A 'Human Conversation' with Author Sam Harris

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Photo Credit: AshlieRené

As social media consumes our collective consciousness bit by byte, is reasoned dialogue among humans in danger of extinction? Nimble public intellectual Sam Harris returns to the oral medium through which he and his interlocutors broach pressing, taboo topics with civility before live audiences. “Experiments in Conversation,” his current armchair roadshow, is coming to The Pabst Theater, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 29. Guest mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein will join him to flex some neurons and slay some sacred cows for our dairy state’s more curious minds.

Harris is one of the new breed of experts revolving around comedian-podcaster Joe Rogan, curating rationality, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind, politics, religion, terrorism and artificial intelligence in his weekly “Waking Up” soon to be “Making Sense” podcast. His stage-message is two-fold: a mental entertainment oddity and a crash course in how science and critical thinking are what can make America great again.

Harris has been evangelizing polite discourse as the “only remedy to violence” since snapping up a nonfiction PEN Award for his first book in 2004, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. A case in point is his new documentary, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, in which Harris debates, then collaborates with Islamist-turned-liberal Muslim Maajid Nawaz on the need to reform Islam’s incompatibilities with 21st-century liberal values.

In one prominent confrontation, on an episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Harris was accused of racism by actor Ben Affleck after stating “liberals have failed on the topic of addressing theocracy,” and that “We have to be able to criticize bad ideas, and Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas.” Replying to his critics, Harris says, “If we want to know what is true or good, we can’t avoid difficult conversations. Many of our neighbors have installed tripwires in their minds and seem to spend most of their time waiting to be offended. My conversations never go well with such people—and the failure comes long before they understand what I believe or what my political goals actually are.”

He is known as one of the neo-atheism movement’s “Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse” (along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens) attempting to bring religion to its knees. Some heads were turned when his sixth book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, cast Harris as a would-be defector. It chronicles his profound psychedelic drug experiences as a young adult that beckoned him to India and Nepal to study with Buddhist and Hindu religious teachers. His meditation practice blossomed into a “Waking Up” app that facilitates discoveries about the human mind through introspection.

What inspired you to put this show together and what key message do you hope to get across?

Any problem you can name is either solvable through human effort and cooperation, or it isn’t. Clearly, we can’t do anything about unsolvable problems. So the problems that we must confront every day are those that admit of some possible remedy. Viewed generically in this way, it suddenly becomes obvious that human conversation—successful conversation—is the most important thing on earth.

All shared knowledge, all common goals, all acts of persuasion are accomplished through conversation. And the variables that make conversation difficult or impossible—dogmatism, tribalism, cognitive bias, political correctness, etc.—need to be understood and overcome. “Experiments in Conversation” is my attempt to make honest conversation on difficult and consequential topics far more commonplace than it is.

Can you expound on your idea that conversation is the only remedy to violence?

Let’s say you are burning trash in your yard, and the smoke from this project is engulfing my house and making my family ill. I ask you to stop, but you refuse. I give reasons why your behavior is unacceptable, but you ignore me. I argue that if our positions were reversed, you would find the consequences of my burning trash just as injurious. In retort, you merely heap more garbage upon the flames. What is left for me to do? If we live in a society governed by laws, I will call the police—and you will soon be talking to men who wear guns on their belts. A moment ago, you were happily burning trash; now your every move is being scrutinized by men who have been trained to physically attack (and sometimes kill) people who can’t be reasoned with. We have left the domain of conversation, and you are now being implicitly threatened with injury or death. In the absence of laws, it will be me holding the gun—and as I am now infuriated by the smell of burning plastic, I am probably less judicious than the average cop. The basic picture is this: if we can’t reason with you; if we can’t get you to modify your behavior through evidence and argument; there is nothing to appeal to but force.

You brought up in a recent podcast the need to establish a new norm of human growth. Can you give us a sense of what that is and looks like?

We rarely think about improving our minds or our characters once we reach adulthood. The expectation seems to be that, in the best case, we achieve a highly functional state of discontent. No one hopes to be grotesquely selfish or unhappy, of course. But there are very few norms around what a deeply fulfilled, ethical life looks like. Just how good can human life be? How much of our psychological suffering is unnecessary? Might the answer to that question be, “all of it”? We have barely begun to explore the possible depths of human flourishing, culturally and scientifically.

What do you think is the main similarity and/or difference between nationalism and religious fundamentalism?

Nationalism and religious fundamentalism are both examples of tribalism. Each can be terrifically motivating, and therefore useful in limited cases. But each can also bring out the worst in us. Religious fundamentalism has the added danger of making death seem like an illusion—or, worse, a career opportunity. Aspiring martyrs do not make good neighbors.

How do you hope to evolve your “Waking Up” app?

In “Waking Up,” my meditation app, I try to show that there are fundamental discoveries about the nature of our minds that can be made directly, through introspection. The emphasis is on depth over breadth. The course starts with a fairly standard mindfulness curriculum—so it’s appropriate for beginners. But my goal is to create a tool that even very experienced meditators will continue to find useful.

What do you think—the fact that we can have different conscious experiences via drugs or meditation—says about the brain’s relationship to reality?

The human brain hasn’t been designed to give us direct access to reality, and its various states are only loosely constrained by inputs from the outside world. So waking life is more similar to a dream than most people understand. We see what we expect to see, and only revise our picture of the world after bumping into some hard object. To say that we are sleepwalking most of the time, isn’t much of an exaggeration.

In different ways, psychedelic drugs and meditation can perturb this default trance and allow us to notice facts about our minds that we tend not to notice—and this can permanently change how we perceive ourselves and the world thereafter. For instance, it is possible to recognize that the feeling of being a self—a subject interior to the body, a thinker who initiates the flow of thoughts, an experiencer in the midst of experience—is an illusion. There is no such homunculus riding around in your head. We know this neurologically, and yet almost no one experiences this truth directly. That’s the primary purpose of meditation. As luck would have it, cutting through the illusion of self feels very good—because so much of our psychological suffering is anchored to it.

What do your critics most misunderstand about you?

If we want to know what is true or good, we can’t avoid difficult conversations—and I tend to have these conversations in public. Unfortunately, many people have been taught (whether by religion or politics) to be terrified of where a commitment to honest reasoning might lead. Consequently, many of my critics attack me, not for views I actually hold, but for what they imagine the worst possible consequences of discussing a topic might be. Generally speaking, are there psychological differences between men and women? Are some religions more divisive and encouraging of violence than others? Are our most cherished psychological traits largely governed by genetics? Many people will begin to worry about the political motivations of any person who even raises questions of this kind—and honest answers will brand one a heretic. Many of our neighbors have installed tripwires in their minds and seem to spend most of their time waiting to be offended. My conversations never go well with such people—and the failure comes long before they understand what I believe or what my political goals actually are.

Let us take it as given that we want to live in a world where everyone gets every opportunity he or she can use to live a beautiful, creative life. Anything less, and we should consider civilization to be a work in progress. In light of this shared goal, my basic premise is this: we should never have to lie to ourselves, or to our children, to keep moving in the right direction.