Charles Murray, Sam Harris, pseudo-science, and racism

I've posted Sam Harris's excellent videos debunking religious faith, but his discussion with Charles Murray' about his pseudo-scientific racism is very disappointing.

Ezra Klein on the subject:

...This isn’t “forbidden knowledge.” It’s ancient prejudice.

I’m a listener of Sam Harris’s podcast, Waking Up, and so I heard his conversation with [Charles] Murray when it first aired. I often disagree with Harris, but he’s a curious, penetrating interviewer, and his discussions on consciousness, artificial intelligence, and meditation are worth seeking out.

What bothered me most about Harris’s conversation with Murray was the framing. There is nothing more seductive than “forbidden knowledge.” But for two white men to spend a few hours discussing why black Americans are, as a group, less intelligent than whites isn’t a courageous stand in the context of American history; it’s a common one...

Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and claimed to abhor slavery; he condemned interracial relationships for defiling the white race (“Amalgamation with the other color, produces degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent”) while fathering children with Sally Hemings. And of African Americans, he wrote that he could “never...find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”

Reflect on that. A Founding Father of the country that would produce James Baldwin and Langston Hughes believed African Americans could not produce thoughts more complex than literal narration. And yet Thomas Jefferson was an undeniably brilliant thinker. He believed his assessments were based on fact when, in reality, they were mere bigotry that both emerged from and was used to justify a racist regime.

This pattern has played out across American history, and these ideas have persisted well into the modern age. William F. Buckley, the venerated founder of National Review, wrote this in 1957 in a column titled “Why the South Must Prevail”:

The central question that emerges...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over negro, but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

Whatever the future holds, the idea that America’s racial inequalities are driven by genetic differences between the races and not by anything we did, or have to undo, is not “forbidden knowledge” — it is perhaps the most common and influential perspective in American history. It is embedded in our founding documents, voiced by men with statues in their likeness, reflected in centuries of policymaking. It is an argument that has been used since the dawn of the country to justify the condition of its most oppressed citizens. If you’re going to discuss this topic, that’s a history you need to reckon with.

Harris and Murray’s conversation stretches more than two hours. A transcript runs to more than 20,000 words. Unless I missed it, at no point in the discussion do Harris or Murray use the words “slave,” “slavery,” or “segregation.” It is curiously ahistorical...

Klein's whole article is well worth reading.