Open letter to Sam Harris

Open letter to Sam Harris*

Dear Sam,

I’d have sent you this directly and personally rather than in the present form but, somehow, I haven’t figured out what so many others seem to know: how to address you by your e-mail account.

Having recently listened to several of your podcasts, I'd like to offer these thoughts in reply to some of your puzzlement.

First, there is the popularity among so many Americans of Donald Trump, a man you see as being easy to spot as a con-man and fraud and one doing immense harm to the country, including, not least, many of the very people who are his avowed supporers.

In this, Scott Adams really is your best guide. Adams is seeing things clearly and well just where you have particularly disabling blind-spots. He was especially correct in his understanding that, since, and largely due to, Trump’s election—whatever Trump himself intended about it—there have been some vital awakenings to long-obscured facts about the country’s ills on the part of many Americans. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, I do not believe that would have been the case.

The country is in a very bad way and Trump certainly isn’t the cause. At most, he’s a symptom. To suppose that it was very bad luck that the country has Trump for this wake-up call is to miss the point: there are much more serious problems and nothing less than an event like the election of a Donald Trump was going to get so many people to start paying better attention to certain realities.

How bad are things? They’re this bad: Trump at his worst will, in the longer-term, do the nation far less in harm and far more in good than Hillary Clinton, as I see it, would have done, had she been elected at her best—because Hillary Clinton’s earnestly trying to do her ideas of the right things is a disaster when it comes to domestic and foreign policy. But, too often, the impression that, unlike Trump, her heart is really in the right place is sheer deception mixed with self-deception. That is a truly terrible thing to have to recognize about the depth of this corrupted system. Barack Obama is fully part of that. Scott Adams declined to state it openly but the truth is that, if you only knew the truth about Barack Obama, you would not think of him as any sane person’s idea of a good steward. Adams understands that while you do not. Hillary Clinton would have been not merely everything bad that we had in Barack Obama, in her own peculiarly disgusting way, she’d go Obama’s worst one better and make a putrid system stink even more. Again, when Adams tried to offer the insight that, if we were able to see far enough inside them, there is nary a single president of the United States who we'd be happy to leave unimpeached and untried he wasn't really allowed the oppotunity to develop that point and I think that's alas a loss for the conversation.

Scott Adams’ experience in corporate life has, I guess, set him apart from your view of things, innoculated him to an overweening respect for authority and expertise which you sometimes exhibit.

I know that you and Scott Adams share many, many opinions on other important matters and this is to the great credit of both of you. I also suppose that there are some respects in which your clear-sightedness is exactly what Scott needs for his blind-spots. But I have no example of that in mind.

That brings me to your discussions and your differences with Jordan Peterson.

Again, like Adams, Peterson has grasped something essential which you’re missing. If you could borrow this insight from him you’d be much better in your other analyses.

As I understand it, what Peterson grasps that you (may) overlook is that, as evolved and of course still-evolving creatures, we simply do not have the luxury of jettisoning many scores of millions of years of evolutionary heritage. To suppose that we can now, in some sense and in certain special respects, start afresh, and make a ‘clean-break’ with our superstitious past misunderstands the depths of our superstitous present. Whatever the some of the most primitive human and pre-human societies had lacked in pagan naturalist rituals and proto-religious superstitions, it’s the more ritualistic and more religiously-inclined which survived them and produced our ancestry. That it might have easily happened otherwise is, again, beside the point: it didn’t happen otherwise and we are not necessarily either able or even best-advised to pretend that we can now just bundle all that past, all those blind-alleys and false-assumptions and dump them and walk away. These are in the most essential way now part of us and part of what we are and what we pass on.

Intelligence arising in matter happened uniquely, I believe, in organic matter, sprang up from living simple organisms, not inert matter. Further, I believe that this happened only a few times over eons and eons and only when a rare combination of environmental conditions were united. Thus, all of that constitutes our biological preconditions and presuppositions. It may be that this is something now irradicably inherent in cellular structure and material that, if artificially modified, will lose the properties which make living evolutionary life possible. Strange or not, this may include factors which are not naturally inherent but are now culturally inherent. Nature could and has done without them—but humans, it seems likely, never have and it is not clear that we ever might if nature were left alone to do its random work.

I suspect that much in Peterson’s views is somehow premised in such an understanding.

You’re both brilliant psycho-social analysts in your own ways. But Peterson has some insights which you need. And, of course, the converse is likely. But, again, I don’t have an example in mind.

All three of you—Scott Adams, Jordan Peterson and you—have many extremely important things to say and in so many instances you’re in agreement about them.

_______________________________

* the author, cognitive neuroscientist, philosopher and social critic who is editor of his own website, www.samharris.org

RE: Your Ezra Klein podcast post-mortem:

Had you posed significantly more questions to Klein, he'd simply have dodged them in the way he did throughout the talk. There isn't really any genuine good-faith going on on his part. Identity politics contains within it the profoundly and stubbornly-held view that, at bottom, a racist's bigotted view of the world is essentially correct: group-identities are "destiny" and he applies this logic no less to you than to others--"friend" or "foe." That should lead him to conclude that, basically, 'you are what you are and there's really no use in trying to argue or reason with you.'

Point two: I think it's a mistake for you to regard what you have termed "the far left" as not an important part of your audience or almost-as-good-as-beyond-your-reach. As I see it, on the contrary, your most important work should be in trying to reach and help these people see where they are making serious mistakes in their reasoning. That there shall be many among them you won't convince should not discourage you in that work. The plain fact is that you are far ahead of many people in your thinking. That's just the way it is. It might be a good idea to adjust your expectations for the vast majority. But you should not dismiss those who really are on the Left. Ezra Klein simply is not.

I do not regard Ezra Klein, for example, as a Leftist. Rather, he's essentially no different from any other closed-minded person; Left vs. Right are beside the point. He's very simply very anti-democratic and that is true of a very great many of the people who think the way he does. On that, he's indistinguishable from right-wing authoritariams. Indeed, I think you'd find it enlightening to review Bob Altemeyer's work on authoritarians and notice how much what he finds in profiles of them applies to Klein.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

http://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pdf

https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/