I find Sam Harris's barely concealed smugness and aura of enlightened rationalism grating, and his unabashed apologism for Israel and Islamophobia indefensible and reprehensible. The extent to which people professing devotion to spirituality can be egregiously unaware of their own shortcomings never ceases to baffle me.
If I recall, I actually found Bob through Sam around the time "Why Buddhism Is True" came out, and I think Bob was on Sam's show, so seeing all of the mutual animosity was a tad disorienting. That said, I listened to the Decoding the Gurus podcast and didn't find it particularly informative when it came to tribalism, precisely because it didn't seem like anyone had an agreed upon definition.
Here's an idea: Get Paul Bloom to mediate. He was on both podcasts within the last week promoting his book and seems like someone both Sam and Bob respect. Make it happen, Bob!
I guess I don't really understand what tribalism is. It's still not clear to me what tribe Sam defends. You make a case that he is not perfectly rational and that he has self-serving bias maybe. I find you both quite rational and objective (perfection is the enemy of the good here). I've read both of your many book and I don't see what you guys are squabbling about. Bob, I don't see how you can't defend the idea of attempting to be as reasonable and objective as possible, you are quite good at those things yourself. Your frequent podcast guess, not so much. Shake hands and makeup with Sam. There's enough divisiveness these days. You two are in the same tribe - those trying to be reasonable, but sometimes failing.
Apropos of the tendency to see connections where there may not be any between opponents, the Yale professor Paul Bracken described this in a class I was a TA for and I thought it was a neat idea. I wrote to him about it recently and he wasn't aware of a name for it. I remember explaining it to students like this: you're looking at people far away from you, they look small and all clustered together over there - all in one spot - while the people nearby (your allies) are all around you, some in front, some behind, left, right etc - you see their distinctiveness and individuality. Seems like a variant of the fundamental attribution error but with some different nuances.
As others have said, this needs a Julia Galef-style arbiter to define some terms.
It seems to me that Harris dismantled the ‘tribalism’ accusation comprehensively (what can it mean if you can’t define the tribe and show a pattern of behaviour that is driven by conscious or unconscious loyalty to that tribe?)
But he did admit to being susceptible to ‘bias’ and the niceties of interpersonal networks as much as anyone else—and this is where I suspect you’d end up agreeing after a sufficiently long conversation.
Your critique uses broader terms like the ‘psychology of tribalism’, which refers to a pattern of biases, all of which I imagine Harris would admit to being susceptible to. But the cognitive biases associated with tribalism are surely a different thing to tribalism itself.
I had pretty much lost interest in anything that Sam Harris has to say after his disappearing act in the conversation with Evan Thompson some months ago. I'm still mystified why he was so ill-prepared and didn't even seem to realise that he'd not done his homework (particularly on the history of Buddhism, both recent and ancient, and on Thompson's work, which is very germane to Harris' Waking Up project). By contrast, the recent conversation you and Thompson had, despite your sometimes substantial differences in views, was focussed, informed, and illuminating. I really enjoyed it.
I summoned the will and courage to listen to Harris' recent conversation on the Decoding the Gurus podcast and largely agree with your overall report card--though, I probably would have given him a C-, factoring in the fact he again alluded to in this conversation that he's considering himself largely free of bias and tribalism thanks to insights he's gained through his meditation practice. It's almost a caricature of a position that one therefore should be extremely careful not to take.
On the other hand, that he apparently very generously gives out free subscriptions to his app made me view him more favourably. But I'm wary that he might get pulled more and more into the guru corner--as a podcaster and app producer, he needs to cultivate a fairly large audience (i.e., followers). He has multiple fine lines to walk, and he's spreading himself very thin.
I love you and Sam both, so I'll continue to hope you two kids eventually work it out. I'll say this though, you're a much better writer than he is sir. This seems fair, and I'll grade it a solid A (the + deducted for revenge-writing an article against your adversary.)
I am new to your newsletter, I don't listen to podcasts, have long since cancelled my farcebook and instuhgrim accounts and never signed up for twiddle. I much prefer reading material with some meat on its bones, so your newsletter works for me.
I applaud your willingness to take on the whole tribalism subject and look forward to getting it much clearer in my mind as your narrative unfolds in future installments.
I belong to several "tribes," though not with the clarity of actual tribe members, as someone noted. Perhaps we err in placing more weight on the concept than it is designed to bear, but I continue, at least at this point, to find it useful to think about how we identify with tribes, how we practice tribalism, and how that impacts our ability to sustain and even improve The Great American Experiment--which is the reason for my interest in the subject.
Here is just a brief context for one application of the concept in my case. I was registered as a Republican for over fifty years and never voted the straight party ticket. Not once. Then, fourteen years ago, I switched to Independent status, unaffiliated with a party. In Arizona, where I live now, voting in primaries--where the rubber usually meets the road--is a real mess for people like me. So, what I have to do is pick a party ballot that comes closest to my preference, vote only for the candidates I support on that ballot, and leave the rest of the boxes blank. On presidential preference elections, I temporarily re-register for a party, and then switch back to who I really am as soon as the election is over. What a circus!
So, am I now a member of a tribe called Independent Voters? Am I exercising political tribal behavior?
I will end with this comment in response to those questions. Yes, I am influenced by the associations and literature and propaganda associated with my several tribes and I violate tribal prescriptions whenever I think it makes sense for issues larger than the tribes (and most are). I am also influenced by input from sources other than the tribe. My friends used to let me get away with that, if they even knew. Now, I've lost relationships because I was perceived as being a traitor or spineless or whatever other negative label comes in handy.
So, what interests me as this dialogue continues is the relationship between membership in or identification with a tribe, on the one hand, and the practice of tribalism, on the other. And--especially--how all of that plays out in running our country other than into the ground.
Haven't read this yet. But I was stunned that Sam Harris almost seemed to at one point equate his level of enlightenment with Joseph Goldstein's. I'm not privy to each man's total experience and efforts practicing but I don't think it would even matter. Has Joseph Goldstein ever said anything as wildly reactive and rooted in personal, well, animus, as that Ezra Klein is far left? Sam absolutely does not have the lightness of spirit, does not exude the mastery of non-clinging, that one would associate with and surely expect from any successful and experienced meditation practitioner. The way he goes on about how he's accessed all of this insight about the human condition and the workings of his own mind palace from his time spent sitting - it's like Sam, you sound like it's about all you can do to not lose your entire shit about 'identity politics' every three seconds. Not a way of carrying yourself befitting some kind of nigh-enlightened guru that's seen the light!
I've actually come round in recent years more to Sam's position on Islam simply because in the UK we have a bunch of Islamist Youtubers who have over half a million subscribers each who make videos explaining how in their ideal Islamic state other apostate youtubers would be executed, and they'd be watching. Whereas in the past I was much more sympathetic to Robert's view that we're better of trying to nurture whatever the opposite of a clash of civilisations is. But in any case, this business about Sam being such an advanced practitioner of anti-wokeness and stuff is pure exhilaratingly cringe. Robert hit the nail on the head when he said Sam lacks a sense of humour and it's because he takes himself so seriously as this public intellectual who has transcended tribalism and solved moral philosophy when the truth is he's done neither.
The thing that gets me, while he's not a bad person, Michael Brooks was right about him: Sam's just a privileged trust-fund intellectual who spends all day railing about wokeness and barely ever uses his platform to support medicare for all or things that might actually make a material difference to people's lives.
While it may be true that Sam didn't accurately represent your views, this fact says very little about Sam's tribalism or even specifically his failure to "accurately represent the views of people in tribes [he] consider[s] adversarial." He mentions that both of you have made this critique about his tribalism. Then he goes on to describe Ezra's critique. That form of the critique is more salient to him for many reasons. He finds it more galling. It connects to larger themes about dysfunctional conversations in our culture. He had a much discussed 3 hour conversation in person with Ezra. And for him to spend the time untangling your critique of him as tribal with Ezra's doesn't necessarily lend itself to the back and forth exchange of ideas which is a conversation. I haven't listened back to the podcast, but I think the flow of conversation makes it fairly clear that Sam hasn't actually conflated your view with Ezra's. One of the hosts pushes back and says something like "not everyone who makes this critique does so in racial terms," and Sam's response is something like "yes, but Ezra's critique is explicitly racial." This incident is less about tribalism and more about you not getting your due. I like this format and idea, but it's obvious that the execution was marred by self indulgence and sensitivity to personal slights. The fact that you are somewhat in on this joke (e.g. somewhat cheekily giving yourself an A+) only helps a little.
Resorting to the smug and arbitrary metaphor of deducting points from a report card you just invented instead of just coming out and saying to hell with this guy...
Sorry to say it Bob but I think the entire premise of this article is flawed and you’re making the same error that Sam kept trying to point out to the DTG guys, namely that if you expand the concept of tribes/tribalism too much then it loses any useful meaning. For example dimension #1 presupposes that you and he are in different “tribes”. However if you examined your respective political and philosophical positions, I’d be willing to bet you’re quite closely aligned. Similarly in more general terms you’re both successful public intellectuals and podcasters who write a lot about mindfulness and religion! So in more ways than not you could say that you’re both in the same tribe, and the much more pertinent fact here is that you simply don’t like each other. Of course it’s still not good to misrepresent the views of people you don’t like, but that’s as far as Sam’s transgression goes and that’s different to “misrepresenting the views of another tribe”. Similarly Sam and Bret Weinstein have been at loggerheads for many months now, to the point where they could reasonably be considered in separate “tribes”. The example you give is simply a case of Sam being kinder to those who he still considers a friend. Again not exactly virtuous but I don’t see how that represents tribalism. Finally in #4 you say that Sam being fair to Trump ‘cost him support within his own tribe’. Is this the same tribe that he and BW are supposedly a part of? I don’t know what BW’s views of Trump are (nor do I care) but I’m pretty sure significant elements of the IDW are sympathetic to Trump. I’m sure Sam being fair to Trump cost Sam support among Trump fans, and that may be worth commenting on, but trying to overlay the tribalism framework to this seems pointless. You could make the case that Sam being fair to Trump helped him with his own tribe, or hurt him, depending on which definition of "tribe" you feel like using. By all means continue to criticise Sam for what you consider to be his personality flaws (and I’ll continue to read it!) but I think you’d be better served dispensing with the elastic and inconsistent “tribalism” framework.
Ken Wilber places tribalism as a part of our developmental human history. It's about our affinity for those who we feel close to, cognitively and emotionally. It's
our safe space. In his view it is always with us even as we have expanded our views of who we are and learned to include more of the human race in our comfort zone and to relax our cognitive and emotional biases against them. We also revert to a narrower view when stressed or traumatized. That means it's fluid. In my opinion, meditation helps with the expansion, and can guide us to avoid reverting to the smallest version of tribalism. But not always. Each human is always the whole enchilada potentially.
my view of wokeness: When I read or heard this phrase, I associated it with awareness as in I woke up to something that I had been asleep to before. I thought it referred to anything you awaken to, not just leftist ideas. Others seem to have a narrower view. I don't use the phrase because it unclear what most people seem to mean by it.
I find Sam Harris's barely concealed smugness and aura of enlightened rationalism grating, and his unabashed apologism for Israel and Islamophobia indefensible and reprehensible. The extent to which people professing devotion to spirituality can be egregiously unaware of their own shortcomings never ceases to baffle me.
If I recall, I actually found Bob through Sam around the time "Why Buddhism Is True" came out, and I think Bob was on Sam's show, so seeing all of the mutual animosity was a tad disorienting. That said, I listened to the Decoding the Gurus podcast and didn't find it particularly informative when it came to tribalism, precisely because it didn't seem like anyone had an agreed upon definition.
Here's an idea: Get Paul Bloom to mediate. He was on both podcasts within the last week promoting his book and seems like someone both Sam and Bob respect. Make it happen, Bob!
I guess I don't really understand what tribalism is. It's still not clear to me what tribe Sam defends. You make a case that he is not perfectly rational and that he has self-serving bias maybe. I find you both quite rational and objective (perfection is the enemy of the good here). I've read both of your many book and I don't see what you guys are squabbling about. Bob, I don't see how you can't defend the idea of attempting to be as reasonable and objective as possible, you are quite good at those things yourself. Your frequent podcast guess, not so much. Shake hands and makeup with Sam. There's enough divisiveness these days. You two are in the same tribe - those trying to be reasonable, but sometimes failing.
Apropos of the tendency to see connections where there may not be any between opponents, the Yale professor Paul Bracken described this in a class I was a TA for and I thought it was a neat idea. I wrote to him about it recently and he wasn't aware of a name for it. I remember explaining it to students like this: you're looking at people far away from you, they look small and all clustered together over there - all in one spot - while the people nearby (your allies) are all around you, some in front, some behind, left, right etc - you see their distinctiveness and individuality. Seems like a variant of the fundamental attribution error but with some different nuances.
As others have said, this needs a Julia Galef-style arbiter to define some terms.
It seems to me that Harris dismantled the ‘tribalism’ accusation comprehensively (what can it mean if you can’t define the tribe and show a pattern of behaviour that is driven by conscious or unconscious loyalty to that tribe?)
But he did admit to being susceptible to ‘bias’ and the niceties of interpersonal networks as much as anyone else—and this is where I suspect you’d end up agreeing after a sufficiently long conversation.
Your critique uses broader terms like the ‘psychology of tribalism’, which refers to a pattern of biases, all of which I imagine Harris would admit to being susceptible to. But the cognitive biases associated with tribalism are surely a different thing to tribalism itself.
I had pretty much lost interest in anything that Sam Harris has to say after his disappearing act in the conversation with Evan Thompson some months ago. I'm still mystified why he was so ill-prepared and didn't even seem to realise that he'd not done his homework (particularly on the history of Buddhism, both recent and ancient, and on Thompson's work, which is very germane to Harris' Waking Up project). By contrast, the recent conversation you and Thompson had, despite your sometimes substantial differences in views, was focussed, informed, and illuminating. I really enjoyed it.
I summoned the will and courage to listen to Harris' recent conversation on the Decoding the Gurus podcast and largely agree with your overall report card--though, I probably would have given him a C-, factoring in the fact he again alluded to in this conversation that he's considering himself largely free of bias and tribalism thanks to insights he's gained through his meditation practice. It's almost a caricature of a position that one therefore should be extremely careful not to take.
On the other hand, that he apparently very generously gives out free subscriptions to his app made me view him more favourably. But I'm wary that he might get pulled more and more into the guru corner--as a podcaster and app producer, he needs to cultivate a fairly large audience (i.e., followers). He has multiple fine lines to walk, and he's spreading himself very thin.
I love you and Sam both, so I'll continue to hope you two kids eventually work it out. I'll say this though, you're a much better writer than he is sir. This seems fair, and I'll grade it a solid A (the + deducted for revenge-writing an article against your adversary.)
great piece. i really enjoyed the gurus podcast with harris too.
Is not the tendency to see one's so-called opponents as a "united front" what leads to paranoia? Just a thought...
I am new to your newsletter, I don't listen to podcasts, have long since cancelled my farcebook and instuhgrim accounts and never signed up for twiddle. I much prefer reading material with some meat on its bones, so your newsletter works for me.
I applaud your willingness to take on the whole tribalism subject and look forward to getting it much clearer in my mind as your narrative unfolds in future installments.
I belong to several "tribes," though not with the clarity of actual tribe members, as someone noted. Perhaps we err in placing more weight on the concept than it is designed to bear, but I continue, at least at this point, to find it useful to think about how we identify with tribes, how we practice tribalism, and how that impacts our ability to sustain and even improve The Great American Experiment--which is the reason for my interest in the subject.
Here is just a brief context for one application of the concept in my case. I was registered as a Republican for over fifty years and never voted the straight party ticket. Not once. Then, fourteen years ago, I switched to Independent status, unaffiliated with a party. In Arizona, where I live now, voting in primaries--where the rubber usually meets the road--is a real mess for people like me. So, what I have to do is pick a party ballot that comes closest to my preference, vote only for the candidates I support on that ballot, and leave the rest of the boxes blank. On presidential preference elections, I temporarily re-register for a party, and then switch back to who I really am as soon as the election is over. What a circus!
So, am I now a member of a tribe called Independent Voters? Am I exercising political tribal behavior?
I will end with this comment in response to those questions. Yes, I am influenced by the associations and literature and propaganda associated with my several tribes and I violate tribal prescriptions whenever I think it makes sense for issues larger than the tribes (and most are). I am also influenced by input from sources other than the tribe. My friends used to let me get away with that, if they even knew. Now, I've lost relationships because I was perceived as being a traitor or spineless or whatever other negative label comes in handy.
So, what interests me as this dialogue continues is the relationship between membership in or identification with a tribe, on the one hand, and the practice of tribalism, on the other. And--especially--how all of that plays out in running our country other than into the ground.
Well. This interests and disturbs me a tad, considering the high esteem I hold both Bob and Sam.
Haven't read this yet. But I was stunned that Sam Harris almost seemed to at one point equate his level of enlightenment with Joseph Goldstein's. I'm not privy to each man's total experience and efforts practicing but I don't think it would even matter. Has Joseph Goldstein ever said anything as wildly reactive and rooted in personal, well, animus, as that Ezra Klein is far left? Sam absolutely does not have the lightness of spirit, does not exude the mastery of non-clinging, that one would associate with and surely expect from any successful and experienced meditation practitioner. The way he goes on about how he's accessed all of this insight about the human condition and the workings of his own mind palace from his time spent sitting - it's like Sam, you sound like it's about all you can do to not lose your entire shit about 'identity politics' every three seconds. Not a way of carrying yourself befitting some kind of nigh-enlightened guru that's seen the light!
I've actually come round in recent years more to Sam's position on Islam simply because in the UK we have a bunch of Islamist Youtubers who have over half a million subscribers each who make videos explaining how in their ideal Islamic state other apostate youtubers would be executed, and they'd be watching. Whereas in the past I was much more sympathetic to Robert's view that we're better of trying to nurture whatever the opposite of a clash of civilisations is. But in any case, this business about Sam being such an advanced practitioner of anti-wokeness and stuff is pure exhilaratingly cringe. Robert hit the nail on the head when he said Sam lacks a sense of humour and it's because he takes himself so seriously as this public intellectual who has transcended tribalism and solved moral philosophy when the truth is he's done neither.
The thing that gets me, while he's not a bad person, Michael Brooks was right about him: Sam's just a privileged trust-fund intellectual who spends all day railing about wokeness and barely ever uses his platform to support medicare for all or things that might actually make a material difference to people's lives.
While it may be true that Sam didn't accurately represent your views, this fact says very little about Sam's tribalism or even specifically his failure to "accurately represent the views of people in tribes [he] consider[s] adversarial." He mentions that both of you have made this critique about his tribalism. Then he goes on to describe Ezra's critique. That form of the critique is more salient to him for many reasons. He finds it more galling. It connects to larger themes about dysfunctional conversations in our culture. He had a much discussed 3 hour conversation in person with Ezra. And for him to spend the time untangling your critique of him as tribal with Ezra's doesn't necessarily lend itself to the back and forth exchange of ideas which is a conversation. I haven't listened back to the podcast, but I think the flow of conversation makes it fairly clear that Sam hasn't actually conflated your view with Ezra's. One of the hosts pushes back and says something like "not everyone who makes this critique does so in racial terms," and Sam's response is something like "yes, but Ezra's critique is explicitly racial." This incident is less about tribalism and more about you not getting your due. I like this format and idea, but it's obvious that the execution was marred by self indulgence and sensitivity to personal slights. The fact that you are somewhat in on this joke (e.g. somewhat cheekily giving yourself an A+) only helps a little.
Robert Wright's Anti-Anti-Tribalism Report Card
Display of genuine cognitive empathy...
A+
Rehashing years-old minor squabbles...
C
Resorting to the smug and arbitrary metaphor of deducting points from a report card you just invented instead of just coming out and saying to hell with this guy...
A++, worth $8/mo. would recommend
Sorry to say it Bob but I think the entire premise of this article is flawed and you’re making the same error that Sam kept trying to point out to the DTG guys, namely that if you expand the concept of tribes/tribalism too much then it loses any useful meaning. For example dimension #1 presupposes that you and he are in different “tribes”. However if you examined your respective political and philosophical positions, I’d be willing to bet you’re quite closely aligned. Similarly in more general terms you’re both successful public intellectuals and podcasters who write a lot about mindfulness and religion! So in more ways than not you could say that you’re both in the same tribe, and the much more pertinent fact here is that you simply don’t like each other. Of course it’s still not good to misrepresent the views of people you don’t like, but that’s as far as Sam’s transgression goes and that’s different to “misrepresenting the views of another tribe”. Similarly Sam and Bret Weinstein have been at loggerheads for many months now, to the point where they could reasonably be considered in separate “tribes”. The example you give is simply a case of Sam being kinder to those who he still considers a friend. Again not exactly virtuous but I don’t see how that represents tribalism. Finally in #4 you say that Sam being fair to Trump ‘cost him support within his own tribe’. Is this the same tribe that he and BW are supposedly a part of? I don’t know what BW’s views of Trump are (nor do I care) but I’m pretty sure significant elements of the IDW are sympathetic to Trump. I’m sure Sam being fair to Trump cost Sam support among Trump fans, and that may be worth commenting on, but trying to overlay the tribalism framework to this seems pointless. You could make the case that Sam being fair to Trump helped him with his own tribe, or hurt him, depending on which definition of "tribe" you feel like using. By all means continue to criticise Sam for what you consider to be his personality flaws (and I’ll continue to read it!) but I think you’d be better served dispensing with the elastic and inconsistent “tribalism” framework.
Ken Wilber places tribalism as a part of our developmental human history. It's about our affinity for those who we feel close to, cognitively and emotionally. It's
our safe space. In his view it is always with us even as we have expanded our views of who we are and learned to include more of the human race in our comfort zone and to relax our cognitive and emotional biases against them. We also revert to a narrower view when stressed or traumatized. That means it's fluid. In my opinion, meditation helps with the expansion, and can guide us to avoid reverting to the smallest version of tribalism. But not always. Each human is always the whole enchilada potentially.
my view of wokeness: When I read or heard this phrase, I associated it with awareness as in I woke up to something that I had been asleep to before. I thought it referred to anything you awaken to, not just leftist ideas. Others seem to have a narrower view. I don't use the phrase because it unclear what most people seem to mean by it.