Of the great mid-2000s tranche of “celebrity atheists,” each has his own distinctive style: the professorial Dennett, the street-fighter Hitchens, the smartypants Dawkins, and so on. For me at least, Sam Harris is the least distinctive of the crowd, the one who leaves the blurriest image in one’s mind.<\/p>\n
Here’s Sam giving a presentation<\/a> at the TED conference in California<\/a>. It de-blurred the image some for me.<\/p>\n It did other things, too: fortified my suspicion that modern liberalism is a kind of religion, or at least draws on some of the\u00a0theogenic modules of the human mind for its inspirations. It also left me thinking that the word “scientism,” as used\u00a0pejoratively by believers, may not be as empty of semantic content as I’ve supposed.<\/p>\n Tremendously compressed pr\u00e9cis of Sam’s talk: “There are indeed moral facts,\u00a0but they are nothing like as relativistic as\u00a0you’d\u00a0infer from a study of anthropology or comparative religion.” \u00a0<\/p>\n Even more compressed pr\u00e9cis: “There are indeed moral facts, and I know what they are!”\u00a0<\/p>\n Child-beating, for example, is wrong, according to Sam; that’s a moral fact, whatever the Bible says to the contrary.\u00a0 (And presumably notwithstanding that\u00a0child-beating<\/a> has\u00a0been routine practice for 99.99 percent of human history.)<\/p>\n It’s still a style of magical thinking, an appeal to the Transcendent\u00a0\u2014 a claim to know<\/em> the Transcendent in fact. (That the Transcendent exists in some style, I could easily be persuaded; that anyone knows anything about it, seems to me improbable<\/a> at a very high order.) Yes, religious, really.<\/p>\n Contrariwise, the view of morality I myself\u00a0find most plausible is the “grammar of action” notion put forward by (I think) Rawls. We have the capacity to react instinctively against some classes of acts, just as we have a capacity to react instinctively against some classes of utterances. A man clubbing his child to death is wrong in our perception, in the same kind of way that a sentence like “The house\u00a0be on fire” is wrong.<\/p>\n As with actual language, the whole business is mightily confused by the peculiarities of particular communities’ \u00a0“languages” and the weaknesses or habits of individual “language” users: this one muddles up his tenses carelessly, that one winces at a split infinitive. Also by\u00a0one of those\u00a0“good enough” principles so common in human affairs,\u00a0yet so shocking to intellectuals.\u00a0 If the house actually is<\/em> on fire, “The house be on fire!” is a good enough warning. \u00a0<\/p>\n Those instinctive reactions are there, though, in our nature\u00a0\u2014 in our brains, most likely\u00a0\u2014 not in the sky \u2014 and they have some kind of phylogeny in the history of social animals. All our ethical systems are built on them.<\/p>\n I have a dim memory of having reviewed one of Sam’s books somewhere\u00a0\u2026 Yep<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Of the great mid-2000s tranche of “celebrity atheists,” each has his own distinctive style: the professorial Dennett, the street-fighter Hitchens, the smartypants Dawkins, and so on. For me at least, Sam Harris is the least distinctive of the crowd, the … Continue reading