of that with an ex-Muslim who comes from one of the relevant countries in the region. And Yasmine Mohammed is a great example of that. She's got her own podcast. So, yeah--one irony here is that someone like me is often accused of lacking empathy for Muslims worldwide, and that my critique of Islam is coming from a place of just being dangerously detached from the lived experience of Muslims anywhere. And, in my view, that gets it almost exactly backward in terms of how I actually think about this, because I perceive myself to have much more empathy or a truly committed spiritually awake Muslim than most people. Right? Most people I encounter--most secular people--certainly, simply don't know what it's like to believe in God. They tacitly imagine that no one really does. They think that everyone is bluffing. I've met anthropologists who think--anthropologists who focus on this terrain--I mean someone like a Scott Atran, right? Jihadism is his major area of focus. He doesn't think anyone believes in paradise. Right? He thinks all of that's just bluffing. It's all just propaganda. What they really believe in is just the necessity of male bonding with what he calls fictive kin--a wider social network than is strictly predicted by the evolutionary rationale of bonding with kin: How is it that young men form these bonds and gangs and soccer teams, et cetera? And, in the case of Jihadist organizations, they form bonds for which they're willing to die? Well, this has nothing to do with eschatology or a belief in prophecy or belief in the validity of specific doctrines like martyrdom and the real existence of paradise. No one believes in 72 virgins. Most secular academics, whether they have explicitly denied the reality of all of this or not, they doubt that anyone believes these things. Now, I have no doubt that anyone believes these things. The people who claim to love death more than we love life, I think, almost to a man or a woman, are honestly representing their lived experience. It is an honest confession of both a worldview and of a state of mind psychologically. They don't think death is real. They think that you get everything you want after you die. As a martyr, you are guaranteed to be instantly whisked past this velvet rope in the sky, and you wind up in paradise with Allah, with rivers of milk and honey and 72 virgins. And what's more, you can get 70 of your nearest and dearest friends and family in with you--when they die--on the power of your sacrifice. This is the vision of what happens after death that jihadists believe. Now, can you find the occasional cynical operator or the mentally unwell person who is just functioning by a slightly different piece of software? Of course. You can find the person who doesn't believe it, or had his doubts, or reluctantly was goaded into becoming an attempted suicide bomber and failed, etc. But, for the most part, what you get is--when you listen to interviews of jihadists, when you bug their mosques and hear what they talk about behind closed doors when they think no one is listening--what you get is sincere confessions of religious belief. Right? Every bit is sincere, apparently, as far more benign confessions of an ordinary Christian who thinks that Jesus can hear their prayers. Right? That is a--the difference with Islam--and there are several differences. I realize I'm giving you kind of a scattershot and an impressionistic account of my criticism here. But, there are several ways in which we are misled in thinking that Islam is the same as any other major religion. Right? Obviously, the religions can't be the same because there'd be no reason to be a member of one as opposed to another. Right? There are differences. There are specific doctrines that are different. If you're a Christian, on some level you have to believe that Jesus was divine. Any serious Christian believes that as minimum table stakes. Well, that's anathema under Islam. Jesus was not divine. That would be polytheism, to imagine that Jesus was divine. So, there's no negotiating that. So, it's a different point of view. But Islam is different in several specific ways. One is that its militancy--the expectation that the faith will be defended with force--right?--and the faith will conquer the world, in this life. They're not just waiting around for the Messiah to come or for Jesus to come back and rectify things. No; there's this expectation of conquest. And, this is theologically distinct from the other religions, but it's also just historically distinct. I mean, just look at the career of the religion from its founder on. Muhammad was not a hippie who got crucified. Muhammad was a warlord who fought in dozens of battles and won. Just imagine a religion born of a progenitor who is much more like Napoleon or Alexander the Great than he was like Buddha. It is just a very different DNA [Deoxyribonucleic acid], theologically, and a very different set of expectations. And the ideal is not to be--certainly not to be turning the other cheek. Right? It's certainly not: The meek shall inherit the earth. Right? That's not the ethos of Islam. And, the problem we have worldwide--we've had it for decades and we'll have it for the rest of our lives and our children and their children will also have this problem--is that if you honestly look at the Quran and the Hadith and the Biography of the Prophet, and you look at it as a recipe for building a life, which is what every believing Muslim must do. And then you look at the most grotesque example of theocratic barbarism we witnessed in our lifetime--the Islamic state--and you ask yourself, what was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi getting wrong about Islam? What were all these people who were migrating to Syria and Iraq when the Caliphate seemed to be real about 10 years ago? I mean, people dropping out of medical school in London and going to support the Caliphate? What were they getting wrong, when they were taking sex slaves from the Yazidis by the thousands, and crucifying the men, and starving people on the slopes of a mountain there, and burning people alive for all manner of thought-crime? And cutting the hands off of thieves? What were they getting wrong about the religion? That is a very difficult question to answer. And, honestly, there's no great answer coming from Islam. You can split a few hairs there, but this was a totally plausible version of the faith. Now, if you ask that question about any other faith--if you say, 'Well, what are they getting wrong about Jainism here?' 'What are they getting wrong about Buddhism?' 'What are they getting wrong about the Anglican Communion here?' Right? They're obviously getting a lot wrong. No one can say that this is an honest way of connecting the dots of theology and practice in any of those other faiths. But, you can say it for Islam. Right? And you can say it of a group like Hamas. Honestly, you can stand with ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria; Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham] and criticize Hamas as being insufficiently committed to the project of jihad and cutting corners on their theology. |
| 50:36 | Russ Roberts: But surely there are Muslims--and I think, they face a problem that's not dissimilar from the one we talked about earlier about putting your own game-theoretic problem of--you want to be a free rider if you can, and often, that's your incentive. When you have groups within your faith that are eager to use violence and you're not, you're going to look complicit. And, you are complicit. But, we understand that complicity. For, surely, there are people who say--and I assume they mean it, but you can tell me if I'm wrong--that jihad is a spiritual battle. That the Islamic state, that Hamas, that the Muslim Brotherhood, that these radical groups are not true Muslims. They have corrupted the faith and they've just gone rogue. And it would be unfair for you, Sam, or me, Russ, to lump them together. In fact, it's offensive. And this makes you an Islamophobe. How dare you imply that they're the same religion? Sam Harris: Right. Well, so half of that is understandable, half it's clearly dishonest. But it's all too common. So, here's what's true here. What's true is-- Russ Roberts: I'm doing my best-- Sam Harris: Yeah, yah. What's true here is that most Muslims in most places, most of the time, one had every reason to believe and certainly hope, have realized that they don't want to live the way Jihadists and even Islamists want all Muslims to live. They've got enough of a taste of modernity and secular rationality--whether they think of it in those terms or not--they know enough science, they know enough about democracy, they know enough about human rights. They have enough of a taste of life being worth living in this world that they want other things. Right? In this regard, they're the same as religious moderates in every other faith. Right? There are--obviously--there are ultra-Orthodox Jews that are plain, that really care what is spelled out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But most Jews worldwide don't want to live that way, and for good reason, in my view. So, genuine liberals among Muslims and genuine free thinkers, and all of that is to be encouraged and to be celebrated, and it is why we don't have a bigger problem than we have. But that's not--as with every other faith, that's evidence of the faith being--and the doctrine and the scripture--being effectively edited by everyone's disregard of it. Right? It's not a new form of Christianity to decide that you really don't want people who really believe in the power of prayer having too much responsibility in your society. You certainly don't want them flying your planes and trying to cure your kids' cancers. Right? You want rational people who are secular, who are ruled by scientific principles and are disregarding the Bible for their important tasks. You know--most Christians in the West feel that way, and that's why most Christians in the West look back on medieval Christendom with amazement and horror. Right? The Christians of the 14th century were not the rational actors of a sort that we want to live side-by-side with, and for good reason. But that is a story of how Christianity has been winnowed and modified and moderated by its collision--its multi-century collision--with secular rationality and the norms of open societies, etc. Islam is suffering a collision now. It hasn't had the benefit of centuries. It has been isolated to really a unique degree in recent centuries. And still is. So, I think--these data are a little old, but as of maybe 10, 15 years ago, it was true to say--and I assume it's probably still true to say now--that Spain, the country of Spain, translates more of the world's literature and learning into Spanish each year than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the seventh century. Right? I mean, that's a picture of many things, but chief among them is of profound intellectual isolation. Because here we're talking about Spain. We're not talking about--that's not even a first-tier translation project into Spanish. Right? So, it's--at bottom, we're talking about the power of ideas. Right? Ideas matter. Beyond asteroid impacts and the activity of viruses that no one yet knows the name of, what we should care about and worry about are ideas. Right? The power of bad ideas is much bigger and more consequential and alarming than the power of bad people. There's just not that many bad people. I'm not worried about the 1% of humanity that happen to be psychopaths. They're a problem, obviously, and they commit disproportionate harm because they get up every day and they're very busy and they do bad things. But, the real problem we face is that we have lots of psychologically normal people--and even people who would, in other contexts, be extraordinarily good and inspiring people--believing ridiculous and divisive and dangerous things. And they're doing it in contexts where these ideas have effectively become immune to criticism. And religion is the ultimate context where this gets achieved more or less without friction, because there are taboos around criticizing religious ideas that are still observed even in secular culture. And, this is--obviously, we play a very different language game in science and every other area where we let ideas collide. Right? And we protect people from our incredulity in the face of their religious certainties, even in a secular context. I got my Ph.D. in neuroscience. And one of the smartest people in our lab--she was a graduate student, but she had kind of oversight over all of the statistical methods we were using to analyze neuroimaging data. Right? She was kind of the math head in this particular lab. She was also a fundamentalist Christian--right?--who believed that evolution was a fiction and that God created the earth more or less as described; and probably as recently as 4,000 years ago. Right? Russ Roberts: 5,700. Yeah. Sam Harris: Like 4,004 B.C., or something like that according to certain Evangelicals. This is what she believed. Right? Now, no one--she managed to pass through a scientific education here at UCLA without anyone ever sitting her down and saying, 'Listen, there's a lot of stuff you believe that doesn't--that really can't survive collision with the rest of what you believe over here scientifically.' Right? 'We know that evolution is real, and we know that the earth is older than you think it is; and your church is not an authority on any of these things. And you, as an intellectual, have a burden to get your beliefs to cohere, or at least to acknowledge this discordance that is just cognitively inoperable.' Right? No one ever does that because it's taboo to do it. Again, even it's not just within the walls of a church. Outside of the church, in the walls of the ivory tower. And so it is with Islam, and so it is with the belief that it must be at bottom a peaceful religion because most Muslims, most of the time, certainly in the West, are peaceful people who just want to get along with their neighbors, right? It's wonderful that there are peaceful people that want to get along with their neighbors because--and they are human beings: it's not a surprise that they would want to live that way. But, when you drill down on the articles of faith, you get a very different message. And, that message is of consequence to anyone who wants to go down that rabbit hole. And, again, this comes back to empathy. What is it like to be a person who really wants to understand what salvation is? How is it that you can live so as to escape the fires of Hell--if you believe in Hell--right? What does God say on this subject? God is very clear in the pages of the Quran. Right? He is not--and, it's not: The meek shall inherit the earth, right? It's that--the principal message of the Quran, and I invite all of your listeners to just read the book. This is not like the Bible. It would take you a month and a half to read it cover to cover if you were spending all day and night reading it, right? This is something you can read effectively in a weekend. And, don't let anyone tell you that you can't read it if you can't read Arabic. Now, you can read the most plausible English translations of it, and you will absorb its central message. Its central message is not how important love is, or how important compassion is, or how it's, say, it's important to avoid conflict at all costs. No. Its basic message is that you should fear going to Hell. And, because this is the main problem of this life--how to avoid going to Hell--you should fear, and shun, and revile all of those people who don't believe precisely what you need to believe to avoid going to Hell. You should fear the unbeliever. You should shun him. You should never befriend him. Right? And, the Jew and the Christian are--yeah, they're not as bad as the polytheist. They're not as bad as the Hindu. But, they're bad, and they need to be subjugated. They need to convert, or they need to pay the poll tax. And, there's no world in which Muslims should be living alongside them with equal power. No: Muslims need to rule over them. That's the only way this world is supposed to be organized. And, this is absolutely clear in the text, and it's clear in the Biography of Muhammad and in his success in doing that, right? |
| 1:02:39 | Russ Roberts: Yeah. But, the thing I want to emphasize--and it's funny: you're saying these things; they still make me uncomfortable. But, you're getting to me. And, I think the way for those of us who find such clarity uncomfortable is to think about it in the following way--and tell me if this is fair to your perspective: There are Muslims who are peaceful. There are Muslims who reject the most fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran. There are ways to interpret the Quran that are less vivid than the description you just gave. But, we know there are a lot of people who accept that because they act on it. And on October 7th, Hamas wasn't launching a normal military action. They deliberately killed civilians, and enjoyed the fact that they were Jews, and enjoyed taking them back--some of them alive, some of them dead--and glorifying their death. And, in your most disturbing episode, the one about the bright line between good and evil, you catalog very painfully the number of people who believe--whether it's mainstream Islam doesn't matter: There are numerous--not like five, not like 10--but many, many, many episodes where people murdered infidels in the name of their religion in the 20th and 21st centuries. It's hard for us to accept. You can see that. You say that we like to believe that other people are like us. Even anthropologists, professors of anthropology, assume that no one could take seriously the idea that there's a God in heaven. So, I think--I'll let you comment on that. But, my next question--I'll give it to you now so you can roll it into your answer--is: It doesn't matter what the percentage is. There's a significant number of people who are willing to kill in the name of God out of theological motivation. And it's particularly relevant for Jews. But it's not just Jews. And, it raises the question of what--because it's not just about the Jews, it's about the West, coming back to where we started. What's the West possibly to do about this? I think about--I don't pay any attention to French politics. I know there's somebody named Marine Le Pen who doesn't like radical Islam. She just got the highest number of votes, and there's a snap election. We don't know how she'll do this Sunday in the next round, but she probably will win. She could win. And, let's say she does win. We know that Geert Wilders in the Netherlands has been very successful. There's the rise in the West right now of people who take your point of view--not most of the rest of your point of view, but this piece of it--and view Islam as an--radical Islam, at least--as an enemy. The problem is, is that they're not going to ban Islam, I don't think, in France. They're going to--Marine Le Pen says she wants to ban radical Islam. She wants to close radical mosques. She wants to deport people who don't want to live the way the French people live. Is it really possible to implement such a policy in an open society in today's West? It seems--I can't imagine what's going to happen. And, after her election, there were riots, and buildings were burned to the ground, and windows were broken, and looting took place because she's, quote, "anti-Islam." This is the future, I think, of the West for a while. This battle. That's what I'm worrying about. It's very hard for me to say these things, but I've learned this from you. Am I right? Sam Harris: Yeah. Yeah. Russ Roberts: Is this what you believe? And, how's that going to play out? Sam Harris: Yeah. Well, so let me address your discomfort here, because there are reasons why what I'm saying makes people uncomfortable and why there's a reputational cost, frankly, for saying these things. And, it's--yes, it's worth just specifying what a few of these are. There have become[?] many layers to this. But, I mean, one is, you just pointed out that there are real bigots in every society, right? There are real racists. There are real xenophobes. There are people who just hate Muslims as people because they hate all non-white immigrants as people. And, this is their attitude, politically and ethically. And so, if those people happen to also hate Muslims as they do, they may superficially sound like they're saying some of the same things I'm saying about Islam and its threat to the West. And then, there'll apparently be some kind of guilt by association because I seem to be echoing their sentiments. You have some crackpot racist preacher in Florida who decides to burn a Quran to prove that Islam isn't a religion of peace. And, I seem to be standing alongside such a person in my critique now. So, that's inconvenient. The thing to point out there is that bigotry and racism and xenophobia are bad things--for people psychologically and for all of us socially. And they're not what we want in an open society, and they're not the core of any sane ethics, etc. And, they're to be disavowed. So, and I say this--you know, again, there's not even a hint of--so there are many things that are heaped in here by people on the Left and by people who are worried about so-called Islamophobia, to confuse matters. So, there should be no logical implication of racism in anything I've said about Islam here. And, this should be very easy to see. One, you should recognize that Islam is not a race, right? It's a set of ideas. This idea is now prevalent in a hundred countries. There are at least 50 Muslim-majority countries, but Islam is the fastest-spreading religion on earth, and it's in at least 100 countries. Right? So, there's no race of Muslims. And I could become a Muslim now in five minutes just by converting. Right? So, this is totally orthogonal to the question of race. And you can see that from the other side, right? I just told you that some of my friends and some of the people I trust most on this issue are ex-Muslims. Right? So, people who are born in countries like Egypt, etc. So, if I were a racist against such people, well then I would be just as racist against them as any of the Muslims I'm apparently racist against, etc. So, racist just--whenever you hear an allegation of racism on this topic, you know that someone is just not interacting with the actual criticism. And deeper still, I'm not even--for the most part, I'm not talking about people. I'm talking about the power of ideas. I'm talking about ideas that can, to the degree to which they're believed, they have certain logical, behavioral implications. Right? [Time mark: 1:10:28] If you really believe that dying, and under certain circumstances, is the best thing that could possibly happen to you because it ushers in an eternity in paradise--not just for you but for the people you care about most in this world after they die--well then that has certain consequences insofar as you actually believe that. And, we see those consequences, and people talk about those consequences ad nauseam in jihadist circles, and we need only listen to what they say, right? And, you know, here you encounter a double standard here, which should be really perplexing if we're not so widespread as that we just cease to notice it: but in every other context, we take people at their word. Right? Again, to go back to Dylann Roof, right? Dylann Roof, the maniac racist who went in and killed, I think it was nine black churchgoers in Charleston. You ask him why he did what he did, and you read his online rantings, and there's no mystery as to why he did what he did. He hated black people. He was a White Supremacist, right? You say, 'Why'd you do that?' And he says, 'Well, I hate black people. I think they're polluting our society, and I'm a White Supremacist.' Right? 'I want a purely white society.' No one takes a step back at that moment and says, 'Well, does he really believe those things?' I mean, is that just a cover for what was really going on here? Is this really just a story of economics, at bottom? Was it lack of economic opportunity being expressed here, and this is just we have a veneer of racist ideology that is masking the deeper causality here? Or did he really believe that he hated black people and they were destroying his society and he wanted to make a political point to all of his fellow White Supremacists who he agrees with? No one doubts that racists, real racists, when they tell you they're racists, have the actual courage of their convictions and are speaking honestly about what they believe. Right? And even in a religious context, when you ask people, 'Why is it that you go to mass every Sunday?' Right? And, 'Why do you say the rosary? And, why do you teach your children what you teach them? And why do you force them to go to church when they don't want to? Etc., etc. Why do you do these things?' 'Well, I believe that Jesus is the Son of God. I believe that the Bible is a divinely inspired book.' No one says, 'Well, does she really believe those things? Couldn't this be just--again, just economics forcing its way through into her experience in a way that's just totally unacknowledged and unconscious, and that that's the level at which we have to engage this?' No. People believe--people rather often believe what they say they believe. Now, again, there could be some daylight between professions of belief and actual core cognitive commitments that we want to dignify as real beliefs. I'll grant you that. If 65% of Americans say they believe in Satan--which used to be the case; I don't know about recent polling on this issue--if that were true, so that's what they say. But when things go bump in the night or when their kids get a weird look in their eye, what percentage of people really believe that Satan may be at work? Well, it's going to be less than 65%. But it's not nothing. Some people really do believe in Satan. And, when you have a woman who drowns half her family in a bathtub because she thinks they're possessed by Satan, yes, in many cases, you can ascribe mental illness to these people because that's what it takes to really believe in Satan--really, really believe in Satan in most 21st century contexts. Now, often. But, it's not so in the Muslim community throughout the developing world. When you're talking about Jihadism, what does it take to believe that the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe, and that He is being honest about martyrdom as a real principle? Right? And that death is an illusion? What does it take to believe that? Not much, right? That is the culture. That is what you get on mother's knee, right? That is just straight religion with these slight turns of political and terrestrial implication of what should you fight for and how should you fight for it? And, what's a killing offense? 'Well, wait a minute, you're telling me that this woman burned the Quran? Can we get a mob together to beat this person to death on a sidewalk?' Sure, we can. We can do that in any Muslim community in almost any city on earth. Right? You can get a quorum of people who will do that. And it's not a mystery as to why. And there's absolutely nothing mysterious. I mean, if you believe that economics is the reason or ordinary political concerns are the reason for jihadist behavior, then you have to be absolutely mystified as to why someone would drop out of medical school to join ISIS, right? I mean, that has to be a confession of just stark mental illness. And then you scratch the surface on this person: You say, 'Oh, no, he is not mentally ill. In fact, he was the captain of a soccer team. He had a lot to live for. He's not this weird person who is on some spectrum of psychopathology who just couldn't get his life together and in a desperate moment booked a ticket to Syria. No, he--'. There are endless examples of high-functioning people--people who are getting their degree in engineering or architecture, people who had wives and children that they were leaving behind, or mothers with children who were going to marry the jihadist who they fell in love with online. Right? I mean, these are--you have to believe that ISIS was acting as a buglight for the world's psychopaths and mentally unstable: people who were just frankly crazy, who could be lured there, and other evil people who were going to do evil of the same sort regardless of the circumstance they found themselves in, right? Yes, they could go to Syria and do it to the Yazidis, but no, they were going to do it in the suburbs of Paris, and Munich, and Los Angeles anyway. Right? Because these are bad people who were going to do bad things anyway. None of that's true. There's not a scintilla of evidence that any of that is true. What there's abundant evidence for is that psychologically normal people can be led to believe these things, right? People who would have otherwise become, you know, Buddhist meditators who would put themselves on--I mean, this is--now to come back to me and my protestations of empathy, right? The reason why I feel like I have some sense of this is that in my 20s, I did something rather extreme. Right? I dropped out of Stanford and spent a tremendous amount of time studying meditation in Asia and on silent retreat. Right? And I spent, you know, something like a year and a half in silence in my 20s: and it was in increments of one week to three months long, and in a period of maybe four or five years. And that was on the wings of some very specific beliefs: That meditation was an incredibly powerful tool for exploring consciousness, and that there was real spiritual work to be done in doing that. And, that self-transcendence is a real possibility psychologically, which is the self, the ego, as we--all of us come to know it in our experience by default--is an illusion, right? You can transcend this illusion and feel much better in your own skin, moment-to-moment as a conscious being. I felt all of that was true, and based on certain experiences I had both in meditation with psychedelics and in my reading of the literature, and it just so happened that I was reading Eastern Philosophy, and Buddhism especially. But what would have happened if I had been reading the Quran? What would have happened if all of my spiritual aspirations had been channeled in the direction of Islam and Muhammad had been my example of the best possible life? [Time mark: 1:19:35] I could have lived--I could have done what John Walker Lindh did. I mean, John Walker Lindh was patient zero in the West for this specific basilisk. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, we went into Afghanistan. We find this white guy from Marin County in a hole being flooded with his fellow Taliban fighters, and we drag him out of there and try him and put him in prison. And, apparently, now he's out of prison. I think he got out in 2022, still believing in everything he believed to get him into that hole in the first place. He's an Islamist at minimum. He hasn't disavowed anything. He's a proto-jihadist. He's a white guy like me, grown up in relative privilege. And, he[?] just had his spiritual aspirations channeled in the direction of a sincere commitment to the root texts and foundational examples to be found within the tradition of Islam. Right? I know what that's like. I just know it under a different aegis[?] and by a different logic. I know what it's like to stay up all night in darkness, you know, sitting under a tree, focused on nothing but your core spiritual concerns--right?--in this life; how--letting go of everything else, any other ambition in life, but to break through to profundity. Right? And I know that in a Buddhist context, and in kind of a yoga context, and in a context that committed me to--it could have committed me to other beliefs that I don't happen to hold and things about which I'm agnostic because, again, I have enough of a grounding in science to be skeptical about things like rebirth and karma and all that stuff that you get in Buddhism. I'm not saying that Buddhism is a perfect temple of nationality. But what you don't get is a commitment to Jihad in any of those other traditions. And you can readily get that if you go deep with Islam. And, the fact that most Muslims, most of the time, haven't done that is a very good thing. But, what we need to engineer within the Muslim world--and we really can't engineer it; we just have to sort of wait for it to happen because we can't engineer it from outside--but, what we need to have happen in the Muslim world is a proper civil war of ideas, and I think several actual civil wars that marginalize Jihadism and Islamism as social phenomenon. And, what we need to do from outside of the Muslim world, as infidels who are on collision course with Jihadism and Islamism, is win wars against Jihadism, and political wars against Islamism. We have to--I mean, Hamas has to be destroyed, right? I mean, that's just a fact. There's no good outcome with Sinwar ambling out of the rubble saying, 'Look, I'm still here. We won. We've lived to fight another day, and we're going to do October 7th again and again. You just watch.' That is not the outcome--yeah. Russ Roberts: Which is, people have said. So, I think part of the--so go ahead, finish [?]-- Sam Harris: No, no. I mean, you let me rave for quite some time there. I think you know what I think on this issue, but it's--yeah, I mean, let's keep going. Ask me anything you want. |
| 1:23:24 | Russ Roberts: So, I think there are two things that are difficult about that viewpoint, and part of my discomfort is the liberal discomfort of--same liberal in the 19th century sense--the liberal discomfort of tolerance. But certainly, taking people at their word is part of that tolerance. And, I think you're right that we should respect what people say, especially when they act accordingly. That's the strangest, most disturbing part of this moment for me. They don't hide it. Hamas doesn't hide it. They did amend their charter. Their charter is not quite as filled with Jew-hatred as it was originally. I think it was amended in 2017. But certainly, their actions don't suggest they've amended it. They don't want to lose side-by-side with the Jewish state. So, what makes me uncomfortable, first, is the idea that: Yes, I don't like to think that human beings are that way; but I do think you have to take it seriously. But, I think the risk that many of us from a Western perspective feel--it's less common here, I think, in the Middle East generally--but for those of us who were marinated in an American culture and have moved here, I'm agnostic about how many Palestinians accept Hamas's charter/agenda. I'm agnostic about what polling shows. Polling shows that 60-to-70%, I think, if I got it right, still support October 7th. But, it's a quite large difference between the West Bank and Gaza, by the way. It's much higher in the West Bank, and it's lower in Gaza because they're living with the consequences of it. And, a number of people feel like you do: that, we got to get rid of this Sinwar guy, period, before we can prosper. It's not just that he's filled with Jew-hatred and acts on it. It's that he has no respect for his neighbors, his fellow citizens, who he has dominion over. He steals their food, steals their money, and uses it for his own projects rather than to make life better for their people. So, I like the idea that there are a lot of people in Gaza who would like to live a better life and who do not have Jihad at the center of their being. But, if I'm not careful--if I'm not careful--I might come to believe that that's not the case. And, that would justify what I think the worst enemies of Israel see as how they see Israel. We are not genocidal. We could have destroyed Gaza in a weekend. We could have killed all 2 million effortlessly. They have no defenses. We would be victimized by world opinion, but we're victimized anyway by a good chunk of it. And I say this over and over again--it's biased information; I understand that, listeners--but, I talk to my students every day, and they go into Gaza. Our army is filled with my students. And they go up north to Lebanon. And in their mind, they live by a code of protecting as many Gazan civilians as possible. They have no desire to kill innocent civilians. They have orders to kill people carrying guns, and they have orders to kill people who are in certain places where they've been told to leave, but they have no interest in gunning down innocent people. And, it would break them as human beings. And, I don't want my children, or my children's children, or my neighbor's children to be those people. And, my worry is, is that if we go to war against this idea of radical Islam--we, meaning Israel and the West--we will do things that will be very destructive of our humanity. Which, of course, all wars are. World War II, which most people would say the Nazis were worth defeating, or the Japanese military was worth defeating--we did horrible things in the name of that mission. And we did them at the time--I don't know if we'd still do them that way; I think we'd have trouble with it now, maybe--but, we did it effortlessly. We've talked about it before. Dropping the atomic bomb does terrible things, but we'd firebombed Tokyo before that and killed 100,000 people in a night. We did it to Dresden--meaning the West, the Allies. So, I think the challenge for the West is that we're between two very unpleasant choices. One is: We have a tolerance of the other that is admirable and beautiful. And it comes at a price. And the alternative is to be vigilant. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And, since it's hard to distinguish between the peaceful Muslim and the radical one, I think most Westerners are going to struggle to make the choices that you're suggesting we might think about taking. And I don't see how this is going to end particularly well. You know, I like to quote Hilaire Belloc every once in a while, his poem. I think it's called "Pacifism" ["The Pacifist"--Econlib Ed.]: Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, And, most of us in the West are pacifists. In Israel, we don't have a choice. When they come across the border and rape your women and kidnap your children, you fight. But, most of the West doesn't feel like it wants to fight; and they're not going to want to kill, deport, and shame people who are innocent. It bothers us, just like it bothers us to kill innocent Gazans here in Israel. So, how is this going to turn out well? How is that intellectual fight that you're talking about--how are we going to win this? A lot of people say, 'Oh, it's easy. We did the same thing with Nazism. You go in and you just de-nazify them. So, we just need to have Gaza run by people who don't have these horrible textbooks that talk about how great it is to kill Jews and how Israel is evil, and we'll de-radicalize them.' Well, that's not going to--I mean, that's just not a plausible strategy. To me, it might be effective. I just don't see it happening. So, where do we go from here? What do we do day-to-day? Besides tell the truth? Which I'm a big fan of, and you've convinced me that we should be more honest about some of the evil in the world while being careful to distinguish between the dark, ugly parts of all religions and the not-dark parts of religions. How do we go forward? Sam Harris: Yeah. Well, it's a hard question. There is, there's a needle that needs to be threaded here or a high wire that we are on that we don't want to fall off. And you've pointed to some of the directions where we might topple on this. I mean, we have to be aware of the fact that in responding to violence, we run the risk of brutalizing ourselves--which is to say being made brutal by our own response. And, to guard against that is an enormous priority for us ethically. I mean, we don't want to lose what we are right to defend in civilization, in the act of defending it. Right? There is a moral high ground. We are on it. We want to stay on it. Right? And, that can be hard to do. And I think--obviously when you look back at the details of how we fought World War II--which I think everyone acknowledges was a necessary war and we were on the right side of it--I don't think we could fight it that way again and probably shouldn't fight it that way. Again, it's more military history than I know to get into the details of parsing just what was effective and what wasn't there in terms of killing non-combatants in Dresden and Tokyo and elsewhere. But, one can imagine that much of it was not necessary and effective and that it was gratuitous and just sheerly grotesque and horrible from an ethical point of view, and that we wouldn't do it again in hindsight. Which is to say we were wrong to do it at the time. But, notwithstanding the fact that Nazi Germany was really--and Imperial Japan--were both their own versions of a kind of consummate evil that we were right to destroy. Right? And, people--all these people will say you can't bomb an idea. Well, you can pretty effectively bomb an idea. I mean, look, there's not much real Nazism and real suicidal devotion to the Emperor of Japan left. And, that's a good thing. And, force was the answer to that problem. And, the first thing to bracket this conversation with is an acknowledgement that pacifism, as much it seems to have real spiritual bonafides, is not an ethical position that is easy to defend. I mean, when Gandhi was asked--I mean Orwell wrote about this quite sneeringly--when Gandhi was asked what the Jews of Europe should do in the face of the Third Reich, he said that they should have walked willingly into the gas chambers so as to arouse the rest of the world--to arouse the conscience of the rest of the world. But that demands the follow-up question which is: What is the rest of the world to do with their aroused consciences if they are also pacifists? Right? [Time mark: 1:33:44] I mean, what pacifism is, is a willingness to let the thugs inherit the earth. Right? If you're willing to let your wife and children be raped and decapitated in front of your eyes and you're not going to lift a finger to protect them because you're a pacifist, you know, yes: maybe you have not got your hands dirty on one level, but you represent a kind of ethical singularity on another, and that's an event horizon no one should want to disappear through. It's a--geopolitically, politically, interpersonally--it's just--it's a kind of fanaticism and a delusion to think that it's an adequate response to the evils that we can confront in this world. And, it only worked for Gandhi in the Indian context, because he had a sufficiently civilized enemy in the British. Right? It would not have worked against the Nazis in India who were just going to kill everyone who lined up to be killed. So, and that's the kind of enemy we face. We just have to be aware of the asymmetries here, which are as real and as surprising as some kind of bizarre cartoon. I mean, it sounds like a cartoon. It sounds dishonest. It sounds like wartime propaganda for me to say that if the Palestinians just laid down their arms, there would be peace in the Middle East, whether in a one-state solution or a two-state solution. If the Palestinians were pacifists, this problem would be over. Right? That sounds like it's just too simple. But it's true. Right? Modulo a couple of right wing fanatics in Israel who can say some crazy things and they represent almost nobody, there would be peace in the Middle East. If the Jews laid down their arms, there would be a genocide. Right? That's not mere speculation. That is what Hamas has said. That's what Hezbollah has said. That's what the Islamic Republic of Iran has said. And, it's what Hamas and Hezbollah, to some degree, have attempted. Right? [Time mark: 1:36:05] It's just--and it's not just a modern species of political derangement. They have the Hadith to back them up, right? And they have the example of the Muhammad in various collisions with Jews to back them up. Right? I mean, it's not the Hadith of the Trees and Stones, which was in the original charter of Hamas-- Russ Roberts: You should explain what that is. Sam Harris: I mean, it's Islamic prophecy. When the Day of Judgment comes, the very earth will cry out against the Jews. The trees and the stones with their mouths, will cry out, 'There's a Jew behind me. Oh Muslim, there's a Jew behind me. Come kill him.' I mean, this is a fulfillment of Islamic eschatology, right?--the murder of the Jews by the triumphal Muslims at that moment in history. Now, it's happening too early. If you're going to be a member of ISIS or the Islamic state, the ultra hardcore, you're going to look at what Hamas is doing and say, 'You're doing it too early, guys. This is not the moment to be killing the Jews.' Right? 'This is the moment to form the caliphate. And, you got things out of order. You're not good enough scholars of all of this.' Right? And, 'If we could get our hands on you, we might want to cut your heads off as apostates.' So, there's schisms among Jihadists. Right? But the basic message is: No, there's no way of living--you can't live in Israel with the third-holiest site for Islam ruled by Jews and Jewish cops. Right? This is anathema, theologically. Right? [Time mark: 1:38:05] But this sounds like a cartoon. To point out these asymmetries sounds cartoonish. But they're all too real. So, Hamas is using its own civilian population as human shields. Now to diminishing effect, but it is in fact true that your students, your college students who are fighting this war are reluctant to kill innocent Palestinian non-combatants if they can possibly avoid it. This is not part of their aspiration, to be shooting through the bodies of children to get at Hamas. And, Hamas knows this. Cynically, they know that they're in a conflict with people whose ethical scruples are much more finely tuned than their own, who actually care about their own children--that is, not killing them--more than the Palestinian leadership cares about them. I'm talking about Palestinian children, to say nothing of the human shields they're using that are hostages. Now, just try to reverse this. Imagine those poor people on a kibbutz. Imagine the IDF had been there, the southern border with Gaza, on October 7th, and had decided in defending itself against Hamas at that moment, had decided to use women and children in those various kibbutzes, as human shields. Imagine there had been IDF soldiers at the Nova Music Festival deciding to use teenage revelers as human shields against Hamas. First of all, it is unthinkable that that decision would be made. I mean, that's just simply not the culture and psychology of anyone in Israel to do such a thing. I mean, that's a moral horror to even contemplate that they would do that. But, just imagine the effect of doing it. Imagine the minds of the Hamas fighters with their assault weapons, confronting IDF soldiers who are laying their barrels on the shoulders of children to fight back, Jewish children, as though that could possibly work. Hamas, whose purpose was to kill non-combatants--again, as I say, I said this in that podcast--this is a Monty Python sketch in which all the Jews die. This is absolutely absurd to think about, and the magnitude of its absurdity should alert us to just how uneven this moral landscape is. I mean, the place where the Jews are standing is worlds apart ethically, from where Hamas is standing and where any sympathizer with Hamas among the Palestinians, is standing. It's a completely different moral project. It's a completely different vision of the value of human life. Everything is upside down. And we have to admit this. These are not analogous cultures. And, again, this sounds like a cartoon. This sounds like wartime propaganda where I'm demonizing the other. It's total bullshit. I'm empathizing with the other. I understand what they think is true about the moral order of the universe. They think death is not real. And, many religious people think death is not real; but they think some very specific things around the act of dying and what needs to be done in life while alive, certainly to defend the one true faith against its attackers. And, this extends even to the lowly cartoonists. It's completely valid to risk your life for the privilege of killing a cartoonist who has defamed the Prophet, in Paris. This is a project that can be justified. Right? And that's a problem not just for the Jews and not just for Israel: it's a problem for the entire world. It's a problem for open societies. And, above all, moderate Muslims--liberal Muslims--by the hundreds of millions need to recognize this and join us. The most toxic thing here is for so-called moderate Muslims, Muslims who consider themselves to be quite far away from Hamas, to reflexively defend their co-religionists, even when they're acting like psychopaths. [Time mark: 1:42:47] And, this is what we have seen again and again in all of our conflict with the Muslim world. It's not just Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah. This is America in wherever it has had to deal with any Muslim population. In any of its wars or in any of its local skirmishes or anywhere, what you find are Muslims--other Muslims--just because they're co-religionists, no matter how sociopathic their behavior. That has to stop. That's the bright line that can't be crossed. We need Muslims who are committed to free and ethical and tolerant lives in open societies to totally disavow all the needless chaos and mayhem and suffering being created by jihadism and fanatical commitments to theocracy within their faith. |
| 1:43:45 | Russ Roberts: So, let me say two things against that perspective. A lot of people in the aftermath of 9/11 said that no Muslims in America spoke out against it. Many did. They weren't easy to find. Sam Harris: Some did. Some did. Russ Roberts: And, they weren't covered by--it's not like, how do you know when they--how many times do you have to disavow it? Do you have to march every Sunday and say, 'We disavow it'? Do you have to say--? Sam Harris: But speaking out--but there's two types of speaking out. You can speak out with lies. You can say 'This has nothing to do with Islam. This, this is just like the Christians murdering abortionists.' Right? Like, the people who spoke out against 9/11 and said, 'Well, this has got nothing to do with our faith,' and then immediately pivoted to, 'What about all the abortionists killed by Christians?' And, the last time that happened was, like, in 1986, right? That was a tissue of lies and obfuscations. And, when you drill down on that, it can often become pretty sinister. Again, coming back to an organization like the Council of American Islamic Relations, which is stealth Islamism. It had explicit ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of the people associated with it actually fund terrorism. I mean, you drill down on these organizations and you often find something quite sinister. And then, this goes back to the money that Qatar is lavishing on all of our institutions. Qatar shares the theology of the Muslim Brotherhood. They're committed. They might not be jihadists of the Al-Qaeda sort, but they are Islamists. They're committed to the same project, but by another means. They want the world to live under Sharia law. They want, at the end of the day, perhaps with a few niceties thrown in, they want to live in a world where homosexuality is a killing offense. It is a very different vision of life. And so, what you often have in an American context--and in a Western context, in the United Kingdom--you have people, people who have very prominent platforms: someone like Mehdi Hasan, the pseudo-journalist who has a background as an Islamist. You can find Mehdi Hasan talking about how non-Muslims live scarcely better than apes and pigs. I mean, he was a religious fanatic at one point. I think he's since disavowed it. But, he is someone who will just dance around the topic--just playing hide the ball with the Articles of Faith endlessly, and demonize anyone like me as a bigot and as an Islamophobe--anyone like me, who is actually drawing a straight line between actual doctrines and behavior we see in the world. He will just say, 'This is bigotry, this is racism.' Right? It's not. And, what you see in that bad faith dance is someone who is for reasons that might vary depending on who you're talking about, you're seeing someone who is playing a very different political game that's not honest. Right? It's not doing the thing that I'm saying is actually necessary, which is: 'Listen, we are Muslim, but we acknowledge that there are parts of the doctrine that no modern Muslim should take seriously.' And, that's a hard thing to do theologically-- Russ Roberts: But it's a hard thing to do practically too, because you're dealing with, again, people willing to use violence. Which makes it so much harder. Sam Harris: Yeah. Yeah, yah. That's why ex-Muslims are so brave. Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, to march on a Sunday in London in a parade called 'Not in My Name'--which hasn't happened--would be nice. And, I'm not sure why it doesn't happen. It could be because--meaning, 'October 7th did not happen in our name,' but it could be because they don't feel that way. Or it could be because afraid to come out and publicly and do that. And I understand it. And I also understand the theological part. I mean, there are many things, again, being a religious Jew, there are many things that ultra-Orthodox Jews believe, or more importantly do, that I think are not consistent with Judaism as I see it. But I'm not--I am loathe to--we got enough troubles. And, I think probably Muslims feel similarly, and I empathize with them, that it's hard to critique your fellow travelers because--it's hard. But, I want to say something else-- Sam Harris: I just want to add one thing, Russ, there, because I think it's important. I think it really is necessary for Jews and for Israel, politically, to kind of break the spell of the ultra-Orthodox and the religious--the fanatical religious--justification for the settlements, etc. Like, that part of Israeli politics is not at all helpful. You just get one person in at some periphery to power saying, talking about Amalek and the Biblical justification for, you know, turning Gaza into a parking lot, and it can seem--it can make it seem--like there now is some kind of ethical religious parity between the two sides. Like: They have their extremists; We have our extremists. Russ Roberts: I have no problem critiquing those viewpoints. I get it. And I would add, by the way, that I have no problem critiquing their actions: their unwillingness to serve in the Army, for example, right now. Some of it's political posturing, but some of it I think is a misapplication of Jewish theology. But, that's the subject for another time. |
| 1:50:26 | Russ Roberts: I want to add one more thing, though, that I think is important, and get your reaction, which is--again, it's a bleak picture you're painting. I want to give a slightly rosier, cheerier vision, which is: here in Israel the 7 million Jews live alongside 2 million Arab-Israeli citizens. There are another 2 million Arabs in Gaza and another 2 million-plus on the West Bank. But, there's 2 million Arabs, who are mostly Muslim--there's some are Christian, but mostly Muslim--who live within the borders Israel--of Old Israel, what's so-called, inside the Green Line. And, it's an uneasy relationship at times. And, in 2021, when Israel and Gaza had a--what is now could only be called a dust-up, after what we're seeing now--but many Israeli-Arabs within the borders rioted and showed solidarity with Gaza. We've seen none of that this time around. And, more than that, there are a number of Arabs who, I think--well, I'll say it this way: It's pretty clear to me that if they had to choose between living under Hamas, a theocratic thugocracy that hates Jews, and is it eager to exterminate them, versus living under the Zionist entity as they do now, they will choose the Zionist entity. And they're happy to do so. And they are--they're dispersed. Some of them are separate in towns that we don't go in, but many of them are my doctors and pharmacists and cab drivers. And, I encounter them here in the city, in the streets of Jerusalem, fairly often. And, we get along. And they don't have any of that Islamic--I don't think they have any of that Islamic--well, I don't know if they have some Islamism at their heart, but they don't have any jihad, at least publicly. And, I don't feel it in any way. So, maybe it's not as viral as you worry and that it could be different. Sam Harris: Well, it is as viral as I worry, but it does go in both directions. I mean, rationality is also viral. And, I mean, the basis for hope here really is that we're just talking about ideas, and people can change their minds. And, more important: every child comes into this world knowing nothing. Right? So, this could all be accomplished in a generation. You just teach the next generation that we have this totally pluralistic, non-sectarian wealth of human wisdom to learn from. And, there's--religious tribalism is insane. And we should all just take the best ideas and talk about them freely in the spirit of tolerance and creativity and reason. And, it would be accomplished 30 years from now. We would have none of these problems--right?--if we could effect that. But obviously we can't do that. But, the point is: people's minds can change. And, I think there are some levers, some pretty long levers, that we need to get our hands around and pull as hard as we can, to accomplish that. One is to make the secular, pluralistic open world, better and better. Right? It should be better and better to live in Tel Aviv. Right? It should be so obviously better, that it has to be unignorable. Like, the worst life in Tel Aviv has to be so much better than the best life in any of the Arab capitals under a theocracy, that that's the commercial you want to run. On the other side, we need to kill jihadists. Right? I mean, when someone raises their hand and says, 'I love death more than you love life,' we should oblige them. Right? We are at war with--and this is not just Israel. Again, there are situations that have nothing to do with the West. They have nothing to do with Jews. We're you're talking about Nigeria, with Boko Haram using children as suicide bombers, right? Boko Haram needs to be defeated. Right? These guys need to die. This is a zombie movie. This is not a normal conflict. We're talking about people kidnapping children and turning them into bombs. Right? And they have a religious justification for it. Right? And, we're talking about Westerners who sympathize with this. We need to win against jihadism. Every Muslim needs to be able to look at the jihadist project and understand that in the 21st Century, it is just synonymous with failure. It has to be just relentlessly proven how unsexy it is to be a jihadist. And what was so alarming about the Islamic State is for a moment there, it looked pretty sexy. Right? I mean, they would just roll into town and everyone would give way in front of them. Right? I mean, you could think you were basically going to be a spiritual James Bond if you got with the jihadist project, there, for a moment. And, to some significant degree, that's still true in various pockets of the Muslim world. It could seem like the best thing going. And it's going to seem credible if Sinwar stands on top of a pile of rubble and says, 'They didn't do anything to us.' Right? 'Our martyrs are in paradise and we're still standing.' You know? That's not going to be good. And, granted, it could be worse. It could be--there are more triumphal versions of that. But, I really think it should be clear to everyone that the most obnoxious jihadist projects have to be discredited through force. Right? And, Hamas is certainly one of those at the moment, in the aftermath of October 7th. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Sam Harris. Sam, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Sam Harris: Thank you, Russ. Great to talk to you. |
READER COMMENTS
Eric
Jul 29 2024 at 9:34pm
Keeping in mind that not all Muslims are Islamic Fundamentalists, I appreciate the clarity with which Sam Harris discusses the real danger of Islamic Fundamentalism. Yet I wonder if he even notices the many ironic contradictions and inconsistencies in the ideas he promotes as his supposed cultural remedy.
As an atheist, he repeatedly implied that there is safety in “secularism” as if only supernatural religious ideas are dangerous. However, if the 2,977 people who died on 9/11 were repeated every other day for a century, that would be less than 55 million dead. Meanwhile, an estimated 94 million to 168 million died in the 20th century due to atheistic Marxism/Communism.
Harris seems to think we will be better off (safer?) in a world where no one questions the idea that mankind is the unintended, accidental product of mindless evolutionary processes. But he showed no indication of realizing that if there is no Creator who endows humans with inalienable rights, there cannot be any inalienable humans rights. If the government is the highest authority, any rights granted by a state can also be removed by a state. Rights granted to one group may be denied to another. Consider what China does to minority groups and how they support finding and providing matching surgical transplants on demand to paying parties.
The moral equality in dignity and worth of all humans is built upon the non-materialist understanding that all human life bears the image of God. Darwin’s ideas are based biological inequality, which leads to the selection of some (not others) and “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. If Harris doesn’t like racism, does he understand that the atheism of Chinese rulers does not ensure the equality of those who are not Han Chinese?
Harris seemed to think that if we believe this is the only life we have, we will consider this life more precious to us. Even if this were true about our own life, that wouldn’t make it true for the lives of others, since human rights would not exist within merely material worldviews. Consider Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukraine, or his ideas about “needing to break eggs to make an omelette”. The omelette (*ideas* about future utopian society) can become more important than the lives of expendable humans.
Harris claimed that the approach of Gandhi worked because Britain was more “civilized” than Nazi Germany, but it was Nazi Germany that was seeking to “advance” beyond backward Britain. Harris also appealed for safety in “science”. However, science is amoral. It can never determine any direction on what one “ought” to do. It can only show how one can do what one wants. Nazi Germany was at least as advanced as Britain with regard to science and technology, if not more advanced. The real difference is that Britain retained more of the sense of older Judeo-Christian morality, the morality of western civilization that Gandhi could appeal to. Hitler was a strong fan of the newer ideas of Friedrich “God is dead” Nietzsche, who had contempt for old Judeo-Christian slave moralities and instead advanced the dangerous idea of the strong man with a will to power who is so advanced that he is no longer restrained by those weak herd mentalities.
Even though Harris repeatedly appealed to implicitly objective contrasts between Good and Evil, he didn’t give any indication of awareness that he was assuming and relying upon Judeo-Christian contributions to western civilization (e.g. that Gandhi appealed to) while remaining convinced we would all be better off if we cut off the theistic branch that he sits upon. The Communists had that idea too.
See also the EconTalk with atheist John Gray, who had awareness of this tendency of atheists to assume borrowed moral truths that atheism cannot justify.
Emil
Aug 6 2024 at 4:07pm
You should listen to some of the debates Harris has taken part in. I think you’ll find that he has adressed all your quibbles with his beliefs, satisfactorily in my opinion.
I’d also be happy to correspond with you on email. I share most of Harris views (not uncritcally), and i’m guessing that you don’t. I think we may both learn something in discussion.
Debate link: https://youtu.be/OSBaAT6WPmk?si=PTJWc94g_P8QQBl3
Eric
Aug 12 2024 at 3:04pm
Emil, thanks for the Harris debate link. However, even though Harris repeatedly exalts “reason” in this EconTalk episode, his debate rhetoric fails to overcome the inherent logical impossibility of his position. Science studies the material aspects of nature and provides propositions of fact, i.e. of what is. Harris is claiming we can draw out from these propositions about fact some practical conclusions about what we ought to do.
This EconTalk episode (“Sam Harris on Jew-Hatred…”) provides an ideal case to show that Harris is unable to derive true moral/ethical conclusions about how we ought to live (e.g. “Is it wrong to exterminate Jews?”) from the practice of science, which is inherently amoral in its nature.
When debater Harris tries to build “ought” upon the science of the brain biochemistry of “happiness” or on any “psychological fact ‘I have an impulse to do so and so’”, then that foundation is exposed as an epic failure as soon as we consider the self recorded ecstatic happiness of the October 7 murderers. Or consider his shift to something as equivocal as studying what brings about “the good life”. If “good” means “what I like or want”, that also fails since for some the final solution of a world without Jews fits that definition. Or if “good” is assumed to have some predefined meaning of moral goodness, then Harris is committing the error of begging the question by smuggling in an assumed moral standard that science can never provide.
When Harris talks or writes about “The Bright Line Between Good and Evil”, his choice of the definite article implies there is only one such defining distinction, but that is an unwarranted claim for an atheist. In an earlier EconTalk, atheist John Gray pointed out that there is no single atheist morality: (1:02:17) “…you find that there are many, many different varieties of atheist morality…” (e.g. with or without racism, with altruism or instead with egoism, liberals vs. most often anti-liberals, etc.).
When non-Muslim demonstrators side with Palestinians against Israel, Harris repeatedly depicts this as “moral confusion”, but the reality is that they are just applying a different moral “Line Between Good” (i.e. the weak “oppressed”, e.g. Palestinians) and “Evil” (i.e. the strong “oppressors”, e.g. Israel). While Harris addresses the dangerous religious ideology of jihadism with detailed clarity, he remains strangely incurious and vague about the secular source of this alternate secular ideology that he also rejects, but has no scientific basis for rejecting and cannot malign as being religious. Being clear about that would reveal that science is amoral and offers no protection against dangerous atheistic moralities that have killed many more people.
Shalom Freedman
Jul 30 2024 at 4:07am
Harris tells he uncomfortable truths about Islam so many in the West refuse to see.
Islam is the only major religion founded on the principle of violent conquest. It’s aim is world -domination. It’s focus is on the world-to-come. The martyrs in this world go to Paradise in the world-to-come They and their seventy closest family members are rewarded with Eternal Bliss.
This means they are not open to compromise, tolerance and totally reject the values of the free world
Harris sees that there is no way to compromise with Hamas Hizbollah Iran and other exemplars of Radical Islam. Only total military defeat will stop them.
Harris and Roberts discuss how their kind of close-minded thinking has spread throughout the world especially in university campuses and how it has fostered growing Anti-Semitism and isolation of Israel.
They do not however discuss the growth of Islamic populations in Western European societies and the threat to the freedom of those societies in future generations.
The tale told here is a frightening one for its ultimate threat is the end of human freedom.
Non-Islamic societies with oppressed Islamic minorities Russia and China are also central in this story of the global threat to Freedom. We live in an extremely difficult and dangerous time which will only get worse if the March of Evil is not confronted and stopped.
Russ Roberts
Jul 30 2024 at 4:30am
The radical Islam that Harris outlines here is indeed deeply disturbing and a threat to the West. There are other strands of Islam. I hope to interview Muslims who are taking a different path from the one that Harris focuses on here.
John H Wolfe
Jul 30 2024 at 8:17am
I look forward to that interview.
Mark
Jul 30 2024 at 12:29pm
Russ,
I look forward to the interview you describe. I think it would be an important counterbalance to an interview of this type. As a longtime listener (since 2007) I confess the long, uninterrupted soliloquies Harris engaged in, where he was effectively maligning the religious view of a billion people with little pushback, seemed out of character for this program. Harris claimed that the best way to learn about what a religious group believes in is to interview disaffected ex-members of that group. As a religious person who has interviewed a number of ex-members of my own faith, I know from direct experience that there’s no better way to arrive at a false sense of understanding about what I believe. I have also known people, whose only exposure to my faith is these disaffected ex-members, who confidently think they understand what I believe but don’t understand why what they say makes no sense. I’m sure as a religious Jew you’ve had similar experiences. This was my first clue that while Harris almost certainly believes everything he says about Islam, by his own admission he has relied upon the most distorted interpretation of that faith to form those views.
I consider you to be an excellent interviewer, and at times it seemed you were falling short of your usual standards during this one. However, as you allowed your guest to continue talking, he pivoted to Christianity and began giving the same kinds of criticisms he gave of Islam. It was then that your interview style displayed its wisdom. I’m not Muslim, and so can’t accurately judge his perceptions of that religion. But I am both a believing Christian and a PhD-trained biologist. Harris’s representation of myself and the many Christians like me who are also academically-trained scientists had no descriptive accuracy. I have met the tiny minority of people who do think this way, but I also understand the context that they are a tiny minority who in no way represent the vast majority of believing scientists.
That Harris chose to represent people like me this way made me question everything he said about Islam. I’d be very curious to listen to a discussion with someone who actually believes in Islam – especially someone who is an academic or scientist as well – and can accurately represent their perspective on the themes Harris discussed. My only concern is that a discussion that includes hostilities in the Levant won’t have enough scope to discuss anything else.
Eric
Aug 1 2024 at 9:19am
Like you, I am a Christian with a career in biological science. I agree that there are many points about which Harris is confused/misguided and his descriptions cannot be relied upon (e.g. see my comment above). Even so, I will offer one qualification on his behalf. You suggested “…he was effectively maligning the religious view of a billion people…”. Yet, he does actually make a distinction between Muslims who are Islamists (i.e. Islamic fundamentalists) and those moderate Muslims who are not. For example:
Sam Harris: Yeah, yah. What’s true here is that most Muslims in most places, most of the time, one had every reason to believe and certainly hope, have realized that they don’t want to live the way Jihadists and even Islamists want all Muslims to live.
…
In this regard, they’re the same as religious moderates in every other faith. Right? …
So, genuine liberals among Muslims and genuine free thinkers, and all of that is to be encouraged and to be celebrated, and it is why we don’t have a bigger problem than we have.
Mark
Aug 4 2024 at 5:30pm
Maybe? That’s a very charitable interpretation of his intent, and I’d like if it were true. My problem is that he went on at length without any of these qualifiers, clearly intending to implicate Islam as a whole. It felt explicitly like this was his intent to me. For example:
“And, the problem we have worldwide–we’ve had it for decades and we’ll have it for the rest of our lives and our children and their children will also have this problem–is that if you honestly look at the Quran and the Hadith and the Biography of the Prophet, and you look at it as a recipe for building a life, which is what every believing Muslim must do. And then you look at the most grotesque example of theocratic barbarism we witnessed in our lifetime–the Islamic state–and you ask yourself, what was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi getting wrong about Islam? What were all these people who were migrating to Syria and Iraq when the Caliphate seemed to be real about 10 years ago? I mean, people dropping out of medical school in London and going to support the Caliphate? What were they getting wrong, when they were taking sex slaves from the Yazidis by the thousands, and crucifying the men, and starving people on the slopes of a mountain there, and burning people alive for all manner of thought-crime? And cutting the hands off of thieves? What were they getting wrong about the religion?
That is a very difficult question to answer. And, honestly, there’s no great answer coming from Islam. You can split a few hairs there, but this was a totally plausible version of the faith.
Now, if you ask that question about any other faith–if you say, ‘Well, what are they getting wrong about Jainism here?’ ‘What are they getting wrong about Buddhism?’ ‘What are they getting wrong about the Anglican Communion here?’ Right? They’re obviously getting a lot wrong. No one can say that this is an honest way of connecting the dots of theology and practice in any of those other faiths.”
He did this in a section where he compared Islam to other faiths, and in particular Christianity, claiming these traits are unique to Islam. I don’t think that assessment is accurate on many levels.
Eric
Aug 7 2024 at 8:42pm
Mark: “My problem is that he went on at length without any of these qualifiers, clearly intending to implicate Islam as a whole.”
You are not wrong about his assessment of what the original written texts of Islam actually teach, e.g. “… if you honestly look at the Quran and the Hadith and the Biography of the Prophet, and you look at it as a recipe for building a life, …”, and if you understand abrogation (that newer passages can abrogate/supersede older passages), Harris is indeed saying that the Islamists (Islamic Fundamentalists) have a good case that they have a faithful interpretation of the jihad that Mohammed both taught and practiced.
To illustrate by comparison, “fundamentalism” in Christianity may seek to takes one back to core teachings and practice (the fundamentals) known and expressed by Jesus and his original apostles.
By contrast, “fundamentalism” in Islam can bring someone back to the desire to pick up and continue the fundamentals of the violent, military, world-conquering jihad that Mohammed was teaching and practicing at the time he was poisoned to death.
None of that contradicts the additional true fact that Harris also knows and recognizes that many Muslims are not Islamists and don’t live or practice Islam in this way. Their practice does not follow in the footsteps of Mohammed. As noted, Harris is glad that they don’t. There is no contradiction between these facts. Harris legitimately affirms both.
SK
Aug 5 2024 at 4:04pm
Russ:
Will be interesting to hear the views of other Muslims, but a question is this: Who is capturing the hearts and minds; the radical Islamists, ie the Muslim Brotherhood or more moderate voices whoever they may be ?
Brent Wheeler
Jul 31 2024 at 2:06am
A very useful discussion which clarified much for me. In thinking about how productive debate (let alone acceptable solutions) might be advanced, I was reminded strongly of Arnold Kling’s paper (and update) describing the nature and effects of “tribal domination” amongst people as they posit and seek to discuss issues.
Kling’s hypothesised model seems particularly apt and serves as something of a warning – if from another sphere – of the incredible difficulty of reconciling tribes and their domineering behaviour.
Not positive I realise, but I fear accurate.
Cindy
Jul 31 2024 at 10:36pm
Does Sam Harris have training on any of these topics?
I recall Harris debated Ezra Klein years ago, which was a gracious act by Klein, as Harris had published their email correspondence online, in a move Harris conceded to be a blunder. I think a lot of people just feel bad for Sam or worry about him.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve
Floccina
Aug 1 2024 at 4:04pm
I there another explanation of murderous acts in the name of Islam, let’s call is the bully theory? About 40 years ago I saw a guy bullying a homosexual. People contended, it was caused by Christianity but the guy doing the bullying was not at all religious. Could it be that he was bullying the homosexual because he thought that he could get away with it. It could be that the Islamist are mostly bullies using Islam as an excuse to do what they want to do anyway?
Roy
Aug 2 2024 at 11:24am
Isn’t there something to say for the oppression the residents of Gaza have endured for years? The pressure cooker exploded on Oct 7.
Robert Swan
Aug 2 2024 at 8:13pm
Eric,
You talk about “Judeo-Christian moralities” as a guiding star, if only everyone would hold to them. One point Sam Harris made which you may have missed is that these values have evolved a lot over the centuries.
The 12th century crusaders were applying Christian moralities with the sword. Christian moralities were also on show in the 16th century as the Conquistadors brought western civilisation to the heathens in the Americas and the Pacific. I’m less familiar with historical drift in the “Judeo” part, but I’m pretty sure the number of stonings has fallen away over time.
Christianity continues to evolve. The Presbyterian Church I was born into has morphed from its strongly Calvinist dogma to something far less strict (and rather wishy-washy). The broad flow, it seeems to me, has been in the direction of making Christianity gentler and more tolerant. What has driven this evolution? It can hardly be a rereading of the Gospels.
My view (and I think it’s Harris’s position too) is that the pressure has come from secular ethics. Everyone can see that murder is bad. On the other hand, failing to keep the Sabbath holy is not so obviously evil. Common sense wins through: the Presbyterians aren’t as worried today about “the Lord’s Day” as when I was a boy. I think you have it backwords: it is western civilisation that contributes to Judeo-Christian values. The church is not at all immune to the marketplace of ideas.
The problem with Islamism is that it’s still nearer the “crusader” phase of evolution. We can hope it evolves more quickly than Christianity did.
Carl
Aug 6 2024 at 7:23am
One point he made was that there really is no way to read Jesus’ teachings as advocating conquering and killing other people, and Christians who do that stuff really have to ignore Jesus’ teachings. Whereas Mohammed was actually a warlord, and anyone who honestly follows him as the example of a perfect life will be led to violence.
Robert Swan
Aug 6 2024 at 10:09pm
Very true, Carl, but how do Christians actually make their decisions? Is it by continually asking What would Jesus do? Or is it by consulting the Bible (with all the disagreements therein). Is it by seeking advice of the church/pastor? Is it by going with what people in their circle would approve of? I think it’s mostly the last, but a “yes” to all, depending on circumstances.
Muslims will have parallels for each of those influences, and quite likely follow them in similar proportions to Christians. It doesn’t really boil down to which holy figure makes the better role model.
I’m sure Islam *can* soften; the question is will it?
Eric
Aug 15 2024 at 6:10pm
Robert Swan: “My view (and I think it’s Harris’s position too) is that the pressure has come from secular ethics. Everyone can see that murder is bad.”
Actually, Harris’s major theme is that some people do not see that murder is bad. They see it as good and necessary.
Harris (emphasis added): “And, it only worked for Gandhi in the Indian context, because he had a sufficiently civilized enemy in the British.”
Harris repeatedly leans on the term “civilized” to distinguish the “good” society, but without mentioning how those cultures became “civilized”. Pre-Christian Romans did not “see that murder is bad.” It was not strange for a Roman to write his pregnant wife to keep the child if it is a boy, but “if it is a girl, throw it out” (i.e. infanticide by exposure). Christians would rescue and raise those children.
Atheist historian Tom Holland realized “In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.” Tom Holland: “I began to realize that actually, in almost every way, I am Christian.” Some other atheists and former atheists have also acknowledged their preference for cultures influenced by Christianity. Still other atheists acknowledge that ideas we now take for granted as the foundation for a civilized modern democracy (e.g. the equal dignity of all humans, human rights, equality before the law, and more) were developed and promoted by Christians based on Christian theology.
Harris is quite mistaken that secular science can get us there on its own. Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, disagrees with the affirmations of our Declaration of Independence regarding unalienable rights.
“According to the science of biology, people were not “created.” They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be “equal.”… Evolution is based on difference, not equality….
“Created equal” should therefore be translated into “evolved differently.”… Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a “Creator” who “endows” them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals…. Equally there are no such things as rights in biology.” — Yuval Harari
Relevant to this episode, between 1841 British culture (moved by Christians to abolish slavery and the slave trade) and 1941 WW2 German culture (executing a secular ethic of inequality, the denial of human rights, and the evolutionary quest for racial superiority), my guess is that you and Harris would regard the British culture as more civilized.
Greg
Aug 2 2024 at 9:31pm
As you are now Israeli, I would be interested in your take on John Oliver’s West Bank piece. How does one compare and contrast the very visceral, horrible, inexcusable, slow-burning international antisemitic sentiment with what could certainly be seen as a slow-burning, incremental expulsion of Arabs from their homes in occupied territories through the policies described?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY&t=791s – starts at the 13:00 mark.
I liked how you have at speak to trying to think into the Palestinian mode of thought. Are we perhaps labeling all of Palestine with the extremist views of the horrible minority, and punishing (see above: price-tag), instead of finding through programs those ready for the next chapter and incentivizing; which as an economist, you know is a better path to success?
(I loved your piece some time ago that was a discussion with the author of sic. “My Palestinian Brother” as it provided some historical perspectives.)
I have no skin in the game particularly, although Sam points out, that we all do if the future is sufficiently plotted, just an interested individual who listens to almost all of EconTalk & Making Sense (+ John Olver / Bill Maher et al).
Another interesting piece – interview with ex-Gaza hostage https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/chrt.fm/track/B6G873/traffic.megaphone.fm/ATL2287664386.mp3?updated=1722484651
Gregory McIsaac
Aug 3 2024 at 3:32pm
Sam Harris (around 12:00): “I mean, for every year after September 11th, 2001 in America–even the very next year, 2002, right?–Jews have been a greater target of hate crime than anyone else in American society. Including Muslims. Including African-Americans. I mean, there’s barely anyone in second place, right? It’s like a five x [5 times] difference in most years.”
Mr. Harris made a similar statement on his blog: “Jews are about 2 percent of the population, and they have always received around 50 percent of the hate crime.”
Crime statistics are notoriously flawed, incomplete and Mr. Harris did not provide citations for his claims. But this FBI document about hate crimes in 2021 seems to confirm some of Sam’s claims, along with some caveats. For that year, there were 1,746 victims of hate crimes classified as religiously based and 869 of the victims were reported in anti-Jewish crimes (Table 1A), or by my estimate 13 victims per 100,000 Jews assuming 6.6 million Jews in the USA (2% of 330 million).
But there was a much larger number of hate crimes based on race, and anti-Jewish crimes do not appear in that category. There were 8,005 victims of racially based hate crimes, and 3,906 were classified as anti-black (more than 4x the number of anti-Jewish hate crime victims), or roughly 8 victims per 100,000 Black people assuming a Black population of 48 million. This is less than the 13 per 100,000 hate crimes against Jews, but not 5x lower.
Back to the religious hate crime category: Of the 1,746 victims of anti-religious hate crimes, 190 were classified as anti-Islamic, or 5.4 victims per 100,000 Muslims, assuming 3.5 million Muslims in the US. Here we can say it is less than half the hate crimes against Jewish victims, but not one fifth.
Most surprising is the number of religious hate crimes against Sikhs: 195, which would appear to be 38 victims per 100,000 Sikhs, if there are 500,000 Sikhs in the US, as claimed by the Sikh Coalition. Fewer than 100,000 people identified as Sikh in the 2020 Census, and if this lower number is more accurate, the frequency of hate crimes against Sikhs would be closer to 200 victims per 100,000 Sikhs. However, because many Sikh men wear turbans, like many prominent Islamic leaders, they are sometimes mistakenly identified as Muslims. Some of the hate crimes against Sikhs may have been intended as hate crimes against Muslims. The combined reported hate crimes against Muslims and Sikhs (385) is 9.6 victims per 100,000 people in those populations (assuming 4 million).
The 2021 data indicate Jews suffered more hate crime per capita than other groups except for Sikhs, and while these differences among groups are disturbing and worth emphasizing, the differences among groups per capita were not nearly as large as Mr. Harris’ comments suggests. None of this is intended to diminish the seriousness or deplorability of hate or other crimes against Jews or any group of people. A crime of any kind is one crime too many.
Gregory McIsaac
Aug 3 2024 at 8:08pm
The link in the text to the FBI document with 2021 hate crime data does not appear to be functional. I think this link is fuctional Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021 — LE (fbi.gov)
Luke J
Aug 4 2024 at 3:54pm
Prior to October 7 was generally sympathetic to the Palestinians and cynical of Christian Zionism (I was raised Christian protestant; I am not Jewish). Since that day I find myself more accepting of Sam Harris’ comments on Islam.
Most of my friends and acquaintances who are leftists remain pro-Palestinian, and I find it remarkable and sad that many of them who called Trump “Hitler” in 2016 and Republicans “Nazis” are now themselves espousing Jew hatred. And they don’t find it hypocritical at all. That is why I find myself nodding in agreement with Sam Harris and Sam when they warn that Westernism is at stake.
David
Aug 10 2024 at 10:50am
But were they? When I critizr the actions of the American government, I am not anti-american. It seems appalingly trite to say but it is possible for people to critisize the actions and statements of the isreali government without espousong Jew Hatered.
Someone somewhere said that behind most acts of violence are acts of injustice. That is reason enough for introspection about how just the Isreali state has been to the palastinians.
Lawrence Proulx
Aug 5 2024 at 7:14am
The conversation, which I found worthwhile in its entirety, started off about antisemitism but quickly turned toward the nature of Islam. Nowhere was the issue of immigration discussed. Given the danger of Islamic radicalism, why have so many Jewish organizations opposed efforts in the US and European countries to restrict the immigration of Muslims? Am I wrong? Is it not true that some groups — I’m thinking mainly of the ADL — have vilified people who oppose immigration?
Walter B. Levis
Aug 8 2024 at 10:34pm
Sam Harris is employing the same logic used by Joe McCarthy and many others during the height of the Cold War. Determined anti-communists believed in the “power of ideas” and argued, as Harris does, that “the power of bad ideas is much bigger and more consequential and alarming than the power of bad people.” Moreover, they believed, as Harris asserts, that “you can pretty effectively bomb an idea.”
Harris advocates for bombing the “bad ideas” found in the Koran and urges us to read the book ourselves. After doing so, he presumes we would support a full-scale war against Islam. Similarly, here are a few lines from the “bad ideas” found in the Communist Manifesto:
… Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things…[and] they openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Perhaps Sam Harris endorses all of the American foreign policy decisions made in the name of fighting communism. But he shouldn’t. The Cold War was marred by mistakes, largely because separating ideas from the people who hold them is a gross oversimplification of reality. And this oversimplification results in something even worse: the dehumanization of us all.
Dave Chisholm
Aug 10 2024 at 11:04am
Sam Harris is missing the mark In my opiniom. The foundational texts of any religeon or idealogy are irrelevent. It doesn’t matter if it is Islam or Christianity, people with an agenda will mis-appropriate it in service of their perceived cause. The Nazi’s, and other Christian authoritarians, have used their faith to comit atrocities, and so have non-supernatual idealogies (as so many others have pointed out above).
The problem is utopian thinking itself. What all these cases have in common is the dream of a perfect problem free future. If you sell a perfect end then any means are justifiable.
It is the single most important aspect of diliberative democracy is that it is never done, never perfect so can not be used to hustofy inhumane actions.
So please Sam, stop maligning Islam as some special case. It is only special today by an accident of history. Instead focus on the dangers of utopian thinking and the scapegoating that seems to accompany it. Eg. The only thing standing between us and the promised land are the [insert scapegoat herr]”
Judith khan
Aug 10 2024 at 2:37pm
Thank you Sam Harris for making it so clear, the reality of the problem with fighting against hamas and Islamic wars.
The Quran and hadith
make it all so clear, and Muslims are not allowed to speak against or oppose other Muslims, per the Quran and Hadith. This is what is so hard or not known by non-Muslims to grasp, ot understand. Muslims will never ‘reform’ because it cannot, it is not allowed by the religion itself.
Killing Jews especially, all Jews, and other non believers is their religious duty.
thank you Sam Harris for speaking to this truth, especially in light of the protests in the US.
Jonathan Passey
Aug 12 2024 at 9:22am
I have been thinking a lot about this episode. Russ repeatedly expresses discomfort with Sam’s arguments. They also make me uncomfortable.
And I think it is because Sam is (seems to be?) using religion and religious beliefs/ideas (rather than behavior) as justification for the use of force.
And for people who are very religious and live within religious communities, this is threatening. It feels wrong because it is wrong. They can imagine a future in which their beliefs are deemed too irrational to be allowed. I already hear hints of this in public discourse. We criticize the way religious people are raising their children (plus they have so many more children… Children belong to the community/society… we can’t possibly allow their whole upbringing to be determined by their superstitious and irrational parents) We think that their political opinions should count for less because they are are irrational or don’t have proper incentives. (Climate change can’t possibly be taken seriously by a person who believes Jesus will come and magically fix everything. Or who believe that the earth and life on it are relatively minor and trivial part of an infinite existence)
Sam is as religious as Russ, perhaps more so. He believes with utter conviction that the self and free will do not exist and is an incredible evangelist for those ideas. He thinks that is how everybody should believe. He isn’t a pluralist. He is savagely critical and dismissive toward anyone who disagrees. And yet he admitted in this conversation in regard to Islam: there, but for the grace of [complete chance], go I. Based on his own doctrines neither his enlightenment nor the Jihadist’s depravity are anything but inevitable. And. if that is the case, how is he so confident in his righteousness?
Ant
Aug 13 2024 at 6:37pm
I’ve read and listened to nearly everything Harris has said over the last 16 years or so.
It’s great to see an engaging debate in the comments, but also frustrating to see the same old criticisms that he and overs have thoroughly rebutted over the years.
Sam is one of the very few people with an absolute commitment to intellectual honesty. He has gone to great lengths to ensure there are no vested interests impacting his ability speak honestly on any topic. He’s willing to following truth seeking, rational inquiry to uncomfortable places and I think too many people dismiss him because they feel uncomfortable.
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