Sam Harris and the Higher Snobbery

Harris' Trump Derangement Syndrome isn't the only thing he's deranged about

Sam Harris has been the topic of conversation recently as a consequence of some incendiary remarks he uttered during an interview on the Triggernometry Podcast—remarks which illustrated to an alarming extent the degree to which he had succumbed to a very extreme and quite possibly terminal form of Trump Derangement Syndrome. When confronted by the specter of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the contents of which the media conspired to conceal from the public, Harris boasted how little it mattered to him. Hunter Biden, he breezily declared, “ literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement,” Harris wouldn’t have cared one bit. Nor did it bother him that efforts to keep the contents of the laptop away from public scrutiny amounted to a “left-wing conspiracy” (Harris’ own words). If so, it was a necessary conspiracy to keep Trump from being elected to a second term. 

What, may we ask, is at the bottom of Harris’ Trump Derangement Syndrome? Does it even have a bottom? Harris, to be sure, has plenty of rationalizations at his fingertips to explain his loathing of Trump. Oddly enough, it’s not Trump’s policies or the MAGA agenda that chiefly draw Harris’ ire, but rather Trump’s personal characteristics. It’s Trump the person, not Trump the politician, whom he chiefly hates. Harris has gone so far as to declare on multiple occasions that he regards Trump as a “worse person” than Osama bin Laden. Never mind that bin Laden helped inspire a terrorist attack that killed 3,000 Americans. In Harris’ disordered mind, psychology is more important than behavior, and Harris regards Trump’s psychology as beyond horrific. Bin Laden’s psychology, on the other hand, doesn’t bother Harris nearly as much. He even goes so far as to lavish praise on bin Laden, saying that the terrorist “demonstrated many virtues.” For example, he was capable of “real self-sacrifice, [and was ] personally quite courageous—[a man] of real integrity and generosity and compassion,” none of which, Harris contends, could ever “be said about Donald Trump.” The Orange Man is “missing something that almost every other person on earth has…. You could probably walk a thousand miles in any direction and not meet a less admirable person than Trump…. If he weren’t funny, and I admit he can be funny, he might be the least admirable person on Earth.”

Harris has suffered from this extreme version of TDS since at least 2016, so none of his comments on the Triggernometry podcast (or Harris’ own podcast) should come as a shock. His anti-Trump diatribe did nonetheless create something of a stir in the alternative media when it first reached the public last August. This is partly due to Harris’ willingness to hold nothing back when it comes to giving full expression his demented loathing for Donald Trump—which is unusual for Harris, especially given all the attention he has devoted over the years to  crafting a public image of himself as the ever calm and lucid voice of science and rationality. He often enunciates his thoughts with such slow and careful circumspection that it can nearly put one to sleep. So to hear him throw caution to the winds and freely indulge in all manner of insane and patently hyperbolic nonsense about the forty-fifth President came as a shock to many of his admirers. “I felt as though I was mourning the loss of a friend the deeper into the video I got,” wrote one of his admirers in the comment section of the Triggernometry YouTube interview. “I feel sadness to see this once great man fall,” wrote another. “Sam Harris really had me fooled with his fake intellectualism and has really let me down,” wrote another.

Fake intellectualism indeed! As it turns out, Harris’ Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t the only thing he is deranged about. Since the beginning of his career, he has shown himself prey to other forms of mental unsoundness which, although not quite matching the degree and intensity of his TDS, nevertheless betray a mind seriously compromised by various personal and ideological agendas.  For despite all the lip service Harris bestows on science and progress, he remains at heart a very provincial and narrow-minded person. He can be exceedingly petty and bigoted in his judgments of people and ideas he doesn’t approve of. Consider, as one example, his penchant for equating belief in God and traditional religion with having a mental illness:

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.

The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.

Of course, per usual, Harris phrases all these comparisons in a rather vague and sneaky way. He isn’t actually saying that religious believers are mentally ill or that belief in religion is a form of insanity. No, he’s a bit too clever for that. Instead, he merely implies or suggests such a thing without actually explicitly saying it, so that if he’s ever called out for equating religiosity with mental illness, he can safely deny the charge. Yet the drift of his thoughts is clearly in the direction. One cannot escape suspecting that Harris feels a great deal of contempt for ordinary people, with their simple, unsophisticated belief in God. If he should insist that it is the absurdities of religion, not religious believers, he has contempt for, one wonders if he really understands the difference.

Contempt for ordinary people is a fundamental part of progressive liberalism.  All “earnest liberals,” as George Santayana once pointed out, “are higher snobs.”

If you refuse to move in the prescribed direction, you are [to the liberal] not simply different, you are arrested and perverse. The savage must not remain a savage, nor the nun a nun, and China must not keep its wall. If the animals remain animals it is somehow through a failure of the will in them, and very sad.

Harris regards himself and his own liberal convictions as a kind of gold standard. He is the one great moral exemplar capable of determining the value of such things as religion, belief in God, Trump, science, democracy, and even progress itself. In Sam Harris we find an almost perfect representative of the higher snobbery. Despite all his efforts to fashion for himself a public image as the calm, polite, rational spokesperson for scientific progressivism, Harris can never completely conceal the withering contempt with which he looks down on everyone and everything he regards as beyond the pale. For behind Harris’ carefully manicured facade of the equable, wise-cracking scientist there always lurked a more thin-skinned, fussy, and wryly supercilious persona. Sometimes, through his mannerisms and tone of voice, it’s hard not to suspect that it’s a bit of an ordeal for him to put up with the rest of us. 

We see all this very clearly in his Trump Derangement Syndrome. Harris’ obsession with Trump’s personal characteristics—which he of course exaggerates well past the point of hyperbole and caricature, turning Trump into an absurdly cartoonish figure of evil buffoonery—is pure higher snobbery. He sees Trump as a brash, vulgar, egotistical cretin who has the temerity to think he’s smarter than the sort of people Harris admires and approves of, such as “scientific” experts, globalist policy wonks, and the overly educated. In short, Harris regards Trump as an inferior who has no business being President. Those who voted him into office are the very same “morons” that Harris for years complained about when he was chiefly absorbed in his jihad against religion. In Harris’ world, only people like himself—that is, atheistical believers in materialism, “science” and “progress”—have any business running for high office. The world needs to be controlled by “the experts”—which is to say, by those who have been credentialed and approved by the world’s most prestigious institutions of learning and research.  Donald Trump posed a threat to Harris’ world because he understood that these so-called experts who presumed to rule over the rest of us were intellectually and pragmatically bankrupt and needed to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and whisked away from the levers of power before they caused even greater damage to the country than they had already. Harris, ever the true-believing progressive, hasn’t a clue that the kind of world he craves is self-imploding and that there is nothing he can do to prevent neo-liberal globalism from continuing its ignominious slide into dysfunction and chaos.

Allied closely to Harris’ snobbery is another characteristic that often eludes detection, yet on closer examination seems quite obviously an integral part of Harris’ person-hood. I have in mind the man’s deep, one might even say fanatical, religiosity. It is this religious fervor, I would contend, that fuels the militancy of his atheism. The hatred and contempt Harris evinces for traditional religion and belief in God is the hatred and contempt of someone who follows a rival sect. It is fundamentally a religious hatred. For Harris is a true believer in that great secular trinity of atheism—Rationality, Science, and Progress. These words may sound impressive on paper or on a computer screen, but once intellectuals like Harris have put their stink on them, they become little more than placeholders for intellectual dysfunction and empirical irresponsibility. Rationality is thus transformed into a kind of facile and clever casuistry; science is turned into a rationalization of dogmas used as to justify political overreach; and progress is reduced to a cheap and ridiculous form of secular millennialism. 

Now to fully grasp the extent of Harris’ intellectual and moral bankruptcy, one need only peruse his rather inept excursion into moral philosophy set down in his 2010 tome, The Moral Landscape. The book is based on the following two premises:

(1) some people have better lives than others, and (2) these differences are related, in some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way, to states of the human brain and to states of the world.

Harris’ first premise is one of those vacuous truisms that moralizing rationalists often trot out so they can claim their ethical systems are founded on “reason” or “rationality.” It’s an appeal to what most everybody believes. If nearly everyone believes that the life of a woman raped and murdered by a gang of marauders is worse than the life of a suburbanite living in a first world country with a loving husband and a great job, than that somehow proves that there exists common standards of values that can be used by human rationality and science to determine objectively a universal system of ethics. But since when does the standard of what nearly everyone believes constitute a standard for anything, in ethics or in any other domain of human inquiry? If nearly everyone believed in God (which in certain societies during certain periods of history they may have) does that mean atheism would thereby find itself refuted? Harris certainly would never agree to such a thing. Then why does Harris believe that because almost everyone regards with horror the fate of any woman whose life that ends in rape and murder, this proves that in a world without God rape and murder can be proven to be universally wrong? 

Harris’ confusion on this issue runs deep. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that ethics in a secular world can be based on one and only one thing: namely, the moral sentiments of particular individuals. Now the problem with determining morality in this manner is that not everyone has the same moral sentiments. Whereas most people (at least in the civilized world) believe that rape and murder are wrong, there are other moral issues, such as abortion, where sentiments are very much divided. Harris himself is pro-choice. He once wrote that “if you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing [a three day old fetus].” Now anywhere between a third and a half of people in America are opposed to abortion, and perhaps as many as three-quarters want to see fewer fetuses massacred. So where does Harris get his moral authority on the issue of abortion? Well, of course, on this issue, as on all others dealing with morality, he’s not drawing his authority from rationality or consensus or anything along those lines. He simply favors the right for women to abort their fetuses (for at least up to fifteen weeks) because it aligns with his progressive-liberal moral sentiments. There is nothing more to it than that. Nor could there be.

Harris' second premise is even more tendentious and irrelevant. Harris contends that, since our experience of “well-being” presumably correlates to certain “states of the human brain,” this somehow proves that ethics can be reduced to the subject matter of neuroscience. This is a piece of stupidity that a man of Harris’ intelligence should not be soiling himself with. How can studying brain states tell us anything about right and wrong? The experience of well-being in no way guarantees that we are in the presence of a genuinely moral endeavor. It is quite possible that many of the very worst crimes committed by the most heinous offenders were accompanied by states of “well-being.” For this reason, establishing through “science” which “states of the brain” correlate with “well-being” is nothing to the purpose. 

Harris’ cluelessness about these matters is a consequence of his tendency toward materialism, which is essentially an epistemological doctrine that wishes to reduce all or most knowledge to the subject matter of some particular science, such as physics or (as in Harris’ case) neuroscience. It’s little more than reductionism 101. Materialism is often considered a position entailed by “scientific realism,” but there is nothing either scientific or realistic about the belief that only matter counts. The universe of man and spirit and God is simply too vast and complex to be reduced to the subject matter of physics or neuroscience. Only a very superficial intellect would ever fall for this kind of nonsense.

Harris’ confusions about ethics reach a sort of nadir of ineptitude when he attempts to comment on David Hume’s so-called is-ought gap:

Hume’s argument [against arguing from is premises to an ought conclusion] was actually directed against religious apologists who sought to deduce morality from the existence of God. Ironically, his reasoning has since become one of the primary impediments to linking morality to the rest of human knowledge. However, Hume’s is/ought distinction has always had its detractors. [The Moral Landscape, 210]

I have no idea where Harris gets the idea that Hume’s is-ought gap was initially formed to refute religious apologists. For that is not what Hume was intending in the least.  Hume introduced his so-called is-ought gap at the end of a much longer chapter devoted to establishing Hume’s assertion that moral distinctions can never be founded on reason. That, in fact, is the entire point of the is-ought gap: to disprove just the sort of “reason-based” or “rational” and “scientific” moral systems that Harris himself seeks to promulgate. The irony here is that Hume, despite his skepticism toward religion, was actually bolstering the case for a God-based morality. Theists have no issue with Hume’s is-ought gap because it only tells them what they’ve known all along—that is, that no universal morality can be founded on “reason” or “science” or any other secular doctrine. Since morality in the natural world (as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has established) rests on the individual’s unique moral foundations, this by logical implication leads to moral relativism. In a godless world, each individual’s moral intuitions become the sole voice of moral conscience. Now to someone who, like Harris, has rejected the existence of God, this can be quite frightening; which is perhaps why he has so zealously sought to create his own secular equivalent to God-based religions. But all such secular systems of morality exist under the very great handicap that they cannot account for universal moral values—not at least without a great deal of philosophical legerdemain. 

In a godless world, a woman who is raped and murdered has no possible redress. Even if her rapists and murderers are found and punished, this act of justice can never make things right for her, because she no longer exists. A godless universe is hence a rather scary and inhospitable place. To make it less scary and inhospitable, atheists have to convince themselves that a universal morality can be founded on reason and science, and that once discovered, it then only needs to be propagated to the rest of eight billion souls who occupy the planet. Since this is an impossible objective, some atheists wind up giving up on it altogether and instead devote themselves to trying to prove that their atheistic universe isn’t quite the vale of calamity and death that it most obviously must be. Hence begins the mad obsession to, if not cure, at least mitigate the tragedies that are intrinsic to a worldly life.

We saw all this play out with Sam Harris in his reaction to Covid-19. As soon as the virus came upon the scene, he developed a disturbing mania to prevent its repercussions, which he imagined would be immense. In early March of 2020, before the pandemic had a chance to establish itself in North America, Harris got himself into a twitter feud with Candace Owens. Owens had spoken out against the absurdity of the growing panic over the virus and Harris, with the rather patronizing air of one who regards himself as superior to all others, responded with the following tweet:

Harris’ tweet is a masterpiece of indirect name-calling and intellectual snobbery. It begins with the progressive assumption of a better world to come—a time when the culture will celebrate people who walk back “dumb tweets.” Harris wants to believe in this better world of his progressivist fantasies because, as an atheist who rejects God and an afterlife, he has nothing else to believe in. A godless world is one that, in the words of Matthew Arnold,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

It is, in other words, a bleak and awful place. Most atheists, lacking the courage to live in such a world, build castles in the air about the world to come. Belief in “progress” is thus central to the atheists' religion. 

Having introduced his motif about progress and the culture we will one day all live in, Harris continues his tweet by inviting Owens to participate in the creation of this brave new world by renouncing her “dumb” tweet. There’s only one problem here. As it turns out, Owens “dumb” tweet is not so dumb after all. On the contrary, she seems to have been a prophetess speaking with a wisdom from on high. Her tweet has actually (as she anticipated) aged very well, while Harris’ tweet makes him look arrogant and clueless.

Alas for Harris, the twitter feud didn’t end there. At one point, he became so distraught with Owens’ refusal to take him seriously that he called her on the phone so he could beg her to stop speaking against the lockdowns. “He sounded like he was in a bunker,” Owens later reported, “and was just like, ‘You don’t understand, there’s going to be gurneys in the streets,’ and ‘I know doctors in Italy, this is what’s going to happen in two weeks in the United States…. He was in a mania. I just sort of listened to him, because, in my head, I wanted to be kind, but I was looking at my husband, thinking, this man needs a therapist.” He was “unstable,” she noted, “and this is a smart person who got himself into this position.”

That’s exactly correct. Despite Harris’ fine intelligence and extensive education at the nation’s very best seminaries of secular indoctrination, he could not avoid succumbing to a pathetic hysteria. For as it turns out, he was almost certainly wrong about the necessity for lockdowns.  According to Konstantin Yanovskiy of the Shomron Center for Economic Policy Research and Yehoshua Socol of the Jerusalem College of Technology, 

comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence – neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past. The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection of health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years that they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown for either COVID-19 or any future pandemic.

I recognize that there are studies that claim to show the opposite, but given the very well known fact that Covid-19, particularly in its earlier and more lethal strains, pretty much left the young and healthy unmolested, there was no pressing need to impose a lockdown on everyone, the high risk and the low risk alike. Yet because of the hysteria of secular progressives such as Sam Harris, lockdowns became the norm for much of the civilized world. We are only now beginning to appreciate how economically catastrophic these ill advised policies have proven to be.

Harris’ hysteria over Covid persisted into the controversy over the vaccines. As could be expected, Harris accepted the narrative that the vaccines were “safe and effective” hook, line, and sinker. He rather condescendingly chastised Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying for their skepticism about these dubious concoctions:

We're in the middle of a pandemic. There is no compelling reason, at this point, to be worried about these vaccines. There is a compelling reason to be worried about just letting this pandemic burn through the unvaccinated population.

As the evidence begins to accumulate against the vaccines, it now seems that we would have been better off, perhaps much better off, if we had just let the virus, as Harris puts it, “burn through” the population, because the vaccines have been largely ineffective and quite possibly scandalously dangerous. Consider some recent data published by the CDC:

These numbers are exceedingly grim. Over 70% of children aged 12-17 endured a systemic reaction from the second dose and the booster. Over 25% were unable to perform daily activities. The booster prevents nearly 15% from being able to work or attend school.

Yet that’s not the worst of it. Reports from embalmers are showing an alarming increase, not only in deaths, but in deaths by blood clotting.  These clots take on average about five months to bring about mortality—which may explain the five month lag between the spike in vaccinations in 2021 and a marked increase in all cause mortality, as these two graphs demonstrate:

There is no getting around it: this data on excess mortality is very chilling. While there are those who still insist that these vaccines are “safe and effective” and that all these post-vaccination deaths are mere coincidences, in the light of such evidence, the pro-mRNA vaccine narrative is becoming increasingly untenable. 

One wonders whether, as the evidence against these vials of death accumulate, Sam Harris will ever issue a mea culpa? He did, to give him credit, admit to being wrong about President Biden:

But would Harris ever admit to being wrong about Covid-19, or the catastrophic “vaccines,” or Donald Trump, or God and religion? Not likely. He’s too invested in these errors ever to break free of them. Admitting that he was wrong on issues of such significance would constitute too great a humiliation. And let’s face it: Harris has built his entire career on being wrong. He has allowed his contempt for God and traditional religious faith to get the better of his judgment. His atheistical screeds against Christianity read like clever but ultimately jejune special pleading by an overly precocious adolescent. Typical in this respect is Harris’ contention that, because 50% of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, this indicates that God “is the most prolific abortionist of all.” His books are filled with such facile and meretricious assertions. He no doubt thinks such arguments prove beyond all doubt the stupidity of Christian doctrine, but as a matter of fact they do no such thing—they only prove Harris’ own ignorance about what he seeks to criticize. His understanding of religion is not even shallow—it’s all surface. He simply has no idea what sort of reality religions such as Christianity seek to plumb and elucidate. He is like a blind man trying to criticize and refute the reality of color. 

But this is not the worst of it. The essential poverty of Harris’ mind is demonstrated by the degree to which his basic views on life have misled him time and time again.  The very fact that he should plunge into such depths of hysteria and derangement when confronted by Donald Trump or the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates the intellectual bankruptcy of the progressive liberalism and materialist “science” that have formed the main pillars of Harris’ thought. In moments of crisis and bewilderment, Harris has nothing of any depth or wisdom to turn to. And so he ends up where all such adepts of the higher snobbery find themselves eventually: in an echo chamber of their own making, spouting ever more deranged nonsense to a world that, over time, will come to realize he has little of any real intellectual substance to offer.

Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.