Sam Harris

(Photo by Matthew C. Wright)

One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words, “God’s earth is vast,” name this region from which the saints have come.

—Jalal-ud-Din Rumi

Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of “spirituality” or “mysticism” to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem—because millions of people have had experiences for which “spiritual” and “mystical” seem the only terms available.

Of course, many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact that most atheists will view a statement like Rumi’s, above, as a sign of the man’s gullibility or derangement, places a kernel of truth amid the rantings of even our most gullible and deranged opponents.

(Albert Einstein lecturing in Vienna in 1921)

In my last post, I suggested that Einstein shared my skepticism about free will. Nothing in my argument turned on this, of course: Several great physicists have believed in free will, and Einstein got many things wrong, both inside and outside of physics. One doesn’t argue these points on the basis of authority in any case—and this is what distinguishes science and philosophy from religion. Respecting one’s elders, however brilliant, is no substitute for making sense.

Nevertheless, it is generally interesting to know what great scientists believe. And a helpful reader has called my attention to the fact that Einstein viewed the connection between scientific and moral truth in terms similar to those I argue for in The Moral Landscape (thanks Matt!).

In the following essay, Einstein endorses a strong conception of moral truth, founded on axioms, and focused on the well-being of humanity. While he does not discuss progress in neuroscience and psychology—which, I maintain, makes the separation between ethics and science ultimately unsustainable—he seems to consider ethical truth to be on all fours with the truths of mathematics and the rest of science. 

I have added a few footnotes to clarify points of interest.

The Laws of Science and The Laws of Ethics

By Albert Einstein

Science searches for relations which are thought to exist independently of the searching individual. This includes the case where man himself is the subject. [1] Or the subject of scientific statements may be concepts created by ourselves, as in mathematics. Such concepts are not necessarily supposed to correspond to any objects in the outside world. However, all scientific statements and laws have one characteristic in common: they are “true or false” (adequate or inadequate). Roughly speaking, our reaction to them is “yes or “no.”

(Photo by Victor Nuno)

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects. Janet Malcolm examines these fraught encounters in a fascinating book, The Journalist and the Murderer, which focuses on the relationship between Joe McGinniss, the best-selling author of Fatal Vision, and Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret physician convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters.

Malcolm’s book is especially interesting for its diagnosis of the ethical problems posed by the standard print interview:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Malcolm is probably being too hard on herself and her fellow journalists here—and in this way hoping to appear unsullied. Nevertheless, these are remarkable disclosures. As someone who has sat for his fair share of print interviews, I can attest to the insidious way that one’s vanity and trust can work to one’s disadvantage. Malcolm captures the resulting derangement perfectly:

(The one who does not judge, by h. koppdelaney)

There are many forms of introspection and mental training that go by the name of “meditation,” and I have studied several over the years. As I occasionally speak about the benefits of these practices, people often write to ask which I recommend. Given my primary audience—students of science, secularists, nonbelievers, etc.—these queries usually come bundled with the worry that most traditional teachings about meditation must be intellectually suspect.

Indeed, it is true that many contemplative paths ask one to entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very least, to develop a fondness for the iconography and cultural artifacts of one or another religion. Even an organization like Transcendental Meditation (TM), which has spent decades self-consciously adapting itself for use by non-Hindus, can’t overcome the fact that its students must be given a Sanskrit mantra as the foundation of the practice. Ancient incantations present an impediment to many a discerning mind (as does the fact that TM displays several, odious signs of being a cult).

But not all contemplative paths kindle the same doubts or present the same liabilities. There are, in fact, many methods of meditation and “spiritual” inquiry that can greatly enhance our mental health while offering no affront to the intellect.

For beginners, I always recommend a technique called vipassana (Pali, “insight”), which comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism, the Theravada. The advantage of vipassana is that it can be taught in an entirely secular way. Experts in this practice generally acquire their training in a Buddhist context, of course—and most retreat centers in the U.S. and Europe still teach its associated Buddhist philosophy. Nevertheless, this method of introspection can be brought within any secular or scientific context without embarrassment. The same cannot be said for most other forms of “spiritual” instruction.

(Photo by JD Hancock)

There is one concern that seems to derail every discussion about my view of morality. The philosopher Russell Blackford put it this way in his review of The Moral Landscape:

Why, for example, should I not prefer my own well-being, or the well-being of the people I love, to overall, or global, well-being?... Harris never provides a satisfactory response to this line of thought, and I doubt that one is possible. After all, as he acknowledges, the claim that “We should maximize the global well-being of conscious creatures” is not an empirical finding. So what is it? What in the world makes it true? How does it become binding on me if I don’t accept it?

I believe that Blackford (and most everyone else) has confused two separate questions:

(A) What is the status of moral truth?—that is, what does it mean to say that one state of the world is “better” than another?

(B) What is rational for a person to do, given what he or she wants out of life?

The argument I present in my book focuses on (A), but has implications for (B). The concern about zero-sum conflict (whether between individuals or between an individual and society) focuses on (B). Consider the following example:

Supporters of Pakistani religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam rally to condemn the killing of Osama bin Laden in Quetta, Pakistan on Monday, May 2, 2011. (AP Photo/Arshad Butt)

President Obama has announced that the U.S. government will not release photos of Osama bin Laden’s corpse. I don’t know which fact is more alarming, that this appears to have been a very difficult decision or that the head of the CIA believes that these photos will leak in any case. Officially placating the conspiracy theorists of the Muslim world would have been fatuous in the extreme. Let them waste their lives chasing bin Laden’s ghost. But the idea that we cannot contain a few photos beggars belief. Which member of Seal Team 6 is going to put them on his Facebook page?

Of course, catering to the doubts of conspiracy theorists wouldn’t have been as craven as the pains we took to bury bin Laden in compliance with shariah law. Apologists for Islam insist that bin Laden was a terrible Muslim who represented no genuine strand of the faith. One wonders, therefore, who would have been offended if we had just kicked his corpse into the sea without a word. Indeed, one might wonder why our government wasn’t afraid to grant this ghoulish man full Muslim honors. Shouldn’t this have offended the true adherents of so peaceful and tolerant a religion?

In any case, it is time we ignored the fathomless depths of Muslim “sensitivity” on such matters. Anyone provoked by our denying bin Laden his last rites would have thereby declared himself an enemy of civilization. Why not allow such people to step forward so that they can be photographed (as above)?

And we should not let the hopefulness of this moment go to our heads. Thomas Friedman has grown so manic as to imagine that bin Laden was never very popular among Muslims in the first place:

Very few Arabs actively supported Bin Laden, but he initially drew significant passive support for his fist in the face of America, the Arab regimes and Israel. But as Al Qaeda was put on the run, and spent most of its energies killing other Muslims who didn’t toe its line, even its passive support melted away (except for the demented leadership of Hamas).

Here, Friedman has taken flight on the fairy wings of false nuance. Support for bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the practice of suicide bombing—passive or otherwise—was shockingly high in almost every Muslim community where one could safely conduct a poll in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001. Yes, these terrifying sentiments are on the wane in most places. How could they not be? As Friedman points out, Al Qaeda has done little more than slaughter innocent Muslims in the meantime. But current levels of admiration for bin Laden are still appalling. Let’s hope the downward trend continues and that someday a mere 10 percent of Muslims support global jihad. Today, this would equate to 150 million people. Winning the war of ideas to this degree would represent extraordinary progress. But the existence of 150 million friends of bin Laden, spread over scores of countries, would still be no small problem for the rest of us.

I have no illusions that this will be the end of the war on terror, but it does not seem irrational to think that it could be the beginning of the end. Personally, I feel like a tumor was just removed from my brain—so present has the man been in my thoughts this last decade.

I cannot begin to express my gratitude and admiration for our troops…