I’ve said that the Intellectual Dark Web’s favorite move is to naturalize or mythologize historically contingent power structures. How this works is pretty obvious in the case of an ignorant charlatan like Jordan Peterson. In the course of defending hierarchies, Peterson merrily bounces back and forth between calling himself an “evolutionary biologist” (a field he has no academic background in whatsoever) to elucidating on “the dragon of chaos.” Sam Harris, though, is a different beast requiring more serious investigation.
Harris first became a public figure with the release of his anti-theistic manifesto The End of Faith in 2004. Six years after declaring that religious belief is dangerously irrational and that politely pretending otherwise is “a luxury that we can no longer afford,” Harris wrote The Moral Landscape. The book dismissed any attempt to build a system of moral values on any foundation other than the empirical sciences as nonsense. The next year, he followed this up with a thin book titled Free Will in which he affirmed that:
Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
All in all, the worldview of Harris’ books might seem like a far cry from the one promoted by the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. Where Peterson is as emotionally intense as a tent revival preacher, Harris’ speech patterns are usually calm and measured. The impression he works hard to convey is that of a rational man inviting you to face harsh, and often unpleasant, realities.
He even manages to sound like that when he’s floating the idea that—while it would be a terrible shame, of course—America might have to commit genocide in the Middle East. Here’s the passage in The End of Faith in which he promotes this notion:
It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own.
Even if you’ve seen that passage before, it’s worth taking a moment to allow its full absurdity to register. Harris is both trying to sell his readers on the possible “need” to engage in a genocidal mass killing and preemptively demanding that no one think badly of him for advocating this. After all, he’s already said that such a strike would be “horrible,” “unconscionable,” even an “unthinkable crime.”
The phrase “virtue signaling” is wildly overused—including by Harris himself. Reactionaries often refer to any attempt to condemn bigotry as “virtue signaling.” But what Harris is doing at the end of that passage is virtue signaling in its purest form. He doesn’t want the genocidal content of the passage to be held against him. Instead, he wants to be given credit for having noisily signaled his virtue even as he promotes a “necessary” genocide that he, as a “good” person, naturally finds upsetting.
The endless heat generated by this paragraph has resulted from critics of Harris pointing out how horrifying his vision is while his supporters insistently claim that this moral condemnation is somehow unfair. I suppose it would be unfair to lambast Harris if in the preceding sentence he had written that he “would be absolutely hysterical, immoral and ludicrous, to seriously assert the following...” But he didn’t. And furthermore, Harris, who often presents himself as the sine qua non of rational thought, completely disregards the realities of international arms control as they existed when he wrote The End of Faith. When Harris published his book, the Bush administration was waging a global “war on terror” that had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives; a war that was predicated on the assertion that the United States was justified in taking aggressive preemptive action to prevent weapons of mass destruction from harming US national security. Of course, the only avowedly Islamic state with a nuclear weapon in 2004—and still today—was Pakistan, which had never engaged in a jihadist “dewey-eyed” first strike, even as tensions ratcheted up with India. Harris’ “hypothetical” scenario ran roughshod over what was happening in the real world and gave cerebral cover—and moral license—to some of the most dangerous policymakers in Washington. In addition to being morally appalling, Harris’ take was historically and politically illiterate.
This is also true of his method. In his subsequent convoluted rationalizations, Harris has referred to this passage as a “thought experiment.” It’s important to spell out why that’s wrong. According to my friend Ben Burgis, the author of Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left, a thought experiment generally refers to two things: first, an imaginary situation designed to test whether a certain definition of a concept captures what we really mean by it, and second, an imaginary situation in which we bring two moral principles into conflict in order to discover which one we care more about. The most famous thought experiment is the so-called “Trolley Problem,” which was originally formulated by the British philosopher Philippa Foot, though the version that most people are familiar with incorporates a change suggested by the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. Here’s Foot’s original example:
Edward is the driver of a trolley whose breaks have just failed. On the track ahead of him are five people; the banks are so steep that they are not able to get off the track in time. The track has a spur leading off to the right, and Edward can turn the trolley onto it. Unfortunately, there is one person on the right-hand track. Edward can turn the trolley, killing the one; or he can refrain from turning the trolley, killing the five.
Most of us think it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent people. The problem is that most of us also think that it’s wrong to knowingly let innocents die when we could have saved them. Some moral philosophers, like Immanuel Kant, think the second principle is more important than the first—that killing is worse than letting die. Other philosophers are ‘consequentialists,’ meaning that they believe morality is fundamentally about maximizing good consequences. The consequentialist approach to the Trolley Problem is to make whatever decision—in this case, turning the trolley to the right—that will result in the fewest deaths.
When they first hear Foot’s version of the Trolley Problem, the majority of people have a consequentialist reaction. (Or their eyes glaze over, as yours might be doing. Just give me a minute here. This is going to come up later.) The usual response is to argue that the morally “right” thing for Edward to do is to turn the trolley to the right, killing the one person to save the five. Nevertheless, Judith Jarvis Thomson amended the Trolley Problem in such a way that, when hearing her version, people have the opposite reaction. Here is Thomson’s version of the problem:
George is on a footbridge over the trolley tracks. He knows trolleys and he can see that the one approaching the bridge is out of control. On the track back of the bridge there are five people; the banks are so steep that they will not be able to get off the track in time. George knows that the only way to stop an out-of-control trolley is to drop a very heavy weight into its path. But the only available, sufficiently heavy weight is a fat man, also watching the trolley from the footbridge. George can shove the fat man onto the track in the path of the trolley, or he can refrain from doing this, letting the five die.
When presented with this version of the Trolley Problem, most people refuse to sacrifice the fat man’s life to save the five people. In other words, though on the face of it the moral calculation in both Trolley Problems is the same—in both versions of the story, one person dies to save five—the different responses that people give demonstrate that in real life, people distinguish between actively participating in a killing and letting someone die.
Whatever you think about the solutions to the Trolley Problems, you can see the point of the thought experiment. Two principles are being pitted against each other to test which one we think ‘outranks’ the other. But what’s the point of Harris’ “thought experiment” on Muslim genocide? What concept is it supposed to clarify? What is it supposed to show us about how we should think?
Remember, clarification is the only thing a ‘thought’ experiment can do. If you want to know how the world actually works, you need to do an experiment-experiment. Or a historical or sociological study. Or find some other way to go out into the world and check to see what’s true. Unless Harris wants to start claiming that his meditation practice has given him psychic powers, there’s just no way to gain empirical information from his armchair. (Unfortunately, my own meditation practice has yet to give me these powers, though not for lack of trying.)
I support Medicare for All. This goes right to the core of my politics and my values. Imagine that I made a Harris-style argument in favor of it by deploying a “thought experiment.”
Private insurance poses serious moral hazards and may in the long run undermine public health, despite the possible gains from private sector innovation. The danger of private insurance is such that—and this is horrible to contemplate—we may need to consider a government solution to healthcare. Now in some major respects this is unthinkable—however, it’s something that we need to examine no matter how upsetting.
Would framing my support for Medicare for All in this way make it somehow better than a straightforward argument that emerged from clearly stated premises about moral hazards and public outcomes? Would libertarians who opposed such government programs on principle be mollified by the rhetorical bones I was throwing them by talking about how horrible and unthinkable it was that we might maybe possibly need to institute this particular program? They wouldn’t, and, given their worldview, they shouldn’t. Any libertarian with half a brain would recognize that the important thing is the position I was taking, not how I was dressing it up.
Harris often claims that his remarks are taken out of context, but in this case, a fair reading of the context makes it very clear that Harris’ discussion of nuclear genocide is not a thought experiment in any meaningful sense. He’s describing something he thinks may actually happen. In fact, as he underlines in the sentences immediately following the ones quoted above, he believes that it is extremely likely that millions will be eradicated as the result of a nuclear explosion prosecuted by non-State terrorists.
All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.
Then there’s the larger historical context. The End of Faith was published about one year after George W. Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003. A major part of the pretext for war was the allegation that Iraq had “an active nuclear program” (along with various other “Weapons of Mass Destruction”) and that Saddam Hussein might share such “WMDs” with fundamentalist terrorists—in Harris’ words, “men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers.”
In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush declared that Iran was part of an “Axis of Evil” whose other members were Iraq and North Korea. Iran and the United States have a long and complicated history. In 1953, the United States helped overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected leader; thereafter, the country was ruled by the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a brutal dictator. Once the Iranians deposed the Shah in 1979 and replaced him with Ayatollah Khomeini, the United States imposed sanctions of various kinds that continue to this day. In 2006—2 years after the publication of The End of Faith—the US and its allies persuaded the UN Security Council to pass Resolutions 1696 and 1737. The former demanded that Iran cease its nuclear enrichment program and the latter imposed new and more punishing sanctions for noncompliance. For its part, Iran insisted that the only aim of its enrichment effort was to develop a civilian nuclear energy program. Nevertheless, the Bush administration and its allies refused to accept Iran’s arguments, partially because they, like Harris, believed that the “steady proliferation” of nuclear technology in “the Muslim world” would generate a “scenario in which much of the world’s population would be annihilated on account of religious ideas.”
It’s important to keep in mind that the Bush administration had rejected overtures from a reformist Iranian leadership headed by President Mohammad Khatami, which had not only condemned the 9/11 attacks but also offered Iranian assistance to the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan, assistance that was motivated primarily by Iran’s own geostrategic interests. Iran, like most countries, acts according to its geostrategic interests, and at the time it believed that it was wise to reach a détente with the United States. In other words, though they no doubt govern a repressive religious state, Iranian leaders—unlike their American counterparts—are not looking to remake, let alone destroy, the world. It is for this reason that Harris’ subtle conflation of the actions of an independent terrorist network like al-Qaeda with those of a nation-state like Iran is ludicrous. The most basic historical overview would have shown Harris that many revolutionary states, from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China to the Ayatollah’s Iran, have very quickly determined that their geopolitical decisions cannot be based on ideological fervor, but must rather be premised on the cold calculations of Realpolitik. This is simple stuff, and it is appalling and embarrassing that Harris’ “thought experiment” isn’t informed by any knowledge of historical facts.
In fact, if we’d listened to Harris we might very well have had a third war in the greater Middle East. Instead, under the Obama Administration (following an approach led by Brazil’s President Lula Da Silva), Iran and the G5+1 concluded a nuclear agreement (until the Trump Administration ripped it up due to its own belligerence and warmed-over neocon tendencies). Harris, unsurprisingly, has maintained a “mindful” silence on most of this.
But perhaps none of this is relevant. In his frequently updated “Response to Controversy” blog post, Harris has claimed that the warning he issued during the Bush era—when he said, remember, that nuclear war was “plausible,” that indeed if “the Muslim world” didn’t find a way to prevent it, it probably would happen sooner or later (“time is not on our side”)—doesn’t actually have anything to do with the real world.
Clearly, I was describing a case in which a hostile regime that is avowedly suicidal acquires long-range nuclear weaponry (i.e. they can hit distant targets like Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, etc.). Of course, not every Muslim regime would fit this description. For instance, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, but they have yet to develop long-range rockets, and there is every reason to believe that the people currently in control of these bombs are more pragmatic and less certain of paradise than the Taliban are. The same could be said of Iran, if it acquires nuclear weapons in the near term (though not, perhaps, from the perspective of Israel, for whom any Iranian bomb will pose an existential threat).
The contrast between the 24 episode-level hysterical bloodlust of the passage from The End of Faith and this mealy-mouthed revisionism is so stark that Harris’ attempt to say that this is “clearly” what he meant can be passed over with the contempt that it deserves. Notice, though, that even here, he’s trying to have it both ways. Is the Iranian government “avowedly suicidal” enough to initiate a nuclear exchange with Israel—or are they “more pragmatic and less certain of paradise” than that? (For some reason, he seems to think that Iran would be willing to annihilate itself by starting a war with Israel—a nuclear power—but would not be willing to do so by initiating strikes on “Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, etc.”) Keep in mind that the original passage was about an Islamist “regime” acquiring nuclear weapons. If this was a not-even-very-long-term danger in 2004 (though why say “time is not on our side”?) then which regime was he talking about? He mentions the Taliban, but it hadn’t held state power for 2 years by the time Harris wrote that passage, and when it did, its actions hardly resembled those of a cartoonish nation-state whose government lacked any sense of self-preservation. (In fact, as I’m writing this some factions of the Taliban are engaged in peace negotiations with the United States in Qatar.) But if Harris isn’t talking the Taliban, and if he isn’t talking about Pakistan, and he maybe even isn’t exactly talking about Iran, who exactly is he talking about? I’m pretty sure he wasn’t musing about a nuclear first strike coming from America’s long-term strategic partner Saudi Arabia. And if the Saudis too are struck off our list of possibilities, we’ve come pretty close to running out of candidates for the “Islamist regimes” that grow “dewey-eyed at the mere mention of paradise” discussed in The End of Faith.
Despite the impossibility of squaring his current rationalizations with the actual words he wrote in 2004, Harris complains in “Response to Controversy” that he’s being “defamed.”
Such defamation is made all the easier if one writes and speaks on controversial topics and with a philosopher’s penchant for describing the corner cases—the ticking time bomb, the perfect weapon, the magic wand, the mind-reading machine, etc.—in search of conceptual clarity...
Another whimsical place Harris’ “philosopher’s penchant for describing corner cases” has taken him is the possibility—only under “extreme circumstances,” of course—that it might be necessary to torture suspected terrorists. As might be expected, he takes no pleasure in advocating torture. It’s just another thing—like committing genocide by nuclear first strike—that the United States might have to do.
I am not alone in thinking that there are potential circumstances in which the use of torture would be ethically justifiable. The liberal Senator Charles Schumer has publicly stated that most US senators would support torture to find out the location of a ticking time bomb. Such scenarios have been widely criticized as unrealistic. But realism is not the point of these thought experiments.
Even “liberal” Chuck Schumer, the senator so progressive that he voted for the invasion of Iraq and whose extreme far-right views on Israel would not be out of place at an APAC convention, in fact they’re not as he’s a speaker at APAC regularly.
The important thing is that we shouldn’t think too hard about the realism of the ticking-time bomb scenario. Who, after all, is even talking about the real world? The United States has spent decades fighting pointless wars in the Middle East; Harris is just exercising his philosopher’s penchant for abstract thought. Meanwhile, the United States is actually doing the things Harris’ “thought experiments” just so happen to be about, like torturing suspected terrorists and going to war with the stated goal of stopping Islamic fundamentalists from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction. Somehow, his philosopher’s penchant for exploring corner cases never led him to lay out thought experiments in which Iraqis or Iranians or Afghanis or Palestinians were forced by extreme circumstances to fight off occupying powers by using extreme tactics. Such circumstances are far outside the reach of Harris’ imagination, empathy, or analysis.
Of course Harris has no critique of the invasion of Iraq, but only faults the Bush administration for being naive about the likelihood of sectarian conflict and violence in an occupied Iraq.
Even in 2015, 12 years into this horror show, the only criticisms Harris could muster of either the invasion or the neocons who oversaw it were that the war was a “risky” decision and that in retrospect Bush and his cronies were a bit too “idealistic” and impractical. Harris likes to portray himself as a purveyor of Cold Hard Truths about matters both metaphysical and historical, but when it comes to the crimes of the American Empire, he can never quite bring himself to believe that things can be as bad as critics claim. In fact, his certainty that the worst that can be said about American foreign policy is that “idealistic” intentions were poorly executed is a fundamental axiom of his belief system. Ironically, then, Harris, who presents himself as being above history, is, like all of us, completely a product of the context in which he was born, lives, and works—the US Empire.
Harris’ faith in Empire, his “philosopher’s penchant” for imaginative speculation (which always seems to correlate with actually existing war crimes), and his almost childlike lack of information came brutally to light in his discussion with noted academic and dissident Noam Chomsky. The conversation between Harris and Chomsky played out over private email. (For another classic of the Sam Harris Makes An Ass Of Himself Over Email And Publishes The Results For Some Reason subgenre, see his exchange with Ezra Klein.)
The discussion begins with Harris expressing interest in a public debate. Chomsky responds with relatively polite disinterest (although he doesn’t bother to disguise his distaste for Harris’ antics):
Perhaps I have some misconceptions about you. Most of what I’ve read of yours is material that has been sent to me about my alleged views, which is completely false. I don’t see any point in a public debate about misreadings. If there are things you’d like to explore privately, fine. But with sources.
In other words, look, if you want to ask me a few questions about my writings I guess we can do that, but I don’t have any particular interest in your half-assed critique of my life’s work.
Somehow, though, Harris seems to have taken this four-and-a-half-sentence-long email to be an open-ended invitation to have a long debate about morality, international relations, and philosophy. He starts his response email by encouraging Chomsky “to approach this exchange as if we were planning to publish it.” (Word.) He appends several pages from The End of Faith in which he criticizes Chomsky for suggesting that the US bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan was the sort of crime that could be morally compared to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Harris takes this to be an instance of “leftist unreason.” Much of his discussion is devoted to Chomsky’s belief that we should judge the actions of countries (and for that matter stateless terrorist networks) not by their stated intentions but by the predictable and predicted consequences of their actions. That Harris construes Chomsky’s underlying ethics in an almost comically uncharitable way, inferring for some reason that Chomsky doesn’t think that intentions can ever be morally relevant to anything, may ultimately be less interesting than the fact that he never gets around to answering the question with which Chomsky started his original discussion:
What would the reaction have been if the bin Laden network had blown up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the US and the facilities for replenishing them? We can imagine, though the comparison is unfair, the consequences are vastly more severe in Sudan. That aside, if the US or Israel or England were to be the target of such an atrocity, what would the reaction be? In this case we say, “Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake...”
When Chomsky pointed this out to Harris, the latter’s excuse was that he hadn’t read the discussion about Al-Shifa in the original source—Chomsky’s Radical Priorities.
I have not read Radical Priorities. I treated your short book, 9/11, as a self-contained statement on the topic. I do not think it was unethical or irresponsible of me to do so.
To put this in context, 9/11 was a 5 by 7-inch 128-page collection of essays and interviews in which Chomsky is interviewed about what he said in Radical Priorities. This is the equivalent of going to a major international debate about Marxism and only reading The Communist Manifesto as preparation. (See Chapter 4.) It’s that embarrassing.
When Chomsky eventually drags an answer out of Harris, things get pretty bad. Harris lays out a torturous scenario in which Al-Qaeda would have been justified in blowing up half of the pharamacuetical supplies in the United States:
Imagine that al-Qaeda is filled, not with God-intoxicated sociopaths intent upon creating a global caliphate, but genuine humanitarians. Based on their research, they believe that a deadly batch of vaccine has made it into the US pharmaceutical supply. They have communicated their concerns to the FDA but were rebuffed. Acting rashly, with the intention of saving millions of lives, they unleash a computer virus, targeted to impede the release of this deadly vaccine. As it turns out, they are right about the vaccine but wrong about the consequences of their meddling—and they wind up destroying half the pharmaceuticals in the US.
Chomsky pours well-deserved scorn on this implied defense of the bombing of Al-Shifa. The same Clinton Administration that bombed Al-Shifa spent 8 years enforcing sanctions on Iraq that killed half a million children. (Notoriously, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright told CBS’ Lesley Stahl that these deaths were “worth it.”)
And of course they knew that there would be major casualties. They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?
In response, Harris does what Harris does—he retreats to the claim that realism is irrelevant because he was just engaging in a “thought experiment.” As we’ve seen, he doesn’t use the phrase “thought experiment” in a way that would be recognized by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Descartes, or any other philosopher who constructed interesting arguments with thought experiments at their center. Instead, his working definition of the phrase seems to be some bullshit I wrote that should be immune from criticism.
More tellingly, though, is the fact that Harris just can’t bring himself to acknowledge that US intentions could be less than noble. If American bombs kill a lot of civilians, that must be because the country is acting for a good reason and, unfortunately, technology hasn’t produced more precise military instruments. That killing a lot of people in order to cause fear and chaos could be part of US strategy—“shock and awe”—is unthinkable. He even finds a way to use the example of a fairly low-tech American atrocity—the My Lai massacre in Vietnam—as evidence of Americans’ fundamental goodness.
[While this was] as bad as human beings are capable of behaving...what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us. The massacre at My Lai is remembered as a signature moment of shame for the American military. Even at the time, US soldiers were dumbstruck with horror by the behavior of their comrades. One helicopter pilot who arrived on the scene ordered his subordinates to use their machine guns against their own troops if they would not stop killing villagers.
Even putting aside that My Lai was hardly as rare an occurrence as the attention it got might lead you to believe—anyone with any doubt on this point should read the grisly transcripts of the Winter Soldier hearings organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War—this gloss on the massacre is astonishing. Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson lays out the historical distortions in his critique of Harris, “Being Mr Reasonable.”
First, the helicopter pilot Harris mentions was Hugh Thompson, Jr., and far from representing the American moral mainstream, Thompson was ostracized and condemned by his fellow soldiers for his intervention in the massacre. In fact, popular opinion was overwhelmingly on the side of William Calley, the lieutenant who had ordered the killings. There were pro-Calley sympathy marches across the country, and the White House was flooded with calls for his release. A song called “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley,” honoring the man who had ordered the execution of dozens of Vietnamese children, sold a million copies. Out of 26 soldiers initially charged with offenses related to the massacre, only Calley was convicted. But there was such a public outcry over the conviction that Richard Nixon reduced the sentence, and Calley ended up serving three years under house arrest, the only punishment handed out for a mass rape and the systematic murder of approximately 400 unarmed Vietnamese peasants.
In the original passage from The End of Faith in which he expresses outraged astonishment about Chomsky’s failure to comprehend American goodness, Harris says that “not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development.” He spends a fair amount of time in this passage—as is typical for Harris—congratulating himself on having the courage to formulate such a bold opinion. “It is time to admit,” Harris sputters, that this “is objectively true,” even though saying it is “radically impolitic.” This is ridiculous for two main reasons. First, Americans have been making this argument since they began displacing indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century. Second, hard-core moral relativists who believe that it’s never acceptable to criticize the injustices of another country or culture are a lot thinner on the ground in real life than they are in the writings of people like Harris, who are always congratulating themselves on their rejection of moral relativism. I imagine that if people at dinner parties react badly to Harris saying morality isn’t relative, that’s because they know the racist path on which he is treading. Keep in mind, again, that Harris wrote this during the Bush years, when the United States was waging multiple wars in the Middle East and justifying its actions, at least partially, on “humanitarian” grounds, claiming that the country was fighting wars of “liberation” to, for example, save Afghan women from the oppression they suffered in a morally undeveloped culture that forced them to wear burqas.
A clue about Harris’ actually controversial views comes a couple of sentences later, when he suggests that we express such differences by saying that “not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth.” This kind of wealth, he pontificates, tends to be a result of “political and economic stability, literacy” and “a modicum of economic equality.” All of this sounds suspiciously like a description of the distinction between the Global North and the Global South—and a justification for the domination of the former over the latter. When you put this story about “moral wealth” together with the views he expressed in his exchange with Chomsky, the racist and imperialist story becomes fairly obvious.
From 1823 to 1857, the moral philosopher John Stuart Mill had a day job as an employee of the East India Company, helping to administer the subcontinent from an office in London. His 1858 book On Liberty was a classic defense of human freedom...or at least, freedom for some humans. Mill, unlike Harris, was at least open about who didn’t quite count:
I hardly need say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings when they have reached the age of maturity. We aren’t speaking of children, or of young persons below the age that the law fixes as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who still need to be taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as not yet adult. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement may legitimately use any means that will attain an end that perhaps can’t be reached otherwise. Despotism is a legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians.
Here’s Sam Harris in 2014 discussing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, making a similar argument about the necessity of brutality:
Needless to say, in defending its territory as a Jewish state, the Israeli government and Israelis themselves have had to do terrible things.
Notice that Israel, like the United States, has to do these things; there is no moral question. In contrast, somehow Palestinians—or Iraqis or Iranians or Pakistanis or any Muslim-majority country—never have to do anything to Israelis or Americans. Instead, when Muslims “do terrible things,” they do so of their own free will—even though Harris doesn’t believe in free will—and as a pure result of “bad ideas” and lack of “moral wealth.” He goes on:
More civilians have been killed in Gaza in the last few weeks than militants. That’s not a surprise because Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Occupying it, fighting wars in it, is guaranteed to get women and children and other noncombatants killed. And there’s probably little question over the course of fighting multiple wars that the Israelis have done things that amount to war crimes. They have been brutalized by this process—that is, made brutal by it. But that is largely due to the character of their enemies...One of the most galling things for outside observers about the current war in Gaza is the disproportionate loss of life on the Palestinian side. This doesn’t make a lot of moral sense. Israel built bomb shelters to protect its citizens. The Palestinians built tunnels through which they could carry out terror attacks and kidnap Israelis.
As usual, Harris ignores the real world and has no sense of—or interest in —the complexity of Palestinian politics and society. Like Mill writing about India, Harris paints all Palestinians with as broad a brush as possible and laments the “backwards state” of the nation as a whole. In other words, he totally flattens Palestinian reality. But, of course, Harris’ complete ignorance doesn’t stop him from making sweeping moral judgments, as when he says that Palestinians don’t build shelters because they aren’t morally developed enough to want to do so. (Never mind the Gazan schools and shelters that were built by the United Nations and destroyed by Israel, or the fact that Israel is far richer and has access to far more sophisticated weapons than Hamas.) In Harris’ writings, Israel plays the role that Britain did in Mill: a good country forced to act brutally due to the moral immaturity of a barbaric people.
This is nothing more and nothing less than a mythologized, racist, and imperialist defense of an immoral hierarchy—in this case the domination of colonial powers over “morally impoverished” backwaters. The same penchant for defending hierarchy manifests itself in Harris’ attempt to naturalize disparities between white and black Americans.
A pretty obvious explanation of those disparities in income, education, imprisonment, and the rest goes like this:
The class structure of American capitalism has been racialized from the beginning of our society. The ancestors of the overwhelming majority of black Americans were initially brought to America as slaves. Then, for the vast majority of the time between Emancipation and the present, most of them lived under a system of explicit, legally enforced racial apartheid. As late as the early 1960s, in much of the country, black people in much of the United States who tried to vote in elections or go to traditionally white universities to which they’d been admitted due to the intervention of courts were subject to mob violence with the complicity of state authorities. Since then, attempts to undo the effects of all of this horrific history have mostly been pretty lackluster. Even the idea of reparations, for example, has been relegated to the political margins. Meanwhile, in areas from housing to policing to economic austerity, right-wing and neoliberal policies have done a lot to re-enforce the disparities. As such, their continued existence is pretty unsurprising.
Seems pretty straightforward, right?
Well, an alternative explanation is given in Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein’s 1994 book The Bell Curve. The larger thesis of the book is that economic inequality in general is largely attributable to genetically innate differences in IQ. In the most controversial chapter, Murray and Hernstein extend this thesis to economic inequality between the races. It says a lot about the dismal political environment of America in the 1990s that this was the part of the book in which Murray and Hernstein were perceived as having crossed the line. Their larger claims about poor and working-class people of all races didn’t cause nearly as much commotion. While in what follows I’ll talk about the debate as it’s played out, which has focused on the racial dimension, it’s worth underlining that The Bell Curve attempts to justify extreme inequality of all kinds as a result of natural forces. The book is in many respects the ultimate example of the intellectually limiting and morally damaging effects of naturalizing instead of historicizing.
Far from having some well-worked-out objection to the obvious explanation of disparate racial outcomes, Murray has dismissed this explanation in remarkably vapid ways. In a debate with James Flynn, a figure I’ll return to in a moment, Murray actually said that “most of the juice” had come out of environmental explanations “by the nineteen-seventies.” Take a beat and let the absurdity of that sink in. Murray is saying that a single decade after the “Whites Only” signs came out of the restaurant windows and black people started to be allowed to vote, structural racism stopped explaining much of anything.
Sam Harris decided that the obvious explanation is wrong and Murray is right about all of this—that just as he himself is an unfair victim of mischaracterization because of his “philosopher’s penchant” for exploring “corner cases,” Murray is an unfairly maligned researcher who is simply following the empirical evidence wherever it may lead.
Interestingly enough, Harris hasn’t always held this position. Or if he has, he hasn’t always been comfortable expressing it.
In early 2019, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution hit the shelves of bookstores. This was long enough after the heyday of New Atheism that it made its way pretty quickly to the discount shelves. The book is padded out with introductions by all three of the remaining horsemen, but the bulk of it is a transcript of a “conversation over cocktails” (if you’ve ever watched my shows, you can imagine my tone of voice as I read out that description—my eye-roll as well) between Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris in 2007. The first three are at least occasionally witty or insightful, but most of the conversation is exactly the festival of undeserved self-congratulation that you might imagine. Still, it’s an interesting time capsule. For example, there’s a passage in which Dawkins says that it would be “good” to have “someone from the political right” in their ranks so people wouldn’t think they had to agree with liberal politics to be an atheist. (In 2019, that’s pretty clearly Not A Problem.) There’s also a retroactively interesting moment when the four of them start discussing the idea that something could be true but too dangerous to put into print. They all agree that their critiques of religion don’t fall into this category, but they discuss other possible scenarios in which the issue might arise.
DAWKINS: [...] One should never do what some politically motivated critics often do, which is to say, ‘This is so politically obnoxious that it cannot be true.’
DENNETT: Oh, yes.
DAWKINS: Which is a different—
DENNETT: Which is a different thing entirely. No, no.
HITCHENS: It would be like discovering that you thought the bell curve on black and white intelligence was a correct interpretation of IQ. You could say, ‘Now what am I going to do?’ Fortunately, these questions don’t, in fact, present themselves that way.
Harris speaks next. Instead of challenging Hitchens on this point, he redirects the conversation to the comfortable terrain of Islam-bashing. However, in an infamous 2018 debate with Ezra Klein, Harris argues that the question about IQ does in fact present that way. He takes it for granted that the evidence is on Murray’s side, and that everyone who disagrees is just too afraid of being called a racist to admit the truth.
In a 1996 Vanity Fair piece mocking MENSA, Hitchens notes that a propensity for crackpot reactionary and even outright fascist ideas “keeps popping up like a jack-in-the-box in the turgid writings of the IQ-obsessed.” Even in the post-Iraq-invasion years when his liver and his moral core were both failing, Hitchens might well have had the sense to question the core premise that “intelligence” is measurable by IQ tests.
Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man is essential reading on this point. Gould has a lot of fun with the history of attempts to “scientifically” validate hierarchy, like the efforts of nineteenth-century “race scientist” Samuel Morton. Gould discusses the discrepancies between skull-measurements Morton produced in 1839 and 1849, and concludes that Morton was so desperate to believe in white superiority that he unconsciously manipulated his data.
In 2011, Nicholas Wade published an article in the New York Times entitled “Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim.” In it, Wade reports a new study from the University of Pennsylvania that purported to show that Gould’s analysis of Morton was itself an example of unconscious bias corrupting data. A lot of reasonably well-informed people probably think that was the end of it. The New York Times never returned to the subject of Wade’s article. (Wade would go on to publish an extremely sketchy 2014 book A Troubling Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, which was trashed even by some of the scientists whose research Wade cited in the book.) And as recently as March 2019, the always—“race science”—friendly Quillette published an article by Russell T Warne that recapped the Morton/Gould controversy without addressing the further developments Matthew Lau had summarized 2 years earlier in his excellent Jacobin article, “Remeasuring Stephen Jay Gould.”
[M]ore recent evidence suggests that the reanalysis of Morton’s skulls makes computational mistakes that favor Caucasians. And as several studies now show, the scientists did not ultimately challenge Gould’s main claim that the inconsistencies between Morton’s measurements in 1839 and 1849 indicate unconscious racial bias. Moreover, the differences between mean values for all races when corrected were, as Gould originally argued, so small as to be statistically insignificant.
This is all worth underlining, not because the Harrises and Murrays and Wades of the contemporary world literally believe that intelligence can be measured the way that Morton thought it could, but because it’s a revealing instance of a historical trend. Attempts to “scientifically” justify racial hierarchy always end up in the historical dumpster of empirically refuted garbage science.
Even when we take race out of the equation, the idea that intelligence is precisely measurable—either with calipers or with IQ tests—is dubious at best. “Intelligence” is a loose and poorly defined collection of abilities, ranging from mathematical acumen to business savvy, that don’t always go together. Anything as simple as an IQ test must arbitrarily select some of these skills. I agree with the contrarian intellectual Nassem Taleb, who has argued that IQ is basically a self-licking ice cream cone for the testing industry. At best, it measures a certain kind of bureaucratic competence or demonstrates the kind of thing that would show up in a clearer way in diagnoses of severe mental impairments. As a Marxist, my take is that such tests have historically been geared toward job skills relevant in a certain stage of the development of industrial capitalism. No doubt as industry-driven proprietary testing’s methodologies evolve it will come to reflect skill sets more closely attuned with the demands of the Silicon Valley economy.
Even when it comes to these narrow and arbitrarily selected subsets of “intelligence,” we shouldn’t accept the skull-measurer’s conclusions. Some useful pushback to the Murray/Hernstein/Harris picture has been provided by the geneticist Eric Turkheimer, who I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing. His research strongly suggests that the causal connection between poverty and IQ test scores runs in the other direction. Siddhartha Mukherjee summarizes this research in The Gene: An Intimate History:
[I]n the 1990s the psychologist Eric Turkheimer strongly validated this theory by demonstrating that genes play a rather minor role in determining IQ in severely impoverished circumstances. If you superpose poverty, hunger, and illness on a child, then these variables dominate the influence on IQ. Genes that control IQ only become significant if you remove these limitations.
This research is an elegant counterweight to the rebranded social Darwinism of The Bell Curve. Harris, of course, feels comfortable dismissing it, despite the fact that Turkheimer is a subject matter expert and Harris is not.
A key moment in the Harris/Klein debate is when he tells Klein that if environmental factors were driving things more than genetics, we would expect IQ differences to disappear when we look at the scores of middle-class black and white test-takers. Klein makes the obvious empirical point that middle-class African-Americans are much more likely to live in areas still affected by structural poverty, than their white counterparts.
The geneticist James Flynn also undermined biological determinism by demonstrating that IQ across populations has gone up as societies have grown more complex. Possible explanations of the effect have to do with education, nutrition, and the presence of more stimulating environments. This is called “the Flynn Effect” and it led to a priceless moment in the otherwise laborious Harris/Klein debate. Harris, no doubt relying on his meditative psychic powers, told Klein that he was not accurately representing Flynn’s views. Klein responded that he’d just spoken to Flynn the day before. Harris, without missing a beat, continued to insist that Klein (and by extension Flynn..?) was misrepresenting Flynn.
Klein repeatedly tried to point out that Murray falls into a long history of white commentators trying to find “scientific” cover for their racial attitudes. While he doesn’t entirely spell out this argument, Klein’s point seems reasonably clear: This is a conclusion that beneficiaries and defenders of such hierarchies are clearly motivated to convince themselves is true. Past versions of this idea look like obvious nonsense from our historical vantage point. All of that gives us at least some inductive reason to suspect that Murray and Hernstein will turn out to be more of the same—especially given the painfully obvious alternative explanation of the data spelled out above.
Rather than engaging with this argument, Harris self-righteously sputters that “the history is completely irrelevant.” As we’ll see when we look at Shapiro and Peterson in the coming chapters, this might as well be the official slogan of the IDW.