Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions
Sam Harris was on the Daily Show Monday to promote his book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, and aside from being a fine looking man, he's got a perfectly lucid argument for science and "objective morality".
Here's his recent talk at TED. About halfway through (at 10'25") he starts talking about "the great problem of women's bodies," a topic that came up (with a woman) last night at my friend Iory's monthly salon. (We talked about men's bodies, too, of course — more just the fact of them, though.)
We got on the topic of women in full face veils (lots more these days in the Fenway), and one of the women shrugged and said, "who are we to say that it's wrong?" (although no one had — we're smarter and more subtle than that — we're Bostonians!) and "Maybe they're perfectly happy in there." Of course she was being typically contrariant (see her weekly column in the South End News here), which certainly sparks a kind of conversation.
But I have to say, I like Sam Harris's chutzpah.
Let's light it up.
Unrelated to this post, but still very present of mind... when might you expand upon your photo journalism essay addressing the joys of bachelorhood?
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But what about the members of the "Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.)", so lovingly portrayed by David Foster Wallace?
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I needed to peruse Sam Harris' website, and visit my local library to check out his books since I'd never heard of him until your post (and even though I live in L.A.!). He posits some fascinating ideas and his reasoning is sound...for him. I do feel he needs to give the same rigorous scrutiny to Buddhist thought as he does to Christian, Islamic, and Jewish religions, because his bias is rather obvious. It's refreshing as you say to hear someone with a wide-ranging scientific methodology comment on religion and morality vis-a-vis science, and suggest that science can provide equal time for moral dilemmas. My major caveat with Harris is that his knowledge of philosophy and religion sweeps over and under deeply percipient thought like "The Story of Philosophy" by Will and Ariel Durant. Good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. Oh, and his critique of Islam is too much on the surface and lacks historical context: hence his readings of the Qur'an and the Hadith focus more on the "dramatic" passages of jihad and women and Shari'ah law. Hmmm, kinda of like those fundamentalist Christians he is trying to battle in the U.S. with the scientific morality in his books,eh?
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I think there are a lot of things, even in just the TED talk that you could object to, the strident denunciation of certain practices in Islam definitely being one. One of the things I like about him is this stridency, though, because "enlightened liberals" are so often also knee-jerk apologists for religion on cultural grounds.
I do think that he uses the extremism in religion to great effect in his talk, and it makes a certain kind of sense to do so. It's my impression that most moderate folks, even if they participate in religion on some level, subordinate it on another level to the claims of science, and have no trouble marrying moral claims and scientific fact.
I don't know that his overall claims are inconsistent with or hostile to those at the core of Buddhism or Judaism, both of which are by and large "practical religions". And, personally, regardless of the claims of Christianity, I don't think there's anything in "christ-nature" that could be inconsistent with scientific claims. Nor are those aspects of religion at battle with secularists, humanists, and the scientific community.
I remember going back to the visit the pastor of the church I grew up in, which was very progressive in retrospect, because he had used the very Tillich-esque phrase "the abyss of nonbeing" at my father's funeral. It had a philosophical ring to it reminiscent of the mid-century Christian Existentialism of Niebuhr that seemed almost sacrilegious in this setting (and in this day and age of decidedly anti-intellectual religious extremism).
As we got to talking afterward he expressed his horror at the megachurches that had sprung up over the previous decade, and the extremist political agenda they espoused, which seemed to him totally counter to the heart of the gospel he had preached all his career in the ministry. He invited me back into the fold. When I told him I considered myself something more along the lines of a mid-20th century secular humanist, he smiled and said "so much the better."
I agree that Harris is certainly no expert on the religions he criticizes, and probably goes too far in the other direction, but it's refreshing to see some intelligence in a public debate on morals like we haven't seen since the days of Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr and, for that matter the Reverend Martin Luther Kind Junior, all fiercely intelligent, fiercely articulate, and fiercely modern moral thinkers.
More please.
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