Making Sense with Sam Harris - #33 — Ask Me Anything 4

Episode Date: March 26, 2016

Sam Harris answers questions from listeners about the recent attacks in Brussels, dealing with anxiety, the science of immortality, fame, liberalism, the Golden Age of Islam, 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Apologies in advance, I'm getting over yet another cold. I'm beginning to wonder whether my commitment to vegetarianism isn't just a strategy cooked up by the cold virus to prepare me as a vector by which to lay waste to the rest of society. I have just gotten so many colds since I stopped killing animals or paying others to kill them on my behalf. Well, this is an Ask Me Anything podcast, which I'm doing a day after the Brussels attacks, so the questions I have here really don't reflect

what has been going on, so I feel somewhat out of sync with what's been going on. Maybe I'll just say a few words about Brussels at the outset. Everything I've written about Islam and jihadism and profiling and related topics should be viewed through the lens of events like this. I really don't have any more to say about this kind of thing. But I'll just give you a glimpse of what my life is like on this issue. So I'm at a conference talking about things like artificial intelligence, and I open my phone to discover that there's an article circulating calling me a white supremacist. Now, needless to say, Reza Aslan has circulated it saying, what do you think Sam Harris means when he says profile anyone who could conceivably be Muslim? Even though in the very paragraph where I make that claim,

I make it clear that white guys like me also fit the profile I'm talking about. And then the very next day, we have attacks like these in Belgium. And you see the pictures of the likely suicide bombers. And once again, they're not blonde-haired old ladies from Iceland. They're not Japanese schoolgirls. They're Middle Eastern young men. And again, let me spell this out. White guys like me have also been recruited to ISIS and al-Qaeda. So I'm not putting myself or anyone who looks like me out of the profile, but not everyone is in the profile. My only point about profiling is that we have to admit that we know what we're looking for.

We are looking for jihadists. 100% of jihadists are Muslim. In a place like an airport, in addition to random searches and searching all luggage, our security personnel should be looking for people who stand a chance of being jihadists. Now, out in the world, they should be looking for Muslim extremists who may be planning some sort of attack. Where should they look for them? Everywhere at random? Is that really what anyone believes? It seems rather obvious that they should be reaching out to the Muslim community.

More important, the Muslim community should be scrutinizing itself. Profiling itself, one might say. If you are a moderate Muslim, you have to admit that there is a unique problem of religious extremism in your own faith community. And if this offends you, you are part of the problem. And if you don't want Muslims demonized, you have to stop attacking people as bigots and Islamophobes for expressing their totally sane concerns about Islamism and jihadism. And as for the presidential election, assuming it's going to be Clinton versus Trump, it's time for Clinton to stop mincing words or lying outright on this topic. There are no liberals who are suddenly going to vote for Trump because Hillary says something politically incorrect. So to make this clear, I think Trump is dangerously

unqualified to be president. And his apparent unawareness of this, his total lack of concern for his obvious ignorance, is fairly terrifying. But in his own idiotic way, at least he is naming the problem. At least he's not pretending that we are all so worried about the IRA or that Middle Eastern Christians are just as likely to be suicide bombers as Muslims are. Just think of what a significant attack

in the U.S. prior to our election could do if Hillary continues to sound delusional on this topic. She has to start using words like Islamic extremism and Islamism and jihadism and political Islam and Muslim terrorism. The so-called war on terror is not a war against a generic problem of terrorism. It's a war, as Majid Nawaz has said over and over, against a global jihadist insurgency. Unless Clinton starts making sense on this topic, she's going to give ISIS a vote in electing our next president, and you can be sure they have a favorite candidate. So to say any more here, I think I will just be saying things you've all heard me say a hundred times.

Maybe there's just one more point to clarify. I clearly have followed Majid's line in distinguishing Islamism from Islam, and I've been hearing many disgruntled noises from readers who think this is intellectually dishonest. So maybe I should make it clear how I see this. I am a critic of all religion. I think the notion of revelation and the notion that faith trumps reason is dangerous and intrinsically divisive and something we have to get over. And I have made no secret of the fact that I think Islam is the worst religion on most

points, currently ruling the minds of a significant part of humanity. So my view hasn't changed here. There is a war of ideas that has to be waged and won with Islam and with anyone who believes that the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe. But there's a distinction between nominal Muslims, or those who are fairly non-committal in their faith, or those who have some interpretation of the faith that allows them to ignore many of its edicts, and Islamists. And there's a difference between Islamists and jihadists. And here I follow Majid's definitions.

Islamism is the commitment to impose Islam on the rest of society. It's intrinsically political. And jihadism is that variant of Islamism that intends to do this by force, as opposed to winning elections or some other process. And I agree with Majid that the way forward is to convince the Muslim world to be increasingly secular and liberal, and that is a much more promising door to try to force 1.6 billion people through than the doorway of atheism. Now, insofar as I can persuade Muslims to be atheists and disavow their faith, that's also something I'm happy to do. And occasionally I notice some

success on that front, but I think it is far less realistic in any reasonable time frame to expect 1.6 billion Muslims to apostatize than it is to expect them to reform their religion in a direction of secularism and liberalism. And I will not pretend to be optimistic on that score either. Many of you think that is just a fool's errand. What more reasonable project do you have to recommend? So my view here is that wherever a distinction between Islam and Islamism doesn't exist, we have to create it. Muslims have to create it, and non-Muslims have to insist that they do. And if you're feeling powerless here, if you're feeling there's nothing you can do that's useful after an event like this, I would say that the one thing you can do is lose your patience for people obfuscating the problem.

Lose your patience for liars. It is not a lie to say that there is a difference between Islamism and Islam. Because one can be created. There are many Muslims who do not want a global caliphate. There are many Muslims who do not want homosexuals thrown off of rooftops. There are many Muslims for whom Islam in some form is important, but who are no more religious than the least religious person you met yesterday. And these people need to be supported. These people need to win a war of ideas. And where they're not waging one, they have to be encouraged to wage it. And the only way I know to do that is for all of us to keep speaking honestly

about the nature of the problem. Okay, so I got your questions on Reddit, and when I last looked at this page, there were over 1,300 of them. So needless to say, I will not make much headway, but I really thank you for delivering so many questions and voting them up. And I can only assume that the ones that came first now were the ones that, in fact, were reliably voted up. Some of these questions surprised me, but maybe I'll dig around a little to find others that are of interest. So there are many questions on anxiety, and one person wrote, anxiety is a monster that is

crippling and paralyzing and keeps you in a loop of debilitating negative emotions, even when one desperately wants out. What are the causes? What can one do to help themselves? What steps, big or small, do you suggest? Well, the neurophysiology of anxiety is pretty well understood, but I don't think understanding it in any detail really helps you. There are drugs you can take to mitigate the effects of anxiety. I should say up front, I have no clinical experience and this is not my area. I would think that if anxiety is really crippling, there's some role for drugs to play, whether it's beta blockers that impede the effect of adrenaline on your heart rate so you don't get the racing heart experience, or anti-anxiety drugs that work

on the neurotransmitter GABA. But in general, the people who work with anxiety therapeutically, to my understanding, don't recommend you take those drugs and that you do something more along the line of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is to say you expose yourself in manageable ways to the things that provoke anxiety and you reframe them conceptually. You become open to feeling the effects of anxiety and realize you can get through it. And there's certainly a role for meditation and mindfulness to play in this part of the process. For instance, many people are afraid to fly, and even those of us who aren't especially afraid to fly can feel anxious in significant turbulence. Now, why do we feel anxious? Well, we have some thought that turbulence might be

dangerous, right? That it makes it more likely the plane will crash. And of course, truly significant turbulence can cause a plane to crash. But this, as we know from the statistics of plane crashes, is a very, very rare thing. So there are two levels to respond to this experience so as to mitigate anxiety. So picture this. You're in an airplane and it begins to bounce. Now, unless you're in that rare and horrible experience of being actually thrown around the cabin so as to get injured, it's very likely that the bouncing is not physically painful, right? You're not being harmed by this sensation. And in other contexts, you would subject yourself to even more violent bouncing and not be worried about it at all. You

might go on some ride at an amusement park, which exerts greater force on you bodily, and you do it because you're seeking that experience out. Now Now on an airplane, it's totally unwelcome to you because you're afraid of dying. But if you just take the raw sensations, they are not your problem. It's what they portend. It's your interpretation of them that worries you. There are at least two levels at which you can deal with this. First is to think conceptually about the nature of the problem and about what you fear. Is it rational to worry that your plane will crash if you're experiencing turbulence? No, it actually isn't.

The likelihood of dying in a plane crash is minuscule. Over the course of your journey, you should begin to worry as you leave the airport and get in an Uber or a taxi or drive yourself home in your own car. That's when your risk of mortality begins to peak. So if you understand that, if you understand that every moment in a plane is in fact safer than many moments you spend on the ground, certainly safer than when you're walking as a pedestrian, fixated on your smartphone, and stepping into the crosswalk. That's when your adrenaline should surge,

or when you're driving and glancing down at your phone to see what text just came in. Those are the moments where the sweat should begin beating up on your forehead. So when you're in a plane and it's begun to bounce, it is in fact unreasonable to worry that the bouncing means much of anything. If you understand that, that actually can have an effect. Then you can become willing to just experience the raw sensations of turbulence.

Then you can cease to interpret the experience as a sign of actual danger. The other level at which you can address this, and these are totally compatible moves, I recommend both of them, is to become mindful of the feeling of anxiety itself. What is it? And what does it mean? Well, it's just sensation. It's just a pattern of energy in your body. And it actually doesn't mean anything at the level of raw sensation. You might have thoughts about it, and very likely much of your thinking in that moment is purposed toward trying to figure out how not to feel that way or not to let it get worse. But if you'll step out of your thoughts and just become willing to feel the raw sensation of

anxiety, actually just surrender your resistance to it, just feel it as energy, it can lose its meaning. It can become very difficult to distinguish from what under another framing would be a positive experience like excitement. How do you know the difference between being anxious about something that's about to happen and being excited? For the most part, it is the thoughts you're thinking when you're feeling that arousal. There's a cognitive conceptual overlay on top of this raw feeling. You can consciously reframe things, or you can step out of it altogether and just feel the raw energy of this experience. And when you do that, anxiety can be like any other experience that has no meaning for you as a person, really. I mean, it doesn't say anything about you. So something like indigestion or itching. Let's say you have a rash on your elbow and it's itching.

Okay, that doesn't say anything deep about you as a person. That has no psychological implications. It might be unpleasant. It might be extraordinarily unpleasant, but it doesn't reach into your sense of who you are. The deepest way to respond to anxiety, and again, I'm not saying that there is no case in which drugs are valuable or even necessary. There may very well be, but for anxiety in its more ordinary range, the deep way to respond to it is to become willing to feel it, to cease to interpret it as important, and to function in the midst of it. And then it will pass. Anxiety rises and falls like any other emotion. And if you're not continually thinking the thoughts that make you anxious, it actually can't stay around very long. And this is true of other unpleasant emotions like anger and sadness. They're continually

resurrected by our thoughts, and we're spending most of our time thinking without knowing that we're thinking. So mindfulness in particular is a very good antidote to this problem. But the trick is you can't apply it as an antidote. You can't be mindful of anxiety so that it will go away. You can't push it away with meditation. Or at least that attempt is more likely to fail. What you're really after in those moments is genuine equanimity, real acceptance of the energy of this emotion. Become interested in it. Become willing to feel it. Just let it burn bright in you and discover that it doesn't matter. It simply comes and it goes and you can function. Next question. What are your thoughts on immortality or at least living a very,

very long time as pursued by researchers like Aubrey de Grey. Do you think it's possible? Do you think it's desirable? Aubrey, if you're not familiar with Aubrey de Grey, you should watch some of his talks. I think he's given two TED talks. He has some very good arguments against people's ethical intuitions here. Many people seem to think that if we could cure aging and death and become immortal or live thousands of years, that there's something unethical about that project, that it's either so unnatural as to be unethical or it represents some kind of selfishness that we should be suspicious of. I think Aubrey's rejoinder to those intuitions is compelling. As to whether it's possible, I think it probably is in principle possible. I think Aubrey's rejoinder to those intuitions is compelling. As to whether it's possible,

I think it probably is in principle possible. I think, you know, Aubrey describes aging as an engineering problem. There are not that many ways in the end to grow old and die. I think he points to seven different ways in which our bodies begin to break down. Cancer is one of those ways. The depositing of junk inside of cells or between cells is another way. There are just not that many ways that an old person on the verge of death differs from a person in the prime of his or her life. So I agree that if we understood those ways completely and we could intervene biochemically and make the necessary changes, well then we may find that aging is now no longer a problem. We can keep repairing ourselves. And I think that would be a good thing. I think, as Aubrey argues, aging is the worst thing there is. And the only reason why anyone's tempted to accept it

is because it appears currently unavoidable. But if you think Alzheimer's should be cured and you think cancer should be cured, well, then aging is the super problem you should want solved. Because each of these evils, along with many others, are mere symptoms of aging. Yeah, I agree with Aubrey. I think if there's any way in which I'm skeptical of his discussion of this topic,

it may be just a basic uncertainty about whether he's too optimistic about the timeline here. But I think it's an incredibly interesting area to work in, and I think the taboos around declaring one's intent to cure aging are fascinating, both ethically and culturally. And I think Aubrey has said some very useful things in that area. Next question. Sam, I remember you mentioning getting flack from Majid about not liking hip-hop. I'm curious what sort of music you do listen to? Stravinsky, Radiohead, Enya? Well, it's not that I don't like hip-hop. I got a lot of grief about this. I just, I'm not a hip-hop fan. I'm just not, I don't listen to a lot of hip-hop, but I don't recoil at the sound of hip-hop. On this list, I would pick Radiohead of the

three choices. The issue with me and music is, one, I'm not a musician, so I'm fairly uneducated in this area. And there's a lot of music I like, but I don't spend a lot of time listening to music because I can't work to music. Certainly not music with lyrics. I can't read to it. I can't write to it. I just spend a lot of time trying to ignore the music. I just find silence works better for me. And when I'm not working, I'm a bit of an information junkie. And so I'm listening to audio books or podcasts or the news in the car while traveling. So there's not a lot of time for music to get in. And if I'm going to listen to music, I often just put on Spotify or something now. And in fact, I don't even know what I'm listening to. I just have something that some AI somewhere is piping

into my brain based on the few Radiohead songs I've selected. And maybe that will be the future of ideas too. At a certain point, you won't know what book you're reading or what lecture you're listening to. Something like Spotify will just start feeding you disconnected ideas. Next question. Why aren't your books translated into Arabic? I'm an Arab who is fortunate enough to be fluent in English, but many Arabs are not as fortunate as I am. I read all your books and I love them all. I just wish they could reach a larger Arab audience, especially the book Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I've been sheepish about letting my books get translated into Arabic. There hasn't been much demand, as you might imagine, but on the few occasions when someone has asked permission to translate one of my books, it's been a long time since this has happened, but I remember

declining because I just didn't want to have Salman Rushdie's experience of learning one day that one of his translators got killed. And when you're talking about Arabic or Urdu or any other language from a Muslim-majority country, I begin to worry about this sort of thing. So, that's why. Maybe that will change. Can you please do a podcast with Richard Lang, disciple and close friend of the late Douglas Harding, about the headless way, the westernized version of Dzogchen? I imagine getting a Dzogchen master on a podcast could be tough, and their message a little abstruse. But the way Lange and Harding talk about seeing is thrilling. I don't actually know Richard Lange. I've seen a couple of his videos online, and he seems to make perfect sense on

this topic, as did Douglas Harding. I will talk about this practice more, and I'll talk about it in particular in the meditation app I'm building, but it's a little difficult for a podcast. So much of it is visual. The exercises that Douglas Harding recommended, and which I'm sure Lange teaches, are based on changing your relationship to your visual field. And I write about this a little bit in my book Waking Up. We define our sense of self visually in particular. It's not the only way. If you feel like a self with your eyes open, you're going to feel like a self with your eyes closed. But the experience of selflessness can be very striking with your eyes open because it changes your felt sense of subject-object perception with respect to everything that you see. And the way that

Harding described this, in particular in his book On Having No Head, is as the experience of headlessness, whereas he would look out at his visual field, and then he would look for his head. He would recognize that his head was not among the contents of his visual field. And as you listen to me now, you might do this just with your eyes open. Look at whatever it is you can see, and notice that your face or your head is not among the things that you see. In fact, where your head is supposed to be, there's just the world. And if you become sensitive to this consideration, if you look for what you presume you are looking out of and fail to find it,

you can have a, as the questioner says, a thrilling sense of having lost the feeling of subject-object perception. And this itself can become a basis of mindfulness. This can be the thing you pay attention to when you meditate, as opposed to your breath or any other object of attention. And some very powerful changes in your conscious experience can happen the more you do this. But as far as talking about this at length on a podcast, it's a little difficult because much of what needs to be said needs to be indicated visually. And so it definitely lends itself more to video than audio. But I will try to be precise about it in my meditation app. video than audio, but I will try to be precise about it in my meditation app. What are your preferred news sources? Well, nothing especially esoteric here. I read the New York Times every day.

I read the Atlantic. I listen to NPR. I watch television news rather often, whether it's the evening news or 60 Minutes or Frontline or Vice documentaries. I'll go to the BBC website sometimes. And often somebody on social media will send me a link to something more esoteric, like an English language paper in Pakistan, for instance. So I do see things that are off the beaten path, but for the most part, I have very standard and uninteresting sources of news, but I do consume a fair amount of it. One of the virtues of social media is that if I haven't noticed something through any of these channels, I very often hear about it from one of you. Sam, I heard you say once before that the left has one advantage over the right in that it has

a self-correcting mechanism. Well, now that the left seems to advantage over the right in that it has a self-correcting mechanism. Well, now that the left seems to be going off the deep end, we need those mechanisms. I'm not sure I said that, or at least I don't think I said that it was an advantage. In fact, it's a disadvantage. The self-criticism of the left is a disadvantage in its tug of war with the right. The left eats its own in a way that the right never seems to. What you find on the left is a criticism of one's own tribe, which can lead to a kind of masochism. Now, short of masochism, obviously self-criticism is a intellectual virtue. It's very good to wonder whether or not one is wrong, to wonder whether or not one's opponent, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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