Sam Harris’s Anti-tribalism Report Card

Is the anti-woke crusader as good at transcending tribalism as he says he is?

A couple of weeks ago the well-known author and podcaster Sam Harris, speaking on the podcast Decoding the Gurus, said he feels “animus” toward me and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. This isn’t shocking; Ezra and I have both been critical of Harris, and it’s natural to feel animus toward people who criticize you.

Plus, Harris has a habit of complaining that people who criticize his views are misrepresenting them, and in the past he has accused me and Ezra of that. So animus makes all the more sense.

But it turns out the story is more complicated than that. Harris says he doesn’t feel animus toward everyone who misrepresents his views. Take New York Times podcaster Kara Swisher. “Whenever she talks about me, she gets something of significant consequence wrong,” he said. “And yet I don't feel the same animus toward her that I feel toward Robert Wright or Ezra Klein, because honestly I find her more likable as a person.”

Ouch!

The good news is that, in this same podcast, Harris misrepresents my views. Which means, presumably, that I’m entitled to feel animus toward him—a prospect I admit to finding in some respects appealing.

But I’ll hold off on that for now, and say something semi-nice about him: His unflattering characterization of me occurred during a long conversation about the problem of tribalism, and I found the conversation illuminating.

Not all the illumination was intentional. Though Harris spent some time fruitfully analyzing the problem of tribalism, he also spent some time (in my view) illustrating it. But, either way, the illumination comes at a good time for me.

I’ve been thinking about starting a regular or semi-regular newsletter feature about tribalism, and that might include periodically commending people who exhibit anti-tribal behavior and chastising people who exhibit tribal behavior. But doing that would require figuring out what exactly constitutes commendable anti-tribal behavior and what constitutes deplorable tribal behavior. That’s harder than it may sound, and Harris’s podcast conversation drove this point home. Much of it consisted of Harris rebutting charges that he’s tribal and claiming to in various ways be non-tribal or anti-tribal. And judging the merits of these charges and rebuttals turns out to be complicated.

But judging is a job somebody’s gotta do! Besides, playing judge will help me clarify my own thinking about the problem—the problem of tribalism, and the problem of labeling behavior tribal or non-tribal or anti-tribal. So I’ll now review a few of the issues that emerged in the course of Harris’s podcast conversation, giving Sam credit when I deem his behavior commendably anti-tribal and taking off points when I deem it tribal.

Here, then, is Sam Harris’s anti-tribalism report card—his grades along four dimensions of anti-tribal conduct, along with extensive comments from the grader: