Can we please stop pretending that Sam Harris is a “great thinker”?
Writing on the death of Sir Roger Scruton recently, writer Ben Sixsmith lamented the dearth of true intellectuals in modern conservatism. Despite admiringly noting the likes of Douglas Murray, Theodore Dalrymple and Peter Hitchens, Sixsmith characterised them as “polemicists” rather than serious intellectuals. I have serious doubts that this is a fair characterisation, nor do I share Sixsmith’s conviction that the left has far more serious intellectuals on its side.
Sam Harris is quite plainly a man of the left and is feted by them as a leading intellectual of New Atheism, but he cannot be taken seriously as a deep thinker. Harris’s career has been distinguished by occasional bouts of intellectual clarity noisily punctuated by noxious eructations of fluff and nonsense.
He wrote half a good book, with The Moral Landscape. Here, Harris made a valiant but ultimately futile effort to overcome Hume’s Razor and establish an objective morality within an atheistic worldview. Beyond that, the book dissolved into a welter of scientistic hand-waving which utterly failed to establish that “science can determine human values”.
That, though, was the high-point of his intellectual career. At the other end of the scale is Waking Up, a mish-mash of New Age and Scientism which merely regurgitates trite Buddhist platitudes and stews of “I-took-some-shrooms-and-I-SAW-things-man” anecdotes which could easily have been written by Cheech’n’Chong.
Any lingering delusions that Harris is an “intellectual” have been well and truly demolished by his asinine ravings as he surrenders wholly to the lunacy of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the latest edition of his “Waking Up” podcast.
I find Trump more despicable than I found Osama bin Laden[…]This is psychologically true, because with Osama bin Laden, it’s just obvious to me that he could have been a mensch in some sense, right? He’s making serious sacrifices for ideas that he deeply believes in. He’s committed to a cause greater than himself. I don’t doubt that he had real ethical connections to the people in his life that he cared about[…]in some ways, he is kind of a moral hero in a very bad game[…]whereas Trump is the negation of all of those things and yet he’s the president of the United States.
For those unfamiliar with Yiddish, a “mensch” is a “person of integrity and honour…someone to admire and emulate”. As Dr. Dreyfuss admonishes Bud, in The Apartment, “Be a mensch!”
In other words, Harris thinks that bin Laden is someone to admire and emulate, whereas Trump is just a Bad Orange Man.
The fatuousness of this claim ought to be instantly obvious to anyone who saw the Twin Towers collapse in smoking ruins, killing thousands of innocents and genuine menschen. But Harris’s utter lack of anything approaching rational thinking becomes even clearer once his argument is pulled apart.
Firstly, Harris’s argument is nothing more than an extended ad hominem fallacy, the logical error of attacking a person’s character as a substitute for rational argument. Harris’s only argument against Trump is that he is, supposedly, a bad person.
But even Harris’s attacks on Trump’s character are often false. Harris praises bin Laden for supposedly “making serious sacrifices for ideas that he deeply believes in” and claims that Trump has not. Yet Trump has sacrificed a great deal of money to become president (not only has he refused a presidential salary, but his net worth has diminished considerably as he stands aside from his business responsibilities). Even more, he has endured a tidal wave of opprobrium that he never attracted before.
Although plenty disliked him, no one ever called The Donald “literally Hitler” when he was a reality tv star.
Yet Harris’s defence of Osama bin Laden is even worse. Commitment to a cause does nothing to establish a person’s moral integrity. Indeed, many of the world’s worst tyrants, from Robespierre, to Lenin, to al-Baghdadi, were passionately committed to their cause. Even Hitler “had real ethical connections to the people in his life that he cared about”. Hitler even personally intervened to save his Jewish WWI company commander.
Would the Jewish Harris similarly, therefore, defend Hitler’s character as “a kind of moral hero”?
As a supposed “philosopher”, Harris simply ought to know better than to make such puerile arguments, or to try and defend them as “psychologically true”. That is a particularly weak cop-out, which suggests that even Harris realises, on some level, how weak his own argument is.
No philosopher would utter such a callow diatribe without a flush of shame. That Harris is instead apparently so pleased with himself that he publishes it in pride of place in promotions for his podcast is damning. We might excuse such nonsense from a mere polemicist, but a “philosopher” must do better.
Any delusion that Harris is a serious intellectual has been demolished against the immovable rock of his own Trump derangement.
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