Talk to me

Take a look at this exchange between Ezra Klein and serial conversationalist Sam Harris regarding the topics occasioned by Harris' April 2017 rap session with conservative policy analyst Charles Murray in which Murray's thesis on the subject of Race and IQ, expressed most famously in his 1994 book  The Bell Curve (co-authored with psychologist Richard Herrnstein) was championed by Harris.  (Start here for background or here.  You can listen to the podcast of Klein and Harris' conversation on Harris's site;  Klein's Vox site has both the podcast and a transcript from which the below was taken.):

Sam Harris: I’m in the, once again, having the bewildering experience of agreeing with virtually everything you said there, and yet it has basically no relevance to what I view as our underlying disagreement.

 Ezra Klein: You have that bewildering experience because you don’t realize when you keep saying that everybody else is thinking tribally, but you’re not, that that is our disagreement.

Sam Harris: Well, no, because I know I’m not thinking tribally —

Ezra Klein: Well, that is our disagreement.

Sam Harris: In this respect because, no, because I share your political biases there. I would line up with you completely. If I gave into my bias, my social bias I would become, I can’t tell you what a relief it would be to recognize that Nisbett and Turkheimer are reasoning better than anyone else in this field. I can’t tell you what a relief it would be to realize that Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man, was right on the money.

Ezra Klein: I don’t think it would be a relief to you at all. Because .. right at the beginning of all this with Murray you said, you look at Murray and you see what happens to you. You were completely straightforward about that, that you look at what happens to him and you see what happens to you... 

Sam Harris: It’s not tribalism. This is an experience of talking about ideas in public.

Ezra Klein: ... I think that your core identity in this is as someone who feels you get treated unfairly by politically correct mobs and —

Sam Harris: That is not identity politics. That is my experience as a public intellectual trying to talk about ideas.

Ezra Klein: That is what folks from the dominant group get to do. They get to say, my thing isn’t identity politics, only yours is. I will tell you, Sam, when people who do not look like you hear you telling them that this is just identity politics, they don’t think, “God he’s right. That is just identity politics.” They think this is my experience and you don’t understand it. You just said it’s your experience and they don’t understand it.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the "conversation" was really two alternating monologues.  Sam Harris, if not exactly making the airtight case for the vaunted science behind Charles Murray's policy projects, was ostensibly defending hypothetical dangerous truths from hypothetical political correctness.  Ezra Klein was both laying out Murray's stated agenda in presenting the science, and making the case for why political and historical perspectives should not be excluded from consideration on the topic.

I'm not a fan of political correctness that reflexively shuts down conversation (whether from the right,  left or middle), but I see none here. I happen to agree with Ezra Klein that the uses for this particular avenue of scientific exploration cannot be separated from the science-- and that it is "not even right" to engage in a discussion about the intelligence of a 'race' while scrubbing the conversation of history, or discounting or disallowing voices of concern from African Americans, Latinos and the traditionally disadvantaged in particular from weighing in. Furthermore, there is definitely something suspect, and may even be something reductive to the claim that IQ, which is to some extent an occasion to demonstrate one's fluency in the dominant culture in which the test is designed, is a predictor of one's success in that culture, especially if that culture has historically been organized to protect the supremacy of some of its citizens over others.

To his credit, Sam Harris reminds Klein that intelligence is not intrinsically a quality of superiority.  After all, as his own output often attests, what good is intelligence if you're just wrong?   But there are several reasons to doubt the truth of Sam Harris's racial IQ science, and to doubt the integrity of his position.  Many of them have to do with flaws in Harris's style of discourse and thought which he has conveniently provided examples of in "conversation" after "conversation" over the years with a series of frequently distinguished opponents on a series of similarly incendiary topics.  Among the problems:

Cherry picking: It's really not enough in this case to accept Harris' decree that the science is non-controversial on race and intelligence-- a characterization that is not merely dead wrong, but laughably tone deaf to the outrage that could be provoked by reducing a topic with a complex and brutal history to an anodyne abstract from out of a journal only scientists and policy makers would read.  As for the validity of  characterizing the state of the science as settled, the exception that proves the rule came on Klein's own Vox site in the person of three Intelligence scientists (2 of whom are referred to in the above exchange) who argued the opposite point.  By definition, their testimony invalidates Harris' point.  Note that this is not yet even a critique of the science, merely of the notion that the science has all been done and that there is now consensus about it among all whose opinion is valued and allowed on the topic.

A pattern of selective skepticism:  None as regards Ruth Benedict's classic colonialist take on the Dobu of Papua New Guinea in 1934's Patterns of Culture, a pleasing narrative about the disagreeability of an isolated  and backward people sitting on some lovely resources that was used as an example of an extreme of cultural relativity, which account was ultimately debunked by anthropologist Susanne Kuehling in 2005, five years before Harris used Patterns of Culture's account of the Dobu as a jumping off point for his 2010 work The Moral Landscape and which he introduced again most recently in a conversation with Jordan Peterson of lobster fame.  To the topic at hand, it should escape no one's attention that whereas Harris presents Charles Murray's thesis on race and IQ as a dispassionate appraisal of scientific fact, and seems almost scandalized by Klein's impugning of Murray's agenda, Harris instantly rejects contrary opinion on the basis that it is tainted by politics.

A habit of special pleading:  for starters, for instance, with regard to the intentions of western democracies in military exercises, particularly contrasted with those they exercise against.  In the present conversation, according to Harris, Murray, who has had a privileged life in Washington as a prominent, influential conservative think tank wonk is especially due the courtesy of a hearing, whereas voices representing the groups Murray's writings have consistently striven (and not without success) to deprive-- voices that I would argue have perhaps been occasionally provoked to a justifiable scream on this topic--  are barred from the conversation that Harris, the self-described public intellectual, thinks we need to have. 

An addiction to very bad thought experiments:  the construction of hypothetical situations that (surprise surprise) Harris believes could objectively be agreed upon by reasonable observers to be responded to with torture or unilateral pre-emptive deployment of a nuclear bomb;  the assumed logical endpoint of the influence of the Koran (above all other collections of writing) on a civilization isolated from any other literature or science. From the Harris Klein debate, proffered as a counterfactual example of a "forbidden truth": What if instead of Europeans being 2.3% Neanderthal as was recently determined from genetic studies to virtually no outcry form Europeans,  it were found that humans of African descent were?  To borrow NPR entertainment critic Tom Shales' dismissal of the 'What if Peter Pan grew up?' premise of the movie Hook: What if Moby Dick were a guppy?  Thank goodness we don't have to put it to the test, but let's hope not even Charles Murray would be motivated to adopt a group's traces of pre-historic interspecies ancestry as a further basis for depleting the funding of anti-poverty programs.  If there are themes in what causes Harris's thought experiments to fail, I propose that the most incipient is his unfounded confidence in what is self-evident.

Sam Harris is drawn to what he terms Forbidden Knowledge, much of which on examination turns out to be Questionable Opinion -- albeit almost consistently, including in this case, opinion that is pretty close to the received and conventional orthodoxy of the elite.   We're all entitled to our opinions, however questionable.  But in most orthodoxies only the priesthood gets to decide what are facts.  Sam Harris is a priest of orthodox opinion.

It's appealing to think that all one needs to access truth is reason; that a rational mind privileges one to proximity to the way the Universe works.  It's pretty to feel oneself free from the burdens of identity that straitjacket those preoccupied with their own perceived oppression-- to know that like Dorothy in Oz, if only they could see it, the more intelligent of those born to less automatically privileged demographics would likewise have access to truth that is just freely available to those who through no fault of their own were born to greater advantage.   But to the contrary, Harris makes clear that he would have those concerned about where his vaunted science is leading shut off the intelligence that they would bring to bear on the conversation that he is having about them.  He may not be a racist, if you want to be believe him.   But especially in light of his performance on topics such as Islam and race and intelligence, I have difficulty believing he is not at least, as Ezra Klein so eloquently put it, an "anti-anti-racist."

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Further Reading:

Take a look at this to get a sense of how quaint, limited and calcified Harris's working notions of human history are.

Here is why Sam Harris gets to call himself a "neuroscientist".  Here is why we should perhaps not be so hasty to be impressed by that.