Interview Analysis: Part V

Skipping some of the small-talk, the next important exchange in the Prager-Harris interview proceeds as follows:

DP: I think the university is a moral failure because it is radically secular. You think it’s a failure because they’re just weak-willed and politically correct. So that’s one difference between us. But let’s go to your basic argument; there are two of them. One, reason will lead us to a better world, and [two], that religion is a real problem.

Let me begin with the religion part, which is your favorite part in the bulk of your book. Why can’t you say, “Some religion is terrific, and some religion leads to evil?” Why the blanket dismissal? I am guided by religion, and I bet I have very similar values in many areas to you.

SH: Right. Right. Well, the first thing to say is that most of our religious texts have in them propositions that are entirely noble and wise and blameless and brilliant, and of course there is no issue to take with them. You can’t argue, really, in any deep way, against the Golden Rule. It’s a beautiful distillation of our ethical intuitions. But first of all, there are beautiful statements of equal usefulness in many other books.

Mr. Harris preliminary remark here is largely true, even if I would disagree with his example of the Golden Rule ("do to others as you would have them do to you", Luke, 6-31). But in fact, if one takes some of the pronouncements in Bible and places them within a rational context they can be interpreted rationally and certainly not all are wrong. But that hardly justifies using the Bible as a basis for a moral code.

DP: Like what? I use my Bible as the basis of my values. What book can I look in to learn Sam Harris’s values?

SH: Well, it’s certainly distributed over many books.

DP: Well, give me five. See, if you don’t have a text, that means Sam Harris is the author of his values. And I don’t trust that.

SH: No, no, I would certainly never claim that.

The above exchange represents the crux of the problem for religious people. This goes beyond books. What Prager is really hinting at here is that for him, all moral values ultimately derive from authorities. Thus Prager thinks he is in the best possible position, as he is relying on the Ultimate authority, namely God. The most revealing statement is Prager's "if you don't have a text, that means Sam Harris is the author of his values... [a]nd I don't trust that." An author, at least in fiction, is someone who makes up a world of his own and puts it on paper. The possibility that Prager fails to acknowledge is that values and virtues, as principles, could be discovered, rather than authored, just as scientific principles in other fields are discovered. That is part of what would make them objective, despite being discovered by a specific person. This is of course only the tip of the iceberg and much more would need to be discussed to prove this but Prager is wrong to dismiss the possibility. Ideally, Mr. Harris should have challenged Prager along those lines.

Let's continue with the interview analysis.

DP: OK, then, tell me. I tell you the author of my values is my religion, Judaism, or broadly speaking, Judeo-Christian values. Where can I look for your values?

SH: Well, honestly, it’s distributed. You can certainly find many of them in the Bible, in your own book. You can find many of them in Ecclesiastes, say. Or you can find them in the New Testament. I think the Sermon on the Mount is a brilliant and quite a wonderful document, and an ideal that many of us should try to live for, or live toward. But where I want to locate the source of our values is in our free inquiry of the world, in the present moment, and in dialogue with human beings in the present moment, in this generation, in the midst of our problems.

DP: Why does one preclude the other? I believe in the text, I believe it’s divine, and I believe that we have to look at the moment to figure out how to apply the text to the moment.

I understand what Mr. Harris is trying to say but given his premises, Prager clearly has the upper hand. If Mr. Harris insists on relying on traditional texts as source for moral values, he can't then claim that "free inquiry of the world" is the source. It really is one or the other. Free inquiry, if by that he means reason, if consistently applied will lead to the rejection of reliance on any texts. But if texts are the ultimate source, if the starting point is necessarily what's written in some text then what is wrong with Prager's approach? Mr. Harris needs to clearly distinguish the fact that he may have some values in common with religious people from relying on religious sources for the justification of his values. That said, his praise of the Sermon on the Mount puts him in the category of people who have secularized the religious ethics without any attempt at rational analysis.

I think for now I'm going to cut my analysis short, as I am getting somewhat bored with it. There are so many errors on both sides that it is too depressing to continue. Nevertheless, I'm sure I'll address much of the same issues in the future.

Interview Analysis: Part IV

The interview continues:

DP: I will defend the religious books, but you need to defend the alternative. Why is it that religious folks whom you fear turn out to be more morally accurate today than the secular folks at the university?

SH: Well, actually, I didn’t concede that first point. I think you would find that healthy people are going to be more or less the same across the board. But I agree with you that our discourse about any number of a variety of things right now in academia has really become unhitched from morality, as you and I know it.

I'm not entirely sure why Mr. Harris insists on substituting medical for moral terminology here. Healthy people and immoral people are not mutually exclusive categories. This seems to be part of the general trend on the part of Liberals to define evil as some kind of psychological disease. Also, Mr Harris should be careful here in his assumption that the morality he talks about and the morality Prager talks about amount to the same thing.

DP: I was going to say, “God bless you for saying it,” but ‘Spirituality’ bless you for saying it. And I’m not being sarcastic. I admire the fact that you, who are in academia, would say that. But don’t you ask what the root cause might be? To me it is clear: secularism.

As I have already discussed to some extent in Part II of this analysis it is not the secular nature of the universities that is to blame, but their irrationalism. Also, it is not at all clear to me that the original claim by Prager, that a thousand evangelical ministers would have greater moral acuity than a thousand liberal arts professors, would in fact be so obviously true. I'll concede that due to the irrationality of the universities it is more likely than not to be true in most cases (and certainly in the case of the war). However, religion comes with its own inherent irrationalities and it very much depends on the specific issue whether the ministers or the professors would be more irrational.

SH: Actually, no, I think the root cause in academia, certainly liberal academia now, is what we call “political correctness.” There are so many taboos in academia and in our culture at large, the one of which that I’m going up against most directly in my book is the taboo around criticizing faith itself, which is something you and I are going to differ on. But, there again…

Once again I have to bemoan the superficiality of Mr. Harris's analysis of the universities. "Political Correctness" is at best a description of a symptomatic trend. It is not an explanation of why institutions supposedly concerned with reason have turned against it. For a deeper analysis from a Conservative source I again suggest Lynne Cheney's Telling the Truth and, even better, from an Objectivist source, Dr. Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels. Fundamentally the answer comes from philosophy. Perhaps I will attempt to sketch a detailed answer at some point.

DP: Oh, no, there’s no taboo on criticizing Judaism or Christianity. There’s only a taboo in the university on criticizing Islam. It’s just… I differ with your read.

SH: Right. Well, I actually find that people are very reluctant to criticize faith itself, even when they don’t have it. I mean, in the privacy of their own salon, they’re going to speak wildly about anybody.

DP: Christianity? I mean, everyone who goes to university learns that Christianity is an impediment to progress. I mean, it is part of the liberal arts curriculum.

I think I agree with Prager here. Universities these days feel very comfortable in criticising Christianity and even Judaism to some extent. Of course, there would be plenty to criticise. However, since they are criticising it from an multicultural, post-modernist standpoint, they are not much better than what they are criticising. The interview continues:

SH: Right. Well, you know, I don’t think this is at the core of either our agreement or our differences on this subject. I think that the problem we have to face now is, people are flying planes into our buildings because they believe their book was written by God. And it doesn’t seem to me that our proper response to that predicament is to say, “No, no, you have it wrong; OUR book was written by God.” That’s not a basis for dialogue; that’s not a basis for sorting out the excesses of human irrationality.

This is arguably Mr. Harris' most intelligent statement in this interview so far but he still gets something important wrong. He says "that's not a basis for dialogues; that not a basis for sorting out the excesses of human irrationality." Why on earth would anyone want to have a dialogue with people who fly airplanes into buildings? The response needs to be to locate the source of the problem and destroy it. A dialogue is no longer possible.

DP: Yet, ironically, it is really only very strongly religious Christians, by and large – and I’m not a Christian, I’m a Jew – who have been at the forefront of criticizing Islam today. And they are called, by your whole secular liberal world, racists and bigots for doing so.

SH: Right, right. I agree with you totally. I think it’s profoundly ironic that the most sensible statements about Islam to appear in our culture have come from our own religious dogmatists.

DP: It’s not ironic! Sam Harris, that’s where you and I differ, and let me just say, I appreciate your honesty, I really do. You are very rare, and I am happy to know you. But to me it is not ironic! It is their faith that gives them their [values and their] strength to say it.

SH: Well, then, I think we’re seeing it slightly differently. You take someone like Falwell, or Pat Robertson, who very clearly appreciate the danger posed to us by Islam. It seems to me they’re uniquely in a position to appreciate it, because they understand that people really do believe the letter of their holy books. And they’ve read the Koran, and they’ve perhaps read the Hadith, the commentarial tradition around it, and they know that the contents of these documents are antithetical to living in tolerance in a pluralistic world. And what has really hampered liberal discourse, intellectual discourse, ivory tower discourse on this subject is that secular people really cannot get it into their heads that when the guy looks into the video camera and says, “We love death more than the infidels love life,” and blows himself up, he really means it. He didn’t blow himself up for economic reasons.

DP: That’s right! You’re right. I agree with your critique perfectly. So then, where do we differ?

What the above exchange proves is not the superiority of a religious point of view over a secular one but rather the superiority of moral judgement, even coming from a religiuos point of view, to moral agnosticism. There are specific historical reasons why the current intellectual landscape is what it is. But it's quite clear that proper moral judgment is not inherent in religion (as can be seen in the current religious left for example or even in some of the less pleasant moral conclusions of the right), nor necessarily absent from the secular as can certainly seen in the Ayn Rand Institute. Moral judgement questions ultimately reduce to questions in the subject of epistemology -- the theory of knowledge. In order to establish moral conclusions we must first know how to establish any conclusions. It is as a result of the disintegration of epistemology on the secular side over the last few centuries that the average secular university professor is no longer able to judge right from wrong. The religious side has been subject to much the same influence though not to the same degree, which is why it frequently appears more rational than the the secular side.

Interview Analysis: Part III

Continuing with the exchange, Sam Harris answers:

SH: Well, you bring up a very interesting point, and there are many different forces in our discourse intersecting here. First, let me just agree with you that liberal, ivory-tower discourse right now is certainly in many sectors bereft of real moral acuity, and the kind of discourse you have about Israel in particular vis a vis the conflict with the Palestinians – all of that is deplorable, and we might want to get into that.

Now, I'll give Mr. Harris some credit here. He seems to understand implicitly that the universities have issues (strange as it sounds, some people actually do believe that they are seats of "secular reason") but his understanding appears superficial. He does not zoom in on the source of the problem but merely mentions one of the most obvious manifestations -- the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nevertheless, he appears willing to condemn the universities in that respect which is certainly a positive thing. Harris concludes his answer by asking Prager to define morality.

SH: But your first question, really, it all turns on what you mean by morality.

DP: I’m very precise: Good and evil.

SH: Right. Take something even more precise than that. Just our aversion to human cruelty.
DP: OK. That’s great. I’m with you. Go ahead.

As usual in the above exchange both sides have problems. Harris's attempt to have Prager clarify what he means by morality is very appropriate. Prager's response is quite insufficient. However, Harris's attempt to be more precise is arguably even worse. Let's start with Prager.

Prager, due to his focus on the amoralism of what he terms the "secular left," clearly assumes that the terms "good and evil" are not controversial, or more accurately, that if they are accepted, there is no discussion about their application, that is, one either accepts good and evil or one does not, but if one does, there is no disagreement. This is clearly nonsense. It is true that there are now large segments in academia that do not think that morality and moral terms are relevant or useful. However, it is also true that there are other sections of academia and the left that have not abandoned those terms but insist on applying them and justifiying them in quite different ways than Prager and his religious friends would. Peter Singer, for example, certainly accepts good and evil and bases his defense of good and evil on utilitarian grounds. Prager and Singer have very little in common. Among other horrendous views, Peter Singer is a defender of animal rights. So Prager evades the existence of other moral views. What Prager should have said, if he wanted to be somewhat more specific, would be something along the lines of: "Good and Evil as established by traditional Judeo-Christian ethics." That is certainly what Prager believes and this moral view can be distinguished from other moral views by looking at what traditional Judaism and Christianity have held to be moral.

Mr. Harris apparently thinks that "our aversion to human cruelty" is more precise a view of morality than merely stating "good and evil." I am frankly baffled by what Mr. Harris means here but he elaborates as follows.

SH: I think that all of us who are well wired neurologically, and do not come into this world with whatever causes, you know, sociopathy – all of us have a predisposition to recoil at cruelty such as torturing other people certainly, and animals, and so forth. And we can all agree on that. I would argue that we don’t get that out of our religious books. In fact, our religious books offer rather equivocal testimony on the moral status of cruelty. There’s a lot of cruelty in them.

Whenever moderns start bringing in neurological explanations, I get highly suspicious. This is the same kind of thinking that leads to the denial of consciousness and free will. Here, Harris appears to be arguing that we are born with some form of empathy. I am not certain of this at all. I wonder what his evidence is. It seems to me that there is, for example, plenty of anecdotal evidence of cruelty in even young children. I still fail to see the relevance of this to moral questions. Whether or not we are born with a certain level of built-in empathy is clearly overshadowed but the vast amounts of lack of empathy throughout history. Certainly, religious books have plenty of cruelty, though particularly in the last century and until just recently, cruelty has not been limited to, nor primarily derived from religious sources. And I still fail to see how any of this is making morality more precise. It seems to be getting us off the subject completely. The most generous interpretation one could put on what Harris is saying is that cruelty, and thus evil, is learned, not inborn.

This is true but does not clarify very much what good and evil actually consists of. Again cruelty means different things in different moral views, whether religious or secular. And I could think of some cases where cruelty would be morally justified. But let's leave that aside for now and proceed with the analysis.