The Moral Clarity of Sam Harris
Why the man who drives everyone nuts is maybe the one to trust.
The title of this essay will have already divided some readers before I get to the first argument. For many, the words “Sam Harris” and “moral clarity” in the same line are uncontroversial, even obvious. Harris, they tell you, has spent more than two decades saying unfashionable things plainly, and often more lucidly than any other public intellectual alive, especially on religion and the moral idiocies of our age. But to some on the left, he is the “Islamophobe” who wants to profile brown people at airports. To some on the right, he is the man who can dissect jihadism from outer space but has a meltdown the moment populism enters the room. Even his own large and devoted audience cannot quite fit him into an ideological box, and often finds him maddening for reasons of its own. This is someone who’s clearer than most of his critics, more exasperating than many of his admirers care to admit, and somehow charges an incredible $25 a month on Substack for the privilege, which many thousands are apparently willing to pay.
I stumbled on Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, the month after it was published in 2004. I read it once, in one sitting, then immediately read it again. I was so impressed that I handed copies to friends, one of whom skimmed the first chapter before throwing it disdainfully on the floor and declaring it racist. That category error – mistaking criticism of Islam for hatred of Muslims – would alternately bore and infuriate the rest of us for the next two decades, right up to the present day, when the British state still worries more about “Islamophobia” than protecting its own children. Harris has been as useful a guide to that moral confusion as anyone, and he brings the same clarity to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which, in hindsight, is where all this was always heading. I’ll come back to that.
First, let’s briefly map the path by which he became one of the leading public intellectuals of our time.
Harris emerged as one of the “Four Horsemen” of the new atheist movement that followed 9/11, alongside Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. That chapter feels like something from another age – it was another age – when rationalism was in vogue and social media was in its infancy. Nobody talks about atheism any more, partly because a new religion stepped into the arena and got everyone arguing about gender and race instead.
Later, Harris became associated with the “intellectual dark web”, a loose collection of heterodox thinkers and academics arguing against the new orthodoxy, including Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Eric Weinstein (who coined the phrase as a joke) and others. That lasted about five minutes, and by the time Covid came along, nobody could agree what they were for or against.
His primary concern throughout these years has been the moral significance of belief – that ideas matter, and that bad ones matter in ways the West would rather not think about. That was essentially the argument in his first book, and it runs through everything he’s written and talked about since, including Islam, Trump, Covid and Israel. Islam most of all, though.
Long before progressive ideology had trained polite society to treat moral clarity as indecent, Harris understood that liberalism cannot survive without the ability to criticise dogma. The left had been explaining away extremism since Salman Rushdie went into hiding for writing a novel, but 9/11 ushered in a remarkable new settlement on the part of the cultural and political establishment. Islam, we were told, was somehow deserving of special exemptions from scrutiny. We learned that criticism of Islam as a set of ideas was equivalent to hatred of Muslims.
To see that moral confusion play out, we can turn to a fascinating cultural artefact: the exchange between Ben Affleck and Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher.
Affleck, standing in for polite society everywhere, simply cannot compute the moral logic Harris is offering. All he’s got is indignation. All he hears is bigotry because he’s soaked up the relentless messaging that honest discussion of political Islam is somehow a form of racism, even though Islam is obviously not a race but a set of ideas. “It’s gross, it’s racist”, says Affleck, echoing a sentiment an entire class has marinated in for a quarter of a century. Affleck isn’t stupid, by the way, nor do I think he’s dishonest. He’s just confused somewhere between becoming Batman and performing the duties of a conscientious Hollywood liberal. Like so many well-intentioned and busy people, he’s absorbed something from the surrounding noise, the way some people pick up an accent. The real dishonesty belongs to the people who feed it to him – the ones who know it’s a category error and reach for it anyway, because admitting it would lose them the argument. Such has been the political culture of our time, with truth a secondary consideration to the demands of the tribe.
Which brings us to Trump, that perfect distillation of everything Harris loathes. Trump, I would agree, is a grotesque figure in many ways: mendacious, egotistical, and vulgar. In 2016, Harris painted a typically vivid image of the man:
“Blow up a balloon without tying off the end, and hold it up high, and then release and watch it fly chaotically around the room. That’s Trump’s mind. In my view that’s what we’d be doing with the country if we put him in charge. Just hitching our future to a totally chaotic system.”
The image was funny because it was true, and the first presidential term bore it out, helped by a media class that went off the rails and still doesn't understand the strange lifeform that is Donald Trump. But Harris did get somewhat obsessive on the subject – enough that even sympathetic listeners started tuning out whenever Trump came up, and his critics claimed he had full-on "Trump Derangement Syndrome". Yet to me, it's always been obvious that Trump is simply a bullshitter in the sense Frankfurt discussed in his famous essay. Unlike a liar who knows the truth and intentionally hides it, a bullshitter is largely indifferent to whether what he says is true or false. Trump doesn't care about the facts; he cares about making the deal. Next to that, you have institutional lying that looks respectable on the surface, speaks in whole sentences and talks about empathy and "saving our democracy". This is lying in the proper sense – deliberate, fluent and ultimately more deceptive.
The Clintons and Obamas of the world seem more “presidential” on the surface, but decorum is not the same as honesty. The people who lied about borders, sex, grooming gangs and political Islam do not become less dishonest because they wear appropriate expressions of concern and speak in managerial clichés. Trump may deal in obvious lies and pointless insults, but on certain basic realities, he grasps the truth that matters: that countries need borders, that men are not women, and that radical Islam is a serious threat. One doesn’t have to wear a MAGA hat or drink “liberal tears” from a mug with his face on it to see that these are statements of common sense that only the hypereducated class could fail to recognise.
Then came Covid.