Reactions to the Sam Harris-Ezra Klein Debate


The much anticipated collision between Harris and Klein resolves little but brings needed clarity to the nature of their disagreement.

 
 
The Harris-Klein conversation was posted yesterday (audio + transcript here). Clocking in at over two hours, the duo give their best attempt to resolve their disagreements in real time. As I suspected in last week’s post-mortem, that didn’t happen. And in truth there is very little of note that wasn’t already fleshed out in the commentaries leading up to this debate. What we do hear is recapitulation with minor elaboration and a few moments of palpable frustration as the arguments refuse to land. So to the extent that one is still getting up to speed on this story, my previous post should do the trick.

What’s clear from the outset is that Harris’s ego is still perhaps the central problem blinding him to many of his own strong biases. This is literally how he frames the conversation from the get-go:
 

“I’m not saying that everyone who did the work, who listened to the podcast and read all the articles would take my side of it, but anyone who didn’t do the work thought that I was somehow the aggressor there and somehow, in particular, the fact that I was declining to do a podcast with you was held very much against me. That caused me to change my mind about this whole thing, because I realized this is not, I can’t be perceived as someone who won’t take on legitimate criticism of his views.”

 
Heaven forbid there is someone out there who thinks Harris backed down from a challenge. For someone so ostensibly committed to defending a person who subscribes to the intellectual inferiority of African Americans, Harris seems positively paranoid about any affront to his own intellectual standing. Imagine that. Better yet, imagine being the subject of Murrayism. Alas, this is more of a character quirk than substantive criticism of his ideas.

The reason this conversation never really made it off the ground is that their emphases are in different places and, where they overlap, are out of register with one another. Harris thinks Klein is underestimating the reputational hazards that attend participation in questions about the science of race and other precarious topics. Klein thinks Harris underappreciates the intricate social and historical context waiting around every corner of a conversation like the one he and Murray had. Harris, moreover, thinks these conversations run independently of one another; Klein thinks they’re more or less indissociable. And round and round they go.

Klein summarizes what he thinks is going on this way:
 

“Here is my view: I think you have a deep empathy for Charles Murray’s side of this conversation, because you see yourself in it. I don’t think you have as deep an empathy for the other side of this conversation. For the people being told once again that they are genetically and environmentally and at any rate immutably less intelligent and that our social policy should reflect that. I think part of the absence of that empathy is it doesn’t threaten you. I don’t think you see a threat to you in that, in the way you see a threat to you in what’s happened to Murray. In some cases, I’m not even quite sure you heard what Murray was saying on social policy either in The Bell Curve and a lot of his later work, or on the podcast. I think that led to a blind spot, and this is worth discussing.

I like your podcast. I think you have a big platform and a big audience. I think it’s bad for the world if Murray’s take on this gets recast here as political bravery, or impartial, or non-controversial. What I want to do here, it’s not really convince you that I’m right. I don’t think I’m going to do that. It’s not to convince you to like me, I don’t think I’m going to do that either, I get that.

What I want to convince you of is that there’s a side of this you should become more curious about. You should be doing shows with people like Ibram Kendi, who is the author of Stamped from the Beginning, which is a book on racist ideas in America which won the National Book Award a couple of years back. People who really study how race and these ideas interact with American life and policy.

I think the fact that we are two white guys talking about how growing up nonwhite in America affects your life and cognitive development is a problem here, just as it was a problem in the Murray conversation. And I want to persuade you that that some of the things that the so-called social justice warriors are worried about, are worth worrying about, and that the excesses of activists, while real and problematic, they’re not as a big deal as the things they’re really trying to fight and to draw attention to. Maybe I’ll take a breath there and let you in.”

 
This cuts right to the chase. The Murray conversation was problematic not merely for its presentation of the mainstream science, but for its neglect of the social and historical considerations with which that science intersects. This is hardly a pardonable oversight given the context. If their chosen topic had been about, say, genetic biomarkers for cancer, no one would have chastised them for not bringing up racism in America. The topic they discussed, however, was race-related differences in IQ. And the reason the additional context matters — and why its omission can’t be overlooked — is firstly because the underlying science has often been used to justify the status quo and advance contemptible political agendas, and secondly because the past and present inequality of American life has contributed to and is responsible for the very outcomes we observe today.

In his opening remarks above, Klein fully concedes that while certain strands of leftist activism are “problematic,” they pale in comparison to the societal ills conspicuously absent from the Murray-Harris podcast. He further traces this imbalance in perspective to Harris’s deep-seated concerns about being misrepresented and the smear tactics of which a number of his ideological adversaries frequently avail themselves. For these reasons, Klein argues, Harris sees in Murray a fellow traveler, even if he doesn’t sign onto the raft of social policies Murray recommends.

To his credit, Klein seems equally adept at navigating the scientific and social dimensions to these issues, while Harris seems none too interested in the latter. Indeed, he even claims at one point that “[t]he weight of American history is completely irrelevant [to the scientific discussion of race and IQ]”. Klein notes that it can’t possibly be irrelevant when the weight of the science points to environmental influences as accounting for measured differences in racial IQ. Here we have another ironic twist in that Harris, who often chides others for denying the tiniest genetic influence on IQ differences across groups, is arguing that the natural experiment of American history is totally disconnected from observable outcomes. Somehow I doubt anyone actively studying race-related questions, including Murray, would go this far.

Klein also came prepared, having spoken on the record with both James Flynn and Eric Turkheimer prior to doing the podcast, both of whom reiterated their scientific disagreements with Murray. True to form, Harris is quick to paint these disagreements as ‘PC culture’ run amok, claiming that these actually are political considerations taking the place of serious scientific criticism. This, of course, is the same Harris who accuses others of claiming to read minds. But when Harris makes the same implicit claim, he is apparently reasoning from a place of good faith.

Which brings us to the last substantive critique of Harris that I want to highlight, which Klein lays out nicely here:
 

“Here’s my criticism of you. I don’t think you realize that the identity politics software is operating in you all the time and, I think it’s strong.

When you look at literature on the conversation about race in America, you often see the discussion broken into racists and anti-racists. That’s something that you’ll read often in this debate. I think there’s something else, particularly lately, which you might call anti-anti-racism, which is folks who are fundamentally more concerned, or fundamentally primarily concerned, with the overreach of what you would call the anti-racists. And, actually that’s where I think you are.

One of the things that I hear in you is that, whenever something gets near the questions of political correctness — the canary and the coal mine for the way you yourself have been treated — you get very, very, very strident. They’re in bad faith. They’re not being able to speak rationally. They’re not being able to have a conversation that is actually going forward on a sound evidentiary basis. The thing that I don’t think that you’re self-reflective enough about — and I apologize, because I know that “I” statements are better than “you” statements, but I do want to push this idea at you for you to think about it — is that there are things that are threats to you. There are things that are threats to your tribe, to your future, to your career, and those threats are very salient.

You see what happens with Charles Murray, the kind of criticism he gets, and that sets off every alarm bell in your head. You bring him on the show and you’re like, “We’re going to fix this. I’m going to show that they can’t do this to you.” You look around and you say, “Ezra, you think we shouldn’t take away all efforts to redress racial inequality? But that’s a bias. You’re just being led around by your political opinions, where I am standing outside the debate acting rationally.”

To me that’s actually not what’s happening at all. I think you’re missing a lot, because you are very radically increasing the salience of things that threaten your identity, your tribe — which is not the craziest thing to do in the world, it’s not a terrible thing to do, we all do it — without admitting, or maybe even without realizing, that’s what you’re doing.

I think that there is a lot of discussion like this in the public sphere just generally at the moment. There are a lot of white commentators, of which I am also one, who look at what’s happening on some campuses, or look at what happens on Twitter mobs, or whatever, and they see a threat to them. The concern about political correctness goes way, way, way, way up. Then the ability to hear what the folks who are making the arguments actually say dissolves. The ability to hear what the so-called social justice warriors are actually worried about dissolves. I think that’s a really big blind spot here. I think it’s making it hard for you to see when people have a good faith disagreement with you, and I also think it’s making harder for you to see how to weight some of the different concerns that are operating in this conversation.”

 
I think we do in this conversation get a better sense of Harris’s understanding of ‘identity politics’. For him, it’s something that other people engage in to lend unjustified credence to their arguments and positions. While he describes the phenomenon as using one’s skin color or gender to gain undue leverage in debate, in practice he often uses the term as simple code for tribalism, or to describe people whose motives for engagement are suspect and unfounded.

At the same time, he sees himself as somehow immune to these impulses. He honestly sees himself as sitting above the fray, reasoning from a purely Rational™ standpoint. His position is borne of sound principles, the other side’s of ideology. His views are dispassionate, unbiased, and uncorrupted, while the opposition — which must include the many well respected scientists who’ve responded to Murray’s work over the years — is contaminated by identity politics and extrascientific agenda.

When Klein offers that confirmation bias and motivated reasoning might just be at work in Harris’s own approach to these conversations and, indeed, might explain why he is so quick to ascribe bad faith and malice to his detractors, including Klein, Harris demurs and doubles down, insisting that he’s “not thinking tribally.” Rather, the default explanation is that he and Murray have been unfairly maligned by dishonest parties who happen to share all the same concerns about the social implications that he does.

The fact is that anti-social justice (what Klein refers to as “anti- anti-racism”) is its own tribe, with its own tendencies toward cognitive fallacies and moral panics and all the rest. And Harris has always seemed more concerned with defending this particular tribe (read: his tribe) than using his intellectual capital and zeal to speak truth to the injustices and abuses of power that actualize social change movements. As Klein suggests more than once, this might be because Harris sees a part of himself in folks like Murray. He feels threatened by the march of social justice, anxious that he’ll be the next Murray-esque casualty in the crusade against destructive speech.

One of Klein’s gifts is his ability to step back and analyze ensuing debates and disagreements and set them in wider contexts, whether it be racial disadvantage in America fueled by discriminatory policies or the flaws in our own human psychology. The excerpts above demonstrate this well. Harris seems utterly incapable of — or unwilling to engage in — that level of panoramic depth or self-examination, preferring to beat the same dead horse relentlessly until it wakes up and apologizes for not seeing matters his way. I think Harris is so invested in his views that he can’t introspect enough to see or own up to his own cognitive and perceptual limitations.

I had hoped against all odds that Sam’s conversation with Ezra would be a turning point. I hoped Sam might at last acknowledge that he, like every one of us, is susceptible to his own set of tribalist tendencies. Instead, it became an exercise in navel-gazing, and yet another seized opportunity to rant against the identity politics he sees as operating in everyone but himself.

 

External link:  The Sam Harris debate

Further reading:

Image credit:  samharris.org

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