Sam Harris
Sam Harris speaks with John Gray about the possibility of moral and political progress. They discuss historical and current threats to freedom of thought, the limits of law, the spread of dangerous technology, failures of convergence on norms and values, Arthur Koestler, de-industrialization in Europe, fellow travelers and the progressive embrace of barbarism, Bertrand Russell, the absurdity of pacifism, utilitarianism, the moral landscape, George Santayana, moral and scientific realism, pragmatism, atheism, Schopenhauer, liberalism as an historical accident, and other topics.
John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including “The Silence of Animals,” “The Immortalization Commission,” “Black Mass,” and “Straw Dogs.” His latest book is “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.” He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full-time.
Website: https://www.newstatesman.com/author/john-gray
February 16, 2024
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Much of what his guest has to say about cancel culture and liberalism nowadays is overwrought if not downright stupid.
Hayek couldn't imagine the speech codes of today..? Then he must have no imagination at all, because he lived through the McCarthy era FFS.
People losing their careers for saying or holding unpopular opinions… Who ever heard for that (spoiler alert; Oliver Wendell Holmes certainly had)
If you want to deride modern culture for prioritizing the customs of the day at the expense of non-institutional freedoms, fine. But to make some of the outlandish comparisons and claims that John Gray makes within the first ten minutes is moronic.
Some student of history this guy is. What a fucking trove of perspective. Zero stars.
Hey, how’s that Zionist meditation crap going for you, Sam; how’s that relativeness going for you and the rest of the world you son of B?
You're a genius, Sam Harris. But I can't follow this other guy. He sounds like a narcissist
John Gray gets so much stuff wrong, it's almost comical.
my favorite quote from this episode: "'Homer is lacking certain values that we take for granted". uhhhh yes 😂
This episode is infuriating. Why didn't you question his flawed thinking? Was it the endless refences to other thinkers? He has obviously cherry-picked through all of the great thinkers to find the ones that fit his already held beliefs.
I can't understand how he could ever think that the current liberal west is as terrible as he says. Where are the actual reasons? The statistics on societies? This is just a hysteria in my eyes necessary for him to justify his outdated thinking. Mental gymnastics to not be forced to change his mind. I'll give him that he is incredibly good at convincing himself.
Mmm.
Wow. This guy just drones on and on and on with his run on sentences and just keeps adding to his thought without stopping to see if the person on the other side hasn’t died. Stop waffling! STFU and have a conversation, get to the point. By the time I finished this comment after thinking and deleting and retyping he STILL hasn’t shut up. God this guy is so insufferable.
Sam asked him where he thought he spent most of his career and 15 minutes in he hasn’t stopped. Holy crap!
There are very few people on the planet less qualified to discuss matters of morality than Little Sammy Sociopath
How does moral relativism look through the lens of Alexei Nalvany vs. Julian Assange? Assange is literally dying in prison at this very moment. His only crime was to tell the public about Western war crimes in Iraq and this thing called vault 7. The West loses more of it's moral superiority with each passing year.
Never heard a man find so many reasons to still be wrong.
This was very hard to listen to with the constant interruption and even non-linguistic agreement
Sorry, but I gave up listening after 15 minutes. I'm in my eighties and have lived in the same world as John, my view of this era is significantly different than his. Most of the lost freedoms are a response to the incredible developments and spread of technology to all of us. Liberalism is prone to provide a logical basis for extremists who are promoting social Darwinism, very dangerous in the era of social media, artificial intelligence, drones and denial of global warming.
Harris your generalizations of a marginalized people is disgusting, and reveals your immoral bias. I once looked to you for a voice of reason but now I know it was all a thin facade over an anti humanist warmongering foundation.
Yes, you speak truth on so many topics, but every now and then you get too emotional and the mask slips. You don’t consider P@lestini@ns as human beings. To you they’re all combatants and must be treated as such, thus you play directly into the hands of the far right wing f@scists in government. Shame shame shame!!!!!!! And you will never live it down.
I've started reading your work in my teenage years well and continued to do so well into my late 20s. Now that I'm in my early 30s, any admiration and/or inspirations I've glimpsed from you was sniffedafter I've heard your take on the recent conflict in Gaza. As an ex-muslim American I wholeheartedly agreed with your position on Israel but then again I was a naive teenager, what's your excuse? I shared my skeptic open-minded attitude as it came naturally to me, until I realized you were deluding yourself with that. You can't advertise yourself having these attributes yet have this inexusable gigantic blindspot for the situation in Palestine. So yes, it took this one issue for me to view you the same way you view Bret Weinstein and I hope this comment finds its way to you. Perhaps you'd start doing some real thinking on your own and reevaluate your morally bankrupt and factually incorrect views on the Israel-Palestine conflict and start acting like an actual humanist again.
Imagine a white kid grows up in a black neighborhood where he gets picked on, beat up and shit stolen by black kids on the daily. He comes home and tells his dad, his dad sneaks in some subtle racist remarks. Kid turns out racist right? But on the other hand, his best friends black, he loves basketball culture, Jimi Hendrix. This is how moral change is done in society the most, by just simply sharing positive differences in other cultures.
Even if God was dead, his Spirit is alive: at least inside of those who get not lost to thoughtlessness, irrationality and imbecility. 🍷🔥
Progressive 'cancel culture' liberalism, now the polar opposite of traditional 20th c. liberalism, has been rapidly evolving into a religion, one that, like many faiths, is far more attractive to younger people, who often hold themselves in high regard with almost no reason for doing so. This faith begins with a conviction that their i.e. the young Jesuits', faith will reform, redeem and validate themselves as, at the least, far better humans than non-believers. When this belief metastasizes, its adherents and its opportunist fellow travelers believe they should next redeem and reform all of society and if possible the world, and that the venomous malignancy involved in spreading the faith is of no consequence at all.
How many times did this this Clown say " in the 90's "
When did `conversation` become an intellectual mindfuck monologue?
Guys like Gray (what a perfect name) need to step out of their ivory towers once in a while.
What makes the US Constitution unique is the matter of individual liberty. The US Constitution and it's amendments are uniquely libertarian. In England, you can be convicted for expressing disagreeable ideas. This is not the case in the US. I agree with Gray's point about the value of any paper but the US Constitution is structurally sound. No paper has power in and of itself but the IDEA is what Sam was arguing for here. The structural advantage of the US Constitution is the elucidation of individual liberty above that of the government. It asserts that liberty is granted, in perpetuity, by the government (through the declaration) and NOT by God or subsequent governments. Unfortunately, people who enjoy this liberty freely, tend to be willing to surrender the same in favor of things like political motivations and security. Gray's perspective is informed by history but I would argue, he fails to stich it together rationally.
Humans just climbed down from the trees an hour ago on the evolutionary scale of Earth and the industrial revolution is not even a second old. That our primal emotional brain has not kept up with our collective intellect is likely the proximal cause of our social failures (setbacks) and intellectual immaturity. Unlike the prime directive of "do no harm to humans" that we would imbue in an artificial intelligence, the constitution relies on humans. Humans have not evolved sufficiently to detach from emotion. The obvious remedy is a combination of intellect and awareness. A world full of Sam Harris's would be lightyears ahead of a world full of Trump supporters (for example). The closest archetype today might be the Netherlands….maybe Denmark…where there are more Sam Harris types and fewer Trump fans, more Atheist actually. Rational thought is our only hope to overcome our emotional brains.
It is. Man kind still makes war, genocides, sex traffics and squeezes every bit of money it can from its enemies and own populace. The problem is not the material circumstances of mankind or what government they operate under—
It’s human nature itself
This guy is awful to listen to. Never takes a breath and when Sam attempts to get a word in he grunts after few seconds. Perhaps find people to interview who understand the concept of conversation. Also, surely there are some female intellectuals out there to interview just to mix it up a bit?
An ongoing persistent topic. Where does one stand!?!
Does he really think there is any equivalence between the occasional excesses of ‘cancel culture’ and what happens in Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China? Daft old reactionary.
‘Woke’ and ‘cancel culture’ are fringe issues compared to the threat of dictatorship and authoritarianism to liberalism. They’ve been invented and inflated as issues by the right to hide the fact that the right have no answers to any of the problems we face. I’m surprised Sam Harris has fallen for this diversion.
Who is the author that Kessler is referring to? Sounds like Arthur Kessler, but I couldn’t find that name anywhere
Just when you think his sentence is coming to an end, he finds more breath to continue down a different track
Contemporary institutions are forcing people to be injected with unknown, untested, demonstrably unsafe and ineffective fluids.
Moral progress is an illusion based on Sam Harris‘s own belief system. Determinism trumps all. How does he not understand this? (sent via determinism.) is everyone stupid?
Uh the US Constitution can be changed though and has.
Horace Slughorn ladies and gentlemen.
Moral progress has been slow and will continue in that pattern so long as the abrahamic religons rule the world.
Although this was a nice conversation, next time you have him on the podcast please mute his microphone while you are talking. The constant “hmmm” on top of you was distracting.
This discussion felt a little like reading Judith Butler ;(