Sam Harris

Harris's writing focuses on philosophy, neuroscience, and criticism of religion. He came to prominence for his criticism of religion (Islam in particular) and he is described as one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.[2][3] He has written for publications such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Economist, London Times, Boston Globe, and The Atlantic.[32] Five of Harris's books have been New York Times bestsellers, and his writing has been translated into over 20 languages.[32] The End of Faith (2004) remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks.[33]

Harris has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss' 2016 self-help book Tools of Titans.

In 2007, Harris engaged in a lengthy debate with conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan on the Internet forum Beliefnet.[34] In April 2007, Harris debated with evangelical pastor Rick Warren for Newsweek magazine.[35] Harris also debated with Rabbi David Wolpe in 2007.[36] In 2010, Harris joined Michael Shermer to debate with Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston on the future of God in a debate hosted by ABC News Nightline.[37] Harris debated with Christian philosopher William Lane Craig in April 2011 on whether there can be an objective morality without God.[38] In June and July 2018, he met with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson for a series of debates on religion, particularly the relationship between religious values and scientific fact in defining truth.[39][40] Harris has also debated with the scholar Reza Aslan.[41]

In September 2013, Harris began releasing the Waking Up podcast (since re-titled Making Sense). Episodes vary in length but often last over two hours.[42] Releases do not follow a regular schedule.[43][44][15][45]

In September 2018, Harris released a meditation course app, Waking Up with Sam Harris. The app provides daily meditations; long guided meditations; daily "Moments" (brief meditations and reminders); conversations with thought leaders in psychology, meditation, philosophy, psychedelics, and other disciplines; a selection of lessons on various topics, such as Mind & Emotion, Free Will, and Doing Good; and more. Users of the app are introduced to a number of types of meditation, such as mindfulness meditation, vipassanā-style meditation, loving-kindness meditation, and Dzogchen.[46]

In September 2020, Harris announced his commitment to donate a least 10% of Waking Up's profits to highly effective charities,[47] thus becoming the first company to sign the Giving What We Can pledge for companies.[48] The pledge was done retroactively, taking into account the profits since the day the app launched 2 years previously.[47]

Harris is a critic of religion, and is a leading figure in the New Atheist movement. Harris is particularly opposed to what he refers to as dogmatic belief, and says that "Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a betrayal of science – and yet it is the lifeblood of religion."[49] While purportedly opposed to religion in general and the belief systems of them, Harris believes that all religions are not created equal.[50] Often invoking Jainism to contrast Islam as a whole, Harris highlights the difference in the specific doctrine and scripture as the main indicator of a religion's value, or lack thereof.[51]

In 2006, Harris described Islam as "all fringe and no center,"[52] and wrote in The End of Faith that "the doctrine of Islam [...] represents a unique danger to all of us", arguing that the war on terror is really a war against Islam.[53] In 2014, Harris said he considers Islam to be "especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse", as it involves what Harris considers to be "bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior."[54] In 2015 Harris and secular Islamic activist Maajid Nawaz cowrote Islam and the Future of Tolerance.[55] In this book, Harris argues that the word Islamophobia is a "pernicious meme", a label which prevents discussion about the threat of Islam.[53] Harris has been described in 2020 by Jonathan Matusitz, Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, as "a champion of the counter-jihad left".[56]

Harris is critical of the Christian right in politics in the United States, blaming them for the political focus on "pseudo-problems like gay marriage".[57] He is also critical of liberal Christianity – as represented, for instance, by the theology of Paul Tillich – which he argues claims to base its beliefs on the Bible despite actually being influenced by secular modernity. He further states that in so doing liberal Christianity provides rhetorical cover to fundamentalists.[57]

Harris holds that there is "nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion, and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have."[23]

Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

— Sam Harris, [58]

Harris rejects the dichotomy between spirituality and rationality, favoring a middle path that preserves spirituality and science but does not involve religion.[59] He writes that spirituality should be understood in light of scientific disciplines like neuroscience and psychology.[59] Science, he contends, can show how to maximize human well-being, but may fail to answer certain questions about the nature of being, answers to some of which he says are discoverable directly through our experience.[59] His conception of spirituality does not involve a belief in any god.[60]

In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014), Harris describes his experience with Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice, and recommends it to his readers.[59] He writes that the purpose of spirituality (as he defines it – he concedes that the term's uses are diverse and sometimes indefensible) is to become aware that our sense of self is illusory, and says this realization brings both happiness and insight into the nature of consciousness, mirroring core Buddhist beliefs.[59][61] This process of realization, he argues, is based on experience and is not contingent on faith.[59] Harris especially recommends the "headless" meditation technique as written about by Douglas Harding.

In The Moral Landscape, Harris argues that science can answer moral problems and aid human well-being.[62]

Harris says that the idea of free will "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality" and is incoherent.[1] Harris writes in Free Will that neuroscience "reveals you to be a biochemical puppet."[63]

Harris describes himself as a liberal, is a registered Democrat[64] and has never voted Republican in presidential elections.[43] He supports raising taxes on the wealthy, decriminalizing drugs and legalizing same-sex marriage.[65] In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Harris said that he supported most of the criticism against Bush administration's war in Iraq, and all criticism of fiscal policy and the administration's treatment of science. Harris also said that liberalism has grown "dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world" when it comes to threats allegedly posed by Islamic fundamentalism.[65] Harris owns guns, and wrote in 2015 that he understood people's hostility towards gun culture in the United States and the political influence of the National Rifle Association, but argued that there is a rational case for gun ownership.[66]

During the 2016 United States presidential election, Harris supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party presidential primaries against Bernie Sanders,[67] and despite calling her "a terribly flawed candidate for the presidency," he favored her in the general election and came out strongly in opposition to Donald Trump's candidacy.[68][44] Harris has criticized Trump for lying, stating in 2018 that Trump "has assaulted truth more than anyone in human history."[44]

During the 2020 United States presidential election, Harris supported Andrew Yang in the Democratic primaries.[69] Harris also introduced Yang to podcaster Joe Rogan.[70]

Harris has discussed existential risk from artificial general intelligence in depth.[71] He has given a TED talk on the topic, arguing it will be a major threat in the future and criticizing the paucity of human interest on the subject.[72] He argues the dangers from artificial intelligence (AI) follow from three premises: that intelligence is the result of physical information processing, that humans will continue innovation in AI, and that humans are nowhere near the maximum possible extent of intelligence.[72] Harris states that even if superintelligent AI is five to ten decades away, the scale of its implications for human civilization warrants discussion of the issue in the present.[72]

Harris was once a member of the intellectual dark web, a group that opposes political correctness and identity politics.[73] New York Times journalist Bari Weiss described the group as "a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation – on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums – that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now."[44] In November 2020, Harris stated that he does not identify as a part of that group.[7][8] Other members of the group include Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, and Jordan Peterson.[74] In 2021 Harris said on his podcast that he had left the intellectual dark web and said he turned in "my imaginary membership card to this imaginary organization".[75]

In April 2017, Harris hosted the social scientist Charles Murray on his podcast, discussing topics including the heritability of IQ and race and intelligence.[76] Harris stated the invitation was out of indignation at a violent protest against Murray at Middlebury College the month before and not out of particular interest in the material at hand.[76] The podcast episode garnered significant criticism, most notably from Vox[45][77] and Slate.[78] Harris and Murray were defended by conservative commentators Andrew Sullivan[79] and Kyle Smith.[80] Harris and Vox editor-at-large Ezra Klein later discussed the affair in a podcast interview.[81][82]

Harris has been accused of Islamophobia by journalist Glenn Greenwald and linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky.[83][84] Greenwald characterized some of Harris's statements as Islamophobic, such as: "the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists," and "[t]he only future devout Muslims can envisage – as Muslims – is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed."[83] After Harris and Chomsky exchanged a series of emails on terrorism and U.S. foreign policy in 2015, Chomsky said Harris had not prepared adequately for the exchange and that this revealed his work as unserious.[85] Kyle Schmidlin also wrote in Salon that he considered Chomsky the winner of the exchange because Harris's arguments relied excessively on thought experiments with little application to the real world.[85] In a 2016 interview with Al Jazeera English's UpFront, Chomsky further criticized Harris, saying he "specializes in hysterical, slanderous charges against people he doesn't like."[84]

Harris has countered that his views on this and other topics are frequently misrepresented by "unethical critics" who "deliberately" regard his words out of context.[86] He has also criticized the validity of the term "Islamophobia."[87] "My criticism of Islam is a criticism of beliefs and their consequences, but my fellow liberals reflexively view it as an expression of intolerance toward people,"[88] he wrote following a disagreement with actor Ben Affleck in October 2014 on the show Real Time with Bill Maher. Affleck had described Harris's and host Bill Maher's views on Muslims as "gross" and "racist," and Harris's statement that "Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas" as an "ugly thing to say." Affleck also compared Harris's and Maher's rhetoric to that of people who use antisemitic canards or define African-Americans in terms of intraracial crime.[89] Several conservative American media pundits in turn criticized Affleck and praised Harris and Maher for broaching the topic, saying that discussing it had become taboo.[90]

Harris's dialogue on Islam with Maajid Nawaz received a combination of positive reviews[91][92][93] and mixed reviews.[94][95] Irshad Manji wrote: "Their back-and-forth clarifies multiple confusions that plague the public conversation about Islam." Of Harris specifically, she said "[he] is right that liberals must end their silence about the religious motives behind much Islamist terror. At the same time, he ought to call out another double standard that feeds the liberal reflex to excuse Islamists: Atheists do not make nearly enough noise about hatred toward Muslims."[95]

Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia University accused Sam Harris of being a "new atheist crusader" having never studied Islam thoroughly and having no special insight into any Muslim community on earth.[96] He further accused Harris of engaging in such language to justify Western imperialism in the Muslim world.[96] An article published in The Guardian accused Harris, along with Milo Yiannopoulos of influencing young white men into becoming racists and anti-Muslim bigots.[97]

Chris Hedges accused Harris of "advancing neoconservative agendas" and for advocating a nuclear first strike policy on Muslims if an Islamist regime ever obtained nuclear weapons, stating in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason that "in such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own."[98][99][100]

On August 17, 2022, Harris appeared on an episode of the Triggernometry podcast, during which he said that if the Hunter Biden laptop story was intentionally ignored before the 2020 U.S presidential election, then it was worth doing so to stop Donald Trump from being reelected. He also argued that "Whatever the scope of Joe Biden's corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It's like a firefly to the sun."[101] "I don’t care what’s in Hunter Biden’s” (referring to the laptop) “At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared,” Harris added. [102]