Sam Harris's Science of Morality: A Case Study of Scientific Atheism

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith was perhaps the first major book in the wave of New Atheist books published after 911. Harris argued for the importance of challenging our so-called private beliefs, since beliefs (mental representations) cause our behaviour and thus have public consequences. He argued also that so-called moderate religion shouldn’t be off-limits to nontheists, since moderates enable more dangerous, fundamentalist religion by contending that since religion has a harmless form, religion itself is never a primary cause of violence. That book defended a commonsense realist philosophy, according to which beliefs are made true or false by the facts, and the facts support atheistic naturalism.

Whatever you might think of his earlier case for a certain philosophical perspective, you should be struck by the shift taken by his more recent book, The Moral Landscape, in which he attempts to show that social conflicts between groups who disagree on moral issues aren’t inevitable, because science has the potential to show us the truth about moral values just as science has done with regard to the rest of nature. Harris uses his case for a science of morality as a weapon against religion, since theists claim that religion (along with philosophy) are valuable in part for providing the only conceivable framework that justifies morality; that is, the theist means to bash science-centered nontheism for the latter’s inability to justify morality. In the process of countering this moral argument for theism, however, Harris throws the baby out with the bathwater. If morality is actually in the purview of science, then neither the philosopher nor the theologian can have anything crucial to say about moral issues, just as a chef or a politician has no authority to speak about biology or physics.

Unfortunately, Harris’s case for scientific morality conforms to the positivist’s pattern of ironically celebrating science with a philosophy that must be kept in the shadows. In Harris’s case, he should have two reasons not to call attention to the philosophical nature of his arguments for scientific morality. First, those arguments would demonstrate that there is a crucial philosophical debate about morality after all, namely the debate about whether morality can be scientifically justified; the nature of this meta-debate, in turn, prevents a fulsome, Scientistic worship of science at the expense of philosophy. Second, his arguments happen to be badly flawed, often resting on evasive verbal tricks or contradicting each other, due presumably to his contempt for philosophy and thus for its ideals of clarity and rigorous logic even in discussions of nonscientific issues. Harris’s case for scientific morality, therefore, illustrates the perils of scientific, as opposed to philosophical, atheism.

Untangling Scientific and Philosophical Atheism

New Atheism is riven by a seldom-discussed split between scientific and philosophical atheists, which reveals some surprising relationships between scientistic atheism, Socratic philosophical skepticism, and theism. In particular, each should be understood as a response to the mystical perception that the reality behind the apparent natural world is far from ideal for us. Western philosophers and Eastern mystics wrestle with this harsh truth and its implications, sacrificing their capacity for happiness in the process. Scientistic atheists pretend to reject all religions even as they belittle philosophical atheism to purify the membership of their science-centered cult. Scientism and literalistic, exoteric theism each represents a flight from the tragic implications of mysticism, and this is the chief weakness of each of these ideologies, according to the philosophical atheist who, unmoved by pragmatic social conventions, shares with the Eastern mystic the burden of suffering from a confrontation with the horrible truth of our existential predicament. In what follows, I explore these ideas with a view to clarifying the differences between scientific and philosophical atheism.

Some Recent Historical Context

The New Atheist movement began as a counterattack against Muslim fundamentalists who took the longstanding war between white American and European oligarchs, on the one hand, and the Muslim world, on the other, into the open with their 911 terrorism. (Moderate Muslims object that there’s nothing Islamic about the members of al Qaeda, but since theology isn’t a science, there’s no non-question-begging criterion for distinguishing between genuine and phony Muslims. The terrorist cherry-picks some passages from Muslim scriptures, taking them out of context, while the moderate, secularized or reformist Muslim does the same with other scriptures.) The war between secular civilizations and the Muslim hordes has been waged for decades via the secular oligarchs’ proxies, that is, by the West-friendly dictators who have--until the recent Arab Spring uprisings--kept a lid on the nationalist aspirations of the Muslim majorities in the Middle East. Secularists hardly need to enter an intellectual war of ideas with the still-medieval Islamic religion since, as Hitchens was fond of saying, the secularists already humiliate Middle Eastern Muslims daily by ruling them via the US military and its proxies. Still, New Atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens took up the call for overkill, launching verbal assaults on theism with their books and in-person debates.

Untangling Liberalism and Libertarianism

Liberalism and libertarianism share a root word as well as a common history, but today liberals and libertarians are often far apart on economic and political issues, especially in the US. I’ll try to get to the bottom of the current divisions, giving due respect to the self-serving talking points repeated by each side, which is to say no respect at all to what partisan liberals and libertarians pretend to believe. I’m more interested in the principles that can be deduced from what such partisans say or that are indicated by their political actions. The principles I detect are rather shocking. As I’ve spelled out in Liberalism and elsewhere, modern liberals must be distinguished from postmodern ones, and postmodern liberals are disgraced, nihilistic servants of stealth oligarchies; moreover, as I’ve explained in Conservatism, libertarians craft noble lies on behalf of those same oligarchies. But in the present philosophical rant, I explore further the nature of those lies, to lay bare the current differences between liberalism and libertarianism.

The Ironic Undoing of Liberalism

Modern liberalism is a scientistic application of rationalism, which imports scientific methods and standards from the empirical study of nature to the management of society. By way of a decline from a modern to a so-called postmodern state, liberalism comes to bridge secular individualism and technocracy in the following way. Historically, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of the merchant class, and the power of modern scientific inquiries undermined the European feudalism, the authority of the Catholic Church, and thus the basis for deferring to Christian dogmas. Faith in received wisdom was replaced with the Renaissance confidence in human creativity and progress. The godlike human, who replaces the monotheistic deity by learning how the world actually works and re-engineering it to our benefit instead of trusting in any alleged divine revelation, and by freely creating cultures inherits the prestige and the rights once conventionally thought to belong to God.

Is Love the Meaning of Life?

No, it’s not, contrary to the sentimental meme. Reading or hearing the sappier assurances that all you need is love triggers my gag reflex. For example, as quoted in Chris Hedges’ recent article, "Acts of Love," even the existential psychologist Viktor Frankl rhapsodizes “that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire,” that “the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart” is that “The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Luckily, Chris Hedges' defense of the meme is slightly more readable, so I'll summarize and discuss his article to elucidate why love is not our highest good after all, contrary to popular opinion.

Chris Hedges on Love

Hedges summarizes his view of why love is so great:

Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the love between two people, between children and parents, between friends, between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns on the planet. Those who cannot love--and I have seen these deformed human beings in the wars and conflicts I covered--are spiritually and emotionally dead. They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of themselves. Those incapable of love never live.

According to Hedges, love is opposed to loneliness, which is the “most acute form of human suffering.” As he explains, “The isolated human individual can never be fully human. And for those cut off from others, for those alienated from the world around them, the false covenants of race, nationalism, the glorious cause, class and gender compete, with great seduction, against the covenant of love.”

Sex is Violent: Why the F-Word is Taboo

Romantic love is frequently touted as the chief politically correct prerequisite for being happy in secular society. But because the causal relationship between finding a life partner and being happy is politically correct, you can be sure that the idea of this relationship is metaphysically, naturally, and in all other ways that matter to those who care about knowledge, wrong. Politically correct notions are propaganda signals that beam back and forth between social interest groups to maintain power imbalances; these notions are tools of social manipulation, not propositions backed up by critical thinking, scientific investigation, or artistic vision. A connoisseur of human folly evaluates mainly the aesthetics of politically correct blather, appreciating the efficiency with which PC notions distort reality sometimes in the service of human vice. (See Political Correctness.)

That the idea that romantic love makes you happy is merely politically correct, and thus substantively erroneous, is apparent from the attendant language game. Of course, romantic love culminates in the sex act, and yet the double standard in our treatment of words that refer to sex is most curious. The clinical word “sex” is perfectly acceptable in the mass media, but the F-word is taboo even while superficially those two words are synonymous. The trick is that their connotations differ. “Sex” calls to mind the biological process of having sex, as in “sexual intercourse” or “copulation.” The F-word, however, has metaphysical rather than mere scientific force, calling to mind the sex act’s deeper meaning. What is this deeper meaning? Well, the F-word gives away the game in its nonsexual uses, as in “Fuck him up,” “Fuck off!” or “He’s fucked.” In these uses, the F-word refers to violence or ruination. You might be wondering what violence has to do with the sex act, with the consummation of romantic love which is supposed to elevate us like nothing else, according to the PC happy-talk.

Sacrificial Offering to Our Lord, the Dentist

Undergoing a dental cleaning is well-known as being a painful experience, but assuming the hygienist doesn’t mishandle her instruments and accidentally cut your lip, no one’s to blame for the pain caused by the scraping of plaque from your teeth with blunt metal tools. On the contrary, this pain serves the greater good of keeping your teeth and gums healthy. However, there’s a subtler but more profound form of suffering inflicted on these occasions--and by the dentist himself rather than by the hygienist. (All the hygienists I’ve ever seen have been women, while all the dentists have been men, but this is neither here nor there.)

Assuming your teeth are healthy, the dentist nevertheless perpetrates the scam of his “Examination and Diagnosis,” as it’s called on the bill. What happens is the following. You lie back in the dentist’s chair for about an hour while the hygienist uses various instruments to remove the plaque buildup and then to polish your teeth. So far no swindle, but just pain for the greater good. Then the dentist drops in, looks inside your mouth for about twenty seconds, absentmindedly touching your teeth a few times with one of his metal instruments, and he pronounces your teeth healthy and walks out. Those twenty seconds of his “work” cost you $30 CAD on top of the fee for the teeth cleaning. You can protest at the outset that you don’t need to see the dentist himself, since you know your teeth have always been fine and there’s been no recent change. But from my experience, dentists will insist that you undergo their personal “examinations” at least every once in a while or else the office will refuse to accept you as a patient even for a cleaning. So a hidden cost of having your teeth professionally cleaned is that you’ve got to let the dentist perform a cursory look-see; hence I speak of the extortion, which is to say, of the wresting of money by an abuse of authority. Unlike the removal of plaque, the dentist’s examination serves no greater good unless, of course, you have a history of problems with your teeth, such as cavities, which requires expert monitoring.

Games, Sports, and Mixed Martial Arts

In species of social animals, rules emerge to govern the animals’ behaviour, complicating biological and other, more general natural laws. The more a species is preoccupied with its social conventions, the more it develops a culture that makes no sense from a foreigner’s perspective, the more the members tend to detach themselves from natural reality, especially if they’re not informed by the link to nature provided by an objective empirical investigation. Without that link, or when citizens favour antiscientific sources of information, which marginalize science in decadent, self-centered and xenophobic societies, the citizens can fiddle while Rome burns. In the latter years of the ancient Roman Empire, gladiators engaged in mock combats and other brutal “games” to distract the citizens from the signs of Rome’s collapse. Had the citizens then a crystal ball in which they could have foreseen the horrors of the Dark Age that would follow the collapse, they might have regarded the games as absurdly, even shamefully divorced from reality. While the barbarians pounded at the gates, the uninformed or deluded masses preferred the spectacle of more controlled warfare which maintained the illusion of Roman hegemony. Just as the emperor dictated whatever happened on the mock battlefield in the microcosm which was the Coliseum, with a mere raising or lowering of his thumb, so too his military crushed foreign uprisings.

Today, there are numerous mainstream sports, including tennis, golf, baseball, soccer, football, hockey, basketball, curling, and cricket, which are relatively harmless diversions, although their players are often injured. Then there are more brutal sports, such as hunting, boxing, mixed martial arts (MMA), sumo wrestling, and dog or cock fighting. What's the relationship between these kinds of sport, and what does that relationship teach us about ourselves?

Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion

In a few rants here I’ve hinted at the Nietzschean view that one of the major problems with secular society, after the death of God, is the lack of an obvious replacement that we can feel in our bones to be sacred. (See Nietzsche.) When scientists discovered the universe’s true inhuman scale and the full animalistic nature of our bodies and of our evolutionary history, the result was a disenchantment of the world that threatens to burst the delusions that sustain our sanity. Postmodern cynics contend that no such nontheistic religion is needed, that we can live with infinite layers of irony, turning our culture into a giant Stephen Colbert skit in which every public statement is at best a white lie and we applaud each other’s savvy pragmatism, our disdain for philosophical questioning, and our nihilistic poses. 

These cynics may fool themselves but they don’t fool me. Hold a gun to the head of a postmodern poseur’s family member and see whether that erstwhile cynic retains her quasi-Buddhist detachment and truly holds nothing on Earth sacred. Naturally, as the animal she is, the postmodernist would sacrifice herself for her loved ones. Her religion is thus biochemically determined. She’s used as a puppet not by a transcendent Creator of all, but by mindlessly replicating genes which cause each of us to care a lot about those who most share our genetic material. The question to ask the postmodernist is whether some feelings can be judged superior to others according to ideals that aren’t lost with the premodern, theistic worldviews. Nietzsche believed that although traditional morality is rendered dubious by the death of theism, aesthetic standards are still compelling. The problem with the emotional defense of our immediate family members, then, or of our instinctive replacement of traditional deities with naturally selected idols, is that aesthetically speaking, such a primitive religious impulse has surely by now, after millions of generations, become a god-awful cliché.

Can we postmodern nontheists do better? Given that religions are inevitable in human societies, because we’re emotionally driven to identify something as sacred, as a radiant good that uplifts us despite our profane lives filled with disappointment, angst, or delusion, can we create a more beautiful religion that’s viable even after modern secular humanism has given way to postmodern hyper-skepticism? Had I such a religion fully worked out, perhaps I’d be on television hawking T-shirts adorned with the creed’s associated slogans. Needless to say, I know of no such religion. However, I’d like to speak of some themes that do inspire me and that sketch, at least, the sort of religion I’d like to see. Some of these themes are found in the closing speech of Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 science fictional novel Last and First Men. This novel is found in its entirety online, hosted in Australia, so I’d like to quote the whole speech after I summarize the context, and then I propose to analyze the speech. However, if you haven’t read the novel and don’t want its ending spoiled, you should skip the next section and perhaps even put aside this philosophical rant of mine for another day. Fair warning then...

Untangling Modernism and Postmodernism

In my rants here I’ve been throwing around the words “modern” and “postmodern”, and I’d like to set forth what I mean by that highly general, and thus potentially quite useful distinction.

Modernism

In my view, the essential difference between the modern and the postmodern is that modernity is the purported cultural progress in architecture, painting, music, mass media, and philosophy, resulting from the Scientific Revolution, while postmodernity is the cultural disarray resulting from the depletion of the fuel needed for that progress. The fuel in question is faith in what postmodernists call the modern “master metanarrative” or myth, which I call Scientism. This myth presumes that society in general can progress just as well as can institutional science, that just as scientists discover how nature operates according to laws, we can discover the rules of how we ought to behave and we’re able to follow those rules and so progress towards a perfect union. In either case, the abilities needed for that progress are, first of all, Reason as opposed to tradition, authority, intuition, faith, or revelation, but also the scientistic virtues (or vices, depending on your viewpoint) that motivate the modern experiment. These virtues include intellectual curiosity; optimism about our cognitive potential, including our abilities to discover, comprehend, and digest the natural truths; and pride in the autonomy and dignity of hyper-rational scientists and their analogues in the other social spheres. In short, modernism, the set of ideas implicit in the cultural phenomenon of modernity, is equivalent to secular humanism, to the ideology that reason, freewill, and sentience render us godlike, equipping us with the potential not just for omniscience through scientific methods, but for happiness and prosperity.  

The so-called New World of North America, colonized by Europeans, became the testing ground for the modern hypothesis that social progress is possible by liberally employing reason in all walks of life, without hindrance from tradition or special interests. In particular, the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence enshrined the values of secular humanism. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the stated or implicit rights of people in a capitalistic, democratic society. Those three values are maintained, first, by using relatively unrestricted science to produce lesser goods as demanded by an equally unrestricted marketplace, that is, by a population that’s allowed to develop its own desires instead of having them controlled by a powerful institution like the Church; and second, by relying on the wisdom of rational, free citizens to hold the reigns of political power through elections of political representatives.

Sheldon Cooper: The Nerd’s Paradox

The Big Bang Theory is a very highly rated comedy in Canada and the US, largely because of the break-out character of Dr. Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons, who’s won two Emmy’s and a Golden Globe for his performance. On the surface, the show is about a group of nerdy friends in their late twenties, who are scientific geniuses but with childish preoccupations that socially handicap them. Why are such a TV show and the character of Sheldon Cooper, in particular, so popular?

Evading Angst and Subduing Technoscience

In the show, Sheldon has the most freakishly high intelligence in his group of friends, but has also regressed most to a childhood state. He’s thus the show’s most paradoxical character. He was a child prodigy with an IQ of 187, earning various graduate degrees, including a Ph.D., while still a teenager. He became a professional theoretical physicist, perhaps the most intellectually-challenging job, requiring a mastery of cutting-edge mathematics and a grasp of the most exotic, inhuman concepts, which are at the center of modern physics. He has an eidetic memory, which enables him to know virtually everything about what he regards as nontrivial subjects, namely all subjects that don’t involve adult social relationships.

If knowledge is power, then, Sheldon should intimidate the rest of humanity with his fearsome intelligence. But the opposite is true: Sheldon is routinely both pitied and mocked by everyone, especially by his friends who know him best. The reason is that Sheldon’s godlike intelligence is complemented by the fact that his emotions are those of a child’s, making him psychologically a boy in a man’s body. He’s obsessed with comic books, sci fi, video games, and trains; he likes to be sung to sleep and otherwise mothered; he’s unable to drive a car so he has to be driven by his friends. Despite his near-omniscience, which theoretically enables him to overcome any obstacle, his lack of emotional development renders him unable to comprehend let alone succeed in the field which adults care about most, the field of social interaction. Sheldon may suffer from Asperger Syndrome or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, since he lacks empathy, engages in restrictive and repetitive behaviours, and is socially awkward. Moreover, he suffers from phobias of germs and of being touched, among others. 

Sheldon is therefore effectively asexual, an alien or a god among human beings who, instead of terrifying his intellectual inferiors, is routinely mocked by them. When his friend Penny, who has lackluster intelligence, attempts to navigate his own scientific areas of expertise, tackling basic questions about how the universe works, she fails dismally but she’s neither pitied nor ridiculed for those failures, because she wields power in social relationships, being an attractive young woman with much sexual experience. The show thus presupposes the higher value of social relationships than of technoscience, so that neither mastery of nor failure in the latter is assumed to matter. Whereas in reality advances in science and technology radically reshape human life, Sheldon’s scientific progress is never applauded or shown to be consequential.