I wanted to do another “Ask me Anything” podcast, but
I know I’m going to get inundated with questions about my conversation with
Noam Chomsky, so in order to inoculate us all against that—or, at least, to
make those questions more informed by my view of what happened—I wanted to do a
short podcast dealing with the larger problem, as I see it, of having
conversations of this kind.
More and more, I find myself attempting to have
difficult conversations with people who hold very different points of view. And
I consider our general failure to have these conversations well—so as to
produce an actual convergence of opinion and a general increase in goodwill
between the participants—to be the most consequential problem that exists.
Apart from violence and other forms of coercion, all we have is conversation
with which to influence one another. The fact that it is so difficult for
people to have civil and productive conversations about things like U.S.
foreign policy, or racial inequality, or religious tolerance and free speech,
is profoundly disorienting. And it’s also dangerous. If we fail to do this, we
will fail to do everything else of value. Conversation is our only tool for
collaborating in a truly open-ended way.
So I’ve been experimenting by reaching out to people
to have difficult conversations. I recently did this with the Muslim reformer
Maajid Nawaz, which resulted in a short book, Islam and the Future of
Tolerance, that will be published in the fall. As you’ll read in that book,
this was not at all guaranteed to work—Maajid and I had a very inauspicious
first meeting—but when I later saw the work he was doing, I reached out to him,
and the resulting conversation is one in which we made genuine progress. He opened
my mind on several important points and, most important, it was a genuine
pleasure to show readers that conversation, even on genuinely polarizing
topics, can occasionally serve its intended purpose, which is to change
minds—even one’s own.
Here, I would draw a distinction between a
conversation and a debate. They’re superficially similar when the parties
disagree, but to have one’s mind changed in a debate is to lose the debate and,
very likely, to lose face before one’s audience. This is an incredibly
counterproductive way to frame any inquiry into what is true. Occasionally, I
engage in public debates, but I’ve never approached them like a high school
exercise where one is committed to not changing one’s view. I don’t want to be
wrong for a moment longer than I need to be, and if my opponent is right about
something, and I can see that, then I will be very quick to admit it.
So my dialogue with Maajid was not really a debate,
even though at times we were pushing rather hard against one another. It was,
rather, a conversation. On the heels of that success, I decided to attempt a
similar project with Noam Chomsky, and the results of my failure are on my blog
for all to see.
Of course, many people understood exactly what I was
trying to do and why I published the exchange, and they apparently appreciated
my efforts. I tried to have a civil conversation on an important topic with a
very influential thinker, and I failed. I published the result because I
thought the failure was instructive—the whole purpose was to extract something
of value from what seemed like a truly pointless exercise.
But that’s not the lesson many readers took away from
it. Many of you seem to think that the conversation failed because I arrogantly
challenged Chomsky to a debate—probably because I was trying to steal some
measure of his fame—and that I immediately found myself out of my depth. And
when he devastated me with the evidence of my own intellectual conduct, and my
ignorance of history, and my blind faith in the goodness of the U.S.
government, I complained about his being “mean” to me, and I ran away. Well, I
must say, I find this view of the situation genuinely flabbergasting. Many of
you seem to forget that I published the exchange—you must think I’m a total
masochist, or just delusional. Now, I know that some of you think the latter. I
heard from one person, I think it was on Twitter, who said, “Sam Harris reminds
me of a little kid who thinks he’s playing a video game, and thinks he’s
winning, but his controller isn’t actually plugged in.” I happen to love that
metaphor. I’m just not so happy to have it applied to me. Anyone who thinks
I’ve lost a debate here just doesn’t understand what I was trying to do or why,
upon seeing that my attempt at dialogue was a total failure, I bailed out. I
really was trying to have a productive conversation with Chomsky, and I
encountered little more than contempt, false accusations, and highly moralizing
language—accusing me of apologizing for atrocities—and weird evasions, and
silly tricks. It was a horror show.
I concede that I made a few missteps: I should have
dealt with Chomsky’s charges that I misrepresented him immediately and very
directly. They are, in fact, tissue-thin. I did not misrepresent his views at
all. I simply said that he had not thought about certain questions when I
should have said he had thought about them badly. Those of you who have written
to tell me that what I did to Chomsky is analogous to what has been done to me
by people who actually lie about my views are just not interacting honestly
with what happened here: I did not misrepresent Chomsky’s position on anything.
And, insults aside, he was doing everything in his power to derail the
conversation. The amazing thing is that highly moralizing accusations work for
people who think they’re watching a debate. They convince most of the audience
that where there’s smoke there must be fire. For instance, when Ben Affleck
called me and Bill Maher “racist,” that was all he had to do to convince 50% of
the audience. I’m sorry to say that it was the same with Chomsky.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard from who
think that he showed how ludicrous and unethical my concern about intentions
was, for instance—he’s dealing in the “real world,” but all my talk about intentions
was just a bizarre and useless bit of philosophizing. But think about that for
a second: our legal system depends upon weighing intentions in precisely the
way I describe. How else do we differentiate between premeditated murders,
crimes of passion, manslaughter, criminal negligence, and terrible accidents
for which no one is to blame?
Imagine your neighbor’s house burns down and yours
with it—what the hell happened? What happened has a lot to do with your
neighbor’s intentions. If he had a cooking fire that got out of control, that’s
one thing. If he tried to burn down his own house to collect the insurance
payment, that’s another. If he tried to burn down the whole neighborhood,
because he just hates everyone, that’s another. Intentions matter because they
contain all of the information about what your neighbor is likely to do next.
There’s a spectrum of culpability here and intention is its very substance.
Chomsky seems to think that he has made a great moral
discovery in this area and that not intending a harm can sometimes be morally
worse than intending one. Now I’m pretty sure that I disagree, but I would have
loved to discuss it. I wasn’t debating him about anything, I was trying to
figure out what the man actually believes. It’s still not clear to me, because
he appeared to be contradicting himself in our exchange. But in response to my
questions and the thought experiments I was marshaling in an attempt to get to
first principles, all I got back were insults.
But worse, many people seem to think that these
insults were a sign of the man’s moral seriousness. Many seem to think that
belligerence and an unwillingness to have a civil dialogue is a virtue in any
encounter like this, and that simply vilifying one’s opponent as a moral
monster, by merely declaring him to be one, is a clever thing to do.
Now, despite what every Chomsky fan seems to think,
there was nowhere in that exchange where I signaled my unwillingness to
acknowledge or to discuss specific crimes for which for the U.S. government
might be responsible. The United States, and the West generally, has a history
of colonialism, slavery, collusion with dictators, and of imposing its will on
people all over the world. I have never denied this. But I’m now hearing from
people who say things like, “well of course ISIS and al-Qaeda are terrible, but
we’re just as bad, worse even, because we created them—literally. And through
our selfishness and ineptitude, we created millions of other victims who
sympathize with them for obvious reasons. We are, in every morally relevant
sense, getting exactly what we deserve.”
This kind of masochism and misreading of both
ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the
Left. I don’t think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton
from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting,
much less wise. And many people, most even, who are this morally confused
consider Chomsky their patriarc—and I suspect that’s not an accident. But I
wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off of
this island of masochism so that these sorts of people, who I’ve been hearing
from for years, could cross over to something more reasonable. And it didn’t
work out. The conversation, as I said, was a total failure. But I thought it
was an instructive one.
So, I don’t know if that answers all of the questions
I’m going to get about the Chomsky affair, but when I put out a call for an AMA
later this week, forgive me for moving on to other topics, because I don’t
think there’s much more to say on this one. But I’m going to keep trying to
have conversations like this, because conversation is our only hope.
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