The Harris-Sullivan debate

In his debate with Andrew Sullivan, Sam Harris’s most recent essay concludes thus:

Imagine a discourse about ethics and mystical experience that is as contingency-free as the discourse of science already is. Science really does transcend the vagaries of culture: there is no such thing as “Japanese” as opposed to “French” science; we don’t speak of “Hindu biology” and “Jewish chemistry.” Imagine a world that has transcended its tribalism—racism and nationalism, yes, but religious tribalism especially—in which we could have a truly open-ended conversation about our place in the universe and about the possibilities of deepening our experience of love and compassion for one another. Ethics and spirituality do not require faith. One can even achieve utter mystical absorption in the primordial mystery of the present moment without believing anything on insufficient evidence.
You might want to say that every religion offers a guide to doing this. Yes, but they are provisional guides at best. Rather than pick over the carcass of Christianity (or any other traditional faith) looking for a few, uncontaminated morsels of wisdom, why not take a proper seat at the banquet of human understanding in the present? There are already many very refined courses on offer. For those interested in the origins of the universe, there is the real science of cosmology. For those who want to know about the evolution of life on this planet, biology, chemistry and their subspecialties offer real nourishment. (Knowledge in most scientific domains is now doubling about every five years. How fast is it growing in religion?) And if ethics and spirituality are what concern you, there are now scientists making serious efforts to understand these features of our experience—both by studying the brain function of advanced contemplatives and by practicing meditation and other (non-faith-based) spiritual disciplines themselves. Even when it comes to compassion and self-transcendence, there is new wine (slowly) being poured. Why not catch it with a clean glass?

Sullivan’s response is to say that Science is equally contingent. This response seems to confuse the contingency of the history of science with a “contingency” of science itself. It is a totally contingent fact that chemistry grew out of the attempt to transmute “base” metals into gold. It is a contingent matter that Aristotle assumed that motion needed explanation in terms of a force, instead of recognizing right off (as Galileo did much later) that acceleration required a force, but not uniform motion. It is a contingent matter that people kept probing Aristotle’s explanation of parabolic motion until they had to switch to the Galilean view. Given that they did keep probing (and that they were smart enough to see the possibility), it isn’t a contingent fact that they eventually did have to switch to the Galilean view. Scientists were seeking objective truth, and careful observation and experiment and critical thinking led them to that truth. Aristotelians didn’t just go on being Aristotelians – they had to concede ultimately that the evidence was against them. (Or if some of them were too stubborn, they died and were not replaced by younger Aristotelians.) Sullivan seems to forget Harris’s explication of “contingency” – there is no such thing as German physics or Jewish or French physics. There is a reason why mathematics and astronomy, rather than some religious message, was used in humanity’s first attempt at communicating with extraterrestrials (i.e., the inscriptions on the golden records included with the Voyager probes). The truths of science and math are not culture-bound – or at any rate, they are the least culture-bound of all the truths we know.

Sullivan’s response to this just doesn’t come to grips with the point. On the other hand, Harris’s assumption that the language of ethics and spirituality should be just as universal as that of science is far from obvious. For one thing, scientific and mathematical universality are purchased at the cost of considerable abstraction. When it comes to ethics at least, I would rather have people immerse themselves in stories of heroes and inn good novels and in their own stories and those of people they know, than have them read very abstract ethical treatises which purport to have greater universality. It isn’t that there are no universal truths in ethics, but that when it comes to living ethically, it’s better to have those truths conveyed concretely than abstractly. If I am lying by the roadside injured, don’t give me somebody who’s read Mill or Kant, give me somebody who’s read the parable of the Good Samaritan – and taken it to heart. That last phrase is the key – it’s far easier to take a story to heart than to take an abstraction to heart. Yes, abstract moral treatises have their place, but they are not as central to the moral life as stories. And it seems plausible that the spiritual life will be similar. If God or Brahma or the Tao or the meaning of life (or the meaning of my particular life) is something that exceeds my understanding, and that at best I can grope toward, then a story, an image, a piece of music that somehow gestures toward these unsayable things will be better than a flat statement of literal truth.

Does that mean that I come down on Sullivan’s side in the argument? No, for two reasons. First, I have yet to hear Sullivan admit that he doesn’t care about the literal truth of the claims that Jesus was the son of God, a being co-eternal with God and somehow identical with God, who nevertheless became human, suffered death and was resurrected…and so on. I don’t think it’s good enough for Sullivan that the story should turn out to be a beautiful myth that somehow expresses (for some people) an unsayable spiritual truth, a truth which might just as well be stated in terms of Brahma or the Tao or Allah. No, Sullivan believes in the literal truth of these claims, claims which Mohammed explicitly denies. Now he is in the realm of statable, historical, empirical truth. He is clearly in the position of denying the claims of another religion (Islam). The justification of these claims requires historical and other forms of evidence, including an explanation for how Mohammed got it wrong. Insofar as faith is a kind of bet on which spiritual tradition will pan out, Sullivan can have faith that Catholicism will prove more justified than Islam in the end, but faith doesn’t free the Catholic tradition from explaining how we know it is right and Islam is wrong ultimately.

Second, even if we put literal truth aside, Sullivan seems to want to use only his own tradition to express the deep, unsayable truths of spirituality. But if these truths really are available to other religions, why should he restrict himself in this way? I can see why these expressions might be the first to come to him, but if all people are groping toward the divine, and if they may each get their own little glimpse of it, wouldn’t it be better to put all traditions together and see whether we can broaden our own view? Shouldn’t Catholic churches read the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran, as well as the Bible? If the seven blind men groping the elephant had compared notes, they might have been able to get a clearer idea of the elephant as it is in itself. Can those groping toward spiritual reality reasonably restrict themselves to one tradition?

To sum up, then, I think Harris is wrong to reject what we might learn about spiritual truth from “the carcasses” of various religions, but that Sullivan is trying to have it both ways. He accepts Catholicism, but he only defends a mystical union of all religions which is incompatible with Catholicism, if you look very hard at it.