New Atheist Fanatic Sam Harris Devoid of Self-Awareness
by Asa Boxer
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Last week, I looked at Sam Harris’s egotism and sensationalist demands that our culture quit presenting stories and myths as truth. Like all scientistic populists Harris has a very tenuous grasp of truth, and in an unexamined way, believes that science doesn’t engage in storytelling, myth-making, and hero-worship (see here and here for starters) but is instead something resembling a fact factory. As I observed, Harris is essentially uncultured and lacking in intellectual subtlety. His entire persona is driven by a fear of Jesus smuggling (since he is the new Jesus), which is why he refuses to actually engage in meaningful dialogue about spirituality and the inner life. To make these points, I drew upon material from a conversational debate in which he participated with Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray in Dublin, July 2018. This week, I’m drawing upon an interview on Triggernometry, hosted by Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster to adumbrate Harris’s inability to self-assess.
Unfortunately Sam Harris has no idea that he’s irrational or that he engages in what third parties would perceive as disingenuous sophistry. This situation is dangerous if only because new atheists like Harris present themselves as exempt from emotional interference in their thinking. Indeed because they are dismissive of the inner world, and because they are unpracticed in spiritual disciplines, they fail to self-evaluate effectively. In short they truly believe they are purely objective beings who have achieved the next level of intellectual evolution, that they are near the perfection of an AI in terms of their lack of inner-life interference. They are Mr. Spock from Star Trek, who operates only according to what’s logical. This delusional self-image sets up an insurmountable problem for their critics, for how does one offer rebuttal without engaging in the ad hominem?
But back to our sheep. . . Here’s Harris from the start of that Triggernometry interview, making an effort at self-assessment:
Harris: It’s a hard question to answer. I think there’s, ah, one algorithm I’m running more than most. Ah. Which is. . . what I would call intellectual honesty. Right? And. . . The burden is not to be who you were yesterday. The burden isn’t to join some tribe who, you know, you’ll get social reinforcement from for, you know, for conforming to. Um. So it’s. . . insofar as I’m continually just trying to figure out what’s true and what’s consistent with what I claimed was true five minutes ago or five years ago. . . Uh. That causes me to just bump up against taboos, and. . . and blasphemies, and ideologies that. . . that um. . . are more rigid than that. Right? I mean, if your. . . I mean really it’s, it’s. . . I mean even having an identity itself is too much, you know. It’s like. . . Not only can you not conform to a tribe, you can’t really even conform to who you were yesterday if your, your master value is to be honest and rigorous and available to new data and new arguments and, ah, new insights.
Kisin: That’s a very good answer, but doesn’t answer my question, which is how did you become that way? Why are you that way?
Harris: Yeah. I have no idea. Like, that was my factory setting. And so from a very early age, uh, you know, like, I guess I showed up as a. . . a skeptic on many fronts. I mean, I, I was certainly an argumentative teenager, you know [laughter]. . . So, um, so yeah, that was. . . that was really some kind of default. (4:10 - 5:57)
Viewing the body language at play, one might charitably conclude that Harris’s choice of machine metaphors to self-describe are meant humorously to entertain. I’m referring to terms like “algorithm,” “factory setting” and “default.” But these analogies are commonplace in new atheist rhetoric, and are hardly as humorous as they appear. This is actually how new atheists view themselves, devoid of an inner dimension, and just playing out a preprogrammed genetic software. Worse, it is typical of this group that they truly believe that they are special, despite (implicitly self-similar) factory settings, running their perhaps not-so-unique algorithms, but “more than most.” They perceive themselves as unique, free-thinking individuals without a tribe, without even a core identity (robots), who conform to nothing and thereby engage in purely objective “intellectual honesty.” How does a passionate human being, fully aware of his own inner life, even begin to engage in an honest conversation with a fellow who identifies as HAL 9000?
It’s worth repeating here Ted Hughes’s observation that “The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines. The faculty that makes the human being out of these two worlds is called divine.” And the faculty that works to keep them apart is called new atheism. Hughes’s concept encapsulates the work I’ve been doing here at analogy magazine. The value of studying folks like Sam Harris lies in what is known as the apophatic approach: that is, knowing something by learning what it is not.
As far as character and inner-development are concerned, I draw your attention to Harris’s admission that he was an argumentative teenager. In other words, he admits here—after setting aside all the blathering egotism—that he’s still essentially a petty teenager. He’s stuck there because he has never pursued inner growth, and this negative quality is borne out by his aggressive and inflexible behaviour and the fact that he has no real grasp of who he is. Folks like this tend to rationalise at length—I mean they tend to drone on and on and on—in a manner that betrays a form of lying to oneself. One can observe Harris getting caught up in his own rhetorical net quite often, and I’ll come round to a glaring and embarrassing example of this sort of reflexive mendacity in two weeks as I wrap up this month of Harris pantsing.
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.
"Some kind of default"? Right you are that he lacks self-awareness. It seems strange that "factory setting" should be his metaphor for biology. He can change a factory setting (we all have to do this with some things we buy) but he can't alter his biology. He seems to think that he can switch from the "factory setting" to his own setting. What he needs to do--and was not doing since as an argumentative teenager--is to find ways to use culture to modify his instincts. Of course, for the male, confrontation and an adversarial stance are biological, the notorious rowdiness of boys. Men learn how to modify that stance and find better, persuasive ways to get what they want. This fellow should work on the necessary modifications.
This piece may sound mean. But it’s not. Normally, I find Harris irritating and mildly repulsive. But this piece showed me I should just pity him.
Why?
Because Sam Harris has no right hemisphere. Or, if he does, it’s held prisoner, Cask of Amontillado style, by his left. His poor wife and kids. (Paging Dr. Iain McGhilchrist...)
Thanks for these takedowns. They’re intelligent enough to induce sympathy, not more anger.