Sam Harris: Career-Suicidal Intellectual Theorist?

Sam Harris

Profile: Incendiary Public Intellectual
Wikipedia

I don't follow any bloggers or tweeters or anyone, but I do regularly read a few public intellectuals because they write stuff that gets my attention, and Sam Harris is one of these few. He recently encountered a bit of resistance to a couple of his posts:

I recently wrote two articles in defense of "profiling" in the context of airline security . . . , arguing that the TSA should stop doing secondary screenings of people who stand no reasonable chance of being Muslim jihadists. I knew this proposal would be controversial, but I seriously underestimated how inflamed the response would be. Had I worked for a newspaper or a university, I could well have lost my job over it.

I told you he was career-suicidal! Best to stand your distance from the man, or you'll go up in smoke with him, either when he goes off on some sensitive issue or when some opponent drones on to him in response.

But if you're a foolhardy mensch, go over to his blog and read "To Profile or Not to Profile? A Debate between Sam Harris and Bruce Schneier" (May 25, 2012), in which he writes:

I am not proposing a mere correlation between extremist Islam and suicidal terrorism. I am claiming that the relationship is causal. There are many ways to see this, and not too many ways to credibly deny it . . . .

The first sign of a religious cause comes from what the terrorists say of themselves: al Qaeda and its sympathizers have not been shy about discussing their motives in public. The second indication is what they say when they think no one is listening. As you know, we now have a trove of private communications among jihadists. The fine points of theology are never far from their thoughts and regularly constrain their actions. The 19 hijackers were under surveillance by German police for months before September 11, 2001 . . . . Islam was all that these men appeared to care about.

And we should recall how other people behave when subjected to military occupation or political abuse. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? They have the suicide part down, because they are now practicing a campaign of self-immolation -- which, being the incendiary equivalent of a hunger strike, is about as far from suicide bombing as can be conceived. And where is that long list of Palestinian Christian suicide bombers you've been keeping in your desk? Now would be a good time to produce it. As you know, Palestinian Christians suffer the same Israeli occupation. How many have blown themselves up on a bus in Tel Aviv? One? Two? Where, for that matter, are the Pakistani, Iraqi, or Egyptian suicide bombers killing for the glory of Christ? These Christian communities are regularly attacked by suicidal jihadists -- why don't they respond with the same sort of violence? This is practically a science experiment: We've got the same people, speaking the same language, living in the same places, eating the same food -- and one group forms a death cult of aspiring martyrs and the other does not.

As I've written elsewhere, it isn't impossible to conceive of Tibetan Buddhists practicing suicide bombing or of Middle Eastern Christians practicing terrorism at the same rate as their Muslim neighbors, but Islam offers a doctrine of jihad and martyrdom that makes such behavior perfectly understandable. And, again, it is the reason that jihadists themselves give for their actions.

There may be a conflation of "cause" and "reason" in this early passage in which Harris sets forth his basic position, for he states that "between extremist Islam and suicidal terrorism . . . . the relationship is causal," but also says that the "doctrine of jihad and martyrdom . . . . is the reason that jihadists themselves give for their actions" (italics mine). That looks like a conflation of two concepts that I would keep distinct, but I suppose that Harris is using the language of statistical analysis in referring to a "causal" relationship. I prefer, however, not to say that suicide bombers are being causally driven by extremism; rather, I favor language emphasizing the fact that they're making culpable choices based on reasons grounded in Islamist doctrines.

But that's perhaps a minor point to raise here, and I see no need to press it. I've yet to finish reading the debate -- a longish one -- but wanted to note this point merely in passing. I'm more curious what Harris and Schneier have to say about profiling. I don't know much about this issue, but I wonder what the problem with profiling is for those who oppose it. Don't we profile all the time in crimefighting? When a married woman is murdered, isn't the husband automatically one of the primary suspects since there's a strong statistical correlation between murdered wives and murdering husbands? I've put that a little crudely, partly because I'm not steeped in the literature on this, but isn't this a sort of profiling -- the husband is a suspect simply for the fact of being a husband. That is, he fits a profile.

Or do I misunderstand?

Reasonable Cause?

Bereitschaftspotenziel

Benjamin Libet's Experiment

Free or not? Decide for yourself...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Malcolm Pollack, of Waka Waka Waka fame, has lately been defending philosophical determinism, somewhat to my surprise . . . though if he's right about absolute causality, then neither he nor I have had any choice in our views.

In which case, of course, I ought not to feel surprised at my surprise (if "ought" has any meaning, given determinism).

Free will is one of those philosophical concepts that resists complete comprehension, at least for me. I can think about it and circumscribe it with my thoughts, but it remains elusive. I can, for instance, state that our will is free if a decision of the will is made freely, which entails that it not be the result of a chain of causes, either external or internal, but is a choice based on reasons.

Yet, how that works, precisely, is the elusive part, for an explanation as to how something works usually appeals to causality. I can only note that if the determinist demands that I give an explanation for how free will works, and means by that a causal explanation, then I can only reply that a causal explanation would not explain free will but deny it.

So, free will is a 'surprising' thing if it exists, but perhaps the world has a few surprising things, as the philosopher David Chalmers argues concerning consciousness in his book The Conscious Mind. One wouldn't, apriori, expect a world with consciousness in it. Why should some things in the world have any awareness? But some things, e.g., ourselves -- as we know from experience of our own qualia -- do have awareness.

I therefore asked Malcolm if he distinguishes between "causes" and "reasons." Malcolm affirms that he does, indeed, distinguish the two, but I'm left wondering what role reasons play in a deterministic schema. I sense a dilemma, so let me see if I can express it.

Assuming the truth of determinism, either the reason that one gives for an action taken does perfectly reflect the true cause of the action, or it does not perfectly reflect the true cause of the action. In the former case, the reason given reduces to the cause; in the latter case, the reason given reduces to a mistake. Therefore, either the reason is nothing more than the cause itself (or at most, one of the merely epiphenomenal qualia associated with the cause), or the reason is merely mistaken rationalization (whether in whole or in part) that itself reflects, albeit imperfectly, more basic causal processes. Determinism would thus seem to leave no genuine role for reasons.

Probably, I haven't expressed myself so well on this issue, and no doubt my friend Bill Vallicella could do far better, but perhaps my musings will spur Malcolm to further posts on this fascinating if maddening topic.