Making Sense with Sam Harris - #20 — Still Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon

Episode Date: November 15, 2015

Sam Harris reflects on the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. 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.

Thank you. Okay, well it is Saturday, November 14th, a day after Paris. And as you all know, at least 129 people were murdered last night by jihadists, probably affiliated with ISIS. ISIS has claimed credit for it. And many hundreds of people were injured, so the death toll will almost certainly rise by the time you've heard this. I hope to get this podcast out tomorrow, Sunday. But anyway, that's where things stand at the moment. And my Twitter feed is just inundated with people wondering what I have to say about this event. And I have nothing new to say. This is a situation I've been in now

many times. I sit down to write or in some other way respond to recent events, and I find that I've said this stuff a hundred times over. You just have to change the dates and a few of the nouns in a blog post or a lecture, and you find what you've said is totally appropriate to the moment. Now that's depressing because it means we are making the same mistakes over and over again, and the stakes are all just getting incrementally higher. So rather than struggle to write something new, I'm going to read an older essay entitled Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon, and I wrote this just a year ago on September 10th, 2014, after the murder of journalist James Foley by Jihadi John, who was killed yesterday, I believe, in a drone strike, or was reported to have been killed. So I will read that and perhaps

offer an aside or two on recent events. I'll be speaking with Douglas Murray on Monday. I'm not sure when I'll publish that podcast. Probably might take a week to get that out. But our conversation of this week was preempted by a cold of mine, which I'm just getting over. So my voice is even less euphonious than it normally is. Sorry for that. I offer this essay because it really is what I'm thinking now.

But one thing to keep in mind, as I've been saying for 14 years, this is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones. Realize that for the rest of your life, you're going to be reading and hearing about and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists. Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the catcall from the Middle Ages or from Middle Earth that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism and Islamism generally, this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and our children's children.

And we have a war of ideas that we have to wage and win. And unfortunately, we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won, which is the purpose of my most recent book with Majid Nawaz. But the balance has to swing. Denying this problem, denying the problem of Islamism, denying that Islam, the religion, has a unique problem at this moment in history, that has to become as unseemly and as reputationally costly

as any dangerous expression of bigotry now is. It certainly has to be more costly than an honest discussion of the problem is. People are referring to these events in Paris as a wake-up call. Who on earth at this moment needs a wake-up call? If you didn't wake up on September 12, 2001, there may be no hope for you. What will it take to get your attention? There are no surprises anymore. We have to relinquish our capacity for surprise here. There is nothing so destructive that these people won't attempt it. The only thing that has prevented them from killing millions of people is a lack of technology, and we have to ensure that they never get it.

But the idea that our enemies are sufficiently like ourselves and that they won't set this world on fire is pure delusion. Most of you aren't even comfortable with the word enemy. To refer to jihadists as our enemies, somehow that is provocative. We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies, or if we do, they're only of our own making. And when people on the right call them barbarians, well then that is just demagoguery. Those are just our own demons springing into view. You have to get some perspective here. It is not mere wartime

propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment, to call ISIS a death cult, day look back on with embarrassment, to call ISIS a death cult, to call them barbarians, to call them savages, to use dehumanizing language. They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value and are right to value. And by we, I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified by the Islamist and jihadist project as I am. We have a project that's universal, that transcends culture, that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault. So if you can't get your head straight about that, you think there might be two sides to this war.

And if this is blowback, that we're somehow culpable for it. You have not understood what these people are about. And they have been telling you what they're about ceaselessly. So the problem is with you. Watch some of their videos if you can stomach it. And if you can't stomach it, that should tell you something. And unfortunately, most of us, we have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live, and in what sort of world they want to build. And if we can't convince ourselves of this once

and for all, well then we'll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort that we just saw in Paris. Why wait? Why not get your head straight now? Again, the situation I most fear is that more and more, with liberals failing to see the dynamics of this problem, there will come a time where the only people who have the moral conviction to oppose this death cult behavior will be nearly as bad as the Islamists themselves. Now I'm speaking of right-wing Christian fascists of some sort. You know, you have to ask yourself, you know, if there was an election in Paris tomorrow, who would you vote for? Right?

And if this happens 10 more times in Paris, who will the French vote for? This mass psychological experiment is being run in every country in Europe, and no doubt will be run again in the U.S. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support,

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