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Over the past two weeks, I’ve been critiquing Sam Harris, taking especial aim at his self-deluded egotism, his attention-seeking sensationalism, his lack of inner-development, his cultural poverty, and his adolescent combativeness. My point in engaging in this distasteful exercise has been to demonstrate what sort of character new atheism typically engenders: close-minded egotism. This week, I will continue examining Harris’s behaviour during his Dublin debate with Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray to point out how Harris, like all new atheists, operates with a limited tool kit like a prototype robot running on one widget.
To drive home his point about how religious and spiritual folk lie to themselves and are essentially stupid, superstitious fools, Harris used the old rhetorical 2-4, applying the New Atheist Tool Kit, Rhetorical Tool No. 2—ignorance of the subject & typical strawman strategy followed by No. 4—reframing the argument in its silliest form. To this end, Harris told a story about walking through Dublin and observing a tarot reader on the street and followed with this:
I’m sorry to say that I didn’t sit for a reading. But, you know, tarot cards if you’re familiar with them are the quintessential artefact of New Age woo. Right? These are not thought of as legitimate tools of divination. . . except by people who think they are legitimate tools of divination. And yet a tarot reading can be truly powerful. Right? It’s . . . This is built on something. Right? This is not just a massive example of self deception on the part of people reading and people getting their cards read. These cards can seem prescient. I could give you all a reading right now and 95% of you would find what I would. . . what the cards would say to be relevant to your lives. I could do this with an imaginary deck, an invisible imaginary deck. . . I don’t know anything about tarot cards but I’m going to turn over two cards now: one is the sun, the other is the fallen man. . . now I know so little about tarot that I’m not even sure that the fallen man is a tarot card. . . or I think it was the hanged man.
In a display of unbounded egotism regarding his talents, he proceeded to provide a rudimentary analysis of his invented symbology, setting up a strawman and providing a stand-up-routine version of the tarot whilst bragging that he could go on babbling in vagaries and universals endlessly, which he has proven on many occasions he is most qualified to do. Now back to his judgement of card reading based on his never having had a reading and on his ignorance of the cards:
to pretend all the while that it has something to do with the cards actually being. . . working in concert with the dynamics of the cosmos such that these cards that I turn over, were they real, would be the ones of necessity were revealing something about your mind in this moment. And obviously people think in these terms about astrology and. . . sympathetic magic and. . . all the rest. And religion is built upon this kind of superstition. There’s a way of understanding the utility of using a device like this. . . and the real effect it has on you. I mean if I turn over the cards and ask you to look at your life in this moment as though for the first time through this lens considering in this case “lost opportunities”. . . right? of course it’s going to be valid. That doesn’t make. . . it can be an incredibly useful thing to do. . . the mec. . . My main concern is that at no point do you have to lie to yourself about your state of knowledge about the mechanism. Right? You don’t have to believe tarot cards really work” [to derive a psychological benefit from a tarot reading].1
Who’s Jesus smuggling now? How do we get from a fake tarot reading based on ignorance of both the cards and the experiences of both reading and having one’s cards read. . . to religion being made of the same stuff?—an ignorance-fuelled imagination wracked by anxiety over the shaky ground of its naive materialism. Ignorant of the history of card reading as well as of traditional interpretations of the cards and what a genuine or competent tarot reading is all about, he invents the silliest strawman he can devise, then strikes it down in a heroic flourish of knowing rubbish by refusing to learn anything about it—his invented, invisible rubbish that is, not actual tarot. (And I should inject here that his assessment of tarot being New Age woo, is a figment of new atheist woo and shameless lying. I mean, if he claims ignorance, where is this garbage coming from? He’s literally making it up.)
Readers of analogy magazine may recognise the idea that science needn’t believe its paradigms actually account for the phenomena in order for them to be productive. Plenty of false scientific views have proven useful over the centuries. In other words, the argument concerning what we ought to believe can be turned on Harris’s own beliefs just as easily. Understanding how to differentiate between truth and the belief systems that give them that truthy feeling is an ongoing challenge, and certainly not one that Harris can settle by calling your paradigm a lie and his a fact.
What happened to the scientific spirit of curiosity and experimentation? What is the difference pragmatically speaking between Harris’s typical new atheist manoeuvre and the egomaniacal belief among fifth-century Gnostics that they were unmediated receptacles of divine knowledge? If Harris doesn’t have to experiment and directly observe to know things with certainty, what claim can he have at all to being a spokesperson for scientific rationality? After all, he rejects scientific empiricism out of hand, since he himself doesn’t need to engage in it to arrive at his knowledge. When it comes to his own attitudes and the way he leads his life, Harris feels he is exempt from doing any hard work because the cosmos communicates with him by osmosis. It’s as though his university certification combined with his commercial success grants him a pass on doing any actual science, and now he is free to go around being smug and putting folks down who don’t believe what he believes. Surely we can all agree that arguing from a place of ignorance (in a debate in which he’s arguing that we ought to base our ethics on facts rather than stories) is an irresponsible act and one that negates his position.
Seeing Harris on video, one has the impression that he is being as genuine as he possibly can. He is relaxed and on his best behaviour. Sadly, the most charitable conclusion then is that he has been trained to think along certain lines and to react according to certain algorithms along with an entire cadre of populist fanatics of TheScience™. In other words, a form of indoctrination is at work here, one that nurtures, sponsors and produces a left brain imbalance.
Note that the new atheist tool kit is nowhere codified: there is no For Dummies manual. But somehow these folks (we’ve seen Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michael Shermer) are all operating on the same programming. Iain McGilchrist’s descriptions of right-brain injury and left-brain dominance fits their behaviour. How else explain the recurrence of the same irrational tactics among the new atheist crowd? The braggadocio is specifically anchored in ignorance and therefore an imaginary world designed by Harris’s left-brain ego, one that feels threatened by all things unorthodox, and indulges phantasies regarding perceived threats to left-brain dominance. Harris is an example of one who lives in his imagination and doesn’t know it; instead he believes he’s epistemologically anchored in the material world—a scientist. And not a confabulating emissary but master enforcer of TheScience™.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
youtu.be/PqpYxD71hJU, 28:03 - 31:04. Accessed February 8, 2024.
Harris's hubris is boundless. The man is a hypocrite, professing a passion for meditation, yet going along with the lite vision of it as temporary stress relief, more in line with faddish power execs than with serious seekers.
On that topic, there's a 21 minute excerpt of a debate on you tube between Harris and Advaita Vedanta master Rupert Spira on Consciousness in which the latter demolishes Harris' unschooled and facile arguments. He's a blowhard and a materialist.