Where the New Atheists Have Let Us Down

Freelance science writer Dan Jones recently responded to a supporter of Sam Harris outraged over Dan’s criticism of Harris’s popular writings on the role religion plays in terrorist violence. Dan Jones’ concluding remarks strike a chord with me:

(One final thing: I’ve been reading atheists like Dawkins, and older, more philosophical ones like Bertrand Russell and AJ Ayer, since the early 1990s. I’ve also read a lot of Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, and welcomed the rise of the New Atheists in the mid-2000s. However, over time I had to come to accept that on some really important issues, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens simply had no real grasp of the relevant sciences of human behaviour to engage with them in any serious way. It’s been a major disappointment for me – I had hoped that these would be the voices of rational and empirical enquiry into things like religious extremism, but they’ve become like populist columnists, rather than scientifically informed intellectuals. It’s a painful truth to come to recognise that you’ve invested a lot of time and emotional energy in their ideas – I used to be like a one-man PR firm for hard-core atheism until I realised that, when it came to explaining human behaviour (rather than just criticising the emptiness of theology), these guys had nothing to offer, and what they did say was just so wrong that I felt embarrassed to have thought so highly of them in the first place. It took me a good 5 years to shake off this feeling, so maybe you’ll have had a change of mind by 2020.)

I copy here the commentary that led to that conclusion. 

First, here is the opening salvo of “Hannu” taking exception to something Dan Jones had written:

Dan Jones: “Various polls, often cited by writers like Harris as well as radicalisation researchers, suggest that a minimum of 15–20% of Muslims globally accept an Islamist or Jihadi ideology — making for somewhere between 240 million and 320 million cognitive extremists. One obvious question is why just 15-20% accept this ideology, while the vast majority reject it. Saying ‘Jihad is the product of beliefs derived from Islam’ doesn’t even engage with the question, let alone provide an answer”

Hannu: Really, this is the level we’re on? You might as well be asking that if belief in forgiving one’s enemies has to do with core Christians ideology why do so few Christians forgive their enemies? We’ve now using your logic argued that Christians forgiving their enemies doesn’t come from Christian dogma. Except it’s a totally incorrect conclusion, there’s clearly a connection between Christians forgiving their enemies and Christian holy text even if few Christians do this. Did this honestly need to be explained to you? Stupefying.

Dan Jones responded:

Before we get going on this, I want to address your complaint

“Really, this is the level we’re on?”.

First, it is Harris who has brought us to this level with his bold statements about belief and behaviour. He has said some very misguided and demonstrably false things, and then I set out to correct them – and in doing so I have to make some very obvious points. It’s very frustrating for me to have to make these points at all, but even more so when someone turns around and says that I’m the one operating a low level of discourse by doing so, when I’m trying to raise it! Of course, you’re going to maintain that Harris never brought the conversation so low, or invited the kinds of objections I raised. I think that’s impossible to maintain if you’ve got anything approaching a fair mind, or the capacity to read and think for yourself.

Hannu’s full comment can be read here. Following is the remainder of Dan Jones’ response:

So let’s review, once more, some of the things Harris says on the link between belief and behaviour, and pause to consider whether there’s anything amiss in his statements that is worth responding to:

“As a man believes, so he will act”

– not true, and in fact completely untrue, so blindly untrue it’s almost unbelievable. It’s outrageous to then complain, when I point out that in fact beliefs and behaviour are not in a one-to-one relationship, that others factors matter (and often much more so than beliefs), that I’m the one making pathetically obvious points. If that’s the case, surely Harris is guilty of uttering a pathetically simple falsehood. That, however, clearly doesn’t bother. My responding to him does. You’re saying nothing, but you’re telling me everything.

You say

“Harris has never said only beliefs matter. He’s saying they matter significantly.”

If you think the claim “As a man believes, so he will act” is merely the claim that beliefs matter significantly, then you have a severe problem comprehending simple words. If a man acts as he believes, then there’s no need to invoke anything else to explain his behaviour. The sentiment Harris is expressing is as clear as can be: beliefs determine behaviour (not influence, not matter significantly, but determine so that as a man believes, so he will act). That you cannot see this is just a sign of how blinkered you are in your evident infatuation with Harris.

But wait, you’ve got a get-out for this, haven’t you (apologists always do!):

“You’re [sic] taken one simplified sentence and reduced the man’s argument to that. I don’t know if you follow what Harris says, it doesn’t look like you do, but to think the man is saying only beliefs matter and nothing else about human psychology does is a total misconstrual of what you’re arguing against.”

What’s so funny about this is that it’s evident that you don’t read Harris very closely. In The End Of Faith the sentence about people acting as they believe sets up what’s supposed to be a discussion about the links between belief and behaviour, but which actually doesn’t review any evidence about this link, or consider it in much detail at all. Instead, Harris simply uses rhetorical tricks to bring people round to the view that beliefs are what matters in explaining behaviour (not that beliefs are among the many factors we might want to consider in explaining behaviour, but to make beliefs the sole focus). Again, that you can’t see this is evidence of your massively tendentious reading of Harris. (On this score, would you care to show me some excerpts where Harris takes a more nuanced and realistic approach to the links between belief and behaviour?)

You’ll surely say it’s me that’s being tendentious. But what makes me think that Harris thinks that beliefs determine, not just influence, behaviour? Because he says just that!:

“The fact that belief determines behavior is what makes certain beliefs so dangerous”.

The only problem with this claim is that is simply untrue. Or do you now want to defend this claim too, or explain it away? (Presumably it’s my fault he wrote such a simple, bold and profoundly wrong claim – and if I reply to it, I’m unfairly reducing Harris’s arguments to his own words. Oh boy…).

Let’s keep going. At other times, Harris writes

“Which will come first, flying cars and vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgment that beliefs guide behavior and that certain religious ideas—jihad, martyrdom, blasphemy, apostasy—reliably lead to oppression and murder? …. In drawing a connection between the doctrine of Islam and jihadist violence, I am talking about ideas and their consequences … Now can we honestly talk about the link between belief and behavior?”

Reliably? Is that a scientific measure? Just how reliably? My car reliably starts when I turn the key in the ignition, in that it’s to date never failed to do so. If it only worked 1%, 5%, or even 30% of the time, I’d hardly characterise that as reliable. How often do the beliefs that Harris mentions lead to the behaviours he cites? Way less than 30% of the time, and in fact way less than 1% of the time. That’s the significance of the polls I cited, and the numbers of people who actually engage in violent extremism. Of course, your warped mindset just cannot see the relevance of my argument to refuting Harris’s daft claim about the reliable link between extreme beliefs and extreme behaviour. Again, I think you’re suffering from a profound comprehension problem.

I’m not done. Harris says, at the end of the paragraph just quoted, that he wants to have an honest discussion about the links between belief and behaviour. Yet his writes demonstrable falsehoods such as

“As a man believes, so he will act”,

“beliefs determine behaviour”,

and

“The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total”.

Either these are dishonest claims, or they’re absurd simplifications (I’d suggest the latter).

Again, Harris says

“Believe that you are the member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels — and flying a plane into a building is scarcely more than a matter of being asked to do it.”

This is off-the-top-of-head nonsense, with zero empirical support. And again, this is why the polls showing how many people hold similar views, and the statistics on how few people act on them, are relevant. But you cannot accept this, can you?

If you actually read Harris’s entire output, it’s absolutely clear that he’s putting belief front and centre in thinking about behaviour, while relegating everything else to mere background noise. You’ll disagree. You’re tripping.

On the basis of simple assertions about the essentially iron-clad (or at least “reliable”, whatever that means) link between belief and behaviour – which is implied by everything quoted here – Harris then goes on to make some very strong and ethically dubious claims, most notoriously:

“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense.”

Note that he doesn’t say here that the link is somewhat tenuous (or, in many cases, very tenuous), and is mediated by lots of other factors, but builds on his earlier claim that as a man believes so he will act and everything else cited here. He doesn’t really argue for this link in any detail, and all we have to go on are the simple claims he does, in fact, make – the very ones that I’m criticised for criticising! (At this point I don’t know what plane of reality you’re operating on.)

And let’s consider the logic of this amazingly fatuous argument, which is actually presented in reverse order. If there’s someone or a group of people that wants to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others, and there’s no way to dissuade them, or capture them to prevent their violence, then there may be an ethical justification in killing them. I agree: on a more prosaic level, if someone comes at me on the street with their fists raised saying they’re going to beat my brains out, I feel justified in taking pre-emptive action and putting them down before they can harm me. (In fact, I train in a reality-based defense system that delves deeply into the psychological, ethical and legal aspects of the pre-emptive strike, and the use of reasonable force.)

On Harris’s logic, because beliefs determine behaviour, we don’t have to wait until the behavioural threat becomes manifest – it’s going to erupt at some point, because the beliefs are going to lead to the violence sooner or later. (Remember, beliefs determine behaviour, or reliably lead to behaviour, or whatever daft formulation of this mistaken claim you prefer, all of which are variations of “As a man believes, so he will act”.) So just as we can take pre-emptive action, which may involve killing, when we’re faced with an immediate threat, so too are we when we’re confronted with someone/people with beliefs that advocate violence, as we’re just making the justified pre-emptive strike a bit earlier.

Can you really not see that such an argument only makes any sense whatsoever if you believe that beliefs really do determine, not just influence, behaviour? If not, let me clarify for you. If, for the sake of argument, that holding a certain belief led to violent behaviour 100% of the time, then perhaps it would make sense to take action against that person solely on the basis of that belief, before they had actually done anything. If, on the other hand, a given belief only led to violent behaviour 30% of the time, then surely it would be unethical to kill someone for holding that belief?

So here’s a case where a close reading of Harris doesn’t refute my claims about his obsessive focus on beliefs and THE causal determinant of behaviour. No; it supports my reading, especially when taken alongside all of the other things I’ve quoted here. You’ve got a lot of work to do to show that I’ve got Harris wrong on this score.

And it’s worth noting that in defending this remarkable claim, Harris takes exactly the approach you do and cries “I’ve been misunderstood and misrepresented!”. It’s really lame. In fact, his defense, as published online after The End Of Faith came out, is so silly as to defy belief:

“To someone reading the passage in context, it should be clear that I am discussing the link between belief and behavior. The fact that belief determines behavior is what makes certain beliefs so dangerous. When one asks why it would be ethical to drop a bomb on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al Qaeda, the answer cannot be, “Because he killed so many people in the past.” To my knowledge, the man hasn’t killed anyone personally. However, he is likely to get a lot of innocent people killed because of what he and his followers believe about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, etc. A willingness to take preventative action against a dangerous enemy is compatible with being against the death penalty (which I am). Whenever we can capture and imprison jihadists, we should. But in many cases this is either impossible or too risky. Would it have been better if we had captured Osama bin Laden? In my view, yes. Do I think the members of Seal Team Six should have assumed any added risk to bring him back alive? Absolutely not.”

The implication, as stupid as it is, is that if we dropped a bomb on Ayman al-Zawahiri, which many people would endorse on ethical grounds, it would be because of what he believes, not because of what he has done:

“To my knowledge, the man hasn’t killed anyone personally”.

I trust you can see that this is ridiculous. When someone hires a hitman to kill someone, and the hitman carries out the job, the person doing the hiring is not free from legal guilt and culpability merely because they did not personally kill someone. They’re guilty of conspiracy to murder. So the case of al-Zawahiri, who is the head of a loose organisation that plans, supports, and finances acts of terrorism (conspiracy to murder), in no way supports the idea that we’ve already accepted that it’s OK to kill people for what they believe. If al-Zawahiri had merely sat at home thinking about how great it would be to carry out acts of terrorism, and never actually got involved in plans to carry them out, then the ethics of killing him would be very different indeed.

As for you own arguments in your comment – well, I don’t know where to start as they’re either completely off target, or are grist for my mill. You write

“You might as well be asking that if belief in forgiving one’s enemies has to do with core Christians ideology why do so few Christians forgive their enemies? We’ve now using your logic argued that Christians forgiving their enemies doesn’t come from Christian dogma. Except it’s a totally incorrect conclusion, there’s clearly a connection between Christians forgiving their enemies and Christian holy text even if few Christians do this. Did this honestly need to be explained to you? Stupefying.”

Let’s get clear on what’s going on here. Harris says that “As a man believes, so he will act”, and that “beliefs determine behaviour” and “reliably” lead to certain behaviours. I think these are stupid claims, and set out to show why – which involves me making some quite obvious points. That’s not a reason to scold me, however, but Harris! What you write is in complete agreement with me, and contrary to what Harris says. So of course this doesn’t need explaining to me – I’m the one explaining this stuff! But again, you switch things up, and say

“there’s clearly a connection between Christians forgiving their enemies and Christian holy text even if few Christians do this”

(yes, a very weak one as you’re implicitly acknowledging) – but I never said there wasn’t a connection between Islamist ideas and Islamist behaviour. I’m questioning the nature of that connection as proposed by Harris. Does this really need explaining to you? The stupefaction is all mine.

You also say,

“If a doctrine of jihad reliably leads to oppression and murder then why aren’t there more people who believe in jihad doing it? You offer this as some kind of refutation yet it’s like asking that if a secular humanism reliably leads to peaceful cooperation why aren’t there more people cooperating peacefully. Guess secular humanism now has nothing to do with enshrining attitudes that reliably lead to more peaceful cooperation.”

Good grief. This is historically ignorant rubbish. This paragraph suggests you don’t know the first thing about the historical and cultural processes that have led to the norms and institutions that underpin peaceful cooperation. I simply cannot write a book-length reply to correct the level of ignorance and confusion implied by your comment.

You also say,

“These criticisms of Harris make no sense whatsoever. That you thought this is some kind of serious rebuttal of Harris is just amazing. Harris attracts clueless rebuttals like a fire moths.”

That you think my rebuttals lack any force is utterly stunning, but given the very odd lens through with you clearly view all this it’s little surprise: Harris attracts mindless, uncritical and ignorant followers like shit does flies.

Your response to my/Neil’s post, far from showing that I’ve gone off on an irrelevant rant, shows just how deep the problem is. No matter how clearly Harris’s position is spelled out, and then shown to be mistaken, his fawning acolytes will jump up and say,

“No, he’s super smart and would never say anything wrong and simple-minded! He’s actually nuanced and, on every important point, correct!”.

The whole point is to try to show people that, in fact, Harris does make some very bald and bold claims that are easy to refute – and in doing so, you encounter some ideas that really do offer some insight into the nature of violent extremism, a topic that Harris is ostensibly interested in (though it’s clear that he’s only interested in extremism to the extent that it gives him a stick with which to beat religion, especially Islam – which, I should add, I have no love for).

I suspect that none of this is going to have any impact on your views whatsoever. You’re going to say that, despite his written words and repeated formulations of the same basic idea that when it comes to explaining extremist behaviour beliefs are where it’s at, I’m misrepresenting him, that he’s actually offered a much more sophisticated argument than I claim. Well, stick with that narrative if it makes you feel better about Harris’s intellectual and moral stature. Or pause to think whether maybe he’s got himself into a rut on this topic, one that he cannot get out of.

(One final thing: I’ve been reading atheists like Dawkins, and older, more philosophical ones like Bertrand Russell and AJ Ayer, since the early 1990s. I’ve also read a lot of Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, and welcomed the rise of the New Atheists in the mid-2000s. However, over time I had to come to accept that on some really important issues, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens simply had no real grasp of the relevant sciences of human behaviour to engage with them in any serious way. It’s been a major disappointment for me – I had hoped that these would be the voices of rational and empirical enquiry into things like religious extremism, but they’ve become like populist columnists, rather than scientifically informed intellectuals. It’s a painful truth to come to recognise that you’ve invested a lot of time and emotional energy in their ideas – I used to be like a one-man PR firm for hard-core atheism until I realised that, when it came to explaining human behaviour (rather than just criticising the emptiness of theology), these guys had nothing to offer, and what they did say was just so wrong that I felt embarrassed to have thought so highly of them in the first place. It took me a good 5 years to shake off this feeling, so maybe you’ll have had a change of mind by 2020.)

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