An open letter to Sam Harris

Dear Dr. Harris,

Please forgive me, and this goes for whatever audience this video might attract for reading this, but I need to make this quick and coherent, and this is the fastest way of doing so. I want you to address some of the issues that I believe made our discussion both more trying and less valuable than it might have been—a problem that many of the people who now listen to it rightly identify.

I think that our discussion would perhaps have been more productive if we started from the realization that we're both trying to address the same problem: what is the relationship between science and ethics? You see ethics as nested inside scientific realism. Now, obviously, that's a contentious claim, which is not the same as it being wrong. But the fact that it's contentious—read David Hume and his problem with deriving an ought from an is—means that there is a real problem there.

I see scientific realism as nested inside Darwinian competition, at least potentially. Not necessarily; I could be wrong. But I am trying to address the real problem, and I think the fact that you're addressing the science-ethics problem indicates that you see that there's a real problem there too.

I also think we only got to the problems with my formulation, not the problems with your solution. For example, the problem with measuring well-being. You consider the enhancement of well-being the proper aim of ethics; however, the psychological measures of well-being currently used are almost only trait extraversion minus trait neuroticism—that's happiness minus sadness. Well, that's how well-being is currently defined.

Well, that proposition is faulty in every way. It's a big problem. It's a measurement problem; it's a scientific realism problem. You might say, "Well, we need better measures of well-being," and I would say, "Well, exactly," and those will have to be nested inside the Darwinian conundrum.

How should we act in the world? Here's an answer: individually, so that the family thrives at the family level, so that society thrives at the societal level, so that the ecosystem thrives—not just today, tomorrow, next week, next year, and across time. That's the problem the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was trying to address when he studied the moral development of children.

Piaget was interested in solving the problem of the relationship between science and ethics, and he looked at how ethics in children emerged and transformed into adulthood. That's what drove him his entire life—he was trying to formulate a scientific solution to the problem of ethics, and I've drawn a lot of my thinking from that.

Now, I'm going to jump to a level of analysis, and when I do so it will make many think I've gone off the rails of this argument. I ask for your indulgence while I try to put things together that have not yet been put together. This means that I have to present many ideas simultaneously, as if looking at a picture or as if describing a picture, which is how these ideas have frequently been represented.

The individual who acts in this equilibrated manner is the mythological hero. It's the mythological hero who confronts the unknown with attention and intent to communicate. It's the archetypal hero who obtains the gold from the eternal dragon—the dragon of chaos. That's an evolved representation of the predatory but promising domain beyond the safety of the tree or the campfire.

It's the archetypal hero who distributes the gold that he obtains from the dragon to the community. It's him who rescues the youthful virgin from the predatory reptile. That's St. George—it’s the oldest story we know. It's in the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian creation myth, upon which the opening lines of Genesis are founded. Can't you see an evolutionary relationship?

That's the archetypal hero. That's first a way of behaving; second, it's a representation of that way of behaving; third, it's a way of organizing society itself around that action and representation; fourth, it's that society that then selects, through masculine competition, for the best contender to that representation. And finally, it's what is selected for by women who peel off the top of the masculine competition. Women outsource the impossible cognitive task of mate selection to the male dominance hierarchy.

A hero emerges at the top of the competition; he gets all the girls. It's that which is selected for, and human females perform part of the selection process. Their mother nature, the selection apparatus, the choosy maters—that female chimps are not.

The archetypal hero might be regarded as a super meme in Richard Dawkins' terminology. It’s been around so long that we have adapted biologically to its existence, just as we have adapted in every way to the presence of the 300 million-year-old dominance hierarchy, which is more permanent, more real—even from a strictly realist perspective—than such evanescent phenomena as amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. It’s even older than trees.

The closer you are to that archetypal hero, the more likely you are, at least as a male, to win the dominance hierarchy contest that makes you attractive to women. If Richard Dawkins, who formulated the idea of the meme, were wiser, he would have been Carl Jung. An archetype is the ultimate meme, in my opinion.

We need to have a real conversation, not an argument. It's not that I think you're wrong; it's that I think that there's a real problem here which we both recognize and are both trying to solve. If none of this makes even the least bit of sense, if it doesn't at least pique your curiosity, if you can't see that we're obsessed by the same problem, then we won't be able to talk, and that would be a shame.

You're very sharp and precise, but I think in patterns. Somebody said listening to us was like the right hemisphere of a single brain talking to the left. That's a good metaphor. There wouldn't be so many people trying to get us to talk if we didn't have something to discuss.

The relationship between science and ethics is vitally important. If we had a real conversation, and no fault is implied on your part, we might be able to further the solution to the problem.

Thanks for listening and watching.