Critiquing Sam Harris's Positivism

James Shaheen at Tricycle posted some sections from an interesting article critiquing Sam Harris's positivism, which is a particular position on the importance of the scientific method:

Positivism refers to a set of epistemological perspectives and philosophies of science which hold that the scientific method is the best approach to uncovering the processes by which both physical and human events occur. Though the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, the concept was developed in the early 19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte.

So in the post, Shaheen quotes Jackson Lears's article- Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris - which appeared at the Nations's website. Lears is a professor of history at Rutgers University - he was offering a rather critical review of Harris's most recent book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Moral Values.

I tend to agree with his assessment - Harris has always shown the potential to develop a more integral perspective, but he has consistently failed to do so, even after having appeared on Integral Naked with Stuart Davis.

Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris

Jackson Lears
April 27, 2011 | This article appeared in the May 16, 2011 edition of The Nation.

Here are some excerpts:

More a habit of mind than a rigorous philosophy, positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes. (This strain of positivism is not to be confused with that of the French sociologist Auguste Comte.) The decades between the Civil War and World War I were positivism’s golden age. Positivists boasted that science was on the brink of producing a total explanation of the nature of things, which would consign all other explanations to the dustbin of mythology. Scientific research was like an Easter egg hunt: once the eggs were gathered the game would be over, the complexities of the cosmos reduced to natural law. Science was the only repository of truth, a sovereign entity floating above the vicissitudes of history and power. Science was science.

Though they often softened their claims with Christian rhetoric, positivists assumed that science was also the only sure guide to morality, and the only firm basis for civilization. As their critics began to realize, positivists had abandoned the provisionality of science’s experimental outlook by transforming science from a method into a metaphysic, a source of absolute certainty. Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the “fit” and the sterilization or elimination of the “unfit.”

Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginably destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of scientific research to advanced technology.

And this . . . . Lears has just spent several paragraphs explaining the "rise" of the New Atheists, as they were named by the media (Richard Dawins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) in reply to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They viewed "the war on terror" as a war on, in Hitchens's words, "theocratic barbarism."

Hitchens and Harris, in particular, wasted no time enlisting in Bush’s crusade, which made their critique of religion selective. It may have targeted Christianity and occasionally Judaism, but hatred and fear of Islam was its animating force. Despite their disdain for public piety, the New Atheists provided little in their critique to disturb the architects and proselytizers of American empire: indeed, Hitchens and Harris asserted a fervent rationale for it. Since 9/11, both men have made careers of posing as heroic outsiders while serving the interests of the powerful.

Of the two, Harris has the more impressive credentials. In addition to being a prolific pundit on websites, a marquee name on the lecture circuit and the author of three popular books, The End of Faith (2004), Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) and The Moral Landscape (2010), he is a practicing neuroscientist who emerges from the lab to reveal the fundamental truths he claims to have learned there. Chief among them are the destructive power of religion, which Harris always defines in the most literal and extreme terms, and the immediate global threat of radical Islam. Everything can be explained by the menace of mobilized religious dogma, which is exacerbated by liberal tolerance. Stupefied by cultural relativism, we refuse to recognize that some ways of being in the world—our own especially—are superior to others. As a consequence, we are at the mercy of fanatics who will stop at nothing until they “refashion the societies of Europe into a new Caliphate.” They are natural-born killers, and we are decadent couch potatoes. Our only defense, Harris insists, is the rejection of both religion and cultural relativism, and the embrace of science as the true source of moral value.

Harris claims he is committed to the reasonable weighing of evidence against the demands of blind faith. This is an admirable stance, but it conceals an absolutist cast of mind. He tells us that because “the well-being of conscious [and implicitly human] creatures” is the only reliable indicator of moral good, and science the only reliable means for enhancing well-being, only science can be a source of moral value. Experiments in neuroimaging, Harris argues, reveal that the brain makes no distinction between judgments of value and judgments of fact; from this finding he extracts the non sequitur that fact and value are the same. We may not know all the moral truths that research will unearth, but we will soon know many more of them. Neuroscience, he insists, is on the verge of revealing the keys to human well-being: in brains we trust.

The whole article is worth the read.

While I agree with Lears on the dangers of positivism, he also throws out some red herrings in his polemic (and I use that word in the best possible sense). He disses Harris for not talking about the "dark side" of the scientific world - the involvement of scientists with the military-industrial complex, the often hidden funding and agendas in research, the politics, and other issues:

Nor is any attention paid to the ways that chance, careerism and intellectual fashion can shape research: how they can skew data, promote the publication of some results and consign others to obscurity, channel financial support or choke it off. Rather than provide a thorough evaluation of evidence, Harris is given to sweeping, unsupported generalizations. His idea of an argument about religious fanaticism is to string together random citations from the Koran or the Bible. His books display a stunning ignorance of history, including the history of science. For a man supposedly committed to the rational defense of science, Harris is remarkably casual about putting a thumb on the scale in his arguments.

These are important, but Harris is not concerned with the shadow of science (although maybe he should be) but, rather, with how best to use its light, its gift to persuade people to stop believing in mythical beings and killing others in their name. Unfortunately, when you hear Harris or the others talk about religion, what you hear is all of the bad stuff, the shadow side, at its lowest level of development of compassion raised up as the whole or religion - any positive aspects of religion are ignored or dismissed as aberrations. That's very wrong-headed and very unfair.

What we really have here is a postmodern critique (with its abhorrence of hierarchy and rationalism) of the rational perspective (which abhors relativism and pre/post-rational thinking). It's basically one of the two major clashes we see right now, best exemplified by Michael Shermer vs. Deepak Chopra (rational vs. relativistic) and Richard Dawkins vs. all religion (rational vs. traditional/deferential). The positivists, despite often having the more valid or useful perspective, are probably going to lose both of these battles.

E.O. Wilson might be the one bright spot for them - he has been increasing integrating the hierarchical view of the positivists with the expansive view of the postmoderns - his sociobiology is still not widely accepted but he is on the right path (and others are not far behind).

Tags: Science, morality, ethics, society, rationality, Philosophy, history, James Shaheen, Tricycle, positivism, postmodernism, relativism, Sam Harris, Jackson Lears, The Nation, The Moral Landscape, scientific method, 9/11, theocratic barbarism, E.O. Wilson