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:

• Sam Harris Still Can’t Take a Hint
• The Bell Curve isn’t about science, it’s about policy. And it’s wrong.
• I begin to sense a pattern
• Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought

Image credit:  samharris.org

 
 
One argument out there is that we on the left shouldn’t feel bad about restricting ourselves to left-leaning echo chambers and social bubbles because there is nothing to gain from engaging conservatives given the current state of play in American politics. Here I want to defend two reasons why this might be improvident, even dangerous, both intellectually and socially, in the long term. But before we get there, I need to issue two caveats.

(1) Some folks truly are a lost cause and aren’t worth the effort. As someone who has wrestled with climate politics for several years, I’ll be the first to recognize that dialogue is no panacea for consensus. There are people who will forever lie beyond the reach of reason, and we need to be honest about that. Depending on the arena of discourse we’re referring to, I peg this portion of the population at somewhere around 10-15%. Into this bucket we can put all of the alt-right sympathizers and Trumpist hardliners, the neo-Nazi types and people who think Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group, and the barely literate partisans who mainline Alex Jones-Limbaugh-Hannity-Barton-Beck-Palin-Bachmann. Clearly these are not the people on which we should be wasting our time. As such, what’s discussed here will not apply to those persons which partisanism and ignorance have rotted to the core.

(2) Another qualifier, one that I should have made more explicit in my previous post on this topic, is that collaborative engagement across party lines will, by function of one’s identity, be easier for some people and much more difficult for others. It’s one thing for cis white men to be willing to sit through and listen to abuse that isn’t actually aimed at them. It’s entirely another to expect minorities and marginalized communities to do the same when they are the rhetorical target. Attempts to educate, therefore, must always be accompanied by a recognition of the privilege that allows white men like me to do so in ways that put POC and other minority groups at risk.

Anyone engaging in politically charged debate, or calling for others to engage in such debate, should keep these prefatory remarks close at hand. Some percentage of our interactions will surely be destined for failure at the outset, and we should implicitly understand why less privileged groups may not be up to the task. By and large, I see bridging the communication gap as a project for the patient, for people who feel a sense of duty to stand up for the oppressed — white folks: this includes all of us — and for those generally at ease stepping into the trenches.
 

 
With those asterisks in mind, the first reason I want to put forward here is that echo chambers as ideologically homogeneous spaces become problematic when those inside them are unprepared for the arguments outside them. Part of what makes political discourse in this country so toxic is the lack of viewpoint diversity on the right. Far too many conservatives are stuck in a spin cycle of thinly veiled propaganda that preys on low information voters by telling them what they want to hear. And what they so often want to hear is how awful liberals are. Careful, fact-based analysis of the issues is fleeting or altogether absent, leaving them defenseless when confronted with informed debate. It’s why we can’t agree on basic issues like climate change and energy production.

There’s an asymmetry here in that this phenomenon isn’t mirrored on the left, at least not at the same scale; indeed, the American right is uniquely egregious when it comes to sharing fake news and falling for misinformation. For those on the left, mainstream media does a commendable job covering conservative commentary, despite some bad apples that traffic in distortion and mislead in other ways. All things considered, I suspect that most of us who follow politics closely have a good sense of what the right-wing media bubble is saying, especially those of us once oriented in that very bubble. But if we take the rather extreme step of cleansing conservatives from our social circles, we lose the opportunity to learn from our disagreement and clarify our differences.

We may possess the utmost confidence in our ability to dispatch the opposition’s arguments. Nevertheless, it can be worthwhile to perform our own ‘peer review’ and test our assumptions in the field. We may find less extreme versions of the click-worthy hot takes favored by social media, or updated arguments deployed in new contexts. Or we might not, but we can only come to this determination through dialogue. Engaging may indeed confirm our suspicions, or it might challenge our stereotypes and give us a clearer picture of the people we rail against on a daily basis.

That the right doesn’t reciprocate this is no excuse to follow their lead. Our ultimate goal, I take it, is better policy, especially for the excluded people whom the left champions. And that requires improving our political discourse, which in turn requires improving people’s rationality. But such fiercely ambitious aims will never come about by resorting to isolationism and pitting everyone not up to our ideological or intellectual standards as an enemy not worth our time and energy. Abandoning attempts to bridge the political divide chipping away at the fabric of American life will only drive us further apart, and make it harder to secure progressive policies.

Whatever ideological circles we run in, whether self-imposed or algorithmically imposed, it can be advantageous to step outside of our regularly scheduled programming and keep an ‘ear to the ground’ so to speak for when the arguments change — and they do change as the Overton window shifts — so that when those arguments arise organically, we are able to rebut them effectively. Again, what matters here isn’t intellectual lucre and personal edification but finding ways to urge social change.

A second, related reason to avoid scissoring out all news and perspectives from across the aisle is that it removes the possibility of discovering common ground where it was seemingly absent before. In recent years, for example, we’ve seen some incremental acquiescence on the part of climate contrarians, who once denied the planet was warming but who now tend to plant their flag beside the question of anthropogenic influence. (This is actually a recurring pattern in the history of science that’s been “fun” to observe in the arena of climate change, but I digress.) We can still prune away the dismissives — the roughly 10% of the population uninterested in meaningful dialogue — while working with people who have demonstrated a responsiveness to evidence, who are interested in genuine conversations, but who are nevertheless saddled with doubt.

If that estimate of malicious actors and bad-faith partisans is accurate, that leaves a lot of room for people who are susceptible to our arguments. A problem with only engaging those on ‘our side’ is that we risk missing out on connecting with people who are open to a change in conviction. There are countless people in this country who don’t follow politics and new developments in science closely if at all. That doesn’t mean they’re not curious about the facts. And if we condition ourselves to write off anyone who doesn’t pass our purity test, we miss out on reaching these individuals, many of whom make it to the polls.

In Sam Harris’ recent podcast with ex-white supremacist Christian Picciolini, Picciolini says that though the folks he speaks with diverge ideologically in many important respects, both sides of the table tend to agree that we want prosperous and healthy lives for ourselves and our families. This can serve as a useful starting point from which to build. We may not get climate deniers to concede that humans are reshaping the earth’s climate, but we can point out that the poorest countries around the world are the most vulnerable to a rapidly warming climate and that we shouldn’t wish the developing consequences on anyone. Empathy and compassion aren’t ‘liberal’ ideals but shared traits to which we can appeal when facts fail.

Interacting with nonsense for extended periods of time can no doubt take its toll, but permanently siloing ourselves in uniform spaces won’t be the best way forward if we actually want to drive positive change in our society. By cutting ourselves off from the opposition permanently, we’ll never know whether our assumptions are off base, whether the arguments have changed, whether our disagreements can be resolved or whether there is room for common ground that can shift policy in a better direction for all of us.

On the other hand, neither is an open door policy where we let absurd and offensive ideas circulate unchallenged. A healthy balance should be struck between querying the database, understanding the perspective of those we vehemently disagree with, disengaging where appropriate, and defending the values we cherish when they are put to the test.

Further reading:

• Dialogue is Hard. This Blueprint May Help.
• Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe on common values

 
 
Color me saddened, but not at all surprised, to see that Sam Harris is still the insufferable egoist he’s always been. By airing another of his long-winded email tantrums — this one directed at Ezra Klein, Vox’s editor-at-large — he’s let his childlike petulance further erode his status as a public intellectual, and, by doubling down on his defense of Charles Murray, resumed his rightward pull in the process. Whatever we might think of Murray’s science and Harris promoting it, one thing is certain: it takes an inflated sense of self-importance to think publicizing this joust like so much dirty laundry was a good idea.

We’ve been here before, of course. He pulled the same stunt with Greenwald and Chomsky, and my impression hasn’t changed. To wit: Harris sounds like an annoying mosquito that won’t stop buzzing around Klein. Harris, for whatever reason, walks away feeling sufficiently vindicated to post the exchange on his blog. Klein walks away relieved that the mosquito isn’t buzzing around him any longer.

And this time, Sam may have finally jumped the shark. Ezra Klein seems an unlikely target for scorn, but Harris’ feverish preoccupation with deplatforming and political correctness helped secure this fate. His endorsement of Murray’s scientifically dubious and morally damaging theses about race, his incessant huff-fests about social justice culture in academia, his chummy nature with Ben Shapiro, and his defense of free speech absolutists like Milo Yiannopoulos have earned Harris a fair number of alt-right fans, including Trump supporters. In fact his audience has grown so full of them that he’s had to address them on several podcasts. You don’t get here without dabbling in and expressing some patently right-wing rhetoric.

So how did we get here exactly? To bring latecomers up to speed, here’s the play by play in a nutshell. Sam Harris had political scientist Charles Murray on his podcast. After Vox published a piece responding to the science presented in Sam’s discussion with Murray, Harris went after Klein directly via email. Some half dozen missives later, a stalemate ensued, culminating in this week’s post-mortem of the whole affair by Klein.

Based on their correspondence, it’s clear Harris regards Klein as a bad-faith actor, when any honest reading of their exchange demonstrates the opposite. Harris’ self-absorbed nature and near-pathological inability to admit a wrong commits him to seeing malice and Tartuffery where mere professional disagreement exists. The message for any hapless soul daring to engage New Atheism’s beloved pansophist is clear: you either bask in the radiant wisdom of Sam’s polemic, or you’re an evil scheming liar — there is no middle ground.

It has to be mentioned that I know of no one else who can boast of such a consistent pattern of failed interactions with reasonable, highly intelligent, widely respected individuals. His back catalog of podcasts is an absolute junkheap of conversational carnage, and reflects poorly on his ability to communicate. That Harris has such an infamous record of public impasses and burned bridges with diverse voices and thinkers says more about him than it does about anyone with whom he’s sparred. At some point you have to admit that he’s the common denominator here, that he might be the problem and not everyone else.

There’s also his strange obsession with publishing private email exchanges. Not only does it smack of voyeurism and self-seeking drama indulgence, it’s also incredibly lame, unbecoming of a serious intellectual, and possibly exploitative since he did not receive Klein’s permission to do so. Once again, as so many times before, Harris utterly fails to impress.

On the other hand, Ezra Klein’s latest, in which he responds to these controversies, is unremittingly brilliant, and one of the best commentaries on the intersection of America and racism I’ve read in a long time. Few can write like Klein, and I’m grateful he has brought his talents to bear on these critical issues. His masterful expatiation deserves to be shared widely and read often, even if you’re new to this topic and have no interest in questions about the relationship between race and intelligence. This is the “care and context” missing in the discussion between Harris and Murray.

Klein points out that any discussion of race and IQ which fails to acknowledge America’s centuries-long struggle with racism, including slavery, segregation, and institutional violence, is bound to be woefully incomplete and ahistorical.
 

“Over hundreds of years, white Americans have oppressed black Americans — enslaved them, physically terrorized them, ripped their families apart, taken their wealth from them, denied their children decent educations, refused to let them buy homes in neighborhoods with good schools, locked them out of the most cognitively demanding and financially rewarding jobs, deprived them of the professional and social networks that power advancement.”

 
And that’s all before you get to the more nuanced conversations about heritability, the interaction between genes and environment, and whether it even makes sense to talk about ‘racial’ discrepancies — as opposed to geographic discrepancies — in intelligence or other DNA-quantifiable traits. Notably, Klein declines to weigh in on these more science-oriented questions. As he makes clear in his exchange with Harris, neither of them are geneticists, and intellectual discretion dictates we leave those matters for more capable hands. What he does feel compelled to relate are the environmental influences that have shaped the trajectory of African Americans in this country and the grievous ways in which racist actors have used and abused genetics to further oppression of marginalized groups.
 

“Here is my view: Research shows measurable consequences on IQ and a host of other outcomes from the kind of violence and discrimination America inflicted for centuries against African Americans. In a vicious cycle, the consequences of that violence have pushed forward the underlying attitudes that allow discriminatory policies to flourish and justify the racially unequal world we’ve built.

To put this simply: You cannot discuss this topic without discussing its toxic past and the way that shapes our present.

Whatever the future holds, the idea that America’s racial inequalities are driven by genetic differences between the races and not by anything we did, or have to undo, is not “forbidden knowledge” — it is perhaps the most common and influential perspective in American history. It is embedded in our founding documents, voiced by men with statues in their likeness, reflected in centuries of policymaking. It is an argument that has been used since the dawn of the country to justify the condition of its most oppressed citizens. If you’re going to discuss this topic, that’s a history you need to reckon with.”

 
For his part, Sam Harris seems more concerned about the politics within academia — attributing the controversy surrounding Murray’s research to “dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice” — than he is with the actual scientific value of what Murray is claiming. That’s why he classifies scientific arguments against Murray as evidence of academia discriminating against Murray, and not as genuine scientific arguments. Klein addresses Harris and Co.’s mushrooming concerns about “PC culture” head-on, and cuts them down to size.
 

“One problem with the political correctness debate, however, is we’re quick to demand a sense of proportion and prudence from college protesters even as we ignore related sins of partiality and overreaction in nationally recognized commentators. I often see pundits — Harris included — who seem far more afraid of “PC culture” than the problems PC culture is trying to address. On some level, that’s understandable. If you’re a white male pundit who trades in controversial opinions, PC culture probably does pose more of a threat to you than the inequalities it means to fight.

Perspective is key here, though. The victims of the toxic idea that Americans with dark skin are biologically destined to be, on average, intellectually inferior to Americans of light skin are not the white men who have promoted it but the black Americans who have endured it. And when your explorations of these debates don’t seem to understand that, you feed the worst fears of the PC culture you’re trying to calm.”

 
Klein nails it. Whatever misgivings we might have about leftist overreach must always be tempered by the more consequential concerns about the injustices and misuses of power those movements are working to face down. It’s precisely this unfeeling misappropriation of outrage that permeates Harris’ rhetorical repertoire. Over the course of several years, he has used his sizable platform not to advocate for equality and fair treatment for those less fortunate, but to rail against the activist left. Given the right’s inexorable slide into authoritarianism, idiocracy, and wealth and justice inequality, there is simply no excuse for framing social justice activism as the central problem of our time.

And it’s here that Klein truly outshines whatever presence Harris seems to think he occupies in this conversation. He flips the script, redirecting the spotlight away from Murray and his alleged bad rap and onto the history of racial injustice to which less privileged Americans owe their unequal outcomes. There’s a certain diplomatic eloquence on Klein’s part as he explains why there’s nothing remotely brave about two white men sitting around chatting about race-related differences in IQ when it is they who have been the principal beneficiaries of the racist policies on which those conversations have historically relied. His finishing stroke:
 

“In this country, given our history, discussions about race and IQ need more care and context than they get. As a starting point, rather than being framed around the bravery of the (white) participants for having a conversation that has done so much damage, they should grapple seriously with the costs of America’s most ancient justification for bigotry, and take seriously why so many are so skeptical that this time, finally, the racial pessimists are right when they have been so horribly wrong before.”

 
Perhaps what’s most regrettable about this whole saga is that it was unnecessary and avoidable. Both are clear thinkers who eschew facile arguments and care earnestly for truth and civil discourse. But thanks to his penchant for verbal conflict, Sam has now pitted Klein, a natural ally, as a sworn enemy, and his rabid fans are all too keen on treating Klein accordingly. The vitriolic mood with which Harris approached and characterized their exchange ensured this outcome, closing off any possibility of future collaboration. While I could have imagined some interesting cooperation on future projects where their values and political views overlap, that seems unlikely after this very public, very messy ordeal. I’m afraid I can’t see anything positive or productive coming from a podcast at this point either, especially since I’m unable to recall a single instance of Harris changing his tune with someone for whom he’s already summoned the pitchforks. And if his series of self-coronating tweets this week are any indication, it doesn’t look as though a merging of minds is in the forecast. It’s a shame, really, albeit predictable given Sam’s track record.

Post-Script: What’s This Debate About Anyway?

For those who may not be up to speed on the longrunning scientific debate around group variation in intelligence, my admittedly lay understanding, in obnoxiously paraphrased form and subject to heavy revision, is as follows:

As with most uniquely human traits, genetics and environment are both surely involved in determining intelligence. When it comes to measured differences in IQ among racial or ethnic groups, the “debate” (which has actually been settled for quite some time) is over which factor matters more, and how much we should emphasize each factor regardless of the size of its actual effect. The balance of evidence to date strongly suggests that the mean differences in IQ scores across human populations — and indeed, human variation in general — are best explained by environmental or cultural differences, not genes, even if we can’t slap precise percentages on these variables. This makes sense given that Homo sapiens as a whole has relatively low genetic diversity — four times lower, in fact, than our closest living relative the chimpanzee — leaving nongenetic factors to account for these observed differences.

Harris & Murray et al often put up a straw man by saying their detractors deny any genetic basis whatsoever for group differences in IQ, and that this denial stems from a left-leaning political agenda. In reality, intelligence researchers are open to the possibility of genetic explanations but see nothing persuasive in the evidence — which is to say there is no known genetic basis for any gap in any data set of IQ scores. Meanwhile, pretty much every well designed study that looks at environmental factors and intelligence finds something significant. Detractors of Murray & Co. argue that race is a biologically invalid concept, that the IQ gap between black and white Americans is predominantly environmental in origin, and that we shouldn’t be having this discussion anyway without properly contextualizing the sordid history of racism in human societies.

So the crux of the debate is over how significant a role DNA plays and the degree to which we should recognize the role of culture and socioeconomic circumstance in shaping both group IQ differences/other outcomes and the genetic patterns themselves.

Obviously, there is much more to say on the subjects of race and IQ, so I’ve assembled below a loosely chronological compilation of resources that should help prepare those who wish to follow along the next time this heated topic inevitably arises.

External link: Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science

Further reading:

• Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ
• No Voice at VOX: Sense and Nonsense about Discussing IQ and Race (counterpoint)
• There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes
• How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
• How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics
• Denying Genetics Isn’t Shutting Down Racism, It’s Fueling It (counterpoint)
• Sam Harris responds to Ezra
• Race, Genetics and a Controversy
• The Fault in Our DNA: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ and ‘Inheritance’
• Letters: “A Troublesome Inheritance”
• A Troubling Tome
• The myth of race: Why are we divided by race when there is no such thing?
• 11 ways race isn’t real
• Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
• Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century
• The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea
• Solving the riddle of race (pdf)

Feature image credit:  Javier Zarracina/Vox

 
 
A recent episode of the Sam Harris podcast featured Joe Romm of ThinkProgress. Overall it was an excellent episode that over the course of two hours unpacks the scientific case for climate change like only Romm can.

We move from the obligatory — how we know humans are responsible — to how we course-correct — what I refer to as the “hard problem” of carbon mitigation. Romm importantly emphasizes that because we are to blame, we thereby hold the keys to the kingdom so to speak in terms of also being the solution. After all, the knowledge that our activities are behind the climate crisis entails the insight that scaling back or modifying those specific activities will reverse the damage already done. The ‘climate change is natural’ camp have no such insight on offer.

Speaking of uninformed palaver, he also takes on some of the common misconceptions and arguments parroted by think tanks and the uninitiated legions who spread them — with a much deserved shout-out to the folks at Skeptical Science who patiently and thoroughly correct the record for the rest of us. Finally, he covers the historical ground surrounding this debate and why it’s existed largely outside the scientific sphere.

How Much Is Too Much?

One point Sam raises that could have benefited from a more comprehensive response is the popular notion that ‘the planet has only increased in temperature by a few degrees, and hence is that really cause for concern’? The misconception here is that a few degrees constitutes a “small change in temperature.” It does not.

This intuition likely draws from our local conception of temperature. In the city or town where you live, it may vary by 20 degrees or more in a single day. What does this tell us about climate change? Not very much in fact. When we talk about climate change, we’re not talking about daily variation in a single spot on the globe, but about the average temperature trends of the globe as a whole. As the mean temperature of the planet moves steadily in one consistent direction, meaningful changes to the environment begin to occur in ways that just looking at a day-night cycle in Vancouver would miss out on.

So how much global temperature change matters? To answer this question, we need to know something about how climate has changed in the past, otherwise known as paleoclimatology. The first thing we learn from looking at historical variation is that it takes a pretty strong influence to tip the earth’s thermostat in either direction. Outside of major events like ice ages and sustained bursts of volcanic activity, the planet has tended to stay within a fairly tolerable range. For the last 7,000 years or so, sea levels have stabilized, and global temperatures haven’t moved more than plus or minus half a degree Celsius — up until recently. It’s probably not an accident that human civilization as we know it developed during this interval.

Even in the case of episodic events it can take a relatively long time for sizable changes in global temperature to manifest. Let’s take ice ages, the records of which leave their mark on proxies like ice cores and oxygen isotope data. A full ice age transition from a glacial maximum to the subsequent interglacial will typically undergo a total change of around 4-6 degrees C, and play out over the course of 5,000 years or more. Contrast that with our instrumental records, which report a gain of over 1 degree (1.1° Celsius or 2.0° Fahrenheit) in a single century, with two-thirds of that increase occurring only since 1975. This equates to roughly ten times the background rate of ice age-recovery warming. Small changes in global temperature matter, as does the rate at which they unfold.

Another high-stakes event, occurring 56 million years ago and known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), unleashed a total warming of between 5-8 degrees C, or as much as 16 degrees F. The prodigious release of carbon, and the associated rapid rise in temperature that resulted, transpired over the course of at least 8,000 years, or 15 times slower than the current rate of carbon release from anthropogenic outputs. A more recent study by Gutjahr et al 2017 corroborates these findings with ocean sediments, showing that a rate “of up to 0.58 petagrams of carbon [were] released each year over 50,000 years. About 10 petagrams of carbon are currently released every year from fossil fuel emissions.”

While the underlying causes of this unique period in climate history are still being sorted out (the latest evidence points to an uptick in volcanism), we can look at the effects of those causes in terms of the climate and planetary ecology and habitability. The PETM carbon perturbation led to massive ocean acidification that resulted in the largest deep-sea extinction event in the last 93 million years, killing off approximately 35-50% of all benthic (bottom-feeding) species. It took more than 200,000 years for the earth’s systems to recover, including 100,000 years for the oceans to rebalance.

We’re already seeing measurable impacts to ocean chemistry and marine biology from anthropogenic activities over the last few hundred years. All of the carbon the oceans have absorbed since Industrial times has reduced the ocean’s pH by 30%, creating grave concerns for marine life across the board, much of which rely on pH stability for their acid-soluble carbonate shells and skeletons.

Another crucial reason small shifts in global temperature are cause for alarm relates to the dynamics of ice sheets and their built-in implications for sea level rise. An increase in average terrestrial temperature creates a shift in the boundary between ice and land. Indeed, the observed change of “just” 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880 has already yielded costly ramifications in terms of ice sheet integrity and global sea level rise. The unprecedented melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, together with the thermal expansion of seawater, has raised sea level by a foot since the late 1800s.

The latest IPCC report projects another 1.6 ft (0.5 m)-3.2 ft (1 m) will come by the end of this century. Again, our intuition tends to balk at these numbers, to write them off as too small to warrant concern. Yet given that globally more than 150 million people live within that upper bound projection of sea level, this should be immediate cause for concern.

What’s more, these figures do not account for the possibility that tipping points are reached before we can scale back our emissions habit. A full-blown collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet alone would add another 10-13 ft (3-4 m). If Greenland and Antarctic losses begin to accelerate, we could see more significant rises still. In total, the Greenland ice sheet contains between 20 ft and 23 ft (6 m) of sea level rise, while the elephantine Antarctic ice sheet, if melted in its entirety, would raise sea level anywhere from 200 ft (61 m) to 240 ft (73 m). At the planet’s current population size, economic dangers and civil conflicts would emerge long before we approached these figures.

Thus what sounds trivial according to our intuition is actually, empirically speaking, quite consequential. Extrapolating seemingly minuscule changes in phenomena like CO2 concentration, mean temperature, and sea level rise to a global scale produces a constellation of near- and longer term concerns with the potential to disrupt the kind of society to which we’ve been accustomed these last few hundred years. Especially if business as usual emissions continue unimpeded, droughts and wildfires, supercharged hurricanes, increased flooding, sabotaged food chains and the extinction of keystone species, and a stalled polar jet stream — all acute indicators of a hastily warming planet — will serve as enduring reminders of how far we have pushed climate parameters outside the range for which much of global civilization is adapted.

Intuition is overrated. We know the degree to which our planet has changed, we know the time scales associated with changes of the past and the present, and we know how the planet has responded to similar changes in the past. All else equal, movement of one-degree Celsius is something we should sit down and talk about, as is a foot of sea level rise. When those changes occur at a faster clip than can be reconciled to historical data, with more expected in the future, it’s time to act.

Honing Our Language

Switching to an entirely different discussion in the podcast, Romm says at one point that he avoids using certain terms like ‘theory’ and ‘consensus,’ presumably in conversation with laypersons, because these terms have conventional meanings out of sync with their scientific meanings.

Regular readers of mine can probably guess how I feel about this, but here’s the thing — we shouldn’t apologize for using the language of science to communicate basic facts about reality. That far too much of our electorate is oblivious to the ways in which colloquial definitions in scientific parlance don’t always map to the formal definitions is largely a failure of our educational process and secondarily a product of decadeslong disinformation campaigns funded by the likes of Koch, Murdoch, ExxonMobil, and Shell and propped up by denier blogs like Breitbart and WUWT, inter alia.

The appropriate response shouldn’t be to cave to the bad-faith rhetoric peddled by obfuscationists, but to educate and inform, clearly and diplomatically, to dispel common myths and misconceptions no matter how deeply embedded, and also (this is key) to help the public understand the methods and means employed by misinformation channels. Knowing how denialist groups intend to manipulate you — and the various ways in which we are susceptible — can serve as a heat shield against future falsity.

One caveat, however: there is certainly a limit to how much jargon we should work into conversations outside the academy. Dropping high-level technical terminology or Latin designations of species and the like at every turn is ill-advised as well. The difficulty lies in balancing simplicity and clarity with scientific accuracy, which is why we should promote and support the journalists who get it right, of which there are many. Reward them for their effort by elevating content that cuts through the noise and conveys the latest research without sacrificing scientific integrity in the process.

Listen to the full episode here.

This post was featured on HuffPost’s Contributor platform.

Further reading: A Climate of Change

Feature image credit: Incoming by joeflowers

 
 
Recently I’ve been going through back episodes of Sam Harris’ podcast (a project he kicked off last year) and a couple in particular stood out as especially noteworthy.
 

Leaving the Church

Harris interviewed Megan Phelps-Roper earlier this summer, granddaughter of the late Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps. The forty member church, known for their overt hate speech and regular picketing of funerals with colorful signage, lists so far toward the extreme that every formal Baptist organization in the country denies any affiliation. While Megan’s experience was certainly a few clicks north on the fundamentalist scale compared to the churchly environment I was raised in, the same non-negotiable commitments to dogmatism and the systemic suppression of outside views are omnipresent.

Bringing sincere concerns to the community’s leadership was simply beyond the pale. Instead of frank conversation, Meghan recalls being discouraged from dwelling on such things, lest her mind get “wrapped around an axle”, as her mom had apparently put it. Examples of hypocrisy and various contradictions in their belief system, no matter how clear-cut, were promptly subdued by appeals to authority and stamped out like an embering fire under foot. Growing up in a doctrinaire culture like Westboro’s, one quickly learns that the folks so insistent on maintaining the status quo aren’t the type to scratch below the surface, but are concerned, rather, with reinforcing a fixed ideology. Truth is subordinate, and hasn’t a chance.

At the same time, we often write off far-fringe groups like Westboro as nothing more than frothy-mouthed cultists whose beliefs are just as insane as the people who hold them. From the perspective of the membership, however, their actions, justification for which seems to follow logically from a handful of baseline convictions, are borne of pure intent. It’s those foundational convictions that are never questioned and allow for the extreme and the absurd to be dressed up as sane. The church’s widely publicized practice of picketing funerals, railing against gay people, and the incessant drumbeat of eternal hellfire are cast in a tint of purity of the divine will. The reason groups like Westboro should disconcert us is because they powerfully demonstrate how even the purest intentions can be derailed by deep ignorance and blur the lines between zeal and hate.

Not until you are outside the fold looking in do you see how absurd those erstwhile convictions truly were. For Megan, such glimmers of sense and reason came through online interaction coupled with open and honest reflection. It serves as a lesson for all of us—that our better angels can be subverted, sublimated by the faith-based instruction of authority figures who never thought to question their faith-based instruction.

Listen in as Megan chronicles her journey and her lachrymose struggle to leave the only community she ever knew. For those of us who share similar experiences with fundamentalist cultures, this may feel like pressing play on an internal monologue serving up echoes of the past.

Update 11.18.2015: Courtesy of the New Yorker, another carefully crafted feature on her story: Conversion via Twitter
 

The Virtues of Cold Blood

The second episode that caught my attention was a far-ranging discussion with Paul Bloom. Bloom’s recent work attempts to divorce empathy from compassion, elevating the latter while decrying the former as obstructive to rational thought, at times psychologically debilitating, and even externally harmful when overclocked in response to the most piercing emotional stimuli. In short, he argues, empathy can be thought of as inefficient “software” that too often jeopardizes rational decision making, such as in the case of administering judgments on the accused.

His ideas on the topic have proved unpopular among colleagues who feel he has trespassed on a taboo of sorts, and who’ve responded in kind to op-eds in The New York Times, Boston Review and The Atlantic (links below). If you can make it past the inevitable semantic hygiene that must be undertaken when shaking down these concepts, you’ll find an intensely thought-provoking discussion.

—Against Empathy: “But we know that a high level of empathy does not make one a good person and that a low level does not make one a bad person. Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one’s appetites.”

—Imagining the Lives of Others

—Empathy Is Actually a Choice (dissenting piece by NY Times editors)

—How Empathy Makes People More Violent

Feature image: “Black Road” by Marcus W.

 
 
This past week saw a frenzied discussion on all things Islam after a segment on Real Time with Bill Maher went insta-viral. True to form, Maher and Sam Harris join forces in pummeling the world’s second largest religion while calling out politically correct liberals who are quick to criticize Christianity but seem to give Islam a free pass. A flustered — and possibly hopped up on something — Ben Affleck also happened to be on the show and burst in with charges of racism and broad-brushing. While the hysterics were predictable given the setting, Affleck’s emotionally freighted cut-ins fell short of the kind of thoughtful delivery needed to address such a nuanced issue. Watch the clip below if you haven’t already.

As the easy scapegoat in these verbal skirmishes, Sam is often handed the Islamophobia card. Indeed, Affleck could hardly keep this indictment holstered for more than a minute. In general, I happen to think blanketing someone with a label like racist or bigot is a poor strategy for successful communication. So I won’t do that here: I do not think Sam Harris is either (though his comments on airport profiling could certainly be construed otherwise). Rather, I think his depiction of Islam is largely deficient and, as a matter of course, unfaithful to reality. I will offer here what many of Sam’s critics already have since he first raised the topic publicly: that there are several variables missing from his platform on Islam that help refocus the discussion with proper context.

Specifically, I will argue that Harris and his co-thinkers disacknowledge the diversity of Muslim-majority nations and Muslim beliefs; that they too readily discount the geopolitics and socioeconomic factors feeding into how religion functions in any given society; that their equal opportunity animus towards religion breaks down at the border of Islam; and that insufficient attention is paid to the reformers within Islam. While Harris has clarified his views over the years with qualifying language, his narrow appreciation of religion in general and Islam in particular remains an area of concern.

We first must recognize the diversity within Muslim culture. As Reza Aslan emphasizes in his CNN segment below, the contextless pillorying of “the Muslim world” as if it’s some monolithic entity is absurd and uninformed. It’s a common thread not just in Harris’ discourse but in media across the political landscape. The differences that exist between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq on the one hand, and Turkey, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Lebanon, and Albania on the other, are often hugely underappreciated in these conversations. The latter group directly falsify the notion that the influence of Islam, by its very nature, leads to sectarian strife, regional instability, and an all-out assault on human rights.

In Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population in the world and a G20 nation, religious freedom is inscribed in the constitution as it is in the US, and gender equality is highly valued and central to several organized movements. Turkey, with 96-99.8% of its population professing Islam, is an intentionally secular democracy that has had more female heads of state than a certain democracy often held up as exemplar to the rest of the world. Turkey and Kazakhstan also consistently outrank the US in education enrollment, with adult literacy rates of 94.1% and 99.5%, respectively. Bangladesh, another democratic state, is moving with the tide of progress, not against it, making great strides in gender equity and universal primary education, and is now classified as a Next Eleven economy. If Islam is the root of all evil, why aren’t these failed states, shot through with Bronze Age barbarism and psychotic death cults?

Islam is not distinguished by a single race or ethnicity, but is part and parcel of a wide swath of cultures comprised of different races and ethnic identities. The refusal to disaggregate a heterogeneous, global community of 1.6 billion people — lumping together autonomous cultures and speaking about them in the same terms — is in large part what invites the xenophobia charge. To Aslan’s point, when we draw conclusions about other cultures based on stereotypes inherited from our own, we have plunged into the territory of bigotry.1

The species of belief and believer is another area where undue homogenizing occurs among commentators. Yes, we’ve all seen the polls, and they ought to be taken seriously. But on many of the central questions you find Muslim-majority nations on both ends of the spectrum. To caricature the most backward beliefs as mainstream Islam, or to pretend that peaceful presentations don’t exist or aren’t possible, is to fail to recognize the diversity of Muslim expression. Trite headlines like “Is Islam an idea that should be supported?” or, per the CNN segment, “Does Islam promote violence?” thinly conceal an essentialist conception of religion. It may make for high-voltage television but it lacks the informed subtlety any mature conversation about a major world religion should require.

Islam, as with other religions, is a broad collection of ideas, doctrines, symbols, and traditions formulated, revised, and reinvented by different cultures at different times in response to different needs, desires, concerns, and motivations, be they individual, social, economic, or political.2 Were you to ask a group of Christians, Buddhists, or Hindus about an idea associated with their faith, you would be met with a rich continuum of understanding of that idea, including rank repudiation in many cases. So, too, with Islam.

Within Christian communities and Christian-majority nations you will find values that are progressive and run parallel to secular values, and others that defy all reason and are worthy of condemnation. Rummage through Buddhist and Hindu thought and you will find zealots and mossbacks championing doctrines that disgust and appall, and reformers who rebuke them with equal zeal and poignancy. So, too, with Islam.

Just this past month a consortium of 120 Islamic scholars from around the world signed an 18-page open letter thoroughly denouncing the beliefs associated with extremist groups like ISIS. Everyone should read this authoritative fisking, which includes such dictums as “It is forbidden in Islam to ignore the reality of contemporary times when deriving legal rulings” and “It is forbidden in Islam to deny women their rights.”

Back in 2007, a gathering of Muslim intelligentsia ranging from devout reformers to ex-Muslims unanimously affirmed the coexistence of Islam and secular democracy. The resulting document came to be known as the St. Petersburg Declaration, which included the following language: “We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.”

These and other proclamations speak strongly against the injustice carried out under the banner of Islam, insisting that ISIS and other radicalized factions are about as representative of the faith as the KKK and fundamentalists like Ken Ham are of mainstream Christianity. Sam Harris demurs on this point, contending that Muslims who don’t want to kill apostates or wage global jihad simply aren’t “taking their faith seriously.” Note again the essentialist assumptions on which this point depends.3

This curious presumption that Islam is more or less synonymous with certain Universal Doctrine appears to be intimately tied to how he and others of his ilk read religious texts and view their role in religious expression. Which brings us to the Quran, the sacred text of Islam. Within its pages are splashes of peaceful proverbs, spoonfuls of tribalistic babble, and a dash of everything in between. Yet even if it were all primitive barbarism, a religion is not defined solely by what is written in its companion literature. If that were the case, Christianity would be inseparable from child-stoners, atheist-murderers, and misogynists, its members enchained to belief in witchcraft and a flat, four-cornered earth. The Bible is, after all, every bit as densely populated with inhumanity and falsehood.

To understand a religion, we must not simply look inside its texts, but outside as well — to the people and communities who practice and cultivate the faith. And since both peaceful and non-peaceful followers can cite Quranic support for their values, it is beside the point to cavil over who represents the “true” faith. There isn’t such a thing. Like any ideology that’s reached a critical mass, religions evolve according to the social and political structures in which they find themselves. As new perspectives emerge, ideas are discarded, others refashioned. Communities take up new ideas even as old ones are vociferously defended by others. It’s in fact why we have some 30,000+ denominations of Christianity. Islam is hardly singular on this score. Asserting that the Islamic faith unilaterally calls for jihadism or death for apostasy or censorship of the press is as misguided as asserting that the game of chess is associated with a single set of rules.

A Perfect Storm

We can now turn to the question of what spawns militant expressions of faith. If seventh century manuscripts cannot sufficiently account for the toxicity in the Middle East and groups like ISIS, what else can? First, other religions have seen their fair share of backwardness in the past, and it has had little to do with ancient books. History lays bare the depths to which so many religions can sink during fragile times with poverty or power hanging in the balance. In the clip above, Aslan touches on the horrors being committed by Buddhists right now upon Muslims in Myanmar. The Christian legacy is patterned with long periods of pious men wielding the cross as a sword, high among them the Crusades — a series of bloodthirsty expansionist campaigns carried out under the pretext of converting the heathens and claiming the glory of the earth for its God — the silencing of dissent and unbelief through incarceration or death, literal witch hunts, and other greatest hits.

As secular democracy gained a foothold on Western shores, the beast was tempered, though far from tamed. This side of the Atlantic has witnessed the near-genocide of the Americas by a Christian-ruled Europe,4 KKK hit squads, attempted and successful assassinations of presidents and civil rights leaders by Christian perpetrators, the lynching of local police, and attacks on abortion clinics and doctors by groups like Army of God and The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. Moving closer in, the last century has seen the emergence of Christian fundamentalism which has besieged democracy in its own special way. And yet it’s beyond dispute that the Christianity of today is nothing like the Christianity of the Middle Ages, suggesting that perhaps religion is better contained when hubbed out of more privileged, stable countries. Imagine that.

Turning to Islam, might we think of ways that geopolitics has influenced its trajectory? We shouldn’t have to strain too hard. Over the course of several decades, the United States has aggressively insinuated itself into nearly every proto-democracy upwelling in the Middle East, with little foresight of the fallout of failure. Let’s not forget we overthrew a secular government in Iran that was democratically elected. Allow that to sink in. Or how Western interests systematically resisted other secular democratic movements in Egypt and several Middle Eastern states in callous bids for power. When we defenestrate democratic steps toward stability, what else can fill the vacuum but extremism?

Here’s Chomsky, who’s been at the spear point of this very matter for the last four decades, in a recent interview:
 

Is it really that surprising that a region torn apart by Occident colonialists and exploited for minimally the past sixty years, the same region which happens to have a large concentration of energy wealth, will have some rather serious issues regardless of which faith predominates there?

And for the full context of nominally Islamic war-bent groups, need we look any further than the ultimate Faustian bargain: the US-Western alliance with Saudi Arabia — the most extremist regime of the modern world, beheading 19 citizens last year alone? Chomsky and others such as Robert Dreyfuss have maintained for years that the soil for ISIS and its predecessors was largely seeded by these economic maneuverings. As the nexus of wealth in Western Asia, Saudi Arabia exports far more than oil, establishing mosques and madrasahs that spread destructive doctrines throughout the world and funding the most militantly fundamentalist philosophies on the planet (see Wahhabism). By the same token, Western nations (US, the UK, France, Germany, and Italy collectively) have dealt more than $262 billion in weapons to autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia in the previous decade alone. Given their financial ties to intolerance, the US and Western Europe are in no position to stand aghast at ISIS with their fingerprints all over the scene.

Were Christian and Muslim countries to reverse rungs on the economic ladder, might we instead be outraged over third-world Christians committing atrocities in the name of their faith? For the destitute and downtrodden, the marginalized and maligned, religion is among the only palliatives which serve to numb the abjection. The last shard of a tattered identity, religion becomes a way to cope with the state of brokenness and has often been used as a cover to justify violent response to long-nourished grievances both real and imagined, easily co-opted as a North Star in the quest for significance and belonging. That economically disadvantaged and socially diminished peoples latch onto and entrench themselves deeper in destructive ideologies is not new insight, and has been borne out in the research as key drivers of radicalization.5

But according to Sam Harris, we can safely ignore all of this in favor of the simplistic narrative that Islam is uniquely arranged to accommodate violence of the kind we are witnessing today. Like many who sound off on this topic, Harris continually neglects the fact that religion doesn’t operate in isolation, but is inflected through culture, human nature, competition for power, and other seesawing forces that moderate its role and expression in society. Whatever innateness or inbuilt tendencies we have towards violent extremism, moreover, are regularly suppressed by the influence of democracy, economic security, education and literacy, individual agency, and, in many cases, by religion itself. It’s in fact why the Islamist threat is largely confined to the Middle East and North Africa as opposed to Southeast Asia and China, despite the much higher proportion of the world’s Muslims living in the latter region.

The pat argument that jihadists are animated by select scriptures strikes me as woefully incomplete, no better than the comic-book mentality that terrorists attack us because they hate our freedoms. If convictions drawn from outmoded books were ground zero for explaining the messiness of reality, this world would already be ablaze, long before Sam Harris arrived to tell us about it.

Concluding Remarks

I’ve certainly spilled enough words on this topic here and elsewhere, but what motivated me to encapsulate them in long-form was seeing my ultra right-wing friends sharing and tweeting the Maher-Harris commentary in approbation. This is a group who views all Muslims through the lens of 9/11, perfectly ignorant of the hundreds of millions of Muslims living among us who do not identify with the most extreme manifestations of their faith and who practice a peaceful Islam. It’s why many clear-thinking commentators on the left see the kind of generalities for which Harris is known as distinctly right-wing in nature. This laser focus on Islam as the Great Scourge fuels a culture of anti-Muslim animus, a sentiment already given safe harbor by the Christian right and large swaths of Western Europe. As history has shown, this can only generate more alienation, more unrest, and more violence.

Objecting to the worst of organized religion is fair, healthy, and necessary, but those of us working for a better world are remiss when we deemphasize the diversity of voices within these communities and delegitimize even those whose interests align with our own. I’ve followed Sam Harris for years, subscribing to his Facebook updates and to his blog. On occasion, he will fire off a spree of the most incendiary, batty piece of Islam-related news he can find. Meanwhile, scores of reformist groups seek to root out the radical elements of their faith.

Why not, for example, call attention to the aforementioned joint letter by Islamic scholars? Or the 2013 Duke University study which found that more people suspected of terrorism were brought to the attention of law enforcement by the Muslim-American community than were discovered through US government investigations? Or how Turkey and the UAE, including the UAE’s first female air force pilot, are helping lead the charge against ISIS?

After all, the shelf life of religions is long; Islam isn’t going anywhere. The best way forward it seems to me lies in giving the reformers priority in the public conversation. These are the voices we desperately need to prop up, not the sloppy, pre-formatted rhetoric of Harris, Maher & Co. in which dangerous right-wing ideology finds refuge.

 
Further reading:

• Religion and Violence 
• Islam isn’t inherently violent or peaceful
• Mindless terrorists? The truth about Isis is much worse
• ISIS is America’s Grotesque Middle Eastern Legacy
• You Can’t Understand ISIS If You Don’t Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia (Part I)
• Middle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Family as the New Emirs of Arabia (Part II)
• To Really Combat Terror, End Support for Saudi Arabia
• Fareed Zakaria: Let’s Be Honest, Islam Has A Problem Right Now 
• Think Muslims Haven’t Condemned ISIS? Think Again 
• Karen Armstrong on Sam Harris and Bill Maher
• Fareed Zakaria on Sam Harris’ podcast (starts at the 37:00 min mark)
• “New atheist” Sam Harris — still deeply wrong on Islamic extremism and terrorism

1. The link between religion and race or ethnicity is tricky. In some religions they are more strongly connected — Judaism and Islam e.g. — in others much less so. In criticizing a religion, you need to be aware of the degree to which it is tied to race and culture, or you’re going to get in trouble.

2. A great source text on the sociology of religion: Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. 1974.

3. This notion suffuses Sam Harris’ rhetoric on this topic. Along with making this explicit statement in the Maher segment, also see his piece here. See if you can count the number of times he is guilty of the infractions I highlight in this post.

4. See historian David E. Stannard’s text American Holocaust (1992).

5. See Kruglanski et al. 2014 and USAID’s report “Guide to the Drivers of Violent Extremism.”

 
 
The recently uploaded Innocence of Muslims stood no chance of being contained before its echoes pulsated across the Muslim world and its reactions warranted a spot on the itineraries of America’s leaders. Its creator still unconfirmed, the tawdry pseudo-film was first hosted by YouTube in mid-July in the form of a 14-minute trailer. In the intervening months, the 74 minute full-length film was released to the web and then translated, re-edited, redistributed, and disseminated to Islamic groups the world over. In it are crude depictions of Islam’s founder, Muhammad, and other vile drivel centered around the Islamic faith. It is a squalid and brazenly propagandistic piece of amateurish videowork to be sure, but the reactionary measures proliferated throughout the Muslim states have shown just how dangerous certain beliefs can be.

Backlash erupted eastward in the form of enraged protests and a number of attacks on U.S. consulates and embassies, leaving over 30 dead in seven countries. The tolling of the fallout continues, as demonstrations have been reported in Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Sudan, Indonesia, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Kashmir, Lebanon and Iran. Last week four Americans were killed during the assault on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, with another 14 found dead in riots across Libya and Yemen. Over 200 people have been injured outside the US embassy in Cairo. A 5,000-strong cohort set fire to the US, British and German embassies in Sudan last Friday. Stone-throwing protesters rushed the US embassy in Tunisia on the same day. Unrest has waxed and waned for the past few months as security forces defending Western embassies attempt to seize control of the situation.

The smoke is far from settled and, as is often the case in crises fueled in part by the internet, Google has been pulled into the fray. At the behest of national governments, Mountain View has had to navigate the treacherous waters of free speech and the amelioration of anarchy. As of this writing, Google has not kowtowed to the likely illimitable number of takedown requests. They have denied a complete removal of the various clips but have blocked viewing of the video for certain countries, including Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, as well as India and Malaysia. Of course, this has the effectiveness of nailing jello to a brick wall, as inevitably some copies will slide past the injunction when they are uploaded by other users. Sensing Google’s unwillingness to act, some countries are taking matters into their own hands. Sudan has actually blocked all access to YouTube after their repeated takedown requests were ignored.

Photo via AFP

If this faith-driven bedlam tells us anything, it tells us the power of beliefs to shape actions. The “lever” metaphor is an apt one. It is the idea that our personal beliefs act as a lever to a roller coaster, which propel us to act in ways consistent with those beliefs. What we truly believe is what truly drives us. In the wake of violent pieties committed by the violently pious, we are pushed to make an honest assessment of the beliefs so crowned by the men and women of faith contributing to this virulent maelstrom.

It is a popular tactic, by liberal and conservative constituencies alike, to rush to the aid of the insurgents by arguing that religious extremism arises principally out of socioeconomic pressures. These conciliators contend that economic and personal despair provide the soil for extremism, terrorism and all forms of misguided activism, and that we should focus our efforts there. This line of defense maintains that conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and those endemic to the majority of the Middle Eastern world are primarily economic and secondarily religious.

Such an appraisal is needlessly hasty. You can’t start a fire without a flame, and here it seems the pacifiers have committed a category error. If poverty were the catalyst for organized violence, then as the poorest continent Africa should be the terrorist hub of the developing world, yet terrorism and civil unrest are highest in predominantly Islamic states across Western Asia, leaving behind a pattern that in no way tracks with poverty level. Rather, our current global crisis is home to a heterogeneous group, ranging from non-developed countries to members of G-20 major economies such as Indonesia and India.

The conversation, albeit nuanced, has been misframed. It is not a matter of economic security, but a matter of belief. Certain beliefs central to Islam are more prone to give rise to volatile misconduct compared with the teachings of other religions, irrespective of culture or economic standing. These are not clashes of civilizations. These are not culturally misunderstood anomalies. These are people whose actions are premised upon steadfast beliefs in 7th century literature. And in a nod of unwavering loyalty to their prophetic vanguard, they have once again shown the world just how religious they are.

We humans are a diverse people with an equally diverse range of beliefs. Many of these may be deeply held and irrational, though relatively benign to the human condition. Astrology, as deluded a belief though it is, is unlikely to lead to proscriptive bigotry and manifestations of violence in the face of nonconformists and iconoclastic depictions. Various sects of the Islamic faith, however, are perfectly consistent with their beliefs by conducting themselves in this way. The hadith strictly forbids visual depictions of Muhammad—a 7th century illiterate war campaigner who many Muslims believe was dictated the last message from God and elevate to semi-divine status—and its source text, the Quran, explicitly authorizes the use of violence to silence infidels and apostates. The slaying of unbelievers recurs so steadily throughout its suras that it is pedestaled as a central theme. A belief, therefore, should only invite concern when its irrationality has been shown to compromise the freedoms and well-being of others. As we’ve seen in a collection of lifetimes, some beliefs have seismic consequences if left unchallenged.

The opportunity to respond with courage to the Islamic protestations should be seized at every turn. In a piece yesterday titled “On the Freedom to Defend An Imaginary God,” Sam Harris delivered a resolute condemnation of both Islamic beliefs and the nation states who’ve relucted to do the same. He notes how the Obama administration chastised the contents of the video in question and then requested that Google take down the “Innocence of Muslims” clips from its servers. Worse, the White House has now released apology ads in Pakistan, with President Obama and Hillary Clinton pandering to the expectations of the demonstrators.

Harris exhorts that the proper diplomatic response is not only to inveigh against the violence but to emphasize that irrational belief has no jurisdiction over our freedom of speech. When met with salvos targeting Constitutional freedoms, and especially when accompanied by threats of violence and death, the only proper reaction is summary impugnment, not callow diffidence. With necessary drum-banging, Harris contends that we must step up our resolve in combating delusion.

Of course, this won’t come easily. As Baghdad businessman Hassan Rahim told Huffington Post on Thursday, “The Muslims are taught to die for God, not to live for God, so I think that the chances of moderation are limited in our Islamic world. The West should accept the fact that Muslims might tolerate a specific level of criticism on Islam, but not mockery or blasphemy.”

This statement smacks both of implicit advocacy of the barbarism being carried out in the name of Islam and a thinly veiled threat that we should expect more to come if we do not succumb to international pressures. In virtually no other sphere of influence do mockery and blasphemy grant impunity for murder and extreme retaliatory force. Releasing apology ads, as our current administration has done, only serves to justify the actions of Islamic exponents and could quite possibly intensify their demonstrations. What we need most are intrepid leaders willing to publicly disavow all infringements on the freedom of speech and to expose fundamentalist Islam for what it is: a breach of reason and a license to deviate from moral norms.

As Harris closes:

 
Feature image via samharris.org