Making Sense with Sam Harris - #273 — Joe Rogan and the Ethics of Apology

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Sam responds to the controversy over his friend Joe Rogan's use of the N-word and his subsequent public apology. 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.    

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, my friend Joe Rogan has come under considerable public scrutiny and personal attack in recent days. And I want to say a few things in response to that controversy. I've been critical of Joe's coverage of COVID and vaccines. In particular, I was critical of his platforming Peter McCullough and Robert Maloney. I reached out to Joe privately about that, and I've said a few things publicly. As you might expect, I restrained myself in public because Joe is a friend, but I didn't leave

any doubt about where I stood. My primary concern was that given his vast audience, getting public health messaging wrong, even a little wrong, could do a lot of harm. Joe is generally considered to have the biggest podcast on earth, and he has greater reach than almost any mainstream media outlet. So this comes with great responsibility, but it's a responsibility that Joe never sought and has been slow to appreciate. And I understand why. I mean, Joe is not a scientist or an academic or a journalist, right? He's a comedian. And because he's a comedian, whatever the topic, he can always pull the ripcord by saying, what the hell do I know? I'm just a comic, right? This is something that I and many other podcasters can't do. And he podcasts so much,

he sometimes produces 20 hours of content a week. So there's no way he can prepare for most of these conversations, nor is there time for him to edit his podcasts. He used to release everything live. He's since stopped doing that, but the spirit of his podcast hasn't changed. He just flips on the microphones and begins rolling with his guests. And while he may know something about their work, he is rather often learning what they think in real time, right along with his audience,

and then responding in the moment, based on his years of doing just this, having long and searching conversations with an incredibly diverse range of guests, and letting his curiosity be his guide. On most topics, this approach to podcasting has served Joe and his audience very, very well. And the fact that the Joe Rogan Experience is the biggest podcast on earth is all the proof we need of that.

But this approach to podcasting doesn't work so well for every guest and every topic. Nor does being a comedian always provide an alibi for getting your facts wrong. So I was very glad to see Joe pivot last week and acknowledge that on the topic of public health, he could and should be more rigorous and careful in the future. This was in response to Neil Young and other musicians pulling their music off of Spotify in protest over Joe's messaging around COVID. So when I saw that video, I jumped on Twitter and said, Well done, brother.

Because Joe promised to treat the topic of vaccines and COVID with more care, and to bring on other experts to balance the opinions of the heterodox people he'd been talking to. As you all know, the pandemic is a topic I've hit several times, and I've been distressed to see how other podcasters like Joe have covered it. I thought Joe's Instagram video, promising to do things differently, was about as good as it could have been. He wasn't defensive. He didn't double down on any mistakes. He acknowledged that he was slow to understand

the enormous role he now plays on our information landscape. And he promised to correct course. So bravo. But now another controversy has erupted, for which Joe also felt the need to apologize. Someone cut together a reel of moments where Joe said the N-word on his podcast, going back 12 years, I think. In the second apology, Joe made it clear that in none of those instances

was he using the word as a racist slur. Rather, he was talking about the word itself, about its use in comedy, and about its magically destructive properties. And in his apology, he went so far as to say that he was wrong to have used the word even in this way, and that as a white man, it's just not his word to use for any reason in any context. I want to say a few things about this second apology and about the way it's being received. First, I should say a few things about Joe as a person. Anyone who knows him, and you don't have to know him personally,

you can just be a fan of his podcast, because what you see there really is Joe. Anyone who has spent dozens of hours listening to Joe's podcast knows to a moral certainty that Joe is not racist. And there really is nothing more that needs to be said on that point.

There is simply no workable definition of racism that includes Joe Rogan. And insofar as there is an enduring problem of racism in our society, people like Joe are not a symptom of it. Rather, they are the cure. Joe is an extremely ethical person, and he has an extraordinarily large and diverse set of friends and social contacts, it would be hard to imagine someone less likely to actually care about the race of

another human being than Joe. So if Joe Rogan is your version of a racist, you have reached a moral and political dead end. What's more, I think Joe actually went too far in his apology about using the n-word. It's totally understandable that he did, because he's been taking a tremendous amount of fire. Even the White House came after him this week. It's been completely crazy. So I understand why he felt the need to disavow his prior use of the word entirely. But let me take a moment to spell out why I think that's a mistake. There is simply no question that American hysteria around the use of the n-word is pathological, and dishonest, and destructive of people's integrity, End an offense to basic sanity.

I remember an example over 20 years ago, long before social media and, of course, long before we spoke of cancel culture. We would have called it political correctness back then, where an aide to the mayor of Washington, D.C. used the term niggardly in a speech. Niggardly is a synonym for stingy, and it has no etymological connection to the N-word. Needless to say, some genius in the audience got mightily offended. And the controversy was such that the mayor's aide resigned,

and the mayor accepted his resignation. This person was later reinstated in another role, I think. But it's a sign of how far we've wandered from the path of progress that the NAACP at the time recognized just how absurd and demeaning of its own interests the initial taking of offense was. Julian Bond, who was the chairman of the NAACP, said, quote, You hate to think that you have to censor your language to meet other people's lack of understanding. And then he said, Seems to me that the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue.

Okay, that was great, right? That was decent. That was sane. Needless to say, we could not expect such a reasonable response from the NAACP today. Here's what I think is patently true, morally and intellectually, and therefore politically, in the end. The idea that a white person cannot say the N-word for any reason when discussing its use, when reading Huckleberry Finn out loud, when dissecting public controversies of the sort that I'm discussing now, is completely insane. To hold this view is to attribute magical properties to words. It's the very essence of a childish relationship to language. And it makes a mockery of the very

real social problem of racism, that is, bigotry as applied through the lens of race. Leaving aside the question of systemic racism, because there's a lot to debate about the scope of that problem today, I don't deny that it still exists. And what has always been pernicious about systemic racism is that the people implementing racist policies need not be consciously racist to perpetrate further harm. But of course, the pendulum has also swung violently in the other direction. And as I've said before on this podcast, I think it's safe to assume that

there is almost no desirable place to work or study or mingle in American society today. In academia, in film or television or journalism or tech. You could literally take the highest status 20% of every corner of our culture. There is almost no place, and perhaps there is no actual place at all, where being a person of color isn't a positive advantage for gaining entry in the year 2022. Of course, this excludes Asians, who are now white adjacent. Again, there's a lot to debate about the ethics of all this, and there are certainly questions about affirmative action and related policies where I don't even know what I think. But we can leave all of that aside, because that's not the sort of racism we're talking about.

The racism of which Joe Rogan has been accused is real racism. Psychological racism. He likes white people better than black people. Racism. When we're talking about a person using the N-word to convey his racism, or using it in such a way as to reveal his racism, whether he meant to or not, then everything depends on the beliefs and

intentions of the speaker. To know if a person is racist, we have to know what he thinks and feels about other human beings. Most importantly, we have to know what sort of and feels about other human beings. Most importantly, we have to know what sort of world he wants to live in. To allege that a person is racist is of necessity to claim that he cares about the variable of race in ways that he shouldn't, that he prefers certain groups of people for reasons that he shouldn't, that he takes pride in things he shouldn't, and that he has contempt or at least disregard for certain people based purely on the color of their skin or some other superficial racial characteristic.

Real racists don't want people of other races to truly succeed, and they feel more or less compassion for the suffering of other human beings based primarily on their racial identities. This is why the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black calumny is so silly and destructive. If a person is white and some of his best friends are black calumny is so silly and destructive. If a person is white and some of his best friends are black, I don't care what jokes he laughs at. He is not a racist in any way that society should worry about. And if you doubt that, there is something you don't understand about what it means to have good friends. So, using the n-word as a racial slur is completely different from using it in some other way. And if you insist that the word itself is magically destructive, like Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels.

If you insist upon treating its use by a person of the wrong skin color, in any context, for any purpose, as some kind of diabolical incantation, if you really believe that someone, somewhere, will be harmed by any conceivable use of the term based merely on the color of the speaker's skin, you are just morally unprepared to solve real problems in our world. And any culture that takes this attitude is morally unprepared to solve real problems, too. And that's where I'm afraid we are. We are mired in a culture that appears totally unable to even identify, much less solve, real problems,

because it has grown hysterical over imaginary ones. There were other things that Joe apologized for in the second video. Things which it sounds like he should have apologized for. These were things he said as a comedian that now sound bad even in context. He told jokes in the past that he wouldn't tell today. It's only decent to notice, however, that literally everyone, not just comedians, everyone, is in this spot, because the norms have shifted massively. You simply can't judge comedy or any other cultural product from 10 years ago by the sensitivities of today. It's just not fair to, because it doesn't give an accurate picture of

a person's state of mind, then or now. And most important, if you watch Joe's recent video, there is no question that he offered a complete apology for things he genuinely regrets saying. What more could we expect a well-intentioned person to do? saying, what more could we expect a well-intentioned person to do? I've noticed two reactions to Joe's most recent video, both of which seem like moral errors to me. First, there were people who smell blood in the water and who are now calling for Joe's annihilation with even greater fervor. These are people on the left for whom no apology would ever be sufficient. These are people on the left for whom no apology would ever be sufficient. Though, ironically, these same people love redemption stories about murderers and rapists,

provided they have the correct skin color. Find me a black man who has shot a cop and then apologized for it, or in some cases hasn't apologized for it, and I'll show you vast numbers of people on the left who are eager to see him brought back into the fold and even canonized as some kind of saint. But find a white guy who told a bad joke in 2007 and these same people will want to see him destroyed for it. That is a bit of hypocrisy

that everyone left of center has to become allergic to. And then, of course, are the responses from the right, or the alt-right, or the QAnon adjacent, or the, I don't know what to call it politically, the I'm way too online and wokeness is the only problem I can keep track of response, which, in light of the left's reaction, has declared that apologizing is always and everywhere a mistake. You can't give an inch to the woke mob, otherwise you're finished. So all you can do is stonewall and double down. From a purely PR point of view, these people aren't necessarily wrong.

They're often right. In Joe's case, they probably are right. Here's one thing that's important to be clear about. Joe didn't have to apologize. Of all the people who could weather a controversy like this by saying absolutely nothing or by telling his critics to just go to hell, Joe is probably in the best position to do that. Even if Spotify drops his show, Joe will be fine. It would be trivially easy for him

to create his own platform, where he'd be answerable to no one, and legions of his fans would follow him there. And he would still have the biggest podcast on earth. But he chose to apologize because he genuinely regretted saying certain things. And he felt bad about how their resurfacing made many people feel. And that's exactly how you would want him to respond. So in my view, he took a risk by apologizing. And he did this because it was the right thing to do.

Here's the culture I think we want, or should want. We want people, when they feel they have done something wrong, to apologize. This is a way for them to express regret over regrettable things, and to communicate their goodwill toward anyone they may have hurt, however inadvertently. I've never had to issue a public apology of the sort that Joe has released twice this week. Perhaps my time will come, but if I ever felt that there was something I really should apologize for, I would find it very depressing not to apologize for fear of the apology backfiring.

for fear of the apology backfiring. A sincere apology is a moral good, as is the forgiveness with which it is often met. We want to live in a world where people offer sincere apologies, and we want to live in a world where sincere apologies are generally accepted. This is born of the recognition that no one is perfect. Each of us is a work in progress. Everyone is growing, and forgiveness itself is one of our highest virtues. Forgiveness is a fucking miracle, and we want a culture that makes us better at both seeking it and bestowing it,

not one that views every apology as a source of shame and as an invitation for further scorn. There really is a ray of ethical daylight here that we must recognize. Asking forgiveness and receiving it is how we repair our relationships and the fabric of society itself. Anyway, as I said, Joe is a friend, but I would like to think that I would defend anyone of his character who found himself at the center of a similar controversy. And Joe, if you're hearing this, you can rest assured that tens of millions of people

who have never met you know and love you for precisely who you are. Because unlike almost anyone else, you have built your career by letting them do that. And that is both remarkable and a true refuge at a time like this. Keep your chin up, my friend.