The following conversation took place between esteemed members of The Falls Society DP, The Immortal Goon, Q Musing, and Process.  In this conversation we reference three articles.  The first article is an interview of atheist(I guess…?) Sam Harris by Salon.  The second article is a published correspondence between Sam Harris and notable political commentator(read: DANGEROUS SOCIALIST) Noam Chomsky.  The third article is a correspondence between The Guardian “journalist” George Monbiot and Noam Chomsky.

DP: Long interview, but interesting http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sam-harris-the-salon-interview/#.VlYSemwpV70.twitter

The Immortal Goon: I met Sam Harris and didn’t think much of him.  It was an event at the Unitarian Church and he’d talk about how important spirituality was, while at the same time advocating atheism if challenged on it.

At one point, someone asked him about yoga, and Harris was all into it, and then asked the dude back what kind of yoga he did.  It was some other kind than Harris, and Harris went off on how only the TRUE form of yoga was the one he did that had his spiritual mumbo-jumbo attached to it.

DP: Weird.  Sounds like a pretentious dick.  In that article he comes off as a complete atheist and quite rational.

Or at least makes interesting and valid points.

TIG: I’ll read it, probably instead of grading.

DP: I read it instead of working.

TIG: I did totally agree with Chomsky in his debate with Harris.  Harris, it seemed to me, engineered it as a way to put himself up there with Chomsky, who then proceeds to wipe the floor with him—I thought.  Here’s that debate: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse

DP: That exchange was, indeed, “tedious.”

TIG: It was.  It goes on and on, and they can’t find common ground.  Though I do, again, agree with Chomsky in the article.  If nothing else, because he seems less reliant on ethical intent and more on actual reality.

DP: I didn’t get a lot out of it from either side.  I think Noam is better spoken.  And yes, I agree, too much reliance on ethical intent by Sam Harris.  I think that ethical intent is important, but I’m not sure they really got to a point in the argument where it was proper to address the intent.  They couldn’t even really agree on the facts of what happened in the al Shifa bombing to begin with.

Interesting, though.  And reading that is much better than trying to drum up work in my office.

TIG: I don’t know how important ethical intent was, at least in the situation they described.  The ultimate diss was Sam saying, “You said I didn’t know what I was talking about about this thing, see in this youtube video!” And Noam was like, “I was talking about Dawkins.  I have never read a word you’ve written.”

DP: Sam Harris seems to use the “intent” argument to justify all US actions

TIG: Right.  But both admitted they didn’t have the full intelligence facts that Clinton had, so they could only speculate on his intent anyway.  Harris thought it was important to assume Clinton had the intent to blow up a weapons factory as protection; Chomsky that since it was actually a medicine factory the intent didn’t matter much.

Man…I hate grading papers.

Q Musing: Ugh. I got like 75% of the way through it. My thoughts, Noam Chomsky sucks. From what I could tell, he was arguing that it was even worse what we did because we didn’t care about collateral consequences and treated people in Africa like “ants.” Flawed reasoning for at least two reasons. 1. There is no indication that the 9/11 attackers didn’t see us nonbelievers as less than human. In fact, that is exactly what they think, treating us as apostates who God instructs them to destroy like vermin. They also explicitly believe that Muslim lives are more important. Noam makes the classic mistake of thinking that westerners have a monopoly on disregarding other cultures. 2. If I recall correctly, 99 to 100% of the victims of the embassy bombing were Africans. We responded to an attack that killed pretty much only Africans. Further, al Qaeda attacked an embassy in Africa without any concern about collateral damage of Africans because they are racist and think Africans are lower than Arabs. Again, Noam ignores this.

I don’t know the Harris guy. He seems…whatever

TIG: I don’t think he was defending the actions of Al Qaeda at all.  In fact, the opposite.  I think he was undermining Harris’s assertion that, “We are now living in a world that can no longer tolerate well-armed, malevolent regimes. Without perfect weapons, collateral damage—the maiming and killing of innocent people—is unavoidable…If we want to draw conclusions about ethics—as well as make predictions about what a given person or society will do in the future—we cannot ignore human intentions. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.”  With such a position, one could justify 9/11 or Japanese or German war atrocities, etc.  To declare that the enemy is some kind of inhuman and you can’t expect to save everyone you’re trying to save so go gang-busters isn’t a tenable position.  The intentions, whether to save the US from its secularism and save souls by a big display of terrorism, or to retaliate based on good intentions with a bad outcome, aren’t as important as the actual reality of either action.  At least that’s my reading on it.  I could be wrong.

I’m also poisoned against Harris because when I saw him he loved to rant and rave about his correct spiritualism guiding him and how everyone else’s ethics were wrong as they didn’t conform to his abstract spiritual nonsense.

Q: I don’t know anything about Harris and I was not particularly impressed by anything he wrote

It won’t let me cut and paste but Chomsky says intention doesn’t matter because it all just boils down to the fact that we don’t care about African lives.
Here is the passage, got it to cut and paste:
“And of course they knew that there would be major casualties.  They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?”
So, purposeful killing is better than collateral damage because it recognizes human life
That is a dumb shit argument.
Let’s use that it court, negligent homicide will be punished more severely than intentional murder because the murderer valued human life

TIG: I would argue the context in the debate is important as Harris feels compelled to argue that our intention wasn’t to kill all the Africans and deprive them of medicine—so people should just brush it off with a sorry.  Chomsky, seems to me, to argue that it doesn’t matter what the intention was—a bunch of Africans died from the action anyway.

I tend to be more sympathetic with the result than the intention.  So, in that respect, I’m biased toward Chomsky.
But, again, I won’t really say I’m not unbiased in regard to Harris.

Q: It is just as idiotic to ignore intentions as it is to ignore consequences because of intentions

TIG: I’m always seeing him cutting down some guy for practicing the wrong kind of hokey-dopey spiritualism because it’s not the hokey-dopey spiritualism that Sam Harris adheres to.  Which is the REAL hokey-dopey spiritualism because he’s an atheist expect for his hokey-dopey spiritualism.

Q: Sam Harris is a dumb name too. Just saying

TIG: From a review from Harris: “You can have spiritual experience and understand the most thrilling changes in human consciousness in a context that’s secular and universal and not freighted with dogma,” which is so annoying to me.  He’s basically a protestant as it’s his own personal CORRECT view of spiritualism that is real, the established churches just have it all wrong.  So that makes him an atheist…somehow.

He describes a walk in Jesus’ footsteps, and the way he was touched by it.

This happened on “an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon,” Harris writes. “As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self — an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ — vanished.”

But really guys, he’s an atheist because established churches don’t understand a personal relationship with Jesus the way that he does.

Bah…

Q: Chomsky has that experience when he is apologizing for terrorists. Hey-o!

Process: Finished the Harris article, going to work on the Chomsky.  At work so I have to hold a conversation while reading which is aggravating because this stuff is fun to talk about.

I really liked Harris in DP’s linked article.  I enjoy someone with at least a modicum of spirituality whose grounded in secularism because I self identify most with that.  I think that TIG’s comment on Harris’ religion wasn’t really fair.  Just because he shared a moment of inspiration from a book he doesn’t believe in doesn’t make him inherently religious.  I think in context as a Westerner with an inkling of spirituality his reaction is understandable even as an atheist which he seems to be.

However, Chomsky killed Harris dead.  Harris looked like an idiot in their dialogue.  Harris looked weak, pretty much arguing over semantics instead of the meat of the what Chomsky was trying to start if anything.  Harris appeared childish and naive, I felt.

Chomsky analyzed the situation and asked for critical thought and Harris was like, I think the suffering we did was done with the best of intentions.  How much weight do you give intentions vs. consequences? Harris is naive to think the intentions were as pure as he felt and oblivious to the reactions of people who probably aren’t that concerned about what Clinton was meaning when he sentenced thousands of their family members to death.  I think intentions are important but perception of intentions are probably even more crucial as the perceptions are all we have.  He perceived Clinton’s as well intentioned but I doubt the dying Africans perceived it like that.  To me, it would be perceived as an attack and therefore justification for attacking when the system appears rigged in favor of the 1st world powers.

It’s a crappy situation.  I think anybody would raise their arms up and say this is just too complex to solve easily as we’ve put some of the best minds we can on this case and we haven’t made a lot of headway.

DP: I agree.  I think intentions are important, and we very rarely target civilians intentionally.  But, Harris sort of ignores that even when we kill civilians accidentally, it makes people much more likely to hate us.

P: Was not impressed with Harris though.  He was trying to punch above his weight class intellectually and became petulant when Chomsky didn’t think it was really worth discussing if Harris wasn’t going to even consider what Chomsky was saying and dismissing Chomsky as not caring about the morality when he called Chomsky a supremely moral person.  Also he didn’t put the research in and wanted to discuss with Chomsky without doing the leg work.  If I were Noam I would have been insulted.

DP: Two things I think we should do: continue to export the revolution, and fervently support Islamic reformation.

And yeah, Harris was out of his league.

P: Yes on both accounts

Emphatically

DP: I dislike debates, often, because they boil down to these absurd arguments of semantics, as you pointed out.
I’m not saying there wasn’t substance there, there was, but so much of it was “you said that I said this, when in reality I was saying this.  You cretin.”

P: I’m surprised Harris printed it.  I guess I respect the honesty but man he looked stupid.  It was a pointless episode provoked by Harris to put himself as Chomsky’ equal without really researching or reading up on his stuff.  Harris was going on how he perceived the intentions were and based everything around his feelings on it.  Well, if my family were killed by medicine destroyed by a foreign country my feelings would be that they were trying to kill my family because they’re evil, amoral fuckers who don’t give a shit.

Then you boil it down to statistics and Chomsky is talking about real life consequences to actions that are quantifiable.  Harris was still hung up on the intentions even when Chomsky accurately pointed out that monsters often deny their intentions were unjust.

I think they could have had something there had Harris put the fucking effort in to read up on Chomsky and the situations he was discussing.

DP: Honestly.  He was emailing him.  He could have paused and done the research.

P: Yeah I know.  I think that’s why Chomsky balked at it.

He was irritated and then Harris started focusing on Chomsky justified irritation and used that as a moral victory appealing to an audience he always wanted hence why he set it up as something he was always going to publish to give him legitimacy.  It backfired, I felt.  This even though I really liked the Harris article you linked with him on Salon which I agreed a lot more with him.

DP: I agreed with a lot of what he said in the Salon article as well.

P: Yeah, 100%

Q: I wasn’t really impressed with either of them. Harris came off as shallow and Chomsky came off like a dickhead who would only debate semantics. It was a useless exercise

P: The difference to me was that Harris sought the engagement and wanted to publicize it while Noam was ambivalent but didn’t see a point as it was indeed a useless exercise.  Noam thought it was wierd to post a private dialogue which produced little of value.  Harris touted it though I don’t think his reasonings were insincere to his credit.

Q: Noam basically refused to engage at all and talked down to Harris and basically said he was stupid. I mean, cool I guess, but Noam basically embodies everything that people dislike about liberals. He is a negative to the cause as far as I am concerned.

I think this “debate” is another example of Chomsky attempt to ignore any non western atrocities. He refuses to acknowledge the atrocities in Bosnia and wrote the forward for a book that said it never happened
http://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/

DP: In reference to the article you just posted, Q, I copied this paragraph because it was particularly ridiculous:

“All of that [atrocities committed by America] is incomparably more significant than the question of how many people Serbs “executed” at Srebrenica as distinct from killing them in combat (the issue between you and Herman, once your misquotation is corrected: and the fact is that you don’t know, he doesn’t know, and we will probably never find out) and whether the huge number slaughtered in Rwanda (Herman’s estimate is higher than yours) were mostly Hutu or mostly Tutsi.”

Then I saw the author himself reprinted this paragraph in italics at the end of the article.  I think it pretty much sums up the debate.  Chomsky wants to focus on atrocities of the west, and refuses to even engage on anything else.

Q: Pretty much. I like that a lifelong academic says basically “well, we will never know exactly how many died, so we can just move along and forget about it”

I always think it is interesting when people become so obsessed with actions of the west. In a way, it marginalized other people by treating them as people with no agency and no capability to act

DP: Other points-

It really, really seems like Chomsky did NOT read the book that he wrote a forward for.

The “journalist” for the guardian started the website arrestblair.org. So fair and balanced.

Interesting that we see another debate published in correspondence format.  I wonder how common this is.

Q: That is what it funny about it. The guardian is insanely anti western but somehow Chomsky beefs with it

P: I agree with you guys on this article.  Chomsky looks like he’s purposely avoiding taking any responsibility for his own actions which is the whole point of the correspondence.  Here he hides behind semantics, the whole genocide/not a genocide stuff but doesn’t address what I think are very reasonable points made by the author.  He didn’t do his research and the author points this out but instead of replying in any form of accountability he says it would be cowardly to deny he made a mistake.  In this dialogue the author seems to have sincere intentions and is baffled that Noam is giving him the run around.  It’s clear that Chomsky didn’t want to deal with it once the guy nailed him on a few things so he talks past him instead.  I still think Harris looked like an idiot in the previous article with Noam but here I think Noam looks like a glacier with his views, unwilling to shift because it’s too large a part of his ego.

Cowardly to admit he made a mistake, even

I have more to say but I’m tired and I drank too much today.  I had a tougher time chewing through that correspondence because it veered away from the Harris/Chomsky pissing contest and the scorn was more veiled.  Chomsky didn’t look good though.

The melancholic ending was especially poignant when he realized his intellectual hero was basically a dickhole hypocrite more concerned with his agenda and “looking cowardly” than the legitimacy of something he essentially signed off on when he wrote a foreword for it.