If one day it was revealed that some of the best minds on Earth are aliens, robots, or genetically engineered humans, the case of Sam Harris would surprise me the least. All the other super-smart people I put in his category - like Dawkins, Pinker, Hitchens, Dennett, or Peterson - had had decades-long careers in academy and/or journalism behind them before they rose to fame. But no one heard a word about Harris before he suddenly appeared out of the blue in 2004. He was in his mid-thirties and he was as eloquent, mature, and confident as any of his peers. With his irresistible attack on religion, especially on Islam, he entered public awareness with a bang.
Vulcan to Earth
His Spock-like relentless and uncompromising adherence to logic and reason, which Harris wields in debates like a surgical scalpel, just reinforces this picture of inhumanness. And like Spock, he often seems lost when he faces other people's irrationality. For example, he is visibly frustrated by the impossibility that half of the US population can vote for Trump, and he rarely refrains from voicing it. Above these, he has at least two other abilities that seem to be beyond mere mortals. First, and here I shamelessly steal from someone on Reddit, Harris can speak not only in full sentences but in full paragraphs. Having a huge vocabulary and the ability to use it is rare enough, but being incisive, perfectly coherent, and even funny in a spontaneously triggered 5-minute long soliloquy is just superhuman. Second, he can deliver hilarious punchlines with a poker face one can only see from professional comedians - after rehearsals.
Eastern Wisdom
If Harris is not from Vulcan, he has a very interesting biography and spheres of interest. He was raised by a single mother, with no siblings. In his late teens, he tried MDMA and got fascinated by the possibilities of altered states of mind. During university, he studied and even taught some martial arts (and he is an enthusiastic BJJ-practitioner today). He dropped out of school and spent the next couple of years in India and Tibet studying with many respected and famous Buddhist teachers, and experimenting with psychedelics. He claims to have spent a net two years in silent meditation. After he came back to America, he finished his BA in philosophy and received a Ph.D. at Stanford in neuroscience.
He summed up his experiences and ideas on the subject in his third book, Waking Up (2014). He made the case for the possibility and the need for a certain type of spiritualism that is rooted in the contemplative traditions of the East but is in accord with modern science.
The New Atheists
But resemblances to the usual "rich Westerner went to the East and experienced enlightment at the hands of old Hindi masters"-story end here. Harris is a staunch materialist and a strong proponent of science and reason. Everything he holds about the self, identity, and free will (that is, they don't exist) is, as far as I know, confirmed by science. He acknowledges (and preaches) that Buddhism discovered something profoundly important about the human condition, but he regards the rest of the religion - all religions -, with its deities, cosmologies, and rituals, as pure garbage. Even his view on mediation is very pragmatic. According to him, it's a mental exercise that can't necessarily be recommended to everyone. Not everyone is built to bench-press with his own body weight or run 100m in 15 seconds. Furthermore, he admits that while years of meditation practice can give one a glimpse into other states of consciousness, taking a couple of milligrams of psychedelics inevitably does.
He is also a militant atheist who rejects any kind of supernatural. And as an atheist he made his debut. He wrote his first book, The End of Faith (2004), as a reaction to 9/11, on the absurdity and harmfulness of religion. In 2007, he was one of the Four Hoursemen of the New Atheists (with Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens) and he mostly spent the following decade participating in public debates against religious (mostly Christian or Jewish) apologists. I loved those debates and I'm really sorry that they've got rarer nowadays - I guess both sides have said everything they had to say, many times over. Nevertheless, even if New Atheism somehow fizzled out, the Internet preserves everything, and I can't recommend enough to watch some of his debates - the man has a mellifluous voice and at the same time, he really is hilarious.
The real fame and notoriety however arrived in 2014 when he was basically assaulted by Ben Affleck on national television, who, in a show where Harris talked about the unacknowledged popularity of dangerous ideas in the Muslim world, tried to expose him as an ignorant Islamophobe. Although I think Affleck managed to come across as an opportunistic virtue signaler, countless people jumped in his place in the coming years who tried to depict Harris either as a racist (apparently not knowing the difference between race and culture) or at best a "secular fundamentalist". Harris's attitude of refusing to play safe in controversial topics got him into public spats with a great number of prominent people - Glen Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Nassim Taleb, Chris Hedges, Ezra Klein among many. Even Hitchens - who himself got the labels of racist and Islamophobe many times - found some of his remarks irresponsible.
Nevertheless, Harris never backed down, and his written responses to some of the attacks are not something to miss out (a longer one on Chris Hedges and a short on Nassim Taleb). Neither is his j'Accuse of the Catholic Church - which is a piece of art of assassination by the pen.
The Moral Landscape
In 2010 Harris spoke at the TED conference about the scientific roots of morality, and he wrote his second book, The Moral Landscape on the subject. In the book, he argued that there are objective moral truths in the world that can be derived from scientific observations. Since David Hume declared that you can't get to an "ought" from an "is", the common understanding among moral philosophers is that science describes how the world is, but it has nothing to say about how it should be. Morals are relative, and no one can objectively judge others' moral systems. Harris thinks it's nonsense. The same way as there is no Taliban-physics, there is no Taliban-morality - commanding the killing of homosexuals, apostates, and shameless female relatives - that we must accept as equal to ours. There are unrefutable, universal, culture-independent truths about the human condition. Science and logic can help us to discover and build our ethics on them. Although the view that there are things that are good or bad on their own, independent of one's culture, is hardly controversial to ordinary people, Harris committed a philosophical and anthropological blasphemy.
The Intellectual Dark Web
In violating social taboos Harris didn't stop at religion. Since around the start of the Woke-movement, he has been both a target and a critic of it. He is generally on the Left in political issues, but he raised his voice early against the Cancel Culture, Antifa, and what he sees are erroneous claims and ideas in the Black Lives Matter movement - on the latter subject he is not any radical than some black thinkers, like Glenn Loury, John McWorther, or Coleman Hughes. In 2017 he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Murray is a social scientist, who wrote a book in 1999 about IQ and its role in personal achievement that unfortunately contained a short chapter about the IQ-differences between races. The book was controversial in 1999, but in the 2010s it got into the public consciousness again and made Murray practically radioactive. Although Harris expressed that he doesn't see any good reason to research that particular subject, he felt that Murray actually doesn't have a racist bone in his body and is probably the most unfairly maligned scholar of the day. Due to his public stance on Islam, Harris' standing was already low among the farther reaches of the Left, but that podcast episode landed him on the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate-speech list.
As a response to this zeitgeist, in 2018 the Intellectual Dark Web was "formed" as a tongue-in-cheek, unofficial club for free thinkers who were willing to stand up against what had become a mainstream orthodoxy on questions about race, gender, religion, and society. I think the name was the brainchild of Eric Weinstein, and the membership was established by an independent NYT article, probably to the surprise of some of the named individuals: the Weinstein brothers, Ben Shapiro, Michael Shermer, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Christina Hoff Summers, and Harris. IDW wasn't really taken seriously by anyone, least of its members, and I think the only reason it caught on is that it sounded kinda badass. It was certainly badass enough to attract followers from the Alt-Right and to make Dave Rubin feel important. At the end of the day, I think the whole thing was for the worse. It gave the opportunity to unsavory characters to rub shoulders with serious thinkers and made the good guys look suspicious.
The Trump-years
Harris was early to warn about the possibly disastrous effects of a Trump-presidency. In 2016, in a short essay, he claimed that Trump had caused irreparable damage to the country just by campaigning for the presidency. His general view of the man has only changed for the worse since then, but basically remained intact, and I largely agree with his diagnosis. As he said early on, around Trump there are secrets, but no mysteries: what you see is what you get. Trump is a malignant narcissist, a shallow, petty liar, and apart from his obvious talent to rile up the masses, a complete idiot who got where he is by a colossal convergence of a series of bad luck. And if America gets through the next four years without a major disaster - Harris said in 2016 -, it just dodged the bullet.
But Left-wing idiotism can very well give him a second term. I think the Trump-era posed a once-in-a-lifetime test of character and judgment for anyone involved in (or simply forming an opinion on) public life, and Sam passed it with flying colors.
He remained critical about how the liberal mainstream continued to go down the rabbit hole of Wokeness. But, unlike James Lindsay, Gad Saad, Maajid Nawaz, or some members of the IDW, he never got sucked into the anti-Wokeness bubble, either. White-guilt driven far-left zealots and cowering elites are bad, but not nearly as bad as having a racist madman as the President of the United States who has been letting hundreds of thousands of people die out of sociopathic indifference. In January 2021, Sam publicly gave back his imaginary IDW party card. I'd be surprised if he ever shared the stage again with the likes of Dave Rubin or Ben Shapiro.
Making Sense - the podcast
It got lost in the chronology, but Harris started a podcast, Making Sense in 2013, on which he has been talking to someone interesting nearly every week. The topics are eclectic - he has interviewed scientists, journalists, hostage negotiators, writers, scholars, Buddhist teachers - but the quality is constant. It is really one of the best podcasts out there, and I have picked up many great books from his interviewees after listening to someone new for the first time. He also launched a successful meditation app, Waking Up, in 2018. It's basically a series of guided meditation, interspersed with frequent interviews and lectures.
The bad part
The podcast reminds me of one of the two things I find annoying about Harris, and that is his relentless pessimism. I understand that he readily discards the beliefs in the self and free will - so he sees us, at the end of the day, as mere biological machines. I also understand that this corresponds to the current state of science. I also get that one day I and everyone else will lose everything and everyone we love. But I still want to cut my throat every time after listening to one of his frequent 10-minutes monologues on these two subjects. But even beyond this, he has a morbid fascination with depressive topics. Once he planned to have three consecutive podcast episodes about the looming possibility of nuclear annihilation, child pornography, and the existential danger of AI, respectively. Thank God, the pandemic came by, and he changed course after the nuclear war part.
AI, by the way, is one of his favorite doom and gloom topics, and one I wish he talked less about. Being alarmed about the future of artificial intelligence is and not uncommon even among experts. But whenever Sam gets into explaining his fears, he also makes it obvious that he is not one of them. He may turn out to be right, but for the wrong reasons. To be fair, he is someone who is always open to change his mind on unfamiliar territories, so after listening to enough experts, he might end up being right for the right reasons.
The other thing I dislike about him is his overprotective attitude to his reputation. When attacked, he lashes back mercilessly. Not everyone can just shrug criticism off in a Ricky Gervais-way, and Harris's responses are fun to read, but I would expect someone who doesn't believe he has a self to indulge to be less thin-skinned.
The last piece of criticism I'd level against him is what I referred to at the very beginning. I don't know anyone for whom cold rationality would be such a pronounced part of their identity. But I think this makes Harris sometimes myopic, especially in the area of religion. Most other people can and do live with contradictory beliefs, and even the ones expressing belief in the literal truth of the Bible don't go on rampage killings against adulterers and homosexuals.
Summary
To sum it up, Sam Harris is one of the most influential and clear-thinking public commentators of our time, as well as one of the most divisive ones. I think the cause for the latter is not only his willingness to venture into controversial topics (where misrepresentation by detractors is very easy) but also his main forte, his preternatural eloquence. Listening to a truly devastating critique of something that is part of one's identity almost never achieves the intended result. Harris's punchlines at the expense of religious beliefs (or Antifa- or Trump-fans) are priceless, as long as you are an atheist (or normal). But they probably put off most people on the other side exactly as much as they attract his fans.
Nevertheless, his fearlessness to engage in conversations on sensitive subjects and even taboos is what makes Harris an invaluable part of public discourse. His thoughts cut deep and wide, and he is brutally honest without the intention to hurt. He is not always right, but more frequently than most, and even when he is wrong, he asks the right questions.
May he live long and prosper!
