Sam Harris Still Can’t Take a Hint


Sam Harris’ latest exercise in egocentrism leaves him outmatched, outwitted, and outclassed by none other than Ezra Klein.

 
 
Color me saddened, but not at all surprised, to see that Sam Harris is still the insufferable egoist he’s always been. By airing another of his long-winded email tantrums — this one directed at Ezra Klein, Vox’s editor-at-large — he’s let his childlike petulance further erode his status as a public intellectual, and, by doubling down on his defense of Charles Murray, resumed his rightward pull in the process. Whatever we might think of Murray’s science and Harris promoting it, one thing is certain: it takes an inflated sense of self-importance to think publicizing this joust like so much dirty laundry was a good idea.

We’ve been here before, of course. He pulled the same stunt with Greenwald and Chomsky, and my impression hasn’t changed. To wit: Harris sounds like an annoying mosquito that won’t stop buzzing around Klein. Harris, for whatever reason, walks away feeling sufficiently vindicated to post the exchange on his blog. Klein walks away relieved that the mosquito isn’t buzzing around him any longer.

And this time, Sam may have finally jumped the shark. Ezra Klein seems an unlikely target for scorn, but Harris’ feverish preoccupation with deplatforming and political correctness helped secure this fate. His endorsement of Murray’s scientifically dubious and morally damaging theses about race, his incessant huff-fests about social justice culture in academia, his chummy nature with Ben Shapiro, and his defense of free speech absolutists like Milo Yiannopoulos have earned Harris a fair number of alt-right fans, including Trump supporters. In fact his audience has grown so full of them that he’s had to address them on several podcasts. You don’t get here without dabbling in and expressing some patently right-wing rhetoric.

So how did we get here exactly? To bring latecomers up to speed, here’s the play by play in a nutshell. Sam Harris had political scientist Charles Murray on his podcast. After Vox published a piece responding to the science presented in Sam’s discussion with Murray, Harris went after Klein directly via email. Some half dozen missives later, a stalemate ensued, culminating in this week’s post-mortem of the whole affair by Klein.

Based on their correspondence, it’s clear Harris regards Klein as a bad-faith actor, when any honest reading of their exchange demonstrates the opposite. Harris’ self-absorbed nature and near-pathological inability to admit a wrong commits him to seeing malice and Tartuffery where mere professional disagreement exists. The message for any hapless soul daring to engage New Atheism’s beloved pansophist is clear: you either bask in the radiant wisdom of Sam’s polemic, or you’re an evil scheming liar — there is no middle ground.

It has to be mentioned that I know of no one else who can boast of such a consistent pattern of failed interactions with reasonable, highly intelligent, widely respected individuals. His back catalog of podcasts is an absolute junkheap of conversational carnage, and reflects poorly on his ability to communicate. That Harris has such an infamous record of public impasses and burned bridges with diverse voices and thinkers says more about him than it does about anyone with whom he’s sparred. At some point you have to admit that he’s the common denominator here, that he might be the problem and not everyone else.

There’s also his strange obsession with publishing private email exchanges. Not only does it smack of voyeurism and self-seeking drama indulgence, it’s also incredibly lame, unbecoming of a serious intellectual, and possibly exploitative since he did not receive Klein’s permission to do so. Once again, as so many times before, Harris utterly fails to impress.

On the other hand, Ezra Klein’s latest, in which he responds to these controversies, is unremittingly brilliant, and one of the best commentaries on the intersection of America and racism I’ve read in a long time. Few can write like Klein, and I’m grateful he has brought his talents to bear on these critical issues. His masterful expatiation deserves to be shared widely and read often, even if you’re new to this topic and have no interest in questions about the relationship between race and intelligence. This is the “care and context” missing in the discussion between Harris and Murray.

Klein points out that any discussion of race and IQ which fails to acknowledge America’s centuries-long struggle with racism, including slavery, segregation, and institutional violence, is bound to be woefully incomplete and ahistorical.
 

“Over hundreds of years, white Americans have oppressed black Americans — enslaved them, physically terrorized them, ripped their families apart, taken their wealth from them, denied their children decent educations, refused to let them buy homes in neighborhoods with good schools, locked them out of the most cognitively demanding and financially rewarding jobs, deprived them of the professional and social networks that power advancement.”

 
And that’s all before you get to the more nuanced conversations about heritability, the interaction between genes and environment, and whether it even makes sense to talk about ‘racial’ discrepancies — as opposed to geographic discrepancies — in intelligence or other DNA-quantifiable traits. Notably, Klein declines to weigh in on these more science-oriented questions. As he makes clear in his exchange with Harris, neither of them are geneticists, and intellectual discretion dictates we leave those matters for more capable hands. What he does feel compelled to relate are the environmental influences that have shaped the trajectory of African Americans in this country and the grievous ways in which racist actors have used and abused genetics to further oppression of marginalized groups.
 

“Here is my view: Research shows measurable consequences on IQ and a host of other outcomes from the kind of violence and discrimination America inflicted for centuries against African Americans. In a vicious cycle, the consequences of that violence have pushed forward the underlying attitudes that allow discriminatory policies to flourish and justify the racially unequal world we’ve built.

To put this simply: You cannot discuss this topic without discussing its toxic past and the way that shapes our present.

Whatever the future holds, the idea that America’s racial inequalities are driven by genetic differences between the races and not by anything we did, or have to undo, is not “forbidden knowledge” — it is perhaps the most common and influential perspective in American history. It is embedded in our founding documents, voiced by men with statues in their likeness, reflected in centuries of policymaking. It is an argument that has been used since the dawn of the country to justify the condition of its most oppressed citizens. If you’re going to discuss this topic, that’s a history you need to reckon with.”

 
For his part, Sam Harris seems more concerned about the politics within academia — attributing the controversy surrounding Murray’s research to “dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice” — than he is with the actual scientific value of what Murray is claiming. That’s why he classifies scientific arguments against Murray as evidence of academia discriminating against Murray, and not as genuine scientific arguments. Klein addresses Harris and Co.’s mushrooming concerns about “PC culture” head-on, and cuts them down to size.
 

“One problem with the political correctness debate, however, is we’re quick to demand a sense of proportion and prudence from college protesters even as we ignore related sins of partiality and overreaction in nationally recognized commentators. I often see pundits — Harris included — who seem far more afraid of “PC culture” than the problems PC culture is trying to address. On some level, that’s understandable. If you’re a white male pundit who trades in controversial opinions, PC culture probably does pose more of a threat to you than the inequalities it means to fight.

Perspective is key here, though. The victims of the toxic idea that Americans with dark skin are biologically destined to be, on average, intellectually inferior to Americans of light skin are not the white men who have promoted it but the black Americans who have endured it. And when your explorations of these debates don’t seem to understand that, you feed the worst fears of the PC culture you’re trying to calm.”

 
Klein nails it. Whatever misgivings we might have about leftist overreach must always be tempered by the more consequential concerns about the injustices and misuses of power those movements are working to face down. It’s precisely this unfeeling misappropriation of outrage that permeates Harris’ rhetorical repertoire. Over the course of several years, he has used his sizable platform not to advocate for equality and fair treatment for those less fortunate, but to rail against the activist left. Given the right’s inexorable slide into authoritarianism, idiocracy, and wealth and justice inequality, there is simply no excuse for framing social justice activism as the central problem of our time.

And it’s here that Klein truly outshines whatever presence Harris seems to think he occupies in this conversation. He flips the script, redirecting the spotlight away from Murray and his alleged bad rap and onto the history of racial injustice to which less privileged Americans owe their unequal outcomes. There’s a certain diplomatic eloquence on Klein’s part as he explains why there’s nothing remotely brave about two white men sitting around chatting about race-related differences in IQ when it is they who have been the principal beneficiaries of the racist policies on which those conversations have historically relied. His finishing stroke:
 

“In this country, given our history, discussions about race and IQ need more care and context than they get. As a starting point, rather than being framed around the bravery of the (white) participants for having a conversation that has done so much damage, they should grapple seriously with the costs of America’s most ancient justification for bigotry, and take seriously why so many are so skeptical that this time, finally, the racial pessimists are right when they have been so horribly wrong before.”

 
Perhaps what’s most regrettable about this whole saga is that it was unnecessary and avoidable. Both are clear thinkers who eschew facile arguments and care earnestly for truth and civil discourse. But thanks to his penchant for verbal conflict, Sam has now pitted Klein, a natural ally, as a sworn enemy, and his rabid fans are all too keen on treating Klein accordingly. The vitriolic mood with which Harris approached and characterized their exchange ensured this outcome, closing off any possibility of future collaboration. While I could have imagined some interesting cooperation on future projects where their values and political views overlap, that seems unlikely after this very public, very messy ordeal. I’m afraid I can’t see anything positive or productive coming from a podcast at this point either, especially since I’m unable to recall a single instance of Harris changing his tune with someone for whom he’s already summoned the pitchforks. And if his series of self-coronating tweets this week are any indication, it doesn’t look as though a merging of minds is in the forecast. It’s a shame, really, albeit predictable given Sam’s track record.

Post-Script: What’s This Debate About Anyway?

For those who may not be up to speed on the longrunning scientific debate around group variation in intelligence, my admittedly lay understanding, in obnoxiously paraphrased form and subject to heavy revision, is as follows:

As with most uniquely human traits, genetics and environment are both surely involved in determining intelligence. When it comes to measured differences in IQ among racial or ethnic groups, the “debate” (which has actually been settled for quite some time) is over which factor matters more, and how much we should emphasize each factor regardless of the size of its actual effect. The balance of evidence to date strongly suggests that the mean differences in IQ scores across human populations — and indeed, human variation in general — are best explained by environmental or cultural differences, not genes, even if we can’t slap precise percentages on these variables. This makes sense given that Homo sapiens as a whole has relatively low genetic diversity — four times lower, in fact, than our closest living relative the chimpanzee — leaving nongenetic factors to account for these observed differences.

Harris & Murray et al often put up a straw man by saying their detractors deny any genetic basis whatsoever for group differences in IQ, and that this denial stems from a left-leaning political agenda. In reality, intelligence researchers are open to the possibility of genetic explanations but see nothing persuasive in the evidence — which is to say there is no known genetic basis for any gap in any data set of IQ scores. Meanwhile, pretty much every well designed study that looks at environmental factors and intelligence finds something significant. Detractors of Murray & Co. argue that race is a biologically invalid concept, that the IQ gap between black and white Americans is predominantly environmental in origin, and that we shouldn’t be having this discussion anyway without properly contextualizing the sordid history of racism in human societies.

So the crux of the debate is over how significant a role DNA plays and the degree to which we should recognize the role of culture and socioeconomic circumstance in shaping both group IQ differences/other outcomes and the genetic patterns themselves.

Obviously, there is much more to say on the subjects of race and IQ, so I’ve assembled below a loosely chronological compilation of resources that should help prepare those who wish to follow along the next time this heated topic inevitably arises.

 

External link: Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science

Further reading:

Feature image credit:  Javier Zarracina/Vox

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