Sam Harris and the modern atheists

I once watched a very interesting talk given by Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. Harris is one of these modern atheists who mostly strike me as a force for good in a world where organized religion and violence too often go hand-in-hand. But I've always had some ambivalence about their agenda, and before watching this I wasn't sure exactly why. Harris discusses some of their public relations bloopers, one being that they label themselves (nobody in the Civil Rights movement ever adopted the label of "non-racist") and another being that they allow the religionists to frame the arguments and assign to them the most easily attacked position. He also points out the benefit of claiming intellectual honesty as their first priority, even above atheism itself. I think I had a gut sense that they had played a little fast and loose with genuinely important things, and I hadn't managed to articulate it to myself as clearly as he has done here.

One thing I found enormously appealing in this talk is the thoughtful and sympathetic treatment that Harris gives to contemplative traditions, starting around the 23:22 mark in the video. Starting out almost apologetically to his fellow atheists, he goes on to note that in every culture there are people perceptive enough to realize that the conventional basis for happiness is little more than the attempt to repeat past pleasant experiences: to have continued access to good health, good weather, good friends, good food, good books, in order to hold one's boredom and dissatisfaction at bay forever. Harris uses the wonderful phrase "to keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road".

Meanwhile, even in times of peace and prosperity, loved ones die and we know we'll die too, and we get sick from time to time, and there are many other threats to our hopes for perpetual happiness. So these perceptive people begin to wonder whether there is some form of happiness that does not depend upon repeated pleasures or the satisfaction of all one's desires, and they set off in search. Sometimes an initial direction may be suggested by a contemplative tradition within one religion or another.

Such people, if they discover anything at all, consistently discover that the source of their suffering is discursive thought misapplied, the same insight that informed the development of cognitive therapy. Our moods are mercilessly batted around by a more-or-less random sequence of thoughts, and we suffer because of "our habitual failure to recognize thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought... and when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available".

There is a second part to this video, the Q-and-A session following his talk, and two questions expand on this theme in interesting directions, starting at 10:00 and at 17:50, the latter in response to a question from Dan Dennett.

I'm approaching the age at which people typically retire, and I have a pretty long list of things I had hoped to accomplish and have not. In my remaining time, I expect more and larger disappointments on the way. Keeping my foot on the gas until I run out of road is not looking like an ideal strategy.