Making Sense with Sam Harris - #27 — Ask Me Anything 3

Episode Date: February 13, 2016

Sam Harris answers questions from listeners about free will, meditation, Noam Chomsky, the illusion of the self, Clinton vs. Sanders, the de-platforming of Richard Dawkins, wealth inequality, and other topics. 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.

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Okay, well, this is going to be an Ask Me Anything podcast. I had an interview with Mariam Namazi that got postponed. That will happen probably in a few weeks. And I'm looking forward to that. And so I've got your questions here coming in from Twitter and email. Actually, the first one is on something related to Mariam Namazi. I'll just, I'll deal with that only to postpone it, really. But many of you asked what I thought about the, quote, open letter to Sam Harris that Ina at Nice Mangoes wrote, alleging that Douglas Murray is a bigot. And Mariam actually circulated that on Twitter.

That's how I noticed it. So Ina, who's this blogger who many of you probably know, wrote an open letter to Ben Affleck after my collision with him. She's an ex-Muslim who has made some very nice noises on this topic. But she attacks Douglass in this letter as a bigot and claims that his views about immigration and the refugee crisis are bigoted. I don't know if there's anything else she believes that constitutes a sign of his bigotry. And a few other people like Atticus Amber, another person I notice on Twitter, have raised a more general concern about taking care not to provide far-right bigots cover in how we talk about Islam and Islamism. And this was also the subject of Ina's letter to me. I definitely share the general concern that we not provide

cover for bigots, but I really reject this claim about Douglas. I don't think Douglas is a bigot. I don't think anything he said in my discussion with him on my podcast suggests that he is. I really think his heart and mind are in the right place. That doesn't mean you necessarily agree with his views about immigration. But I think I'll, let me just table this now because I will get into this in depth when I speak with Mariam Namazi, because she substantially shares Ina's views, as far as I can tell. In that case, a retweet, I think, did equal an endorsement. And there's a lot to talk about with Mariam, specifically on the topic of immigration in Europe, because she is for open borders, which is not a position I share. And in that context, I'll be happy to defend Douglas,

who I think is just genuinely afraid about the destruction of European culture, and one doesn't need to be a bigot in order to worry about that. So to be continued on that topic. Question number two. How should we differentiate labels used for clarity and labels used in a way that encourages tribalism? This comes from Maggie, whose Twitter handle is AsimpleHedonist. And this is related to another question I got about the term regressive leftist. Actually, several people worried that this is

being applied almost at random to people who we don't like and in a very tribal way. You know, I think labels have to be used carefully and accurately. And I do think people are using regressive leftists in a way that doesn't totally track its intended meaning. I would reserve it for any so-called liberal who is either explicitly or tacitly taking the side of highly illiberal people, very likely in the Muslim community, based on political correctness or a misplaced concern about racism. So the classic case of this you see with people like Glenn Greenwald, case of this, you see with people like Glenn Greenwald, who just reflexively, it seems, aligns with theocrats, protecting them from criticism and labeling anyone who would criticize their worldview as a bigot or a racist. So it's on that specific point where you have people who

should be committed and in fact are committed in every other mode of life, to free speech and gay rights and the rights of women, but who can't follow those commitments to their logical conclusion in the presence of usually Muslim intolerance. And the reason for that is simple. There's this underlying software routine they're running on their brains, which one, privileges a concern about bigotry and racism over everything else. And two, in the foreign policy domain, they more or less blame everything that's wrong with the world on the West and

on colonialism and on US foreign policy in particular. And so you have those two commitments aligning to make any moral clarity on the question of, let's say, how women are treated in Muslim societies really difficult to attain. So that's where I would say we should reserve the use of regressive left or regressive leftist. The person who is, in fact, a liberal, except where liberalism really is needed at this moment to protect the most vulnerable people in the most intolerant communities on earth. Okay, next question. What about the idea of free won't as opposed to free will? This comes from Matthew Hentrich. Free won't is this idea that I believe Michael Shermer used in his recent book, The Moral Arc, but it comes from Benjamin Labette. And I'm sorry, I never know

whether he pronounced his name Benjamin Labay or Benjamin Labette. He's no longer alive to consult, and I only ever see it written. But I'm going to go with Labette. Benjamin Labette, who famously gave us some early neurophysiological results on the topic of free will using EEG, and who showed that you could predict a person's motor response some hundreds of milliseconds, up to half a second, before they were consciously aware of having intended to do something. He then came forward with this idea of free won't, that though

free will was difficult to justify in light of these results, he thought that we have veto power and could cancel an action at the last minute, and that this offered some freedom. And I believe he published this first in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I would have to look, but I recall reading a paper from him on this topic. This never made any sense at all to me because whatever the neurological precursors are of the veto, those too are being kindled and made effective by processes which no one is conscious of. Now I don't think Libet ever did an experiment looking for the timing difference there between when one is conscious of one's veto and when it's actually kindled, but surely there's a time difference there.

And again, even if there weren't, this is often a misunderstanding about my argument against free will. It's not just that there's a time difference. It's not just that there is a period where neurophysiologically we can detect an intention or a motor plan, and then this only becomes conscious some hundreds of milliseconds later. Even if we were conscious at the first instant of this plan arising in the brain or of the veto arising in the brain, its mere arising in that moment is also inscrutable. It's also compatible with a total lack of free will.

The time lag is slightly more inconvenient for anyone who wants to argue for free will because what it demonstrates is that there is a period where you still think you're free to make up your mind, where you still think you are making up your mind, where you still think you have not decided what you will do, and yet what you will do is, in a very real sense, determined by the state of your brain at that moment. And this must be true to some degree with any veto of a motor plan. But again, you know, I think in a deep sense, the illusoriness of free will is not dependent on any gap there between the arising of the intention and its conscious execution. So I hope that was clear. I don't think free won't gives you any more freedom than the more common notion of free will.

But of course, it's also a fact about the human mind. We veto various intentions from time to time. We intend to do something. We're about to reach for it. We're about to say something. And then we think better of it and we cancel that plan. But again, the moments where you do that, just pay attention. That is inscrutable. You can't actually account for why you do it in that moment or why it's effective in that moment, why you do it precisely at the moment you do do it. It's all being pushed forward into consciousness

by processes of which you are not conscious and which you did not bring into being. I think there's another question about free will coming up, and perhaps I'll go over that ground again for anyone who's mystified. Many of you are asking me, why on earth am I voting or planning to vote for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders? Well, it's not for any deep conviction about Clinton's integrity or honesty. I share the common perception of her as a political opportunist. I think she really wants to be president. I don't doubt that she also wants to live in a nice world

and help people. But if you get one thing from the Clintons, it is their desire to be in power and on the top of the mountain. And there is a basic insincerity there. There's a endless appetite for political calculation in place of obvious candor. And it is definitely grating, and it doesn't inspire trust. If you ever heard her trying not to admit that she had changed her mind about gay marriage in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, I think this happened about two years ago, you'll see everything that's wrong with her approach to communicating the workings of her own mind. It is the most excruciating five minutes of radio I can remember hearing,

where she's becoming more and more defensive, more and more irate that Terry would suggest that she had changed her mind on this topic, whereas she had actually changed her mind on the topic. It's just unbelievable. But she's changed her mind to the right position on that topic. And I think she's, you know, despite the fact that she will say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam and that Islam is a religion of peace, and she will sound like a fairly delusional person when talking about the conflict in the Middle East. I'm reasonably confident that

she understands what is actually going on there and that she's one of the grownups who will be able to respond to crises there in an intelligent way. I imagine she will continue Obama's policies to some significant degree. I can't claim to know that about Bernie Sanders. I don't think he has thought about foreign policy very much. He certainly hasn't said much about it. The little he has said makes me worry that he's been somewhat infected by Noam Chomsky's worldview, which I think is the moral black hole swallowing everything on the left side of the political spectrum. So I don't actually know whether we can trust Sanders to be wise on what I consider the most crucial question of foreign policy,

which is our fight against global jihadism. And there are many other questions where I would expect Hillary to be far more seasoned and smarter, frankly, on foreign policy, whether it's with Russia or China or any other hard case. I agree that the influence of money in politics and wealth inequality, these are huge issues that we have to get our hands around. I suspect that the difference between Clinton and Sanders on those topics is not so much a matter of what they want to accomplish, but I think Sanders is making promises he can't possibly keep there. I mean, he's clearly an idealist, and his idealism will be smashed if he was ever in office having to deal with Congress.

So I think these are empty promises, albeit revolutionary ones that he's making on those topics. But most important, far more important than anything I have just said, is the fact that I think Sanders cannot get elected in the general election. Now, I know this will raise the ire of all of his fans who are aware of national polls where he's beating Ted Cruz, for instance, and Hillary isn't. But Sanders has not been hammered for the better part of a year by the Republicans, because he's not been a plausible candidate until now. If he were the Democratic nominee, a billion-dollar apparatus on the Republican side would do nothing but emphasize his identity as a socialist, right? There is no way this country

is electing somebody who has to nuance the term socialism in a general election. It's worse than being an atheist at this moment. It's not the only strike against him, but I think it's a devastating one. So I think nominating Sanders would be to virtually guarantee a Republican victory in a year where the Republican candidates are both less sane and less competent than usual. There's just no reason for the Democrats to lose this election. And I think it would be terrible if they did. I think the prospect of having Cruz or Trump as president is an extraordinarily scary one for different reasons in each case. But I think the only grown-up in sight here is Clinton. And that doesn't mean I don't have great reservations about her. reservations about her. But I think she's smart and competent and knows how to compromise so as to get some things done in government. And I certainly can't say that about Sanders across

the board. So take that as a tepid endorsement of necessity for Clinton. But that's why I've said what I've said about Hillary versus Bernie. Next question. There were several questions about Noam Chomsky's interview with Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera, where Chomsky actually greenwalled me to some degree, which is amusing. He claimed that I'm someone who specializes in hysterical, slanderous charges against people he doesn't like. I'd love to know where I'm guilty of that. If I've ever said anything inaccurate, that is slanderous, against the people I don't like, I wish he would point it out. In our email exchange, he hurled this charge at me, but the substance of his charge amounted to a pedantic and evasive distinction without a difference. I had said

that he never had considered the intentions of the United States versus those of her enemies. And he insisted that he had considered them, and it was a baseless slander for me to suggest otherwise. But he totally disregarded the significance of intention, discounted it, said you can't possibly know intentions because people lie about them, and at one point even inverted their significance, suggesting that non-intending harm made one somehow more culpable for evil than intending it. It struck me as a fairly crazy view, but I was eager to talk about it. And in the end, I couldn't figure out what his specific view was, apart from

the fact that it was absolutely clear that it was different from mine in precisely the way that I said it was. He believes that considering intentions in cases like this is a sign of moral confusion. Whereas I believe, in certain cases, it is the only difference between good and evil. Because good people can create immense harm by accident and evil people can sometimes do conventionally good things, seemingly good things, in an effort to do some larger harm, right? If they're manipulating people. Or they can also just do good things by accident, right? If a man kicks a puppy in the street, and unbeknownst to him, he actually kicks it out of the way of a passing car and saves its life inadvertently, the effects of that isolated

action are good. But we wouldn't call him a good person. He was kicking puppies for the fun of it. This is moral philosophy 101. Chomsky can't seem to get his head around it. And in this interview with Mehdi Hassan, when asked to rank the respective evils in the world, he comes right out and says that the U.S. and Britain are off the charts and the most evil regimes in how they've behaved on the world stage. Now, I think that is a frankly crazy point of view. It's a point of view you can only arrive at by totally disregarding the intentions of our governments,

the kind of world we want to build, what we would do if we had even more power, and the intentions of our enemies. In this case, it was the Islamic State that was being talked about. So I don't want to go over this ground again. I think you guys know how I think intention functions here. Intention is the only guide to what someone's going to do next, right? It's the only guide to what they will do if they have the power to do it. That's why intentions are morally important. That's why there's a huge difference between the person who injures you by accident and feels sorry over it, and the person who injured you intentionally

and wants to do you further harm in the future. The injury could be the same. The only difference, and it's an enormous one, is the intention behind the action. So Chomsky seems to simply count the bodies. And this is just a crazy thing to do. Just think of World War II. Someone might have suggested this analogy to me on Twitter or by email, and I think it's a good one. If you're just going by body count, well, more Germans died than Americans in World War II. So you look at what we did and you look at what the Germans did.

And with respect to the conflict between the U.S. and the Third Reich, well, the U.S. looks worse. We killed more Germans, right? I guess we're morally worse than the Nazis there. Does that make any sense to anyone? I guess we're morally worse than the Nazis there. Does that make any sense to anyone? The importance of intention is obvious because our intentions were revealed once we won that war. What did we do to Germany?

We rebuilt Germany. It would have been fairly different if we had conquered Germany only to then go in and rape all the women, enslave all the children, and kill all the men, right? That's a rather big difference. And you would have seen that difference had we intended to behave that way. Chomsky ignores all this. And it's just, it's mind-boggling to me that anyone considers his views on this topic morally sane, much less important to consider. Now, is that a slanderous charge against him? I don't think so. I listened to the whole interview with Mehdi Hassan. He said many other things that were less crazy than that, and he said a fair amount that was just as crazy. He claims to be even more concerned about jihadism than I am, but he purports to be drilling

down to its root cause, which, as was obvious from the context, he believes is U.S. foreign policy. We created global jihadism, according to Chomsky. Okay, well, good luck with that. My analysis of the roots of jihadism can fully absorb the reality of blowback, the fact that we funded al-Qaeda against the Soviets. Did we create the doctrine of jihad? Have we created a belief in martyrdom and paradise? Are we responsible for the fact that tomorrow morning some bright guy in London or Antwerp or Paris or Brooklyn is going to wake up and decide to fight for ISIS? No. The real answer to the riddle of jihadism is both simpler and more complicated than what Chomsky is alleging. And his emphasis is just all wrong, and reliably wrong on this topic, as is the emphasis

of everyone influenced by him. It seems to me no question that Chomsky is the godfather of the regressive left. If responsibility for this moral confusion and political masochism can be laid on anyone's head, it's Chomsky's. And that's why I would have loved to have had a real conversation with him on this topic. Because if he's misunderstood, well, then I would like to cease to misunderstand him. But unfortunately, I think he's understood all too well. And it's time people stopped listening to him. Next question. What was the most unexpected and or remarkable audience reaction during your recent tour of Australia with Majid.

And this came from someone named Good Life Decoder on Twitter. Most unexpected or remarkable audience reaction. Well, first let me say I loved meeting you all in Australia, those of you I met. I feel I need to apologize for a couple of things. One is my jet lag. I was just hammered by jet lag there, and though I attempted to rally, I don't think I was fooling anyone. It's just, it is what it is, but I was pretty tired at each of those events, and some of you noticed that. Majid and I had a

good laugh in one of the book signing lines. I think no less than five people came up to me, and Majid was sitting right next to me. We're both signing books. No less than five people came up and said, man, you look exhausted. And one person came up and said, just don't die, right? So Majid, for the rest of the trip, Majid kept turning to me and saying, man, you look exhausted. So that and my having said that I'm not a fan of hip-hop got me trolled endlessly by Majid and the other organizers of that trip. Anyway, despite jet lag, we had a great time, and Majid was the highlight of those events.

A few other things to know about that. One is that every single Muslim group invited to those events declined, and quite memorably, the Australian Muslim Students Association, I don't know how big that is, I might have that name slightly wrong, but some Islamic student group in Australia declared that Majid was not welcome in Australia. And to see Majid's shunning by the Muslim community there was fairly sobering, given how reasonable and intelligent Majid is. But the most surprising audience reaction, actually, one person came up at the book signing from Pakistan and said to me, not to Majid, which

was surprising, that I really should never doubt that my message is being heard even among religious conservatives in Pakistan. He had been a devout Muslim, and my YouTube videos, apparently, really got through to him. And he was now a non-believer and quite happy to be out of the closet. And I think he was living in Australia now, but he watched my YouTube videos in Pakistan. That seems like an especially heavy lift for me. And I must say that when I put out books and videos and podcasts, I'm rarely thinking that someone in a truly conservative context in a place like Pakistan is being successfully reached by them. I know there are atheists and closeted secularists in countries like Pakistan who listen to this podcast and

watch YouTube videos because I hear from these people. But I rarely picture actually reaching someone who is devout and changing their mind in that context. So that was fantastic to hear. And I don't recall your name, but it was great to meet you. So yeah, I think that was the moment of most gratifying surprise from the trip. But it was great to travel with Majid, and I really enjoyed Australia and hope to go back in the not-too-distant future. One other thing I should say about Australia is that while many people seem to love the events, I did hear some complaints about the format, that these were on-stage interviews.

So I didn't give a proper talk, I just came on stage and was interviewed by different people in the different cities. And there's a strength to that format, but there's also an obvious weakness. The weakness is I don't prepare anything beforehand. I don't know what questions I'm going to be asked. I haven't prepared a lecture. I certainly haven't prepared slides. So it's just a conversation. And so I am at the mercy of whatever I get asked. And it's all extemporaneous and I can wind up saying many things that you have all heard before, depending on what gets asked. And so that's a, I think some of you are not a fan of that format. I didn't dictate that format for the Australia tour.

In fact, Think, Inc. only does events in that format. They want conversations between some interviewer and the person they're touring. And Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cornel West and other people who preceded me in that speaker series engaged the same format. You know, I go both ways on that. Sometimes onstage interviews really work, sometimes they don't. But I acknowledge there is a difference there, and you are not getting my most polished treatments of specific topics that are foremost on my mind at that moment. You're getting my answer to whatever

gets asked in the moment, which is precisely what you're getting in this podcast. So take it or leave it. Next question. Which misrepresentation of your views are you most tired of defending? This is from Amir Pars. I think it would have to be the nuclear first strike that I allegedly want to execute on the entire Muslim world. Yeah, that's the most depressing because I saw it spread and I was aware of doing nothing about it. I just didn't see the point of answering this charge. It was so stupid. And really, it was engineered by one person. Chris Hedges just went on his book tour and shouted this from the rooftops, and it stuck. So, yeah, that's the most boring one, I believe. action only an indication of future behavior?" And this is from Oliver Lyons Hartman. This is a good question. My disavowal of free will is not a denial of there being a difference

between voluntary and involuntary action. Clearly there's a difference between what you intentionally do and what you do by reflex or unconsciously. And there are many different ways to see this difference. One is that voluntary action is something you can cease to do voluntarily or in response to some disincentive. If someone says, listen, I'm going to fine you $100 if you park in that space again, well, then you can decide not to park in that space again. You helplessly park your car there again because you can't do it.

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