My name is Gretchen Mullen, and I am a Sam Harris fan.

I have read several of Harris’ books and have written about him on my blog. I have listened a bit to his new meditation app and find it quite pleasant. I love his smooth voice and his calming tone. I don’t regularly listen to his podcast, but I probably would if I had more time.

To some, this makes me a member of a cult, blindly hanging on my guru’s every word, or at least a rabid “fangirl” who will cry in a corner when the object of my devotion is criticized.

Let me assure you that I didn’t shed a single tear over two much-discussed recent would-be takedowns of Harris: An Arc Digital piece by Jonathan Rash, “Sam Harris Has a Problem,” and a Twitter thread by cognitive anthropologist Chris Kavanagh, a frequent critic of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” that dissected a Harris podcast episode on white power and white supremacy. I did, however, wonder if we were talking about, reading, and listening to the same Sam Harris.

Harris as Holofernes

Rash starts out by comparing Harris to Holofernes, “the loquacious and self-important pseudo-intellectual” from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and then concludes Harris is an actual menace:

Like Holofernes, Harris hides a vast ignorance with a vast vocabulary and silky turns of phrase. He is dangerous because millions of us listen to him, even when there’s no reason to.

But what exactly is the case against Harris — the evidence that, as Rash puts it, he possesses “a general hollowness of mind reinforced by a stunning lack of intellectual rigor and curiosity”?

Rash’s Exhibit 1 is a recent episode of Harris’ “Making Sense” podcast with guest Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA and a renowned author, most recently of a book titled Upheaval.

According to Rash:

The episode begins with Harris asking Diamond about his career and a couple of his books, but within the first half hour the conversation turns abruptly to “race and IQ,” a perennial favorite. Harris asserts, as he has many times before, that it simply must be the case that there is significant genetic variation in intelligence across “populations” (by this he means “race,” crudely defined), and that to deny this is to ignore clear science in favor of one’s ideological precommitments.

But is that a fair description?

Yes, Harris and Diamond start out by talking about Diamond’s earlier work — Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005) — and his theory of why some human populations flourish more than others. Diamond’s theory, to which I enthusiastically subscribe, is that geography is a key factor in human development and advancement (while skin color is not, and neither is IQ).

In the podcast discussion, Diamond lays out his studies from New Guinea, which helped him form his theory that populations that can domesticate plants and animals are most likely to succeed. If you are born into a harsh climate with no resources or domesticable plants and animals, flourishing will be difficult, no matter your cognitive ability (or skin color).

About 29 minutes into the podcast, Harris brings up the question of biological differences among populations. (“Abruptly,” of course, is in the ear of the listener. To me, it flowed quite naturally from the topic of human flourishing; Sam even says he did not intend to discuss the topic with Diamond.) Diamond politely disagrees. While falling back on obvious racial differences is a common talking point, he says, there isn’t enough evidence that “cognitive skill is a factor.”

It is true that Harris pushes back on this. But he doesn’t argue in favor of the race and IQ question — he even says that he is “totally persuaded” by Diamond’s arguments! What concerns him is that political pressure is hampering scientific inquiry.

That exchange took about 10 minutes of the 90 minute podcast, after which they got right back to talking about Diamond’s theories. Harris lets Diamond give long answers without interruption, showing genuine curiosity about Diamond and his work. Rash’s assertion that “like most episodes of Making Sense, this one consists mostly of Harris rehashing the myriad ways he feels he has been mistreated or misunderstood by progressives” is so at odds with what I heard that it left me wondering if he confused it with some other episode.

Rash writes that Harris “sustains an immense amount of self-righteous anger” over being misunderstood by progressives. He may be referring to Harris’ contentious debate with Vox editor Ezra Klein, who wrote an article titled “Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science: This is not ‘forbidden knowledge.’ It is America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.” Harris was indeed angry about it, but can you blame him? That article landed him on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog. But as I noted on my blog at the time, Harris never expressed support for Murray’s views, nor endorsed the idea that IQ is related to superiority or inferiority. Rather, he pointed out that he and Klein share the same goals of remedying racial inequality.

Milkshakes, Airports, and Security

The podcast with Diamond features another conversation Rash treats as evidence of Harris’ ignorance and shallowness. About 17 minutes in, Harris briefly turns to the British trend of throwing milkshakes at disliked public figures and refers to milkshake-throwing as mock assassination. As he mentions, he first made this claim on Twitter in May, in a thread started by atheist ex-Muslim Ali Rizvi.

Rash not only mocks this as “an over-reliance on intuition” — which he says is typical of Harris — but also refers to “milkshaking” as simply “pouring milkshakes on the occasional semi-famous asshole.” It’s an odd stance for an attorney to take, and it raises the question (to channel Christopher Hitchens): “Who will you allow to decide who is the asshole?”

Harris is hardly alone in his “intuition” — or, I would argue, logic — on this subject. As British skeptic Stephen Knight, host of The Godless Spellchecker podcast, points out, milkshaking has already escalated to uglier forms of violence.

On the podcast with Diamond, Harris talks about milkshaking as an example of failure to rely on words, of a breakdown of civility, and of a trend toward humiliation and intimidation of those deemed to be, in Rash’s terms, “assholes.” Harris also says that milkshake-throwing demonstrates the vulnerability of public figures to assaults and violence: If I can get so close to you I can demean you with a milkshake, I can do worse. Diamond concurs, saying that he had to put a spiked fence around his house and hire bodyguards, who accompany him even when he speaks at universities.

One can certainly disagree with Harris’ view of milkshaking, but disagreement doesn’t make him ignorant or shallow. And the milkshaking discussion comprises approximately two and a half minutes of the 90 minute podcast.

Rash’s other example of Harris relying too much on intuition is a written debate with security expert Bruce Schneier about profiling. Yet this exchange, around 15,000 words long, ends with Harris giving Schneier the last word with a brief summary and a question that defers to the latter’s expertise:

You’ve admitted that profiling plus randomness is the best algorithm, but you think it’s too complicated to implement at the airport; elsewhere you’ve conceded that the Israelis are masters at behavioral profiling, but you’ve indicated that we cannot hope to emulate their approach because it would be too expensive. At various other points you have hinted that we should just return to pre-9/11 security and stop worrying. What do you think we should do?

That brings me to another baffling criticism of Harris: the idea that, as Rash puts it, he ventures too much “into areas far outside his core competencies” and thus “often finds himself in avoidable confrontations with experts on controversial topics about which he knows very little.”

I am left wondering why Rash doesn’t see interviews and debates with experts as learning experiences for both Harris and his audience. Should Harris really limit himself to his areas of expertise, or is the goal to gather information and grow intellectually?

Ironically, Rash also calls Harris a “gifted rhetorician” who masks “a general hollowness of mind reinforced by a stunning lack of intellectual rigor and curiosity.” Yet surely the fact that Harris ventures out, talking to so many different experts — and showing, as in the example above, a willingness to listen — is the essence of curiosity itself.

Talking White Power: Sam Harris and Kathleen Belew

The other recent broadside against Harris also had to do with a situation in which he actively reached out to someone for dialogue in an area where he has been accused of a major blind spot: the threat of white supremacism. On August 7, Harris tweeted to historian Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement & Paramilitary America, telling her that he would love to have her on his podcast and that she should direct-message him if interested. On September 20, 2019, he posted this conversation in the latest episode of Making Sense, titled “Omens of a Race War.”

In a long Twitter thread, cognitive anthropologist Chris Kavanagh describes the podcast with Belew as a “surreal” exchange in which Harris reacts with sullen “impatience” to Belew’s discussion of white power groups, dismisses white nationalism as a “moral panic” similar to the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s, downplays it as a motive in some recent mass shootings, and whines repeatedly about his unfair treatment by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and anti-racist activist Christian Picciolini.

Once again, I listened to the episode for myself, and once again I was taken aback by the critical summary.

Much of the first half focuses on Belew’s discussion of her book, which studies the United States from the late 1970s to 1995. (This is why she later declines to answer some of the questions Harris throws her way about more recent events.) There’s also some talk of terminology: “white power,” “white supremacy,” “white nationalism,” “white identity,” and the distinctions between them. Her specific interest is in the white power movement that emerged when many disaffected soldiers came back from Vietnam and began to target the U.S. government as the cause of their woes, forming a network that included the KKK, militias, tax evaders, and skinheads. Belew saw the rise of the militia movement at the end of the 1980s and believes that, although it was not necessarily racist, it could provide a smokescreen for white power activists.

When Harris refers to these activists as “miscreants” and “nutcases,” Belew mildly rebukes him, saying these people follow coherent ideologies and should not be merely derided as insane. Her central message is that America tends to under-react to these movements and to underestimate their potential for violence.

Unlike Kavanagh, I never got the impression Harris was only grudgingly listening to Belew while making impatient noises. He mostly let her talk, but he also asked questions and clarified some of her points.

Yes, Harris did raise the issue of moral panic, asking Belew if there could be a parallel to the now-debunked “Satanic panic” of the 1980s. But why is it wrong to ask this question? I also raised it in my recent conversation with anti-fascist activist and scholar Mike Isaacson on Letter.Wiki, asking if “the fear of neo-fascism in our society [might] show signs of a moral panic.” And Isaacson agreed, saying that “there are some aspects of the response to neo-fascism that could be considered moral panic.”

Kavanagh also excoriates Harris for allegedly disputing that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was tied to the white power movement because “McVeigh didn’t have any Nazi tattoos that Sam remembers,” and suggesting that the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooter was not necessarily a white nationalist because his manifesto was just ironic “shitposting.” Yet after hearing the discussion, both claims seem misleading.

On McVeigh, Harris says that his racist motivation was not immediately obvious — not only because of the absence of white supremacist tattoos, but also because he made no overtly racist statements and white supremacists tend to be outspoken about their views. This relates to Belew’s analysis of connections between anti-government activism (including militias) and the white power movement. Belew proceeds to explain those ties specifically with regard to McVeigh. Harris readily accepts her evidence and agrees there was an underlying element of racism in McVeigh’s motives.

As for Christchurch, Harris discusses the trolling culture of “the chans” (the websites 4chan and 8chan) and the confusion about what is true and what is an act. He never specifically refers to the Christchurch massacre, but makes a general remark about manifestos posted online and whether they can be trusted. (In an earlier podcast episode, “Cause and Effect,” he discussed his belief that the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto and motives were partly trolling.)

But is this isn’t some outlandish Sam Harris theory. The idea has been discussed in such respected venues as The Atlantic (“The Shooter’s Manifesto was Designed to Troll”) and Bellingcat (“Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre”). The reason is simple: along with talk of a Muslim and immigrant “invasion,” the shooter made statements that were clearly meant to troll, such as references to YouTuber PewDiePie, and claims that he was inspired by African-American right-wing activist Candace Owens (adding “the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes”).

Lastly, Kavanagh expresses dismay at Harris “completely denouncing the value and credibility of the SPLC because of its treatment of him and Maajid [Nawaz].” It should be noted that the segue into SPLC overreach occurs partly because Belew herself, at one point, employs an extremely broad definition of white supremacy and white supremacist violence.

As with moral panic around white nationalism, I am left wondering why Kavanagh seems to assume that SPLC overreach is an illegitimate issue. The SPLC’s inclusion of Nawaz, a liberal Muslim intellectual and reformer, in its 2016 “Field Guide to Anti Muslim Extremists” for journalists was decried in such mainstream publications as Politico, The Washington Post, and The Daily Beast. Politico even asked if the esteemed civil rights organization had “lost its way.” Nawaz sued for defamation, and eventually the SPLC paid a $3.375 million settlement and issued an apology.

This is far from the only time the SPLC has controversially labeled someone an extremist. Earlier this year, when feminist essayist Roxane Gay agreed to a debate with contrarian feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, the SPLC apparently reached out to Gay to “warn” her because, according to debate organizer Desh Amila, “they were concerned with Christina’s arguments overlapping with male supremacist groups.” As Amila wrote in our Letter.Wiki exchange, “these cases highlight a wider concern that seems to have woven itself into the fabric of westerns [sic] society: the readiness to silence and falsely label anyone with an opinion that one may disagree with.”

Kavanagh hears “tantrum and grievances” in the second half of the podcast when Harris talks about being misrepresented. But once again, this is a small part of the episode — perhaps 10 minutes out of an hour and a half. (Belew basically closes the discussion by saying she cannot comment on the recent activities of the SPLC.) And, as Kavanagh concedes, Harris himself in his “afterword” at the end of the episode makes self-deprecating remarks about his “whingeing” and thanks Belew for her patience.

Regardless, doesn’t Harris have a legitimate grievance? Is it really appropriate to place a scientist, philosopher, and renowned author on the Hatewatch Blog for one interview with Charles Murray? In his podcast with Ezra Klein, Harris noted that he’s right up there alongside the Boston Marathon bombers. Such casual blacklistings can have a devastating effect on a person’s reputation, career, and livelihood — including loss of speaking engagements, mainstream venues for publishing, and even access to crowdfunding platforms. Perhaps Harris can be forgiven for complaining, especially when he is self-aware and even apologetic about it.

In the “afterword,” Harris praises Belew but still hesitates to see white power movements as a major threat and continues to express concern about moral panic. But he is hardly dismissive. Indeed, he validates Belew strongly enough to say that “Trump seems to have given comfort if not an actual voice to this movement.” He also agrees with Belew that we need to learn more about the way white power ideas can sneak into the mainstream and become normalized.

Importantly, Harris does not close the door on further exploration of this problem. He notes that it warrants revisiting “at regular intervals” and says his conversation with Belew was “useful” and “educating.”

After the Belew episode, I asked myself, “Did I, the listener, learn something from this podcast?” I did. I enjoyed it tremendously. I didn’t find it blundering or contentious. I too found it useful and educating.

Sam Harris Is Not Your Guru

That brings me back to Rash’s concern: that Harris is “dangerous” because so many people listen to him, yet he is (supposedly) shallow and ill-informed.

I believe this is a misconception of what Harris does.

Sam Harris is not a guru. He is not infallible, nor does he claim to be. He is a brilliant and knowledgeable thinker, battle-scarred from the culture wars. He is also a patient and generous podcast host who gives a platform to interesting guests and often learns from them.

It is not Sam Harris’ job to think for you, or tell you what to think, do, or say. Take what you will from the guests he has, the information he delivers, and his own commentary, and draw your own conclusions.

And if you want to criticize him? Go for it. But stick to the facts and criticize the real Sam Harris, not a caricature.

Correction: This article originally stated, erroneously, that Chris Kavanagh’s Twitter thread does not acknowledge Harris’s self-deprecating remarks about his “whingeing” in the podcast with Kathleen Belew. We regret the error.