A really big blind spot here
More of the Harris-Klein conversation, starting where I paused this morning.
Ezra Klein
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 rationale 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.
So here’s my question for you: On that specific quote, what does it mean to you, particularly when you’re talking about something like race, to have your ideas contaminated by identity politics?
Sam Harris
Well, what I mean by identity politics is that you are reasoning on the basis of skin color, or religion, or gender, or some particular trait, which you have by accident, which you can’t change — you fell into that bin through no process of reasoning on your own, you couldn’t be convinced to be white or black — and to reason from that place as though, because you’re you, because you have the skin color you have, certain things are true and very likely incommunicable to other people who don’t share your identity. I view this as this as the most unhappy game of Dungeons and Dragons ever. People have these various stories of victimology that if you do arithmetic one way, one group trumps another. Another way it gets reversed.
But that’s a very idiosyncratic idea of identity politics. What do I think it means to people who use it as a pejorative? Treating sex and race and sexual orientation as sacred, paying too much attention to them, taking them too seriously, policing everything everyone says in defense of them, “virtue signaling” about them whenever possible. That kind of thing. But maybe that is what Harris means after all, since he mentions “victimology” at the end of that paragraph.
This strikes me as a moral and political and intellectual dead end because the things that are really true, the things that will really move the dial with respect to human wellbeing — I view my career as being totally committed to amplifying good ideas and criticizing bad ideas, insofar as they relate to the most important swings of human wellbeing. My concern is, how can the future be better than the past? How can we get to a world where we cancel the worst effects of bad luck, given that some people are hugely lucky and some people aren’t? How can we cancel this, with respect to wealth and health and everything else? How can we get to a world where the maximum number of people thrive?
He doesn’t half think well of himself, does he. He basically calls himself a humanitarian saint there. I think one could argue that his career is totally committed to quarreling with everyone in sight. I don’t really think he’s devoting his life to achieving a world where we cancel the worst effects of bad luck, because he’s too damn prickly for that. I’m quite prickly myself, but then I don’t claim to be making a contribution to human wellbeing.
I view identity politics as among the worst pieces of software you can be running to try to get there. I want to get to a world where, I mean, it’s Martin Luther King’s claim about the content of your character, rather than the color of your skin. That is the goal, and if you want to reverse engineer that goal, giving primacy to identity is one of the worst things you can do. That is my, that’s how I would frame it.
Sigh, yes, it’s always “Martin Luther King’s claim about the content of your character, rather than the color of your skin.” That’s the bromide all the enemies of “political correctness” like to trot out as if we’d never heard it before. King didn’t make a claim about it, he expressed a hope for it – a hope for a time when people’s identities weren’t despised and so they could be judged on more cogent criteria. That time was not then, and he wasn’t saying it was, nor was he complaining about political correctness. Sam Harris is along with everything else woefully tin-eared about such things.
Ezra Klein
That’s super helpful. Here’s my criticism of you. I don’t think you realize that the identity politics software is operating in you all the time and, I think it’s strong.
When you look at literature on the conversation about race in America, you often see the discussion broken into racists and anti-racists. That’s something that you’ll read often in this debate. I think there’s something else, particularly lately, which you might call anti-anti-racism, which is folks who are fundamentally more concerned, or fundamentally primarily concerned, with the overreach of what you would call the anti-racists. And, actually that’s where I think you are.
One of the things that I hear in you is that, whenever something gets near the questions of political correctness — the canary and the coal mine for the way you yourself have been treated — you get very, very, very strident. They’re in bad faith. They’re not being able to speak rationally. They’re not being able to have a conversation that is actually going forward on a sound evidentiary basis. The thing that I don’t think that you’re self-reflective enough about — and I apologize, because I know that “I” statements are better than “you” statements, but I do want to push this idea at you for you to think about it — is that there are things that are threats to you. There are things that are threats to your tribe, to your future, to your career, and those threats are very salient.
You see what happens with Charles Murray, the kind of criticism he gets, and that sets off every alarm bell in your head. You bring him on the show and you’re like, “We’re going to fix this. I’m going to show that they can’t do this to you.” You look around and you say, “Ezra, you think we shouldn’t take away all efforts to redress racial inequality? But that’s a bias. You’re just being led around by your political opinions, where I am standing outside the debate acting rationally.”
To me that’s actually not what’s happening at all. I think you’re missing a lot, because you are very radically increasing the salience of things that threaten your identity, your tribe — which is not the craziest thing to do in the world, it’s not a terrible thing to do, we all do it — without admitting, or maybe even without realizing, that’s what you’re doing.
I think that there is a lot of discussion like this in the public sphere just generally at the moment. There are a lot of white commentators, of which I am also one, who look at what’s happening on some campuses, or look at what happens on Twitter mobs, or whatever, and they see a threat to them. The concern about political correctness goes way, way, way, way up. Then the ability to hear what the folks who are making the arguments actually say dissolves. The ability to hear what the so-called social justice warriors are actually worried about dissolves. I think that’s a really big blind spot here. I think it’s making it hard for you to see when people have a good faith disagreement with you, and I also think it’s making harder for you to see how to weight some of the different concerns that are operating in this conversation.
I think that’s exactly right.
Has Harris never heard of the studies where identical resumes were sent out and those under obviously “black” names were much less likely to have favourable responses from potential employers than those under “white” names? Or the variation where resumes of “whites” who indicated that they had been to prison had more favourable responses than those of “blacks” without prison records? How does one address this sort of systemic attitude without “identity” politics? These results show WHITE identity politics in action. There’s still a lot of shit that needs to be dismantled before anyone can claim a final result in the balance nature versus nurture in determining human intelligence. Harris has no business to claim impartiality in supporting Murray’s results without dealing with these studies (and others like them) first.
That last extract was really clear and really well put. Do you think Sam Harris understood what he was being told?
Re ‘ to reason from that place as though, because you’re you, because you have the skin color you have, certain things are true’…. Well, yes, in a sense. Not that ‘certain things are true’, but rather ‘from the position in this society that’s been assigned to me on the basis of my skin color/sex/cultural or religious background/whatever ‘others’ me I can see some true things that you can’t, and am trying to tell you about them.’ This shouldn’t be such a struggle to understand–if I’m standing over here, I can see things you can’t see standing over there. It’s often argued back ‘well fine, but I can see things standing over here that you can’t see standing over there, so we’re even, right?’–but people standing where you are get to tell the world what you see all the time, so all of us already know it, whether we’re standing in your position or not; what you see is already accepted as ‘what people see’. Those of us in a different position would now like to let you know what we see.
not Bruce,
Those studies actually get mentioned by Klein. As far as I can tell, Harris never addresses any of Klein’s arguments, and his own appears to go as follows: (1) There are differences between populations in IQ testing, (2) that must be partly genetic because genes underlie everything, and (3) that seems to be it. I see no consideration of effect sizes, or of the fact that genes indeed underlie everything to such a degree that that insight is trivial, e.g. the number of fingers per hand, whose mean, however, does not vary between populations.
Interesting how Klien is able to step back and examine the prior discussion(s) from a different level and Harris can’t -or won’t. He’s as stepped back as he’s ever going to get; he has no more backs he can step to. Harris has reached peak meta.
Does one thus pull a Harris and assume bad faith, or have we run into his intelectual limits? Does he have so much invested in his view that he can’t disentangle himself enough to see that he is entangled at all? It seems so obvious to us, but is he really that incapable of introspection? Neither the lack of willingness nor an actual incapacity look good on him, but it would seem that confessing either would, to Harris, look even worse.
I’m sorry, folks, but your arguments, coming as they do from people whose ability to self-inspect and self-reflect is undeniably part of their identity as self-aware people, will be rejected as identity politics by Harris, a man without those qualities.
THAT is a GEM.
Peak meta indeed, since Harris isn’t even paying much attention to things coming out of his mouth in the course of this discussion itself. I think Klein is (maybe intentionally, to avoid pushing Harris’ buttons) missing a really low hanging fruit in what Harris says to defend his position.
I want to break down his points and emphasize the assumptions he is making, thereby demonstrating precisely what that fruit is:
“Well, what I mean by identity politics is that you are reasoning on the basis of skin color, or religion, or gender, or some particular trait, which you have by accident, which you can’t change — YOU FELL INTO THAT BIN THROUGH NO PROCESS OF REASONING ON YOUR OWN, YOU COULDN’T BE CONVINCED TO BE WHITE OR BLACK”
— in other words, you are white or black because YOU reasoned your way into it: it’s something in YOUR mind, rather than something in the minds of all (or almost all) of the people around you who treat you differently based on whether THEY think you are black or white.
” — AND TO REASON FROM THAT PLACE AS THOUGH, because you’re you, BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE SKIN COLOR YOU HAVE, CERTAIN THINGS ARE TRUE and very likely incommunicable to other people who don’t share your identity. […] PEOPLE HAVE THESE VARIOUS STORIES OF VICTIMOLOGY THAT IF YOU DO ARITHMETIC ONE WAY, ONE GROUP TRUMPS ANOTHER.”
— translation: your skin color is in your head the same way mine is in mine, and we can both come up with stories of how that’s been bad for us. That is LITERALLY his point here. Rather than focusing on ALL the reasons why it is an outrageous thing to think and say, I’ll take the most generous possible perspective: this alone demonstrates that Harris, just like faaaaar too many people on both the left and the right, is failing to understand something that should be glaringly obvious but apparently isn’t: whatever your “inside identity” is (i.e. what YOU think of yourself and how YOU identify) is completely irrelevant to other people because THEY can’t read YOUR thoughts. It is OTHER PEOPLE who look at you and “identify” you as “white” or “black” (or male, or female) and TREAT YOU ACCORDINGLY. This basic fact doesn’t sit right with a lot of people, especially a lot of Americans, because individualism is sort of an unofficial national religion here, and, as a corollary, the most popular collective delusion is that of being able to control how other people perceive and treat you. But, as a matter of actual fact, any given individual has NO control and very little ability to influence how other people see or treat them. This is actually a terrifying thought — it’s been a source of terror and despair for me personally for many years — so it’s understandable that Harris, among others, wouldn’t want to seriously entertain it. The problem is, however, that wishing something were true doesn’t make it so, as I’m sure Harris would agree (in a different context). He also happens to have been extremely lucky to randomly receive traits that are viewed favorably by people around him (his complaints about how unpopular being a white male these days notwithstanding), and, given his favorable view of himself, he seems to much prefer to take credit for somehow earning that baseline favorable treatment from others (which is, again, understandable, especially given the alternative).
A side point about things being “incommunicable” to other people: I personally find that literally anything can be incommunicable if the people I try to communicate it to don’t want to hear it. I’ve gone to quite embarrassing lengths to try to get around such unwillingness of people to be communicated to, and found that this is very much a subset of the larger problem of being unable to control and having little influence over how other people treat you. So when Harris says certain things are incommunicable to other people who don’t share your identity, he may be unwittingly sharing how often he’s found people to be so frustrated with trying to communicate something to him (that he wasn’t interested in taking on board) that they basically threw up their hands in frustration and quit (though, again, to be fair, the pain and frustration of trying to communicate vitally important [to you] information to an unreceptive audience is so common among certain groups that the refusal to be drawn into yet another pointless session has become a common collective stance at this point).
So after having just said what he said, he turns around and says:
“This strikes me as a moral and political and intellectual dead end because THE THINGS THAT ARE REALLY TRUE, THE THINGS THAT WILL REALLY MOVE THE DIAL WITH RESPECT TO HUMAN WELLBEING — I view my career as being totally committed to amplifying good ideas and criticizing bad ideas, insofar as they relate to the most important swings of human wellbeing. My concern is, how can the future be better than the past? HOW CAN WE GET TO A WORLD WHERE WE CANCEL THE WORST EFFECTS OF BAD LUCK, GIVEN THAT SOME PEOPLE ARE HUGELY LUCKY AND SOME PEOPLE AREN’T? How can we cancel this, with respect to wealth and health and everything else? How can we get to a world where the maximum number of people thrive?”
— and it doesn’t appear to break his irony meter. Because, apparently, cancelling the worst effects of bad luck has NOTHING whatsoever to do with, oh, I don’t know, maybe not treating black people worse because they are black or female people worse because they are female — clearly this must be because being being black or female (or gay, or just fill in the blank, because it varies from place to place) is just a matter of some individuals being convinced that they are black or female or whatever, and if they just quit thinking that, everybody else will instantaneously go blind and deaf and amnesiac and just start treating them exactly the way they treat a white male. So yes, Harris has totally committed his career to amplifying good ideas and criticizing bad ideas, insofar as they relate to the wellbeing of people like Harris, who are SO incredibly rational that they KNOW their skin and cranium are actually transparent, forcing others to judge them by the contents of their character (unless those others are too irrational because of their commitment to identity politics, and obviously you can’t have a truly rational conversation with them).
Thanks! I have my moments…
[…] a comment by Anna Y on A really big blind spot […]
Anna Y – great analysis.
Actually, I think the reason it doesn’t break his irony meter is that he does not realize that people are treated worse because they are black, or because they are female. I think he feels that they are simply what they are, and the treatment they receive is just part of what they are – which is not white, not male, not a member of the supreme superior. He actually believes, I suspect, that the moves we are making toward equality (small as they are) is treating these groups better than they treat others by giving them what looks to him like an unequal advantage. The way that blacks/women are treated is just part of the natural order of things, and there is no real discrimination in it, other than the “good” type of discrimination, i.e., the discernment of the differential quality of, say, a work of art or a unique dish in a cuisine.
I see this attitude all the time – in my family, my friends, my colleagues. They are white, they are male, and they are treated a particular way. They do not perceive that as unusual or different from how others are treated, because they do not get it…and when they do see it is different, they assume it is from natural differences in the population, and that the treatment received by other groups is different but equal. So when they talk about making the world better for all people, they really don’t perceive that as being incompatible with their statements about getting rid of programs that attempt to make it better for people that have it worse, because they don’t actually believe that the treatment is anything other than different. They don’t realize it is toxic.
” But, as a matter of actual fact, any given individual has NO control and very little ability to influence how other people see or treat them. This is actually a terrifying thought — it’s been a source of terror and despair for me personally for many years — so it’s understandable that Harris, among others, wouldn’t want to seriously entertain it. ”
Ironic that one of the ways that Harris himself could influence how at least some others, including many comenting here, see or treat him would be for him to see and admit where he’s falling short in these very discussions.
Wow. Klein really got to the heart of the asymmetry of Harris’ approach, and identified the way he pushes his end of the scale all the way down with his thumb.
I’m impressed by the way Klein was able to do that without losing his temper. I couldn’t have a face-to-face argument with Harris because I would keep wanting to point out how inflated his reputation is and how bad he is at talking about political and moral issues.