Today's question: Professional intellectuals

Once a simple doctoral student in neuroscience who wrote on atheism and Christianity, Sam Harris has grown, over the years, to gift us his wisdom on an ever-expanding almanac of subjects: free will, morality, happiness, Islam, artificial intelligence, mindfulness, “it is always now,” enlightenment without spirituality (or spirituality without religion), reason, Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, the meaning of life, drugs and the meaning of life, faith, racism, the afterlife, consciousness, how to deal with anxiety, death and the present moment, religious violence, sex and gender, dictators, the MeToo movement, and many others. Jordan Peterson, Canadian debonair, has nourished armchair intellectuals everywhere with these topics: twelve rules for life, legalization of marijuana, feminism, Brett Kavanaugh, “ten things that will change your life immediately,” Christianity, advice about depression, Trump, Jung, “truth as the antidote to suffering,” Marxism, “warning to America,” atheism, why some kids are awkward, gender and patriarchy, hate speech, how to salvage a relationship, how to get respected, and more.*

Today’s question is: Why do these men, who once discovered they were good at logic, argument, rhetoric, and creating orgasm out of controversy, come to believe they understand or could speak authoritatively and uniquely about everything? Is there something about a professional intellectual that he believes he covers all things?

The answer, I think, is that Being-in-itself intellectualism is one of the few forms of masturbation (self-medication) – another is great wealth – that feel benign, as opposed to sordid, and like a human form of God. As God is the source of all subjects and the unity of all differences, so a supple mind feels, to its owner, like the greased skeleton key to the variegated universe. To professional considerers such as Harris and Peterson, deep thinking produces the feeling of identity between the intracranial world and the infinite outer one. The inner and outer are One.

This feeling is so confident that Harris can feign undermining that confidence and discuss with Brian Greene, physicist, whether human consciousness might be naturally barred from real or ultimate knowledge, with the same implacability that a dog’s brain is barred from understanding Sartrean Existentialism. I believe that in his heart of heart’s mind of minds, Sam really believes his mind is not so barred, and could discover the infernal quiddities himself, or at least prove to a galactic superior being that no human or alien can ever find fundamental knowledge (because, for example, of the problems of free will and phenomenology).

The problem is that Sam and Jordan are wrong about the discovering power of intellect. Thinking, no matter how genius and diamond drill it is, can never understand human truths, non-perceptual truths, when it is severed from the seat of human living: the body and feeling. 

As an example, Harris believes that road rage would be

“impossible if you’re being mindful of the shortness of life. If you are aware that you are going to die, and that the other person is going to die, and that you’re both going to lose everyone that you love, and you don’t know when, you’ve got this moment of life, this beautiful moment, this moment where your consciousness is bright, where it’s not dimmed by morphine in the hospital, on your last day among the living, and the sun is out, or it’s raining – both are beautiful – and your spouse is alive, and your children are alive, and you’re driving, and you’re not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You’re just running an errand, and that person in front of you who you’ll never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, but which if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively similar to your own, he’s just driving slow. . . . This is your life, the only one you’ve got, and you’ll never get this moment back again, and you don’t know how many more moments you’ll have, no matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You’ve had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them, in a way that they feel it, and in a way that you feel it, and you’ve missed most of them, and you don’t know how many more you’re going to get. You’ve got this next interaction with another human being, to make the world a marginally better place; you’ve got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence, so why not relax and enjoy your life – really relax, even in the midst of struggle, even while doing hard work, even under uncertainty . . .”**

Sam’s is a poetic, emotionally compelling argument. How could anyone deny that we can and must squeeze meaning, serenity and “love” from the short amount of life we are given? But the point would have no legitimacy in any possible way to Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas mass murderer. In him, equaling him, must have been the meaning of injustice, of the failure of his life to ever be human, with the necessary and final expression of that failure the annihilating of the world in fifty-eight people. Harris’s beautiful speech could only inspire beauty in someone capable of it. But how many people are not? So many have lost so much in the beginning that their life became false or die, false or kill.

Harris is a trenchant debater for atheism. But in his ivory tower he remains emotionally unaware of and resistant to the carte blanche we are given by the limitations of perception, thought and mathematics to plumb the mystery of existence. What is the absolute tiniest, indivisible form of matter or energy? A quark or a superstring? What is it made of? More than carte blanche, a blurry treasure map: We are practically required to wonder what there is behind this reified question mark of existence. Is there a mind? (And does it have a long beard?)

Another detached head is Harris’s*** belief that Islam is an especially dangerous “motherlode of bad ideas” which has caused especial harm in the world. Someone whose reality ground is ideas, informed by his self-medicative feelings, will believe that murderous ones such as jihad (“armed struggle against unbelievers” – Wikipedia) bring evil acts. But our deeper feeling teaches us that destructive thoughts come out of pain, and it is unhealed pain – not religious doctrine – that generates misbehavior. I recently talked with a woman who was consumed with guilt about her bad parenting of her children. To help her feel better, I deepened her predicament: “Even had you not passed on your parents’ shaming of you to your children, had you been a saint in your restraint and deeply loving, they would still see the pain in your eyes and be affected by it. Your small distractions during child-centered moments would have caused them mini-abandonments. They would feel the heaviness of your depression and be made heavier by it. There is so much you could not help, because of the gift from your parents.”

No intellectual can understand liberty or women, racial prejudice or happiness, life meaning or belief or anxiety unless he feels his, then realizes the individuality of others’, first-born and adaptive nature. Human knowing comes not from cerebration but from the inescapable personal. There’s no climbing a mountain on amputated legs, or Maslow’s hierarchy to “self-actualization” when you lived through childhood without love. It’s self-medication to believe otherwise. And masturbation to lecture to the world otherwise.

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* Topics pulled from youtube.

** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEDDNJkrkeo.

*** I am limiting my arguments to Harris because I find Peterson’s thinking so invalid – dogmatic and unpsychological for a psychologist – that there is no enjoyment in addressing it.