The Unravelling of Sam Harris

Has he successfully created his own morality?

Pre-COVID Sam

Sam Harris has said many things I agree with over the years. Religion can’t be above criticism. Our conversations on race in modern society have become insane. In general, we should try to be rational rather than reactive and emotional. When the answer was obvious, he was there to point it out, and was often brave in approaching “nuclear waste topics”.

That said, there has always been something about his approach that puts me off. The “religious zeal” with which he preaches atheism - a blanket dismissal and smearing of religion and the religious, and a refusal to admit that there could be anything positive in religion. His characterization of all who disagree with him as doing so because they are less intelligent, rational, or both. His belief in expertism and the divine right of the elites to rule the feeble-minded masses.

I felt he performed very poorly when I listened to his debates with Jordan Peterson. These debates are online and worth listening to. The topics are deep and difficult and hard to summarize, but the core of the disagreement is that Harris thinks that we can use our rationality and intellect to create fundamental morals, whereas Peterson does not. Do humans get their morality from something transcendent, or do humans create their own morality? Or as some have said: does religion get its morality from humans, or do humans get their morality from religion? I sensed that Harris, for all his intellectual prowess, just wasn’t understanding the deeper issue. He disagreed with Peterson’s assertions without understanding them. His hubris convinced him that he could create morals through the power of his intellect, and he was unable to see the problem with that idea. He is quick to dismiss the collected wisdom of countless generations that came before us - whether one conceptualizes that wisdom as “religion” or not.

There are different kinds of smart

Make no mistake, Harris is a bright man. His technical IQ is very high. He is incredibly well read. He has a high verbal IQ, so can sound “smooth” even when talking about things that clearly he understands poorly.

Aristotle believed that there were 3 different realms of knowledge. Episteme - scientific knowledge, techne - skill and craft, and phronesis - wisdom. Harris is full of epistemic knowledge, but not phronetic knowledge. Put another way: he is smart, but he is not wise.

Many philosophers, from Nietzche onward, have lamented the death of God, and speculated as to whether humans can really start from scratch and use our intellect to construct our own moral framework, given how short our life is, and how limited and imperfect we are. That discussion is far beyond the realm of this writing, but I will just say that if Sam Harris is any indication, we cannot.

His behaviour and statements since the start of the COVID pandemic have been a surprise and disappointment to many who felt he was a beacon of rationality and a guiding light with many difficult issues in society. His statements have made it clear that he believes he is an ubermensch. I think that what he has really proved is that he is incredibly good at rationalizing, not being rational.

Cars, Cliffs, and IQ

There is a way of thinking about intellect and morality that I think is apropos to understanding Harris. Our human brain is like a car. IQ is the engine - how many horsepower are under the hood. Those with higher IQ can think faster, come up with reasoning and explanations (and rationalizations) faster, and see their way through problems faster. But morality and principles steer the car.

More horsepower in a car without good steering ends up just being more efficient at driving the car off a cliff. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot - all of these despicable humans had high IQ’s. But they lacked a properly calibrated moral compass, and drove themselves (and many millions of innocent victims) over a proverbial cliff.

Sam Harris’ Greatest Hits of Pandemic Rationalizing

Allow me to do a short roundup of just a light sampling of Harris’s “Greatest Hits” since the pandemic began.

COVID is dangerous and you should be afraid!

Mr. Rational used fear and emotion rather than facts and figures to justify extreme measures like lockdowns, masking, and forced vaccinations. Numerous times I heard him default to “I know young healthy people who died!” (failing to realize he is connected to thousands of people). This is the same man who would sneer at someone who bought a lottery ticket, or feared flying in a plane because someone they knew had died in a crash. He failed to understand that his experience is anecdotal and that rare events should not guide policy.

Of course ivermectin doesn’t work and the vaccines do, because “the experts” say so

Harris attacked Brett Weinstein for his assertion that ivermectin was an effective treatment for COVID, and that there may be more risk to the vaccines than was apparent at first blush. Harris was not just critical, he was dismissive and demeaning of Weinstein. He accused him of causing death by creating “vaccine hesitancy”, and giving fuel to “anti-vaxxers”. He accused him of succumbing to “audience capture”, where his thinking had been distorted by what his listeners applauded. (Ironically, Harris fails to see this in himself.)

When Harris had blowback for denigrating Weinstein, he did a special podcast ostensibly to clear the air and be conciliatory. Instead, he simply doubled down and repeated everything he had said before, but with more certainty. He literally called anyone who questioned his view that everyone should be vaccinated “stupid”.

Throughout the pandemic, Harris only interviewed “experts” who chanted the “Safe and Effective” mantra. I never heard him give serious shrift to the possibility that vaccines might have as-yet-unknown side effects that would overwhelm their benefits in certain age/health cohorts. In fact, he clearly stated (you can listen in the above link) that it was too dangerous to even allow such ideas to be discussed.

His explanation for shutting down free speech was “merely having the conversation can be misleading… it’s too easy for even smart people to come away from these topics confused”. The implication, of course, is that HE is smart enough to know what’s right and wrong, but others aren’t. And since he already has decided what is right and what is not, it is not just unnecessary but dangerous to allow the other side of the argument to be aired.

Dead kids in basements are fine, but only for approved reasons

Where Harris really jumped the shark for many (he had already done so for me) was when he appeared on the Triggernometry podcast late in 2022 and defended censorship (although only for reasons that he approves of!). This episode (and many of their others, by the way!) is worth listening to. Harris is asked about the loss of trust in mainstream media (MSM), and specifically the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. (I am sure anyone reading this already knows the scoop, but to summarize, Biden would likely not have been elected president without the collusion of the deep state and MSM to keep the story quiet until after the election).

In defending the act of censorship, Harris actually said “At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, and I wouldn’t have cared”.

(listen below starting around the 44 minute mark to get the meat of what he is saying. I’m not taking him “out of context”. He is very definite and literal).

To Harris, Trump was an “existential threat”. And of course, Harris is never wrong, because, y’know, rationality and all that. The end of getting rid of Trump was so important that it justified any means, including the security establishment casting doubt on what was actually a very true story, and social media being complicit by rolling over to “requests” that they should suppress the story. For Harris (and good on the Triggernometry boys for pushing him on this), the principle - that a fair, unbiased, and trustworthy media is essential to make democracy function - is subordinate to his goal of making sure Donald Trump was not re-elected.

(As an aside, for those who have followed Harris’ trajectory since 2016, they will have noticed that he has become quite unhinged, with a primary psychiatric diagnosis of TDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome. Harris believes that the only reason half of those who voted did so for Trump is that they are stupid, uneducated, and irrational.)

If COVID had been a lot worse, then I would have been right!

A true scientist - someone who is truly rational - can admit when he is wrong. He doesn’t take firm stances on weak evidence in the first place. He changes his mind when new information is presented. He doesn’t rationalize, try to wriggle out of previous statements, or try to insist he is right long after he is clearly wrong.

I thought Harris couldn’t be any more irrational than he had been in 2021, but was proved wrong with his statements on a recent podcast, which can be heard in this video and this one.

In this interview, Harris actually says “In some sense, we actually got unlucky with how benign this was… There are situations that could have happened that could have been immensely clarifying… it could have been 10 times as deadly or 50 times as deadly”. “Had COVID been worse… we would have had a different political conversation around it… if kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands, we would have had a very different experience”.

It’s worth watching the full few minutes in the second clip linked above. It’s fascinating to watch his intellect working at 350 horsepower to hypothesize scenarios in which his extreme COVIDian views would have been correct. Watch his eyes - he looks down throughout his ranting. Is he ashamed down deep? Does he know at some deep “religious” level that he was wrong?

I said, and still contend, that COVID policy was a moral, not a technical failure. Is it right to lock people in their homes against their will? To force the elderly to die alone with nobody holding their hand and saying they love them? Is it right to ruin several years of children’s lives in an attempt to prevent a disease that is mostly a concern for frail, very elderly people? Is it OK to force people to inject a pharmaceutical product into their bodies against their will?

Those on my side of the “COVID Wars” lost the war when we let the enemy choose the battleground. We were drawn into fighting on technical grounds. If COVID is dangerous enough, these things can be justified. But to me, the rightness or wrongness of COVID policy didn’t rest on the technical details. Someone with an abiding morality (a la Jordan Peterson) is better able to adhere to first principles when the going gets tough, rather than default to utilitarian ends-justify-means rationalization (a la Harris).

Rather than simply state “It is immoral to lock elderly people away from the people who love them”, we got drawn into quibbling about infection fatality ratios, the accuracy of PCR testing, and other interminable scientific arguments. All of this while humans suffered. We ended up fiddling, arguing with the likes of Harris, while Rome burned.

If things were different, they wouldn’t be the same

Harris is right in a sense. If things were different, they wouldn’t be the same. Imagine COVID was a very deadly disease that had killed our children, spouses, family and neighbours in droves. Imagine if bodies were piled up in the streets. If that were the case, then a much higher percentage of the population would have been lined up to be vaccinated without being coerced, even with a new vaccine with an unclear side effect profile. The conversation would indeed have been different.

But it wasn’t. By May of 2020, the age-mortality curve was already established. By the time vaccines were available, those of us who were truly rational were long past being terrified that COVID was coming to kill us all. We understood the actual statistical risks, the fact of natural immunity, and the “precautionary principle” as it applies to a novel medical treatment.

Harris can’t accept these truths. He planted his flag firmly in the “COVID is so dangerous that extreme measures are warranted” camp. There is no going back for him. There is no losing face. And so he revved his IQ, gunned the engine, and drove his car off an intellectual cliff. I am embarrassed for him.

Might an openness to the basic morality provided by religion have kept Harris from intellectual self-immolation?

I wrote this not to attack or denigrate Harris, but because he exemplifies how our society went off the rails during COVID. An abandonment of principles. A shutting down of free speech. Rule by appointed and unaccountable “experts”. These things - not Trump - are what is tearing our society in two.

There are those who will continue to respect Harris and see him as rational and reasonable. But many, even those who were big fans and supporters, have seen that he is unhinged. He has fallen a long way in the estimation of many.

Harris has long espoused the belief that being religious prevents us from being rational, and once humans abandon religion, they will automatically fill in the void with rational thought. His own behaviour has proved him wrong.

Is religion really a malign force? Or is it an imperfect counterbalance to mankind’s innate tribalism and penchant for violence? Is it coincidence that the greatest atrocities of the modern age have been carried out by explicitly atheistic regimes? Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot were all anti-religious rationalists. This is a long-debated topic and the subject of a mountain of literature by some of history’s greatest philosophers. Whatever side of this argument you come down on, I like the quip “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him”.

Is it a coincidence that Harris - whose views on COVID were clearly authoritarian - is anti-religious? Maybe someday he will understand that he himself is at least as religious in his atheism as a Taliban member is in his belief in Allah.

Mr. Harris has obviously been unable to create his own morals. I hope he can find them somewhere - to keep his car from driving over a cliff. One thing for sure at this point - Sam Harris is off the rails.