Making Sense - Sam Harris - #354 — Is Moral Progress a Fantasy？

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:45.000 Today I'm speaking with John Gray. John is the author of many books, including The Silence of

00:00:51.700 Animals, Black Mass, Straw Dogs, and The New Leviathans. He is a regular contributor to

00:00:59.460 the New York Review of Books, and he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting

00:01:05.120 professor at Harvard and Yale, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics,

00:01:10.300 and he's also been a frequent critic of The New Atheists. One of his books is Seven Types of

00:01:17.360 Atheism, where several of my colleagues and I come in for some rough treatment. Anyway,

00:01:22.920 John and I cover a lot of ground here, or rather he does. He has a wealth of knowledge about the

00:01:27.480 history of ideas. We discuss the historical and current threats to freedom of thought,

00:01:33.560 the limits of law, the illusion, as he sees it, of political and ethical progress,

00:01:38.360 the spread of dangerous technology, failures of convergence on norms and values, Arthur Kostler,

00:01:46.580 de-industrialization in Europe, the phenomenon of fellow travelers and the progressive embrace of

00:01:52.620 barbarism, Bertrand Russell, the absurdity of pacifism, utilitarianism, the moral landscape,

00:02:00.620 George Santayana, moral and scientific realism, pragmatism, atheism, Schopenhauer, liberalism as

00:02:10.140 a historical accident, and other topics. John is a fascinating man, as you'll hear. And now I bring

00:02:17.260 you John Gray. I'm here with John Gray. John, thanks for joining me. I'm very glad to be with you,

00:02:28.820 Sam. Thank you for inviting me. So I think this conversation has been a long time in coming. I

00:02:34.880 have been aware of your work for some years, and I've been aware that you have been aware of mine

00:02:40.120 for some years as well. Perhaps most relevantly, you published a book, Seven Types of Atheism,

00:02:46.800 where you voiced your displeasure over the work of the new atheists, several of us by name. So we'll

00:02:54.560 get into that. But before we track through your various, the books I'm aware of, which I've read

00:03:01.340 in whole or in part, are Seven Types of Atheism, Straw Dogs, and your latest one, The New Leviathans.

00:03:11.040 You're a wonderful writer. Thank you. Which is fun, because I think you and I disagree about

00:03:15.260 many, many things. So it's very... I'd probably agree on some things, actually, as well.

00:03:19.980 Yeah. So I look forward to that. So anyway, before we jump in, perhaps you can summarize how you

00:03:25.140 view your own interests as a philosopher. What do you think you focused on these many years?

00:03:30.980 Well, since I published my first book in philosophy, which I think was in 1983, a book on John Stuart Mill,

00:03:40.140 in that over 40-year period, I've been focusing primarily on liberalism. What it is, or I would now say

00:03:48.760 was, where it came from, what are its strengths and its limitations, and its varieties. Because like

00:03:58.640 any big intellectual and political movement, it doesn't just have only one instance, but a whole

00:04:05.540 range of different brands or species or varieties. So throughout that whole period, I've been interested

00:04:12.580 in liberalism. And that's led me to write the books I have written on Mill and also on Hayek, whom I

00:04:20.240 knew, F.A. Hayek, the liberal political economist I knew quite well in the 1980s and talked with him

00:04:27.340 at length. I also, I can talk about that later. I still think he's a great thinker, but wrong on some

00:04:33.920 fundamental issues, as we all no doubt are. I also wrote a book on Isaiah Berlin. He was my

00:04:41.500 principal intellectual influence in Oxford when I was there as a, he never supervised me formally,

00:04:48.140 but when I was working on my doctorate, which was on John Stuart Mill and John Rawls. I used to see

00:04:53.860 him regularly, and I went on seeing him for the last 25 years of his life, almost to his death. And he was

00:05:02.540 a profound influence. I should say, just as a political footnote, that at that time, and from the

00:05:08.720 early 70s onwards, till the end of the Cold War, I was an active and militant anti-communist. And

00:05:15.780 that was one of the reasons I supported Margaret Thatcher for as long as I did. And I don't regret

00:05:22.820 any of that, because although the aftermath of communism has been a mixed bag in many ways,

00:05:29.920 it was one of the great 20th century totalitarian movements, which I thought, and I'm often criticized

00:05:41.120 for being too pessimistic, but I believed it could be defeated. Otherwise, I might not have bothered

00:05:47.060 struggling against it, as I did. I thought it was more fragile, the communist state in the former

00:05:53.200 Soviet Union than many people believed. And that proved to be correct in the late 1980s.

00:06:01.440 So, and one of the, I should say, one of the interesting features of our present situation

00:06:06.960 today is that the threat to old-fashioned liberal freedoms of thought and expression and so forth,

00:06:14.960 comes from a different source than it did in the Cold War. As I mentioned, from maybe about 1973,

00:06:20.960 up to 1989, 1990, I was an active anti-communist. And at that time, the principal threats to old-fashioned

00:06:29.120 liberal freedoms were from autocratic states, from dictatorships, from tyrannical governments.

00:06:34.160 That's no longer the case, because interestingly, in the United States, and to some extent also in

00:06:39.200 Britain and other European countries, the threats to freedom of expression and freedom of thought

00:06:46.240 come from, not from tyrannical governments, primarily, but from civil society itself, from

00:06:52.400 universities, from philanthropic and charitable organizations, from professional associations,

00:06:58.800 from museums, from artistic institutions, which impose codes of censorship on what their members or

00:07:08.320 anyone working in the relevant industries or branches of society can say or publish and enforce those

00:07:15.280 edicts with various forms of cancellation and deplatforming and stripping of just career

00:07:23.120 destruction and so on. So, a very interesting change in my lifetime, a lifetime in which I've seen,

00:07:29.280 I've witnessed the disappearance, I would say, of a liberal civilization. There are still obviously

00:07:35.920 enclaves of freedom like the one I'm addressing now by speaking to you, Sam. Freedom hasn't disappeared,

00:07:42.080 as it did in the totalitarian states almost entirely. But a liberal civilization, meaning a civilization

00:07:48.160 in which certain norms of free speech and free thought and toleration are taken for granted

00:07:55.120 across most of the society. So, people don't need to worry what they say to their colleagues in the

00:08:01.360 canteen or in the coffee shop. There are many areas of society in which political norms do not apply and are

00:08:09.680 not enforced. That civilization, which existed throughout most of my lifetime, no longer exists.

00:08:17.520 So that if you're a reporter at the New York Times or if you are a university professor or if you are

00:08:24.800 a comedian or a poet or a writer, you have to bear in mind all the time how your statements will be

00:08:33.920 interpreted and reacted to by people who may seek and sometimes successfully seek to end your career

00:08:42.880 in the profession you've chosen. They may aim to silence you. And although there's been some pushback

00:08:50.720 in America and in other countries, including Britain, they have succeeded in doing that to quite a lot of

00:08:57.520 people. And so that's a fundamental change, not only in that there's less freedom, but where it comes from.

00:09:03.920 In the 20th century, the principal enemy of these old-fashioned liberal freedoms were autocratic and

00:09:11.600 totalitarian states. Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the fascist regimes of interwar Europe and Latin America,

00:09:20.640 militarist Japan. These were totalitarian or highly authoritarian states which stamped out whatever

00:09:26.720 freedoms existed and imposed an ideological orthodoxy. The curiosity of, it's almost droll,

00:09:36.480 but is that liberal societies in the 21st century have done this to themselves without really any

00:09:42.400 significant intervention by tyrannical governments. For example, just to come right to the present day,

00:09:48.240 private universities in America, elite private universities have imposed various forms of

00:09:55.920 speech codes and diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology on their staff. Some universities have required

00:10:03.920 what amount to loyalty oaths, which was a practice which one had hoped died out with the autocratic states,

00:10:10.080 but has not. And they've also been, while doing this, they've proved remarkably tolerant,

00:10:15.760 if I can put it like that, of various forms of progressive racism and anti-Semitism, which in recent

00:10:24.240 times have included what have amounted to positive active celebrations of Hamash's pogroms in Israel on October

00:10:33.360 the 7th. Now, all of these phenomena, I think, would have been extremely difficult, even for great minds

00:10:40.720 such as Isaiah Boleyn, my mentor at Oxford, to have imagined back in the 1990s. Because in the 1990s,

00:10:47.760 communism had collapsed, had been defeated by the West. And even if you weren't a Fukuyamist, which I

00:10:53.920 never was, as you probably are aware, he and I have had dialogues, never reaching agreement or even

00:11:00.800 aiming for it for the last, ever since he published his book. And I wrote my first critique of Fukuyama

00:11:06.000 before his book was ever published as a response to his essay in the summer of 1989. I thought all this

00:11:12.560 talk of the end of history and with nonsense from beginning to end, even in this slightly metaphorical

00:11:18.640 forms that he later claimed to have stated that we can talk about that later. Because like all ideologues

00:11:25.120 resist falsification. They're not empiricists. They say, well, I never meant that. I meant something

00:11:29.520 different. It was more metaphorical, more symbolic and so on. But at any rate, I don't think Berlin

00:11:33.920 could have predicted this. I don't think Karl Popper, who I didn't know as well, but who I did

00:11:38.560 talk with, could have predicted it. I don't think Hayek could have imagined it either. None of these

00:11:44.160 20th century liberals could have imagined a situation, which is the one in which we actually

00:11:48.400 now live, you and I, in which large institutions in civil society are policing themselves, censoring

00:11:56.080 themselves and their members and imposing quite serious, not death, as happened in communist

00:12:02.400 countries. They're not firing squads. They're imposing quite serious sanctions on people who

00:12:07.600 deviate from a progressive orthodoxy in whatever way is judged. And that, I think, is new. And it's,

00:12:16.160 to my mind, I sort of had another footnote, which is, in the 1980s, and I traveled quite a bit in what

00:12:22.240 was then communist Europe, so I knew it reasonably well, particularly Poland. And one thing I was

00:12:28.400 impressed by there was the courage of the dissidents, because the courage of the dissidents

00:12:34.320 didn't just, their situation was much more severe and extreme than that of anyone in these, what I

00:12:41.680 think of as the post-liberal societies of the West now. Because in the post-liberal societies of the

00:12:45.760 West, what you lose if you lose, what you lose if you lose as much, the most you can lose is your

00:12:52.400 own career. And in the former communist countries at the height of, in the 80s or the 70s when I also

00:12:59.920 visited, you lost a lot more than your career. What you could lose was your housing, your children's

00:13:06.720 education, the medical care for your mother or grandmother. I knew people who all suffered these,

00:13:12.720 these, these fates. So that if you decided to continue resisting intellectually, it wasn't just

00:13:19.280 you who might suffer. It was the people that you cared about most and, and loved the most. And one of

00:13:26.400 the features of the intellectual conformity that reigns in the liberal West or post-liberal West now,

00:13:31.760 which I find, uh, what's the correct word? Problematic is a word that people use a lot now,

00:13:38.160 is that, uh, the people who do yield to this censorship, this, these threats of cancellation

00:13:44.960 are facing actually a much smaller risk than the anti-communist or, or before that the anti-Nazi,

00:13:52.480 even smaller dissidents risk. Because it's not only to them, but it was not only to them, but to their

00:13:57.360 loved ones. Whereas if you speak out on some issue and violate a progressive orthodoxy now,

00:14:04.640 you might lose your career, but your children won't be denied medical treatment. They won't be denied

00:14:09.280 university places. So I regard actually the, those who conform to the progressive orthodoxy from

00:14:16.240 careerist considerations as more morally culpable, more morally culpable than those who, even though the

00:14:23.040 sanctions are much weaker, they're not going to be put in front of a firing squad, but they apply

00:14:27.840 only to the persons who, in the West, who violate the progressive codes, not to the family members

00:14:32.640 of loved ones. So I regard them as more morally culpable than those that I, I would meet people

00:14:37.360 when I traveled. Some of, most of my friends were dissidents, but I'd meet others who'd collaborate,

00:14:41.600 collaborate in various ways. But there was often a story behind the collaboration, which I wouldn't

00:14:45.760 say justified it, but it certainly made it more intelligible. If you're, if you're, if your old

00:14:49.840 grandmother is going into a hospital for an operation and you're told that if you don't

00:14:54.000 shut up or if you don't write a particular thing or write a particular thing, then she won't get

00:14:57.840 her eye operation. Yeah. You and I are going to fully agree about the, the excesses of, you know,

00:15:04.640 progressivism or, um, you know, the new DEI orthodoxy. But, but I think I would, I think I share even the,

00:15:12.320 the, the extremity of your concern about it. Although I wouldn't put it quite as categorically as you did

00:15:18.720 in terms of the change that has happened. I think you said that, that, that civilism,

00:15:22.960 this liberal civilization that you took for granted and that Isaiah Berlin would have assumed would

00:15:27.600 have continued simply no longer exists. I would say that it's under threat in, you know, across

00:15:34.960 our culture in places that we are, are wise to, you know, lament these changes in. But as you know,

00:15:42.480 and as you acknowledge, many of us are pushing back against those changes. And I, and I,

00:15:46.960 I do have some sense, I don't know if you doubt this, that the pendulum is in the process of

00:15:52.400 swinging back. I mean, especially in the aftermath of the recent college president testimony before

00:15:57.920 Congress, after the Hamas's atrocities on October 7th, that was such a, a shocking and embarrassing and

00:16:07.120 ludicrously masochistic moment. I agree with all of that. Intellectually and ethically.

00:16:11.360 I agree with all of that, but I wonder if it's turning back. I mean, these things have a kind of

00:16:15.760 almost semi, once they get ingrained in institutions as procedures and processes that

00:16:21.680 carry, it grinds on almost automatically. In Britain, we've had some pushback as well

00:16:26.880 on various issues and which have been successful. And yet every single day,

00:16:30.960 I don't think the situation is quite as bad here as it is in the United States, but it is pretty bad.

00:16:35.680 And yet every single day we hear that the processes of vetting people for their views on

00:16:40.240 diversity, equity, inclusion, and so on is going on. I mean, there was a report only yesterday that

00:16:47.200 BBC hiring tech procedures include or have included recommendations not to hire people who are what

00:16:56.320 is described as dismissive of diversity ideology. Now that's gone on after tremendous amount of

00:17:03.840 pushback as this has gone on in various issues, both even within the BBC. I broadcast for the

00:17:08.640 BBC still, and I've never had any censorship applied to me. But I've been lucky. If you're

00:17:14.640 not as old as I am, I'm moderately well-known. I have various outlets that I write in a left-wing

00:17:20.640 magazine, although I'm not from the left. I can survive. I can get by. I can carry on. But if you're

00:17:26.720 younger, if you're a budding philosopher, a budding sociologist, a budding historian of ideas,

00:17:33.760 try writing something, try publishing. Well, you might write it, but try publishing something

00:17:38.320 which goes against the progressive ideology on sex or gender or racism or these other things.

00:17:44.720 What will happen will be either it's not published, which is the most likely development. You'll be

00:17:49.280 privately warned. I know this from people who've told me this. You'll be privately warned not to do it,

00:17:54.320 but if you persist and you submit it to various journals, it probably still won't be published,

00:17:59.760 not in the mainstream, front-ranked journals. If it is then published, you'll suffer for it.

00:18:06.080 Do you remember the case of this young philosopher? I think her name was Rebecca Tuval. This is now

00:18:13.840 six years old. Don't tell me about it, Sam. She was a Canadian professor of philosophy, I think at

00:18:20.160 York University. Forgive me, the audience, if some of these details are wrong, but the part that I'm

00:18:26.400 sure of is what her indiscretion was and the consequences of it. She published a paper where

00:18:32.160 she took the trans issue and set it alongside this infamous case in America of a white woman

00:18:44.240 who claimed to identify as black, and she passed as black for some years. She passed so successfully

00:18:49.600 that she was running, I think, a local chapter of the NAACP. Oh, I remember this, yes.

00:18:54.560 Rachel Dolezal, before she was found out and even outed by her all-too-white parents.

00:19:00.640 And so this young philosopher, in a fairly sheepish way, she was not making,

00:19:08.240 this was not a right-wing triumphal piece of political criticism. She just said,

00:19:14.320 isn't it interesting that on the one hand, someone who changes their gender is lionized

00:19:23.040 on the left by progressives as an exemplar of human freedom and diversity, but somebody who

00:19:29.360 purports to change their racial identity is vilified as some kind of

00:19:34.960 race terrorist, which Rachel Dolezal was, and, and, you know, defenestrated.

00:19:40.240 And destroyed.

00:19:40.880 So she just, yeah. And so, but so she just contemplated that juxtaposition and the consequences

00:19:47.200 were that even her doctoral committee, she got her degree some years before, but her doctoral

00:19:55.440 committee came out of the woodwork to disavow her. And she was just as castigated as you could

00:20:02.640 possibly be in academia by everyone in sight. I mean, people who hadn't even read her essay were

00:20:10.160 hurling her from the rooftops.

00:20:11.680 Well, that's very common. I mean, but that illustrates why I think, I mean, I put it in

00:20:16.480 what you thought was perhaps a slightly hyperbolic formulation to say that the liberal civilization

00:20:21.360 had disappeared. But if I think back to the, I got my doctorate in the 1970s. Before that,

00:20:26.320 I started teaching in 1973 at the university of Essex in Britain. By the way, I taught later on

00:20:32.720 in Harvard and Yale and went to various, and there were indeed 16 consecutive years in which I spent

00:20:40.160 several months of each of those years in America. So I used to know America quite well, but although I

00:20:45.040 stopped doing that in the early nineties, but back in the seventies, what you describe this Tuval case

00:20:51.040 was not only never happened, it was completely unthinkable. There were at Oxford and at Essex,

00:20:58.800 there were liberals of various stripes, Cold War liberals, like myself, as they've later been

00:21:05.920 caricatured classical liberals, left-wing liberals, Keynesian liberals. There were also conservatives,

00:21:11.600 which ranged from liberal or libertarian conservatives through to reactionary or high

00:21:16.240 Tory conservatives. There were Marxists, there were communists, there were anarchists. There was a

00:21:21.760 wide variety of almost, mercifully, there were no Nazis, but there were almost everything apart from

00:21:27.040 that was represented. And that was taken to be normal. That's the point. The point is that that

00:21:32.160 was considered to be a normal state of intellectual life. And it was utterly unthinkable that someone could

00:21:40.400 explore a conceptual incoherence, which is, I suppose, what this philosophy you're talking about

00:21:45.600 was doing. She was saying, well, why does this logic differ from that logic? What's the reason

00:21:50.560 for that? That's all she was saying, or even just asking. She wasn't even saying anything from,

00:21:54.480 as you described, just asking the question. It was utterly unthinkable that that would be,

00:21:59.040 that would lead to her being publicly denounced or her doctoral committee turning against her.

00:22:04.880 It was just beyond this sphere of imagination that would happen. So in that sense, there's been a,

00:22:10.480 I mean, I'm in my mid seventies now, so I can remember that, but I can remember this very vividly.

00:22:14.960 It was completely unthinkable. And that is a fundamental and radical change.

00:22:19.280 And I actually think it's, although there's been some good pushback in various areas,

00:22:24.080 it's not easy to, well, I think it's actually impossible to get back to a situation where

00:22:28.880 these things are taken for granted, because the very fact that we have to fight for them

00:22:32.640 now, and the fact, I know the British situation better than the American situation, that in Britain,

00:22:36.880 I think actually only the power of law, in other words, of the state, the power of the state,

00:22:42.320 can actually protect these freedoms, freedoms now.

00:22:44.880 Well, crucially, you, you lack a bill of rights there, which, yeah, well, I don't think that's

00:22:49.680 the solution either. No, no, absolutely not. I mean, it had, because for one thing, even now,

00:22:54.880 the situation in America, as I've been able to follow it is worse than it is in many British

00:23:00.960 institutions, despite that. And I wouldn't favor it at all, because first of all,

00:23:06.320 the bill of rights would be, have to be drafted by someone. Most of the lawyers now are captured by

00:23:13.600 these diversity ideas of various kinds. And I'm not one who has, as you know, from my most recent

00:23:21.120 book, my principal political influence on my thinking is Hobbes. And my, I mean, constitutions

00:23:28.400 come and go. They don't by themselves protect freedom very well. It's one of my differences with

00:23:34.800 Hayek, by the way. I mean, Hayek was slightly surprised me in a way that when I got to know

00:23:40.000 him, I was interested to talk about his experiences in pre-war. I mean, he was old enough just to,

00:23:46.080 no, to have lived in pre-war Vienna and lived then on to the post-war period. He knew Mises,

00:23:52.640 of course. He knew Wittgenstein slightly. They famously met on a train when they were both in

00:23:57.840 uniform and when they were both still socialists, by the way. And I got to know about his family and

00:24:03.680 so on. So I was interested to talk with him. And one of the features of the 30s is that

00:24:09.360 he left by the early 30s because he, and Popper, his member, believed that the Nazis were going to

00:24:16.000 come to power and that they would do what they had said they would do in many of the worst respects.

00:24:22.720 But he could have observed that having a wonderful constitution like that of Weimar,

00:24:28.800 Germany, or a wonderful constitution like Stalin's Russia didn't stop anything from happening.

00:24:36.080 Law by itself is powerless when it comes up against powerful political forces. And in fact,

00:24:41.120 as you probably remember from my book, one of the things I was writing about in Britain

00:24:46.080 and in American publications in the 1990s was I thought that constitutionalizing certain basic

00:24:52.080 issues in America like abortion would have, I'm pro-choice by the way, that's by the way,

00:24:58.080 but been on record on that for many, many, many, many years. But constitutionalizing that issue

00:25:03.840 would ultimately lead, and I wrote this explicitly in about 1991, to the politicization of the Supreme

00:25:10.640 Court itself. Because if you politicize a freedom which is deeply contested in society, which maybe a

00:25:16.400 quarter of the society regards as an abomination or a third, and another side is another quarter

00:25:22.160 that sees it as an absolutely vital part of human freedom, and in the middle there are various,

00:25:26.960 there's a group which wavers. If you do that, then what that eventually does is it makes the Supreme

00:25:31.760 Court an object of political capture, which has then, in fact, has now happened, although it took 30

00:25:37.520 years to happen. When I said this back in the 90s, people were incredulous because they assumed the

00:25:42.480 American Supreme Court would always be liberal, but there's no reason to assume that.

00:25:46.080 They're all ultimately creatures of political power, and that's where I differ very much from

00:25:52.800 theorists who take their terms of reference from Locke and from rights theory. I think

00:25:58.800 these are all ultimately matters of a political struggle. So I do think, though, in one respect,

00:26:05.200 I don't favor a Bill of Rights in Britain, but we might actually benefit from having legislation in

00:26:11.760 parliament which would establish a right to freedom of expression. And that's partly been done in a way

00:26:16.720 because the present government, which will soon be out of power, but anyway, the present government

00:26:20.320 has brought in a legislation which enables people whose freedom of speech has been curbed on campus

00:26:26.800 to get legal remedies for that. And I do support that. In other words, I support legislation.

00:26:33.360 It's legislation, you see. In other words, it's not an embedded right which then transcends change.

00:26:40.080 It can be altered. But while it's in force, it gives people some remedy. But let me add something to

00:26:46.560 that which is very crucial. The beneficiaries of such legislation are the people who have the courage

00:26:52.720 and the independence of mind to speak against the orthodoxy. It helps them. If they speak and are then

00:26:58.720 punished, they can sue, which is good. But it doesn't change the incentive structures of the profession.

00:27:04.800 The incentive structures of the profession are the ones I described earlier, which is that if you're

00:27:09.200 a young scholar in some humanities or social science discipline or even sometimes scientific

00:27:15.280 disciplines going in early and you choose to take an unorthodox stance or to investigate an unorthodox

00:27:22.560 point of view or worse, still, defend it, then your career will probably never start. Or if it does

00:27:27.280 start, it'll be quickly blocked. And that, I think, can't be changed by law alone or by rights.

00:27:33.920 Well, listen, I want to perhaps circle back to politics and the career of liberalism,

00:27:41.360 such as you see it. But I think there's an underlying claim that runs through much of your work,

00:27:46.960 certainly all of the books I've mentioned, wherein you seem quite pessimistic about the progress of

00:27:55.440 reason and really about the very idea of progress itself. What is your argument against progress? I mean,

00:28:02.240 you essentially consider it an illusion of sorts, and it's an illusion that has many guises. I mean,

00:28:08.160 you, concepts like humanism and the very concept of treating humanity as a whole come under a fairly

00:28:15.360 rough treatment by you. So how do you view the assumption of progress? Again, from people like me,

00:28:21.840 I mean, perhaps most poignantly, somebody like Steven Pinker is, you know, I think he's often misunderstood

00:28:29.360 for being, you know, far more Pollyannish than he in fact is. But what's your case against

00:28:37.120 assumptions of progress in the very concept? Well, I should say, in practice, I'm very rarely

00:28:42.400 pessimistic enough. We might have differed on this at the time, but when I started writing against the

00:28:50.320 Iraq War before the Americans arrived in Iraq, I started to write about a year before, and I wrote a

00:28:57.120 a piece in the new states about a month before the war began. And I said, what will, I think this

00:29:01.920 will, what will happen is a disintegration of the Iraqi state into various bits. Some neighboring

00:29:08.800 powers like Iran will become stronger. That was kind of one of the predictable consequences of the Iraq

00:29:14.240 War. But even I wasn't, and I said it could be like Chechnya. I said this, the article, if anybody wants

00:29:20.160 to read it, they can read it in my, I republished it and I'll did in my book, collected essays called

00:29:25.600 Grey's Anatomy. And I said, it could be as bad as Chechnya, where terrible slaughter, terrible ethnic

00:29:31.680 and sectarian murder and torture and rape and so on. But it was actually much worse because what I

00:29:36.240 didn't anticipate was the full horror of the emergence of ISIS. And I didn't anticipate what

00:29:42.080 would happen to the Yazidi, which was an attempted genocide. It was much worse. So in practice,

00:29:47.680 I'm hardly ever as pessimistic as events really weren't. But let me answer your question more

00:29:52.640 programmatically. I've always made a sharp distinction between progress in ethics and

00:29:57.520 politics, or if you like, in civilization on the one hand, and progress in science and technology

00:30:03.920 on the other hand. And one of my constant refrains over the last 20 or 30 years has been that the two

00:30:11.920 are not closely connected and that there can be considerable progress in science and technology,

00:30:19.440 which is used for barbarous and uncivilized ends. But the key difference between the two is that

00:30:25.440 progress in science and technology is normally cumulative. That's to say, when a new technology

00:30:31.840 or certainly a new scientific theory comes along, everything that was known before isn't lost or found

00:30:37.600 to be false. The truths that were discovered earlier on or the valid theories that were formulated are

00:30:43.600 carried on and incorporated into something bigger or which explains more. And so progress isn't just

00:30:49.840 advance. There's advance in ethics and politics as well. Europe in 1990 was a much better place than

00:30:57.360 Europe in 1940, to take a rather obvious example. But advances in politics and in ethics, I hold,

00:31:04.640 and I must say, having lived as long as I do, this has prepared me for many things, nearly all was lost

00:31:11.440 over a period of a generation or so. There's some kind of built-in moral entropy, ethical and political

00:31:17.040 entropy, whereby what has been achieved, good things that have been achieved, are lost. And evils which

00:31:24.880 were thought to have retreated, not abolished perhaps, come back with all their venom. I mean,

00:31:30.400 this is what one of the reasons I constantly attacked Dawkins and others for this theory of

00:31:35.600 memes. I said, well, whether or not there are memes or there can be theoretical entities called

00:31:40.640 memes. If memes compete in a Darwinian fashion, then I predict that the most successful, the fittest

00:31:47.040 memes will be the worst ethically and culturally and politically. And I think that's been demonstrated

00:31:53.360 by the way that the anti-Semitic meme has revived in recent years and even in recent months, extremely

00:32:01.040 virulently, because it appeals to hatreds and prejudices and bigotries that were there before,

00:32:09.040 but it can spread very rapidly. In other words, if there is Darwinian competition among memes,

00:32:15.280 if there are such things as memes and there is a Darwinian competition, then the fittest will not be

00:32:19.520 the best or the most rational or the most humane. They'll normally be simply the most virulent,

00:32:24.960 which normally is the worst, ethically speaking. I mean, what we've returned to, for example,

00:32:30.160 now in the case of anti-Semitism is the political anti-Semitism of Russia in the 1890s and Europe in

00:32:35.840 the 1930s. But rather than coming from the nationalist or fascist right, as it did in Russia in the 1890s or in

00:32:45.120 Europe in the 1930s, it now comes from progressive liberalism itself. That's the vehicle for this

00:32:51.600 meme, this extremely virulent, hardy, resilient, and almost all-conquering meme that keeps re-emerging.

00:33:00.080 So that sort of illustrates. I draw a sharp contrast between progress, which means cumulative

00:33:06.720 advance, in which what is achieved in one generation isn't completely lost in the next.

00:33:11.760 In science and technology, that's normal. And ethics and politics, where the loss

00:33:16.480 of what's been achieved in the previous generation or two is normal. I'll give you a different example,

00:33:24.240 which might make it a bit clearer. You know, when I read techno-optimists, they say things like,

00:33:29.840 humanity master technology, we will use it for these purposes. We will eliminate diseases. We will do

00:33:36.480 all these good things and extend human longevity. Well, no doubt that will happen to some extent,

00:33:40.960 but they're invoking, and you mentioned this parenthetically, they're invoking

00:33:46.080 a collective agent that doesn't exist. Humanity or humankind or the human animal,

00:33:50.560 it's a biological species or category. It doesn't act any more than lions or tigers act. What there is,

00:33:55.920 is simply the multitudinous human animal with different purposes and goals. And to give an example now,

00:34:03.200 the immense progress in technology that has occurred in the last five or ten years, shall we say,

00:34:10.000 has put what remains of the liberal West at a disadvantage in its conflict with groups like the

00:34:17.520 Houthis and also with Russia in that the spread of technology, the diffusion of technology, the

00:34:25.360 development of new and especially cheaper and more effective technologies has produced generations,

00:34:32.000 new generations of drones, which are hundreds or even thousands of times cheaper than the missiles in

00:34:38.480 which the West has invested so much and which now can be used in huge numbers at low cost in the Red

00:34:46.000 Sea and in Ukraine, often Iranian produced. Now, what does that mean? What it means is that these new

00:34:53.920 technologies- Just to put a finer point on this example, which I love, is that I remember being

00:34:58.880 at the TED conference, which is, as you probably know, a kind of mecca for techno-optimism, when drones were,

00:35:06.960 I think, probably for the, you know, virtually the first time revealed to be, you know, in production. I

00:35:15.680 mean, there was a TED talk where, you know, one of these, I think, pioneers in drone technology, you know,

00:35:21.840 flew a drone out over the audience in the auditorium and then showed video of dozens of drones, you know,

00:35:30.720 flying in, in formation together. And I forget, this had to be at least 10 years ago. Yeah, that's it.

00:35:37.040 And, um, it really was, you know, drones were nowhere until, you know, they were overhead at the

00:35:42.640 TED conference, in my experience. Right about the same time though, Sam, I think you're absolutely

00:35:47.360 right about the dating, about the same time in a meeting in Switzerland, I, there were little tiny

00:35:52.720 drones, but they fluttered above us in the, in the, in the audience. So they were, they were just catching on

00:35:57.600 then, I think. Yeah. But it was just amazing in that context. This was just unveiled as a pure

00:36:04.480 moment of, you know, technological fun more than anything, but the, the obvious military applications

00:36:10.240 were, were never considered, you know, it's just several of us in the audience had a fairly ominous

00:36:16.080 feeling about what we were watching. Well, you're absolutely right because it's now come true. And,

00:36:20.640 and of course, um, so that, that sort of illustrates one of my points, which is that as new technologies

00:36:25.840 or more broadly speaking, knowledge spreads as they spread throughout the world, the spread

00:36:31.200 of knowledge does not make human beings more rational or more reasonable. It does, does not

00:36:36.400 tend to produce in them the same goals or values. They use the knowledge that is being disseminated

00:36:42.640 and the new technologies to pursue whatever goals and values they have, which may be barbarous.

00:36:48.240 I mean, after all, the, the Houthis have reinstituted slavery. They, uh, they're exceedingly misogynist and,

00:36:54.400 um, uh, and homophobic. Uh, this doesn't prevent them being, uh, their success is being welcomed by in,

00:37:02.400 in the West by progressive liberal crowds, uh, and demonstrations, but, um, uh, they, they haven't,

00:37:10.960 they haven't changed their values, the Houthis, from when they were formed, uh, when they emerged as an

00:37:17.200 Islamist, um, group, uh, sometimes met some years ago, they haven't changed them. They're using these

00:37:22.560 new technologies and others that will follow them to enact and advance their values and their goals,

00:37:29.840 which they've been very explicit about what they are. They haven't beaten about the bush. They haven't,

00:37:34.880 uh, obfuscated or, uh, uh, obscured them in any way. They, they, they know what they want,

00:37:40.720 the destruction of Israel, the universal campaign against the Jews, the attacks on liberal democracy,

00:37:45.520 the whole thing. So, um, so that's sort of, that's my reasoning, uh, on this, on this basis,

00:37:52.560 which is that, um, at least over the last few hundred years, technology, technology, science

00:37:58.000 and technology has been a, an exponential process, let's put it like that, in which what is gained in

00:38:04.000 one generation, uh, is expanded upon or magnified in the next generation. But the ethical and political

00:38:12.480 life isn't like that. Uh, it's almost the opposite. What has gained in one generation is almost always

00:38:18.880 lost two or three generations later, and often in the, in the following generation. And what, I mean,

00:38:23.680 I, one of my, my original sort of discipline, if you like, was that of Isaiah Boleyn, which was really,

00:38:29.360 um, partly a philosopher, but a historian of ideas. And if you study the history, the ideas before the

00:38:35.440 First World War, apart from a few dissidents, uh, the assumption was pretty well universal that the

00:38:44.800 basic structure of European society and civilization would persist and indeed grow and improve. And in

00:38:55.600 fact, there's a wonderful book, I don't know if you've ever read it, uh, or your, or your listeners

00:38:59.360 have by Zweig, the, um, called the world, the world of yesterday, fantastic book. Yeah. And there's a,

00:39:06.320 oh yeah, just wonderful. And there's a chapter in it called, I think the world of security and which

00:39:10.480 he describes growing up in the, in the Habsburg empire. And that was a world of security. Everybody

00:39:15.440 took for granted and, uh, money meant what it meant. There was a rule of law. There was some,

00:39:21.360 there were blemishes, there was antisemitism in, um, Vienna and other parts of the empire. There were

00:39:27.040 the nascent forms of ethnic nationalism, but basically it was a, it was a highly civilized

00:39:32.320 empire and also a very modern one, interestingly as well, until the First World War. And then in

00:39:38.640 the First World War, that whole bourgeois Europe was irrevocably shattered. And after it came ethnic

00:39:46.160 nationalism and narcissism, and of course, communism as well. Uh, and an interesting thing then, by the way.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 16, 2024

#354 — Is Moral Progress a Fantasy？

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