CxD #168: Conclusion of Sam Harris Podcast "Can We Step Back from the Brink" Saga
In CxD#164 I shared a podcast with Sam Harris in which he attempts to argue for a clear-eyed view of police violence and social unrest as a consequence of the George Floyd murder and protests. If you haven’t heard the podcast yet, I think it’s worth your time, regardless of where you fall in terms of politics—the questions he poses are urgent.
For more background on Harris and his arguments against Identity Politics, strongly consider listening to or reading the transcript of his debate with Ezra Klein.
In CxD#165 I admitted that I was still too ignorant about all kinds of things to adjudicate wisely on the merits of Harris’s arguments.
My attempt at a limited cure for this woefully large-scale ignorance of mine was to have a conversation with Dr. Circe Sturm—who not only makes me deliciously brewed coffee with cinnamon hearts in the morning—but who was also gracious enough with her time to help me understand some blindspots in Harris’s claims. After considering her views, let the following stand as the best I can do at a summary of what I think is the crux of this debate about the swirl of complicated issues of racial injustice, protests, police reform, and identity politics. To be clear, however: these are entirely my views, and odds are that Dr. Sturm would not entirely endorse them or would find them incomplete or even inaccurate, still, despite her best efforts to educate me. But I can’t become an expert overnight, so you’re stuck with these incomplete attempts at a synthesis.
Sam Harris’s most sincere wish is for us to live in a post-racial, post-identity world. That means a world in which a man is judged by his character, not by the color of his skin, to paraphrase Dr. King. Instead of being judged by what group or tribe you belong to, Harris wants a commitment to basic fairness for all individuals.
As a way forward, he collects what he calls “data” and refers to science as “the real truth” and wants the data to be the place from which we begin to make our policy decisions. But he wants to keep the data separate or uncontaminated by social policy issues, somehow removed from any context from which they were derived, a longing for the purity of scientific mind, so to speak.
So if we look at the “data” about, say, police violence, we will see that things aren’t that bad, not as bad as the protestors are making things out to be in their totalizing “most cops are bad kind of way” and that rioting and looting is definitely counterproductive, and if we can just keep a cool head about us, we can rationally engineer the most optimal strategies for equality for all.
However, here are some counterpoints to consider.
Harris is rhetorically manipulative, and that’s not a good thing to be, coming from yours truly, who happens to teach in the Rhetoric department at the University of Texas. How?
I don’t want to turn this into a biblical treatise, but in general, he uses data about crime statistics that don’t have any direct relevance to the problems of systemic racism, like for example, that crime in LA has decreased significantly.
More egregiously, he cherry-picks data. He cites one study that says: “We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers” while deliberately omitting a link to a study that shows the exact opposite. Harris obviously did diligent research on his stats, so this deliberate one-sidedness taints the “good faith” intentions he claims to write from. You cannot—should not, rather, if you want to remain ethically upright—simply disregard stats that contradict your argument and bully your audience with stats that do support it.
Some of the claims Harris makes lack expertise about race and at best can be labeled amateurish and incomplete. As a dominant example, he uses stats about cops of color killing other people of color to claim that these crimes can’t be racially motivated. Turns out, though, that internalized racism is a pronounced form of racism, so that a person of color very much can be racist towards people of the same race. Lots of latinx people voted for Trump, as one obvious example. You might not understand this immediately, just like Harris doesn’t, but that’s why there is so much literature about this complex topic for you to explore. But for Harris, it’s inconvenient for his argument, so he makes claims that have the appearance of logic and clarity, which any expert in the field will disprove if given the chance.
More holistically, Harris does not allow himself to take seriously the intersectionality of racial oppression. I’ll be reductive here so that I don’t speak way out of my own field of competence, but basically its the idea that something like race is a factor that is widespread and bleeds into all kinds of other categories of oppression, like gender, sexuality, class, economic standing, etc. In other words, you can’t just isolate race like a variable, as Harris would like to in his post-racial world. All these forces are interconnected and they are imbalanced, so that at any given time, people who fall on the up-power side of the line have more opportunities than those who fall on the down-power side of the line. Like, say, if you’re a woman, what are the odds so far of you becoming the president of the United States, given that you have a 0-46 record in all elections thus far. But this gender inequality is not entirely separate from the racial inequality that has given people of color a 1-45 record. And what about when you throw sexuality into the mix? Or your economic birthright? Harris deliberately refuses to acknowledge that race factors heavily in pretty much every aspect of our American society, no matter how obvious or how covert they might be. He wants there to be one string of yarn, rather than a ball of it.
In his attempt of returning to rational discourse, Harris uses the term “moral panic” to describe Left politics as hysterical and unmoored from science and reason. But notice what happens when you use the phrase “moral outrage” instead to describe the genesis of the protests after George Floyd’s murder. Moral panic implies you’re overreacting; moral outrage implies a systematic oppression so thorough, so heavy, so far-reaching and overbearing, that even public videos of black men repeatedly being murdered by cops are not enough to reform the corrupt system, so that the only thing that’s left as an option is to become outraged and threaten the things most dear to everyone, so that people cannot ignore the issue any longer. Moral outrage is a tragic consequence of countless tragedies that came before it, but perhaps the only recourse left after a certain point. Harris deliberately fixates on the problems of moral outrage—the looting, for example— without giving any voice to the deeply embedded systems of oppression that have caused the outrage to begin with. From this view, it’s sometimes shocking that people who have been oppressed for so long have been as morally restrained as they have, not morally panicked.
The last point is also general: Harris wants his science to be removed from the birthplace in which that “science” took place. In the Ezra Klein debate, for example, according to Harris, some science shows that there are intrinsic differences in individual IQs. To which Klein responds:
I doubt that we have, given the experiment we have run in this country, given the centuries of slavery and segregation and oppression, given locking people out of jobs, out of good schools, out of building wealth, out of going into top professions, out of being part of the social networks that help you advance; the amount of violence and terror and trauma that we have inflicted on African Americans in this country, I absolutely doubt — I truly, to the core of my being, doubt — that we are at a place where any of us should have confidence saying that the differences we see in individuals now reflect intrinsic group capacity.
The point being that Harris wants clean variables, somehow removed from the larger context in which they were studied. As though to say: I can deliberately abuse you for decades and then take a test to show your levels of fear and trauma, and the tests will show you are a scientifically verifiably “fearful” person, without mentioning anything about your life as an abused person. The technical merits of the test might be accurate in the most literal sense: an abused person’s nervous system might be prone to heightened reactivity and mistrust and anxiety; but to claim that’s all there is to it and we should just treat this person as an individual outside the frame of whatever caused the abuse, is being willfully literal in the very same way people are bad readers and thinkers and interpreters of something like the Bible as a set of laws that are invoilable.
I sympathize with Harris on one crucial point: when we think about and acknowledge the systemic oppressions that have caused so much inequality and suffering, it gets easy to completely and entirely avoid dealing with the flesh and bone individuals themselves. A perhaps exaggerated case of this might read as follows: ours is a society run by male dominance so that not all genders have equal rights. Someone who calls attention to the evils of patriarchy will be capable of making generalized statements like “all men” do X. Like, say, because the patriarchy does exist, if a woman accuses a man of discrimination, or to an extreme, of rape, there’s a tendency from this view of systemic oppression, to find the individual guilty first, and innocent only if proven innocent later. This is the inverse of what our laws suggest we do, and the spirt of that law is to not allow our biases to overwhelm the facts. Harris has been attacked from all sides and is now sensitive to all attacks on him as an individual. He might now be be prone to over-correction in favor of the individual so that the systemic pressures are discarded too quickly. But unless we want a kind of bad-faith communism, individual liberty and freedoms do matter.
The most difficult aspect to me about all of this is that we have to find a way to look at these monumental problems with a mind that is open to both/and reasoning and thinking. Systematic oppression does exist and has tragic consequences. And the individuals that make up the system ought to be judged by the facts, rather than abstractions, lest the oppression inverts itself. But this kind of both/and reasoning is extraordinarily hard for most people because one must hold any view more lightly and more fluidly than we might want to; it is easier to say “I believe this” than to say “I believe this, but only to this extent, or in this situation but not in that one.” Over time, we become calcified in our views, and it becomes harder to see what the other perspective has to offer. Sam Harris in this podcast had a good intention, I think. We need some smarter ways of reforming some tragic outcomes of a society built on racial oppression. But to deny that this oppression is so thoroughly systemic and pervasive that protests are pretty much the only weapon we have left at our disposal that will force the powerful and privileged to change, is to be blind to the facts that Harris wants us to care about so deeply.
As Kendrick Lamar sings, there are levels to it. Bitch, be humble.
I have similar issues with Sam Harris, or, in general, people who want to win arguments rather than to explore. Isn't his argument basically advocating being colorblind? It seems that it would be best to be somewhere between seeing only color and not seeing color.