Making Sense with Sam Harris - #17 — What I Really Think About Profiling

Episode Date: September 16, 2015

Sam Harris responds to misrepresentations of his views (again). If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

I just got back from Boston where I had my event at the Kennedy Forum with Majid Nawaz, and I've just reaped the whirlwind on social media. It has been really amazing, kind of the perfect storm of political correctness and intellectual dishonesty. So I'm going to do a little bit of housekeeping. Hopefully this won't be too painful. I'm just going to try to suck the poison from the wound as quickly as possible. But the pushback against Majid and I merely having a conversation, the malice we have both received, Majid in particular, has really been flabbergasting. Nathan Lean, an employee of Reza Aslan's, called Majid my lapdog. Lean, an employee of Reza Aslan's called Majid my lapdog. Murtaza Hussain, an employee of Glenn Greenwald's, got on Twitter and called him a talking monkey, a porch monkey, a native informant. This is all after viewing the video of our conversation at Harvard. And that video is

online. You can see that on my blog. Watch that, and then contemplate how close-minded and psychologically and ethically confused you have to be to think that Majid was functioning as my lackey there. As I said on that panel, if anything, my views were more modified by our dialogue than his were. And if you read the book, you'll just see how that conversation evolved. It's just amazing to me the level of cynicism and ill will this is bringing out in people. But I suppose I shouldn't be amazed.

Last week I did an interview with Dave Rubin, and Dave is a really nice guy, incredibly supportive, and had the bright idea of trying to inoculate the world against misrepresentations of my views by just going through the most controversial positions on profiling and nuclear war and all the rest. And he thought we would do five minutes on each over the course of this interview, and then he would put up those separate chapters as a point of reference for anyone who wanted to be clear about what my views actually are. Well, we did this, and then people distorted this very conversation. So, for instance, I said, with respect to my views on profiling at airports, I said, if Jerry Seinfeld shows up at security and gets the same sort of pat down that anyone else does, we know that is a waste of time. We know that Jerry Seinfeld, famous celebrity,

is very unlikely to have been successfully recruited by the forces of global jihad while no one was watching. So any time spent patting down his body or selecting him for special attention based on some notion that it's only decent and fair to do so, that is security theater, and that makes us all less safe. Well, P.Z. Myers excerpted that. If you've forgotten who P.Z. Myers is, you could be forgiven, perhaps. But in any case, he's a biologist who's a blogger who I now never interact with. But I'm mentioning him because he kicked this whole thing off. He summarized my view as being one where if you look like Jerry Seinfeld, you should not receive scrutiny at the airport, which is to say, if you're white and or Jewish looking,

you should not receive scrutiny. And Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan reacted to this, spread this around to millions of people. And Cenk Uygur did the same, I believe. So in any case, my Twitter feed was just a tsunami of stupidity when I got back from Boston. The point, as is obvious in the video and should be obvious, is that I'm saying if you are a famous celebrity, I mean, it was really, it's not a, nothing turns on this. How many celebrities go through the TSA and hold up the line because they're being patted down? It was a joke. I was simply pointing out that we, that there are people at the airport who we know are very unlikely to have been recruited by ISIS. I put 80-year-old Okinawan women in there and

little girls from Norway. But my point was that if Jerry Seinfeld himself is going through, we know he's not a member of ISIS. And when responding to Glenn Greenwald's attack on me on Twitter, I said, Glenn, I could have just as well used Denzel Washington. It would have been the same point. And he said, it's very telling that you picked Seinfeld and not Denzel Washington. Right. So this is Glenn Greenwald in his beloved capacity as a mind reader. He's detecting in me the bigotry and racism that I didn't know I harbored or have imperfectly concealed. Well, let me just spell it out for the deliberately obtuse. If you are Denzel Washington or Jamie Foxx or any other celebrity of color who doesn't stand the slightest chance of having been recruited

by al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, well, then I think you should get the same treatment at security that Jerry Seinfeld gets or Betty White, which is the other example I used in that interview. And this is why I describe my view as anti-profiling. It's not a matter of singling out people from the Middle East or people with dark skin. It's a matter of not obviously wasting time and scarce attentional resources. It's a matter of paying less attention to people who we know are extraordinarily unlikely to be jihadists. Unfortunately, this very public and, I think, calculated distortion of my views about profiling has coincided with a 14-year-old boy's arrest in his school in Texas, this boy Ahmed, who brought what he described as a clock to school. And he is a Muslim boy who is very interested in engineering,

it seems, and is a tinkerer, an inventor. And he brought some tangle of circuitry to school, which he said was a clock, but his teachers thought it was a bomb or might be a bomb and brought him to the principal's office and he wound up arrested as a result of this. Now, who knows what happened? This story is only breaking today, but now I'm getting hammered for this being the outcome of my views on profiling. So I should say a few brief things about this. First of all, everything I've said about profiling relates to what I think should happen at airports, which is a unique circumstance. Why are airports unique? Well, because when you're talking about a terrorist getting on a plane, you're talking about someone

who is willing to die, right? You're talking about someone who is by definition suicidal, if you're talking about bringing down a plane with a bomb or by some other means. So if someone's getting on with his or her kids, you have to then think that this is a person who is willing to sacrifice his kids for this cause. Now, that is a rare breed of person, right? And we should be using all available cues to determine how likely someone is to fit that profile. And as I argue and maintain, smart, well-trained people can, at a glance, exercise very educated intuitions about these things. And not everyone is equally likely to be a jihadist, much less a suicidal one at the airport. But again, I don't think I fall outside of that profile, right? If I'm wandering through

the airport alone, and I'm not recognized to be the vociferous critic of jihadism that I am, hey, I'm as likely as almost anyone, based on surface appearance, to be the next suicide bomber. But Betty White isn't. And no one who looks like Betty White, frankly, is. And until ISIS and al-Qaeda successfully recruit people who look like Betty White, frankly, is. And until ISIS and al-Qaeda successfully recruit people who look like Betty White, I think gradations of suspicion are perfectly appropriate here. But things change when you're talking about schools. Now, we're not necessarily talking about suicidal

terrorism. We're talking about incidents that more resemble the kinds of things we have learned, unfortunately, to worry about at schools. We're worried about mass shootings for the most part of students and teachers by students rather often and rather often by white students. I think probably most often by white students judging from the news coverage. So if you're worried about the next Columbine massacre, if a kid shows up at school with something that looks like a bomb, I should hope that the teachers and the administration will exercise the same degree of caution, whether the child is white or Arab or Muslim or Christian.

The background of the person is totally irrelevant. We're talking about the object they brought with them, which has provoked suspicion. Now, again, I don't know anything about Ahmed apart from the video that I saw of him online. He looks like a perfectly wonderful kid whose interest in science is to be celebrated. But if he brought something to school that looked terrifying to his teachers and he couldn't give an adequate account of what it was, well then caution was totally warranted, whatever his religious background or color of his skin. And if it looked like a clock, well then not. I've seen some photos that purport to be the thing he brought. It didn't look much like a clock. But in any case, the idea that racism or bigotry or xenophobia was giving some top spin to this episode,

that is, if true, to be totally deplored, right? Again, I don't know the specifics of what happened to Ahmed. It looks on its surface to be reprehensible. But the way in which Glenn Greenwald and the usual suspects are demagoguing this issue and holding it up as an example of Islamophobia or as a straightforward implementation of my views, well, that should come as no surprise, it's totally dishonest. And it's quite damaging to our conversation about very hard issues. How we deal with our security concerns going forward

is a very difficult issue. It's difficult politically, it's difficult ethically, it's difficult practically, and it is only made more difficult by this kind of obscurantism. So, I think that's all I have to say about that. Of course, I'm painfully aware that many of you find this incredibly boring.

You can't believe how boring I find this. And I'm aware that many of you think it's totally counterproductive for me to defend myself. I wish I believed that. It's not clear to me what to do, but it's pretty clear that silence on my part and just trying to rise above it doesn't work. So, you know, up to the limit of my tolerance and yours, I'm gonna have to address these things occasionally. However, on my next podcast you will learn that we very likely live in a universe where there are infinite

numbers of beings listening to podcasts just like this one where we didn't talk about any of these things, though that would also entail a universe where there are infinite numbers of beings just like us listening to this exact podcast an infinite number of times. I don't know about you, but I consider that a problem. Let's try to fix that going forward.