Making Sense -  Sam Harris - #9 — Final Thoughts On Chomsky
Aired: 2015-05-15
Duration: 10:10


=== Difficult Conversations Demystified (09:47) ===

[00:00:01]  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.
[00:00:28]  So in order to inoculate us all against that, or at least to make those questions more informed by my view of what happened there, I want to do a short podcast just dealing with the larger problem.
[00:00:42]  As I see it, of having conversations of this kind.
[00:00:45]  More and more, I find myself attempting to have difficult conversations with people who hold very different points of view.
[00:00:51]  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.
[00:01:04]  I consider this the most consequential problem that exists.
[00:01:08]  Apart from violence and other forms of coercion, all we have is conversation with which to influence one another.
[00:01:15]  And the fact that it's so difficult for people to have civil and productive discussions about things like U.S.
[00:01:21]  foreign policy or racial inequality or religious tolerance and free speech This is profoundly disorienting, and it's also dangerous.
[00:01:31]  If we fail to do this, we will fail to get everything else of value.
[00:01:36]  Conversation is our only tool for collaborating in a truly open-ended way.
[00:01:43]  So I've been experimenting by reaching out to people to have difficult conversations.
[00:01:47]  I recently did this with the Muslim reformer, Majid Nawaz, which resulted in a short book entitled Islam and the Future of Tolerance, which will be published in the fall.
[00:01:55]  And as you'll read in that book, this was not at all guaranteed to work.
[00:01:59]  Majid and I had a very inauspicious first meeting.
[00:02:03]  But when I later saw the work he was doing, I reached out to him.
[00:02:05]  And the resulting conversation is one in which we made genuine progress.
[00:02:09]  He opened my mind on several important points.
[00:02:12]  And most important, it was a genuine pleasure to show readers that conversation, even on very polarizing topics, can occasionally serve its intended purpose, which is to change minds, even one's own.
[00:02:26]  Now here I would draw a distinction between a conversation and a debate.
[00:02:31]  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.
[00:02:42]  Now, this is an incredibly counterproductive way to frame any inquiry into what is true.
[00:02:47]  Now, 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.
[00:02:56]  I don't want to be wrong for a moment longer than I need to be.
[00:03:01]  And if my opponent is right about something and I can see that, I will be very quick to admit it.
[00:03:06]  So my dialogue with Majid was not a debate, really, even though at times we are pushing rather hard against one another.
[00:03:14]  It was rather a conversation.
[00:03:16]  And on the heels of that success, I decided to attempt a similar project with Noam Chomsky.
[00:03:21]  And the results of my failure are on my blog, For All to See.
[00:03:25]  Of course, many people understood exactly what I was trying to do and why I published the exchange, and they apparently appreciated my efforts.
[00:03:32]  I tried to have a civil conversation on an important topic with a very influential thinker, and I failed.
[00:03:40]  And I published the result because I thought the failure was instructive.
[00:03:45]  The whole purpose was to extract something of value from what seemed like a truly pointless exercise.
[00:03:52]  But that's not the lesson that many readers took away from it.
[00:03:56]  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.
[00:04:05]  And that I immediately found myself out of my depth.
[00:04:08]  And when he devastated me with the evidence of my own intellectual misconduct, and my ignorance of history, and my blind faith in the goodness of the U.S.
[00:04:17]  government, I complained about his being mean to me and I ran away.
[00:04:22]  Well, I must say, I find this view of the situation genuinely flabbergasting.
[00:04:27]  Many of you seem to forget that I published the exchange.
[00:04:31]  You must think I'm a total masochist or just delusional.
[00:04:35]  I know that some of you think the latter.
[00:04:37]  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 he thinks he's winning, but his controller isn't actually plugged in.
[00:04:48]  I happen to love that metaphor.
[00:04:50]  I'm just not so happy to have it applied to me.
[00:04:53]  Anyone who thinks I 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.
[00:05:04]  I really was trying to have a productive conversation with Chomsky, and I encountered little more than contempt and false accusations and highly moralizing language, accusing me of apologizing for atrocities.
[00:05:17]  And then weird evasions and silly tricks.
[00:05:20]  It was a horror show.
[00:05:22]  Now, I concede that I made a few missteps.
[00:05:24]  I should have dealt with Chomsky's charges that I had misrepresented him immediately and very directly.
[00:05:29]  They are, in fact, tissue thin.
[00:05:31]  I did not misrepresent his views at all.
[00:05:35]  I simply said that he had not thought about certain questions when I should have said he had thought about them badly.
[00:05:40]  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, you're just not interacting honestly with what happened here.
[00:05:51]  I did not misrepresent Chomsky's position on anything.
[00:05:55]  And insults aside, he was doing everything in his power to derail the conversation.
[00:06:01]  And the amazing thing is that highly moralizing accusations work for people who think they're watching a debate.
[00:06:07]  They convince most of the audience that where there's smoke, there must be fire.
[00:06:12]  For instance, when Ben Affleck called me and Bill Maher racist, that was all he had to do to convince 50% of the audience.
[00:06:19]  But I'm sorry to say it was the same with Chomsky.
[00:06:22]  I can't tell you how many people I heard from who think that he showed how ludicrous and unethical my concern about intentions was, for instance.
[00:06:31]  He's dealing in the real world, but all my talk about intentions was just a bizarre and useless bit of philosophizing.
[00:06:37]  But think about that for a second.
[00:06:38]  Our legal system depends upon weighing intentions in precisely the way I describe.
[00:06:44]  How else do we differentiate between premeditated murder and crimes of passion and manslaughter and criminal negligence and just terrible accidents for which no one is to blame?
[00:06:54]  Imagine your neighbor's house burns down and yours with it.
[00:06:57]  What the hell happened?
[00:06:59]  Well, what happened has a lot to do with your neighbor's intentions.
[00:07:03]  If he had a cooking fire that got out of control, that's one thing.
[00:07:06]  If he tried to burn down his own house to collect the insurance payment, that's another.
[00:07:10]  If he tried to burn down the whole neighborhood, Because he just hates everyone.
[00:07:15]  That's another.
[00:07:17]  Intentions matter because they contain all the information about what your neighbor is likely to do next.
[00:07:24]  There's a spectrum of culpability here and intention is its very substance.
[00:07:28]  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.
[00:07:37]  Now, I'm pretty sure that I disagree, but I would have loved to discuss it.
[00:07:41]  I wasn't debating him about anything.
[00:07:43]  I was trying to figure out what the man actually believes.
[00:07:47]  It's still not clear to me, because he appeared to be contradicting himself in our exchange.
[00:07:52]  But in response to my questions and the thought experiments I was marshalling trying to get to first principles, all I got back were insults.
[00:07:59]  But worse, many people seem to think that these insults were a sign of the man's moral seriousness.
[00:08:05]  Many seem to think that belligerence and an unwillingness to have a civil dialogue is a virtue in any encounter like this.
[00:08:12]  And that simply vilifying one's opponent as a moral monster by merely declaring him to be one is a clever thing to do.
[00:08:21]  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 the U.S.
[00:08:31]  government might be responsible.
[00:08:33]  The United States, and the West generally, has a history of colonialism and slavery and of collusion with dictators and of imposing its will on people all over the world.
[00:08:42]  I have never denied this.
[00:08:45]  But I'm hearing from people who say things like, of course ISIS and Al-Qaeda are terrible, but we're just as bad, worse even, because we created them.
[00:08:54]  Literally.
[00:08:55]  And through our selfishness and our ineptitude, we created millions of other victims who sympathize with them, for obvious reasons.
[00:09:02]  We are, in every morally relevant sense, getting exactly what we deserve.
[00:09:07]  Well, this kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the left.
[00:09:16]  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.
[00:09:26]  And many people, most even, who are this morally confused, consider Chomsky their patriarch.
[00:09:32]  And I suspect that's not an accident.
[00:09:34]  And I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off 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.

=== Morally Confused Followers (00:21) ===

[00:09:48]  And it didn't work out.
[00:09:50]  The conversation, as I said, was a total failure.
[00:09:53]  But I thought it was an instructive one.
[00:09:55]  So, I don't know if that answers all 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.