A truly rational conversation not contaminated by identity politics
Ezra Klein did the podcast with Sam Harris, and there’s a transcript. It is, naturally, an interesting read. One sample:
Ezra Klein
One of the things I’ve come to think about you that I actually did not come into this believing is, you’re very quick to see a lot of psychological tendencies, cognitive fallacies, etc. in others that you don’t see applying to yourself, or people you’ve written into your tribe. You say words in there like confirmation bias, etc., to me about how we’re looking at Murray. The whole thing I just told you is that Charles Murray is a guy who works at conservative think tanks, whose first book was about why we should get rid of the welfare state, who is, his whole life’s work is about breaking down social policy.
To the extent that I have any biases that flow backwards from political commitments, so does he. We’re all —
Sam Harris
Okay. But what’s my bias?
Ezra Klein
Hold on Sam. I’m going to go through this.
Sam Harris
But what’s my bias?
Ezra Klein
I promise you I will get to your bias very quickly.
[one para omitted]
Then you asked me — and I think this is a good question, because I think this gets to the core of this and it gets to where I tried to open us up into — your view of this debate is that to say that you have a bias in it is to say, in your terms, that you’re like the grand dragon of the KKK. That the only version of a bias that can be influencing what you see here is a core form of racism. That’s actually not my view of you, but I do think you have a bias.
I think you have a huge sensitivity, let’s put it that way, and you have a lot of difficulty extending an assumption of good faith to anyone who disagrees with you on an issue that you code as identity politics. There’s a place actually where I think you got into this in a pretty interesting way. I went back and I read your discussion with Glenn Loury.
At the beginning, when you’re talking about why you chose to have Glenn on the show, you say, “My goal was to find an African American intellectual, who could really get into the details with me, but whom I also trusted to have a truly rational conversation that wouldn’t be contaminated by identity politics.” To you, engaging in identity politics discredits your ability to participate in a rational conversation, and it’s something, as far as I can tell, that you do not see yourself as doing.
I don’t know what they say next because I paused there.
That’s one of the things that just drives me nuts about Harris and guys like Harris – their blindness (their smug blindness, frankly) to how easy it is for people with the Approved Forms of identity to see “contamination” in the “identity politics” of people who don’t. It’s almost comical that Sam Harris thinks he has truly rational conversations that are not contaminated by identity politics. It’s less close to comical that he doesn’t even realize that his hostility to “identity politics” is “identity politics.”
So, yeah, that’s his bias, or one of them.
I saw that there was a transcript up, and then I saw how long it was, and decided I’d let other people pick out the relevant parts. So thanks!
An excerpt I saw elsewhere quotes Klein as saying he counted two African-American guests on Harris’ podcast (out of well over a hundred, if I recall correctly) — does this mean that Glenn Loury was one of the two? (Sigh.)
Glenn Loury is capable and often very interesting; I used to listen to his bloggingheads podcast regularly. But by his own admission he spent a huge chunk of his career as a token black conservative before he got frustrated with that role and distanced himself from the conservative movement. I don’t know if he still considers himself conservative or not, but you can generally rely on him to criticize mainstream liberal views, especially on race. (He hates Ta-Nahisi Coates, and yet cannot stop himself from bringing the guy up.)
All of which is to say that sure, have Loury on your show. It’s healthy to publicize a variety of views within minority communities. But that’s the thing — if Loury is one of two black people you’ve interviewed, and you defend it on the grounds that you can’t find others who will discuss it “rationally,” then it says far more about you. It’s like saying that Christina Hoff Sommers is the only “feminist” you could find who would discuss feminism rationally with you. (That may be a little unjust to Loury, who I don’t think is the publicity-seeking hack Sommers is.)
When Klein gets to suggesting to Harris that, maybe, just maybe, Harris has a bit of an anti-anti-racist bias, Harris rejects it flatly – boom, no, Harris is operating from a standpoint of pristine, pure reason. He knows this, because he knows it.
I don’t believe he can keep any rational discussion cred when he’s that roundly able to reject any consideration of his own cognitive biases or shortcomings. But “rational” for Harris seems to be “whatever strikes me as quite plausible”.
I always thought it was interesting that they code people who want equality of opportunity for all people as “identity politics” while totally missing the fact that trying to preserve privilege for a single group is, in fact identity politics – of the most toxic kind. Because if you have historically been in power, there is no need to change the system to promote your identity, so you don’t have to stand up and say I am man hear me roar or white power to get the goodies, you think that anyone who does say that is being irrational, identifying themselves by their genitalia or the color of their skin.
When society does not judge you inferior because of your genitalia or the color of your skin, it may escape your notice that you are, in fact, being judged by your genitalia and the color of your skin. You are default, so it isn’t mentioned, it isn’t hinted at, and you just accept it as the norm. Most men I know would hiss and boo at someone who openly said they would never hire a woman, or that black skin makes you less competent, but I know people who will get there through the back door – well, I’m not saying…but…(repeat X anecdote, which is evidence of exactly nothing, but throw in sciency words), so, well, maybe we should have this conversation. Totally not identity politics, no, not me.
Translation: I have principles; you have ideology. I am rational and unbiased: you practice identity politics.
YNnB – You left one out:
I am Sam Harris, you are not.
Screechy @ 1, you’re welcome, but I should warn you, I may end up posting the whole thing (a bit at a time) because there’s a lot to discuss!
Ok that’s a little exaggerated, but dang Harris does say a lot of…self-revealing stuff.
One of my biggest frustrations with Harris is that he seems to *only* think that racism is of the interpersonal, visceral variety. This is the extreme antipode to the activists who’ve soaked up critical race theory and insist that racism is *only* the abstract mechanism of systemic white supremacy. (I’ve had my sparring sessions with a few of them, too.) He seems to think that the number of ‘real racists’ in the United States is somewhere in the low thousands, or perhaps the low tens of thousands, and that anything short of that interpersonal animus and explicit manifestation isn’t worthy of analysis or discussion. This extends to other factors in what he calls ‘identity politics’.
You can see this in his response to the Charleston fracas (which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer), wherein he pointed out (rightly) that white identity politics were ‘the most detestable of all’, while identifying ‘white identity politics’ solely with avowed white supremacists and identitarians.
For a philosopher, it’s awfully bone-headed of him.
Hold on, Ophelia. Are you gonna sit there and tell me that, as a white man, I am NOT the type specimen of homo sapiens sapiens?
Ahhhhhhhhhh there’s a reason for that: he’s not a philosopher. He studied it as an undergraduate but, I would suggest, not to much profit, and his PhD is in neuroscience. Patricia Churchland, who has a PhD in philosophy and one in neuroscience, says he’s a child in philosophy. (Not in the sense of innocent and lovable but in the sense of not getting it.)
Yes, I suppose I meant to say ‘alleged’ or ‘self-described’ philosopher. I’m somewhat leery of accusing others of a lack of sophisticated understanding, given how often such an accusation is used to dodge difficult questions that arise from actually consistently applying some philosophies, and especially theologies. (I am reminded of a recent thread by a rabbi who claimed that belief in a personal, anthropomorphic man-in-the-sky God was ‘kindergarten stuff’.)
But claiming that one’s own position is either unbiased or the least biased takes quite a bit more work than merely repeating the assertion, and at a certain point it becomes embarrassing. I do wonder if Harris has ever taken advantage of the many opportunities he’s been given to learn the First Rule of Holes.
Agreed, about the accusation of a lack of sophisticated understanding. But his book on morality really annoyed me in its lack not just of careful argument but of acknowledgement of the need for such a thing. It was basically “Gee why hasn’t anybody ever thought of making morality about good things being better than bad things?” when…that’s not the case. It was SO presumptuous and SO clueless – and his fans were foaming at the mouth about how awesome it is. Ugh.
I don’t mind not sophisticated; I’m not sophisticated; but then don’t claim to be answering one of the oldest questions in the book in a way no one ever has before.
Harris has always been a glib, smug lightweight. The fact that he’s still considered a pillar of contemporary atheism highlights the very real problems in the movement.
I’m reading this while in bed, and laughed so hard at that I woke Mrs. o’Sagan up.
A glib, smug lightweight sums him up nicely. Why he is taken so seriously by so many atheist activists is just baffling. (Notice that bafflement doesn’t apply to Dawkins. For all his waspish faults, the reasons for his prominence are obvious. He’s brilliant at the writing and public educating. Sam Harris? Not so much.)