I knew that Christopher Lee was a tough and scary dude, but Bela Lugosi? That old guy with the accent who was in Plan 9 From Outer Space? I did not expect this, but man, I’ve got to admire him now.

He fought in WWI, he was a Communist leader and union organizer, he was antifa.

By World War II, Hungarian dictator Miklos Horthy allied with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In opposition, Lugosi helped form the Hungarian-American Council for Democracy, calling for “Nazism to be wiped out everywhere.”

As a member of American-Hungarian Relief Inc., Lugosi was a keynote speaker at an Aug. 28, 1944, rally in Los Angeles. He demanded Washington rescue Hungarian Jewish refugees, pressure Horthy’s Nazi-puppet regime and easing immigration restrictions.

Dr. Rafael Medoff and J. David Spurlock wrote, “He may have portrayed savage villains on the silver screen, but in real life Béla Lugosi raised his voice in protest against the savage persecution of the Jews in his native Hungary.” (Jewish Ledger, Jan. 3, 2011)

Damn. Respect.

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso) by Priyamvada Gopal

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats (Verso) by Maya Goodfellow

The global anti-racist uprising of 2020, driven by the Black Lives Matter movement, has forced Britain into a confrontation with its imperial history. Racist binaries that were developed and established during the age of empire continue to frame and distort our collective sense of self and of racialised “others” both abroad and at home. We are rational, they are irrational; we are modern, they are mired in their backward traditions; we love freedom, they despise it. What is at stake is not some “offence” caused by the crimes and iconographies of the past. Rather, there is a need to develop a true understanding of empire that can help to address and dismantle the racist structures of today. Two recent books speak to these interrelated tasks.

Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent tackles one of the most persistent imperial myths, that values of liberty and democracy “grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world”. This myth of Britain as the bringer of liberty to less enlightened peoples is, in C. L. R. James’s words, “an organic part of the thought processes of the nation, and to disgorge it requires a herculean effort”. This is where Gopal’s contribution lies.

Insurgent Empire illuminates the role that peoples of the global south have played in the development of ideas of freedom – including in the west itself – within the context of anti-colonial struggles. As Gopal shows, while the British mainstream was largely deaf to voices of resistance in the south, British critics of imperialism often heard these voices and adjusted their politics accordingly.

By examining moments of imperial crisis – from the Indian uprising of 1857 to the rapid decolonisation of the post-war era – she shows how colonised peoples generated their own impetus for liberation, rather than learning the concepts of democracy under the unlikely tutelage of empire. Indeed, many significant British writers, politicians and activists had their understanding of the principles of equality and freedom enriched and expanded through their encounters with colonised subjects, in a process Gopal refers to as “reverse tutelage”.

* * *

Rebellion was as inescapable a feature of the colonial epoch as the violence of the system itself. In 1865, an uprising against British rule in Jamaica was met with extensive state terror. Emancipation from slavery had proven a hollow victory for many, replaced by the servitude of wage labour. As the colonial governor’s brutal methods came under increasing scrutiny in London, numerous public figures rallied to his cause, among them Charles Dickens, who decried what he called “platform-sympathy with the black – or the native, or the devil – afar off, and platform indifference to our countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery”. Given the efforts of today’s jingoistic historians to talk up Britain’s role in the abolition of the slave trade, it is instructive to note the passionate commitment to the exploitation of black labour that remained pervasive among the British elite decades after their slaves were supposedly liberated.

The Jamaican rebels did, however, enjoy some support among the wider English public. In Manchester, at a meeting attracting several hundreds, speakers compared the crushing of the uprising to the Peterloo massacre of 1819 and identified common cause with the Jamaican rebels against a common enemy: the British ruling class. It was well understood that the likes of Dickens were denigrating the Jamaicans for no greater crime than the latter’s refusal to submit to wage slavery. As one trade unionist wrote, “Those of our countrymen who, in any dispute between white and black, confine their fellow-feeling to that side where they find complexions like their own, are not to be trusted.”

By the early 20th century, a new generation of anti-imperial intellectuals and campaigners was emerging from the colonised world, subscribing to a dynamic, eclectic mix of Marxism and nationalism. They were often drawn to London, in part because forms of political activity were permitted there that were forbidden under the harsh anti-sedition laws imposed in the colonies. These included the likes of C. L. R. James, George Padmore and the Indian-born MP Shapurji Saklatvala, who were now taking the spirit of rebellion into the heart of empire.

Saklatvala won Battersea North as a communist in 1922, held it for seven years, and used his seat in parliament to launch powerful attacks on the colonial enterprise. He dismissed the idea that Asia was more prone to despotic rule and attributed this stereotype to “Western ignorance” of their own colonies. Indeed, any improvements in the lives of Indian workers under British rule had not been “granted” through enlightened benevolence but “extorted by the workers fighting inch by inch against you”. Above all, Saklatvala urged a spirit of solidarity between the British working class and the colonised peoples of India, chiding parts of the British left for their “unwisdom, apathy or arrogance” in failing to explore this possibility. For his admirable efforts, state espionage agencies bestowed upon Saklatvala the enviable description of “one of the most violent anti-British agitators in England”.

Elsewhere, Gopal notes a “striking correlation” between the contributions of the Trinidadian writer George Padmore to the New Leader, the journal of the Independent Labour Party, and that paper’s shift toward a more radical editorial line. Padmore’s insistence that any serious analysis of capitalist imperialism needed to account for the structural role of racism clearly had a real influence on his white comrades.

In the empire’s dying days, “reverse tutelage” extended beyond the British left and into some corners of the mainstream. Gopal refers to the Oxford academic Margery Perham, whose paternalistic views were shaken, if not wholly dislodged, by the imperial retreat under fire. As she was forced to admit, “the desire for equality, for self-expression, for freedom from any kind of external mastery and its stigma of inferiority” came from the colonised peoples themselves, provoking this moment of self-doubt:

“People of my generation were taught from their schooldays that our empire was a splendid achievement, conducted as much for the good of its many peoples as for our own . . . Have we been utterly blind? Was the idealism we so often professed merely a cloak in which we tried to hide our complete self-interest from the world, and indeed from ourselves?”

As Gopal points out, “myths matter because, unlike crude propaganda, they often drive action through sincerely held views.” In tackling one of imperialism’s most persistent myths, she has produced a profoundly illuminating piece of work, rich in characters and detail. “Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of this nation’s imperial history and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience,” she says, “but rather agents whose resistance not only contributed to their own liberation but also put pressure on and reshaped some British ideas about freedom and who could be free.” She notes with regret that women’s voices were too often absent from the historical record of anti-colonial resistance, and hence from her account. However, this is partly compensated for by the book itself, with which Gopal takes her place as a vital critical voice alongside James, Padmore and Saklatvala.

* * *

Gopal’s account of racist colonialism and resistance provides powerful context for Maya Goodfellow’s Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, which analyses British immigration policy, through the 20th century up to the present day. The UK’s immigration policy is one of imperial racism’s most harmful legacies. Reading the two books together, it’s clear how the racial binaries Gopal works to deconstruct have underpinned the systematic exclusion of various denigrated “others” today, always presented as posing some sort of threat to the innocent and upstanding British.

The UK’s “hostile environment” regime, after which Goodfellow’s book is named, led to the wrongful detention and deportation of hundreds of Commonwealth citizens, mainly from the Caribbean, and is thought to have affected tens of thousands of people from the so-called Windrush generation. The regime effectively imposed a presumption of guilt on people who had come to the UK legitimately as citizens of the empire, often as children. For lack of sufficient documentation, many were refused essential medical care and lost their jobs, while some were deported to countries they barely knew.

Yet, despite the huge outcry when the Windrush scandal was exposed, much of the regime remains in place. The policy was effectively bipartisan, as the Labour opposition had abstained on the 2014 immigration bill, introduced by Theresa May, who was then Home Secretary. Britain’s institutionally racist immigration politics have long been a constant, irrespective of which party happens to be in power.

Goodfellow shows how three key themes have been ever present in the modern history of British anti-immigration politics. First, a tendency to blame immigrants for all manner of social ills, including the racism that they are subjected to. Second, the (often covertly) racialised nature of the policies adopted and legislation imposed. Third, the habit of justifying all this by invoking the “legitimate concerns” of “ordinary people”.

In 1955, Prime Minister Winston Churchill suggested to his cabinet that “Keep England White” should be the next Tory general election slogan. Without explicitly expressing itself in such terms, the 1962 Immigration Act brought in by his successors was drafted so as to effectively obstruct people of colour from arriving from the empire and Commonwealth. Two years later in 1964, Labour’s general election win was marred by the loss of a previously safe Midlands seat to a Tory who had traded in nakedly racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, and effectively endorsed the slogan, “If you want a n***** for your neighbour, vote Labour”. The Wilson government’s response was to bring in what Goodfellow describes as “some of the country’s most poisonous immigration legislation to date”, including the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which effectively targeted Asians in newly independent former colonies in Africa, who had hitherto been British citizens.

The result of this succession of legislation was that, by 1980, visitors from the new Commonwealth and Pakistan were 30 times more likely to be refused entry into Britain than those from the old Commonwealth of predominantly white nations. Until a year earlier, the state had been carrying out “virginity tests” on women entering the country from south Asia. Their presence was welcomed in principle as it was thought to reduce the likelihood of mixed relationships and marriages between south Asian men and white women, but this was predicated on first “proving” whether or not the new arrivals were already married. The barbaric practice was only dropped under pressure from grassroots campaigns led by south Asian women.

The same broad themes continued into the New Labour era, where the major targets were those seeking asylum predominantly from countries in the global south, as well as racialised minorities already in the UK. The philosophy prefigured Theresa May’s hostile environment – the aim was to drive down the numbers of people wanting to come to Britain by making immigration as unattractive as possible. Immigration minister Mike O’Brien set the tone in 1997, telling the Daily Mail he wanted to show that the UK isn’t a “soft touch” for “gypsies” who were “seeking an easy life”.

* * *

What followed was an increasingly punitive, tortuous asylum and immigration process that seemed virtually rigged to frustrate, demoralise and defeat ordinary and often highly vulnerable people who had done nothing worse than seek the prospect of a decent life. In 2001, Shokrolah Khaleghi, a former political prisoner in Iran, died of an overdose after his asylum claim was rejected. In 2003, Israfil Shiri, another Iranian, died after setting himself on fire, having been thrown out of his council house and denied benefits. Goodfellow names other similar examples.

Perhaps the most shocking and now eerily familiar case is that of Jimmy Mubenga, a married father of five, who died in 2010 while being deported to Angola after 17 years in the UK. Mubenga’s final words, while being restrained by guards working for the contractor G4S, were reportedly “I can’t breathe”. That same year, Labour’s general election manifesto boasted that net migration and the number of asylum claims had fallen, under a section headed “crime and immigration”.

Hostile Environment shows how modern anti-migrant discourse grew out of the early 1980s New Right, who pitted the “legitimate concerns” of “ordinary people” against an out-of-touch metropolitan elite. Conveniently absent from this picture are migrants and racialised minorities, who have yet to acquire the status of “ordinary people”, and the racism of the British political class itself. The “legitimate concerns” discourse has been wielded very effectively in recent years by disproportionately upper-middle-class and almost exclusively white journalists and politicians to shout down any critique of the increasingly dark turn that anti-immigration politics has taken.

* * *

The key to Britain’s anti-immigration politics is the dehumanisation of the migrant. Goodfellow’s work, like Gopal’s, is most powerful where it takes this on. While debunking the economic arguments against immigration, Goodfellow also makes clear that migrants should be valued as human beings, not for their economic utility. Moreover, she points to cases where precarious migrant workers have organised, fought for and won better pay and conditions, stressing that they should be recognised as a part of Britain’s working class with their own stake in its struggles.

Throughout, Hostile Environment does something simple but urgently necessary: treating those demonised by the political class as ordinary people with their own legitimate concerns. She tells us their names, quotes them at length, and conveys their stories with sensitivity. Hers is a work of diligent scholarship, but also of great humanity, which holds up a mirror to a society that may finally be ready to start truly looking at itself.

But Britain, as Goodfellow explictly states, will not be able to recognise, let alone dismantle its racist present without facing up to the realities and legacies of its imperial past. It is here that Hostile Environment dovetails most clearly with Insurgent Empire. Goodfellow demonstrates the ways in which British immigration policy has been shaped by racialised exclusion. Gopal shows us how this exclusion – along with racialised binaries and the dehumanisation of “others” – can be carefully taken apart and replaced with better and more truthful stories.

Both books help us toward a future where the lives of the hitherto excluded might finally be treated as though they matter.

From the autumn 2020 edition of New Humanist.

Because he just smote my day a little harder. We had a power outage in the middle of lab today, and all the water baths stopped, and surprisingly, our sinks stopped working. Then I had to go to the refrigerator in our prep room, which is maybe 20′ x 10′ and cluttered with various gadgets, to fetch a reagent, and…I got lost. There were no lights at all in there, and I got turned around trying to maneuver around a ladder and a cart, and completely lost track of which way was what. I thought I might die in there and my body found rotting in the darkness weeks later.

I survived. The lab kind of worked on the residual heat in the water baths. No students were lost, the professor was only almost lost.

I guess the power just came back on after the lab was over. Wheee.

What did I do to offend Thor? If I hang a peasant on a tree, will he stop afflicting me with this cursed day?

Would a billionaire be a billion times more effective than a peasant? I’m desperate to end this cycle of meetings.

Project Veritas should pay attention. James O’Keefe keeps setting up these pathetic stings that only succeed because his gullible right-wing wants to believe, but Sacha Baron Cohen goes extreme and sets up these unbelievable scenarios that we can’t believe anyone would fall for, and we all say “NO!” when some idiot actually falls for them. The idiot this time is Rudy Giuliani, a big fish in the Trump circle of friends.

So apparently Sacha Baron Cohen is playing his character Borat, which is the first thing that had me shaking my head. Really? Doesn’t everyone recognize him yet? Isn’t the Eastern European yokel schtick all played out? I guess not, since Giuliani got played, falling for Borat pretending to be a Kazhakh diplomat bringing a bribe to the Trump campaign — a bribe which happens to be the opportunity to have sex with his 15 year old daughter. I would have told him to take a hike at the word “bribe”, and would have called the cops when he offered me a child.

Not Rudy!

In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

Guiliani has excuses — he was just tucking in his shirt! — but seriously, he’s fallen for a Borat skit, willingly went into a young woman’s bedroom, and flopped down on the bed. Give up.

Of course, he’s a Republican, so there will be no consequences. Rudy will still be Trump’s incompetent consigliere, he will still get invited on CNN and Fox to rave, no one will care.

Way, way back in 2006, I heard that Mike S. Adams was coming to UMM. I was surprised. He was one of those far-right loons who ranted on various conservative websites, and I’d commented on some of his poisonous crap, but why would he come all the way out here? And why would any of our students bother with such a goofball?

I attended his talk. I arrived late, had to listen from the hallway, and didn’t think much of it…but apparently, Adams was looking for me, and noticed that I didn’t ask any questions, and wrote a whole column calling me a coward and misspelling my name. I had to write an article explaining why I was unimpressed and repelled by him, but I was touched: he actually cared about me, and expected that I’d want to talk to him, and seemed disappointed that I found him so repugnant that I had no interest in engaging with a right-wing troll.

It was surprising then, to discover that Mike S. Adams is dead, as I learned in this video (it’s mentioned somewhere around the 15 minute mark, before dissecting Adams’ odious beliefs). He had been battling his university, demanding a promotion to full professor that it had denied him, and went through a long painful series of court engagements which he eventually won, I guess: he was promoted to full professor and given 7 years of back pay, about $500,000, but also agreed to retire. I imagine that cost him, maybe more than he was awarded, and the week before he was due to finally retire, he killed himself.

That was back in July. In a final snub, I didn’t even notice at the time. I ignored him when he gave a talk here, and I ignored him when he blew his brains out.

I wonder how all those people who sent me hate mail, prompted by his column, feel about this unforgivable injustice? They’re welcome to write to me some more, vent their rage and all that, since I don’t mind, and have enough self-confidence that I won’t be affected by their impotent fury.

Poor man.

O, Let Me Not Get Alzheimer’s, Sweet Heaven! (Skyscraper) by Colin Brewer

Every 24 hours, an average of ten new research papers about Alzheimer’s is added to the biomedical database Medline. Much of it is about improving and extending the lives of people with the condition. As Dr Colin Brewer makes clear in his new book, there is no curing the disease: “nobody fights bravely through Alzheimer’s to the other side against all odds and then writes about the experience. There is no other side.” Brewer’s thesis is that many of these people do not want their lives extended and that for someone with Alzheimer’s, it should be as simple and stigma-free as possible to bring their life to an end.

If this sounds a little on the bleak side, don’t stop reading now. Much as abortion – to which Brewer frequently refers – is not about killing babies, voluntary euthanasia is not about killing sick people. It is about ensuring that people with dementia die when they want to, how they want to, and with as much dignity as possible. In 2016, dementia became the most common cause of death in England and Wales. Alzheimer’s is the most common variant. If you live to 95, there is a 50 per cent chance you will get Alzheimer’s. If you live to 85, the probability is still around 33 per cent. This is a cause about which Brewer clearly feels passionately, and the book presents a compassionate case for a change in the way we treat people whose quality of life will never improve.

Euthanasia arouses powerful emotions. Though the public has consistently been in favour of allowing people to choose “deliverance”, in Brewer’s words, the subject is plagued by old taboos about suicide and more terrestrial real-life concerns, on the part of doctors, about being taken to court for killing a patient. Suicide hasn’t been a crime in England and Wales since 1961, but assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia are both illegal, meaning that Alzheimer’s sufferers often fly to Switzerland to end their lives.

Objections to voluntary euthanasia tend to come from the religious, Brewer writes, but the more tenacious objection is the one raised by disability campaigners among others: that legalising euthanasia would open up a slippery slope that could see people with disabilities pressured to end their inconvenient life. As Brewer remarks, this contention has never been proven. “There is remarkably little evidence that laws allowing patients to choose medical aid in dying are abused,” he writes. But his most powerful point is stated so eloquently it took me off guard: “In reality, dementia patients currently experience a great deal of coercion and pressure to remain alive when they would either definitely or probably prefer to be dead.”

The firmness with which Brewer states his case may be too much for some readers. When discussing the notion that someone with dementia might be experiencing something of a second childhood, he writes, “One childhood is enough for most people and its correct place is at the beginning of life.” For the most part this honesty is refreshing, but his short shrift can occasionally appear callous, as when he likens someone with dementia to someone “very drunk”, or under the influence of a date-rape drug. But the book is an informative and informed polemic that only once or twice feels as though it could be reined in.

Unfortunately, for the millions in Britain who share Brewer’s view, “doing nothing looks likely to remain society’s default position for many years”. What he would like to see is not just the legalisation of assisted dying, but also a legislative change that incentivises living wills, in which someone spells out what they want in the event that they succumb to dementia. Though these issues may always be messy, this seems like a surefire way to help clean them up.

Now Brewer is retired, he is free to discuss voluntary euthanasia with patients. His book is a powerful argument in favour of practising doctors, not just retired ones, being able to discuss “the Swiss option” without fear of recrimination. Like a ban on abortion, the ban on voluntary euthanasia looks like a relic from the past. This book makes a strong case that things need to change.

From the autumn 2020 edition of New Humanist.

Alice Roberts is an evolutionary biologist, osteoarchaeologist, author, broadcaster and President of Humanists UK.

Andrew Copson is the Chief Executive of Humanists UK, President of Humanists International and a trustee of the Religious Education Council.

"The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy" was published by Piatkus in August 2020.

What was the motivation for putting together this book?

There are great books out there about humanism as a philosophy, written by philosophers, but we both thought there was a need for a book that would be short and accessible and more about humanism as an active approach to life. We wanted a book that was positive – that started from the positive beliefs and values and opinions that humanists have. And we wanted one that was illustrative – not just our own words but showcasing some of the diversity of humanist thought on different subjects.

How would you define humanism?

Pretty much the same way it's always been defined! The humanist approach to life is a nonreligious one that accepts the universe (including this planet and ourselves) as a natural phenomenon, emphasises the importance of this one life we know we have, and commits to putting the wellbeing of humans and other sentient animals at the centre of our moral decision making.

You've quoted from a vast range of sources, from Greek philosophers to the Disney movie Frozen. What was your criteria?

We knew the humanist ideas we wanted to illustrate – whether it was the interconnectedness of human lives, the importance of the scientific method, or the role of empathy in moral decision making. Once we'd decided that, we just had to find the very best quote from a humanist out there to illustrate each of them. We ended up using quotes from humanists from across the globe and over the last three thousand years, simply because we thought they were the best!

You quote from the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Why?

For us it is one of the ultimate statements of humanism. This isn't just because humanists were involved in writing it, although of course many were and were some of the prime movers in the creation of human rights as a legal concept. It's mainly because the declaration relies on values that can be shared regardless of tribe or race or creed or culture. They are based on observations of human needs that are universal and that is a very humanist idea.

What is the role of ancient wisdom in humanism? You cite Confucius and Mengzhi among others.

Some people think "ancient wisdom" is wise because it is ancient, as if people were once more in tune with the universe and themselves than we have become. That's obviously not a humanist assumption. But there were many people and cultures with a humanist approach to life in the ancient world in Asia and Europe and we wanted to include examples for two reasons. Firstly, because they confound a popular misconception. Too many people think of the past as religious and humanism as a modern western phenomenon. It's not true and we wanted to show that. Secondly, we included them because they were often the best way of illustrating a humanist idea. Mengzhi's illustration of the biological foundations of morality in our natural instincts is hard to beat, even if it is 2500 years old! He said:

"All human beings have a constitution which suffers when it sees the suffering of others… If people catch sight suddenly of a child about to fall into a well, they will all experience a feeling of alarm and distress… Because we all have these feelings in ourselves, let us develop them, and the result will be like the blaze that is kindled from a small flame, or the spring in full spate that starts with a trickle. Let these feelings have a free rein, and they will be enough to give shelter and love to us all."

And the common sense of the Charvaka school of thought, 2,600 years ago in India, is timeless:

"There is no heaven, no final liberation, no soul, no other world… How can this body, once dust or ashes, return?"

We're facing multiple crises as a society – not least the pandemic, and the looming threat of climate change. What role does humanism have to play?

Humanists are all about confronting reality, finding solutions to problems through reason and evidence, and applying those solutions through cooperation. Together with the humanist commitment to valuing every human life, these ideas are well suited to addressing today's national and global challenges.

We also tend to be optimistic (at least "51% optimistic" as Philip Pullman put it). A declaration of confidence at times like these, that if we think hard and try hard we can meet these challenges, doesn't go amiss. Particularly in the case of the pandemic, if you think about the things that are really helping humanity compared with previous pandemics in our history – from the science that is finding treatments to the systems of social welfare – they are due in large part to the impact of humanist thinking over recent decades and centuries.

People often say we live in a 'post-truth' society. In your book, you spend some time on the idea of 'truth'. How can we define truth, and why is it important?

Something is true if it corresponds to reality and this is indeed a very important principle for humanists. You will be a better person if you think more clearly, not just about what others are saying but about your own beliefs too. You will be more aware of reality, and the more aware of reality you are, the more of an honest and authentic life you can live. You will have a better chance of improving not just your own life, but the lives of others, your society, and our world, if you think clearly and face reality with courage.

But human beings are not always good at accepting the truth. We fool ourselves into thinking that things are right or true for all sorts of reasons. Maybe because it is fashionable to think something, or because someone has told us, or because it’s something we’ve believed for a long time. We want to believe it, even if it’s not true. That's why we spend a bit of time on this in the book. Knowing what's true can be hard and we all need to practice!

You also write about critical thinking. Is that a humanist principle?

Absolutely! To think critically and be sceptical is at the foundation of humanist ideas. Harold Blackham put it well when he said that for humanists:

"...there is no immemorial tradition, no revelation, no authority, no privileged knowledge (first principles, intuitions, axioms) which is beyond question and which can be used as a standard by which to interpret experience. There is only experience to be interpreted in the light of further experience, the sole source of all standards of reason and value, forever open to question. This radical assumption is itself, of course, open to question, and stands only in so far as it is upheld by experience."

There are so many barriers to critical thinking put up today, either by people misinforming us or by our own cognitive biases and someone taking the humanist approach has to work hard to compensate for that.

What is the humanist approach to death, and to loss?

What a big question! In the book we look at the question of how to approach our own death, as well as that of others, and explore a wide range of perspectives on death. One of the most important is certainly the humanist acceptance that death is the end of our personal existence. As Bertrand Russell put it:

"The mind grows like the body; like the body, it inherits characteristics from both parents; it is affected by diseases of the body and by drugs; it is intimately connected with the brain. There is no scientific reason to suppose that after death the mind acquires an independence of the brain which it never had in life."

In the book we also dwell on that fact that death is natural – without it there would be no life. And that it is necessary for our own sense of meaning – without it there would be no structure to our lives.

As to the feeling of grief, an important humanist idea is that the feeling of grief is the price of love. Which would you rather have? Would you rather never have any love in your life, or would you rather love, even though this means you will inevitably experience loss and grief as a result? And, although the someone who has died no longer exists as themselves, for us left behind the traces of their lives persist in myriad ways, from their descendants, to the deeds they have done, and in our memories of them. We can still speak with them in our own minds and, quite often, we know exactly how they would reply to us. We carry their legacy forward in the human story, just as the people coming after us will do when we are gone.

A thought experiment from A C Grayling, which we quote in the book, makes a very humanist point about how we should approach our own grief:

"Think of those you care about, imagine them mourning when you die, and ask yourself, how much sorrow you would wish them to bear. The answer would surely be: neither too much, nor for too long. You would wish them to come to terms with loss, and thereafter to remember the best of the past with joy, and you would wish them to continue life hopefully, which is the natural sentiment of the human condition. If that is what we wish for those we will leave behind us when we die, then that is what we must believe would be desired by those who have already died. In that way we do justice to a conception of what their best and kindest wishes for us would be, and thereby, begin to restore the balance that is upset by this most poignant of life’s sorrows."

What does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to be normal? Are they the same thing? And, conversely, what is it to be unhealthy? Is it a fact about being, and thus possible to adduce objectively, or is it a value which depends on the subjective interpretation of the patient or doctor? Or is it the set of medical, cultural or political norms of a given society?

The current health crisis has brought a new urgency to these questions, both at the level of medical science and in the social and personal sphere. In the internet era, it can seem as though every individual has become their own physician. We can access a vast amount of medical theory and anecdote which makes it possible to find fatalities for almost any disease and a disease for any symptom. Self-diagnoses have become quotidian. And in our present moment, amidst the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic, we are consumed by endless flows of information about possible causes, possible cures, morbidity rates and behavioural advice (all of which change continuously). As both personal and public duty, the conversation we have with our own bodies has become louder and more urgent.

The history of medicine is one of changes to the definitions of normal and healthy, sick and diseased. For a long swathe of human history, for example, homosexuality was defined as abnormal. It was only removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973, and remains pathologised in many cultures. Sickle cell anaemia is predominantly found in African and Caribbean populations, where it has a high morbidity rate. However, the cells which cause it also appear to have antimalarial properties, making them a biological advantage in places where malaria is endemic.

Furthermore, many carriers of different diseases are asymptomatic. One can live with HIV without getting AIDS, and one can have latent tuberculosis without being aware of it. No one in apparently “perfect health” is in perfect health.

Given these inconsistencies, how can we really define disease? Is it an entity which in some sense exists independently of the human that “has” it (as when “Susan has a cold”), or is it a process which can only be identified in its dynamic interaction with its host, such as the growth of cancer cells? Or is it simply a set of conventions? Classifications change over time – “fever” was once thought of as a disease and is now a symptom, and epilepsy was once considered a divine state, but is now a disease.

* * *

It is this question of health and illness which the notable French philosopher Georges Canguilhem explores in his radical intervention into medical philosophy, The Normal and the Pathological. First published in 1943, the book investigates the two concepts of the title across medical history and in their contemporary definitions.

Trained in medicine – as unusual then as it is now for a philosopher – Canguilhem is, within France, regarded as one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century, not only for his own work, but for his influence on his students, who included Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu and in particular Michel Foucault, who was to expand on Canguilhem’s fundamental insights in his explorations of the archaeology of knowledge.

His influence was not simply academic. As a professor at the Sorbonne and as inspector general and then president of the Jury d’Agrégation in philosophy (the national educational accreditation board), his role was to evaluate the early work of these formidable thinkers, and he was not one to suffer fools or academic sloppiness. Derrida was told that he needed to prove that he was a serious thinker before staking a claim to iconoclasm (advice that he just about managed to follow), while Althusser was to write that Canguilhem was “one of our old masters, a fierce man, angry, shy and violent, who convinced himself, after years of mistrust, that we really loved him”.

The Normal and the Pathological opens up the field of science and history, framing science as encultured and non-neutral. Canguilhem takes as his starting point the rapid developments in medical biology in the 19th century, in particular the emergent disciplines of physiology – the study of the body as a system and its normal functioning – and pathology, the study of its illnesses. Generally held to be inaugurated by William Harvey’s 1628 discovery of the circulation of the blood, the field of physiology had increasingly come to treat the human as a kind of machine, the organs of which worked in harmony with each other.

Advances which consolidated this view of the human body included three strands: cell theory, which broke the organs down into smaller units and, as Canguilhem notes, has a visual analogy with the cells of a beehive, thus suggesting industry; germ theory, which included the discovery of bacteria and then viruses, which conformed to the model of objects from outside which enter into the object of the body; and immunology, in which the army of the body fights the army of the disease.

In the emergent field of physiology, the body was thought to seek homeostasis – a steady state in terms of such things as temperature, heartbeat, blood pressure and so forth. In each of these metrics, there is an ideal that
possibly applies to all humans but certainly to any given individual. A pathology, then, is something which interrupts this normal functioning, a spanner in the works. For 19th century western physiologists, whose models and analogies continue to inform how we view disease, the difference between the normal and the pathological is quantitative. There is normotension, where an individual’s blood pressure is within the homeostatic range, but there is also hypertension, when it is above, and this is pathological.

These conditions presuppose that the normal state can be defined in an objective way as a fact about humans. However, as we have noted, normality can be site-specific (as in the case of sickle cell disease) or time-specific. For example, not being able to talk is normal for a three-month-old baby, but not for an adult. Physiological averages can vary wildly across societies and within individuals.

* * *

What is described as normal, therefore, in the sense of numerical pervasiveness or statistical averageness, needs to be distinguished from the normative, with which it is often conflated, if not confused. The normative is “evaluative”: it is an imposed criterion for judging whether something is desirable or good. In medicine, that which is considered normal (a fact) is often normative (a value). The longstanding definition of homosexuality as an abnormality is a good example of this.

Thus for Canguilhem, “the normal man is not a mean correlative to a social concept, it is not a judgment of reality but rather a judgment of value.” There are no value-free assessments of normality or disease – excess and deficiency exist, he writes, “in relation to a scale deemed valid and suitable”. For instance, for “a disability like astigmatism or myopia, one would be normal in an agricultural or a pastoral society but abnormal for sailing or flying.”

In this way, Canguilhem challenges declarative statements in medical science and their designation as “existents” which can be defined and kept separate from each other. For Canguilhem, these norms are theoretical abstractions – a mathematisation of individual experience. A medical average is not necessarily the ideal for a particular person. He quotes the example of the physiologist “who took urine from the urinal at the train station through which passed people of all nations, and believed he could thus produce the analysis of average European urine”.

This is not to argue that averages and other such abstractions cannot be useful, only that they can in fact become harmful if they are taken to actually represent disease and the experience of disease itself. To be sick is to live another life. “The living creature,” Canguilhem writes, “does not live among laws but among creatures and events which vary these laws.” Or more colourfully, “What the fox eats is the hen’s egg, and not the chemistry of albuminoids or the laws of embryology.”

Life as an object of science cannot capture life as it is lived, and it is in illness that we live the most intimate and mysterious of scientific puzzles. As Canguilhem puts it, the concept of the norm “is an original concept which, in physiology more than elsewhere, cannot be reduced to an objective concept determinable by scientific methods. Strictly speaking then, there is no biological science of the normal. There is a science of biological situations and conditions called normal. That science is physiology.”

Normalcy, then, for Canguilhem, is “not static or peaceful, but a dynamic and polemical concept”. Because it is individually specific, it is a concept best generated by the patient. A person is healthy “insofar as they are normative relative to the fluctuations of their environment” – insofar, we might say, that they can achieve their functional aspirations, be they practical, emotional or other. That being the case:

The borderline between the normal and the pathological is imprecise for several individuals considered simultaneously but it is perfectly precise for one and the same individual considered successively.

We are, he notes, “sick in relation not only to others but also to ourselves”.

Medical science is, Canguilhem argues, a domain of knowledge and, like all domains of knowledge, it is not purely objective – economic, cultural and technological imperatives are always already present in its creation. Foucault is known for extending this insight into other fields, in particular the realm of mental illness and sexuality, concentrating on the way that signifiers such as “sane” or “mad” are the result of relationships of power. Most directly, his 1963 text The Birth of the Clinic examines the way the medical gaze reorganised medical knowledge in the late 18th century to separate the person and the patient, the person and the disease. “In order to know the truth of the pathological fact,” writes Foucault, “the doctor must abstract the patient ... paradoxically in relation to that which he is suffering from, the patient is only an external fact.”

The dominant positivist account of scientific progress in medicine (as in other disciplines) argues that knowledge is steadily accumulated, eventually leading to absolute understanding. Canguilhem contends that this is doubly false. First, it takes the idea of progress and the process of naming as neutral. Second, it portrays scientific progress as a movement from ignorance to absolute knowledge. As Canguilhem points out, the scientific truth of today (or any day) is always merely an “episode” in truth, which meets no absolute criterion, but is instead manufactured by any number of factors. “The germ theory of contagious disease,” he writes, “has certainly owed much of its success to the fact that it embodies an ontological representation of sickness. After all, a germ can be seen. . . To see an entity is already to foresee an action.”

* * *

Medical knowledge works, therefore, by a chain of analogies. Further, like all sciences, medical science works by inductive logic: a theory cannot be proved, only proved wrong. If the sun rises every day, I can argue that there is a strong likelihood it will rise tomorrow. If it doesn’t, my theory was wrong and no number of sunrises can prove it right. Gravity cannot be “proved” – rather, as a model it displays greater predictive power (up to and including all situations) in dealing with a greater number of physical events (up to and including all of them) than any other theory.

In addition, of all the sciences, medical science remains the most complicated, both in terms of diagnoses and prognosis, and in terms of effectiveness of intervention. In their 2011 paper “Uncertainty in Clinical Medicine”, Benjamin Djulbegovic, Iztok Hozo and Sander Greenland wrote: “It occurs at the intersection of science and the humanities, situated at the crossroads of basic natural sciences (i.e. biology, chemistry, physics) and technological applications (relying on the application of numerous diagnostic and therapeutic devices to diagnose or treat a particular disorder). It occurs in a specific economic or social setting (each with its own resources, social policies and cultural values).”

Moreover, “It essentially involves a human encounter, typically between a physician and a patient.” Unlike the raw material of, say, an experiment in physics, a medical experiment – which is what every doctor–patient encounter remains – does not take as its subject an inert material which yields predictable results. Nor is the practitioner – the physician – able to extract themselves from the experiment, as is the aim of scientific best practice in other fields.

Neither the patient nor the physician needs to act in bad faith to exacerbate this complication. The physician-patient encounter is not not only a case of making predictions; it is, at least initially, making predictions from indirect evidence. It is the patient who decides they are unwell, and it is initially through verbal communication that the symptoms are presented. These initial descriptions cannot help but be partial and subjective – the severity, persistence and location of a stomach ache, which may or may not be related to another symptom, is not, in any understandable sense, fully communicable. In Canguilhem’s words:

It is impossible for the physician, starting from the accounts of sick individuals, to understand the experience lived by the sick individual, for what the sick express in ordinary concepts is not directly their experience but their interpretation of an experience for which they have been deprived of adequate concepts.

For a physician, it is difficult to maintain the abstractions of diseases-as-classified when talking to actual patients whose symptoms, and presentation of symptoms, cannot, by definition, map directly onto those diseases. The accuracy of any prediction about outcomes does not necessarily correlate to the severity of the disease or the accuracy of the diagnosis. Recent studies show that prognoses of the outcomes of cancer treatment hover around the 30 per cent accuracy mark.

The messiness of the diagnostic encounter is not, of course, fatal to medical science – its successes are tremendous at the level of history and society, and often at the level of the individual. And yet the discourse around medicine, particularly during the coronavirus crisis, has fastened to a large degree on the mathematical modes of medical science, from statistics around death to the positivist notion of a logical progression towards a vaccine. Newspaper reports about scientists supposedly “proving” the efficacy (or inefficacy) of a particular medical or pharmaceutical technique have come thick and fast. Even those who regard medicine as malign, such as anti-vaxxers, frame their arguments in the jargon of science.

Public health, whether done badly or well, has its own set of competing imperatives, over and above the individual encounter between doctor and patient. It incorporates epidemiology, statistics and biology, but also economics, architecture and civic planning. It is a political discourse which, as we have seen, must play to particular constituents, ideally balancing this with an obligation to truth telling insofar as such a thing is possible. As Foucault argued, “The first task of the doctor is political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.” It is another front of the battle against disease: a public front.

* * *

And yet, for those who are ill, for those who are fighting their own private battle with their inability to function as they wish, the public version of their illness is no more or less true than the abstract version. It is yet another competing narrative into which their body has been inserted. They are expected to put up a fight, as though immunity were an army of which they are the general, able to muster and direct their forces by the strength of their moral goodness. Disease, Canguilhem writes, is envisioned as “a polemical situation: either a battle between the organism and a foreign substance, or an internal struggle between opposing forces”.

This is a model, dominant in much medical discourse including the current crisis, that privileges disease as a problem for which there is an absolute and knowable solution, as though “disease tokens [could be] separated from the body and displayed on their own”. In this model, the messiness of medical diagnosis is effaced – all symptoms point to a disease, all diseases point to a resolution (good or bad), and a failure of identification is a failure of understanding, rather than a signifier of the complexity of the issues.

As Canguilhem writes, “The living being, having been led, in his humanity, to give himself methods and a need to determine scientifically what is real, necessarily sees the ambition to determine what is real extend to life itself. Life becomes – in fact, it has become so historically, not having always been so – an object of science.”

For all those self-diagnosing, this creates its own anxieties. At once distanced from our body as it becomes an object of study, and brought into intimate contact with the idea that it might get sick and die, taking us with it, we stand at the point between. As Canguilhem’s near-contemporary Gabriel Marcel put it, life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. In Canguilhem’s words, “We maintain that the life of the living being, were it that of an amoeba, recognises the categories of health and disease only on the level of experience, which is primarily a test in the affective sense of the word, and not on the level of science. Science explains experience but it does not, for all that, annul it.”

From the autumn 2020 edition of New Humanist.

I recently co-authored a paper on how a little-known parapsychology journal was years ahead of its time.

Our story starts in 2011, when psychologist Daryl Bem reported several experiments that appeared to support the existence of psychic ability. Soon after, Stuart Ritchie, Chris French and I tried to replicate the studies but obtained null results. Several other academics also criticised Bem’s statistics and procedures. This type of ‘I have evidence for psychic ability – Oh no you don’t’ back and forth has occurred many times over the years. However, this time, something odd happened.

Several researchers noted that the criticisms aimed at Bem’s work also applied to many studies from mainstream psychology. Many of the problems surrounded researchers changing their statistics and hypotheses after they had looked at their data, and so commentators urged researchers to submit a detailed description of their plans prior to running their studies. In 2013, psychologist Chris Chambers played a key role in getting the academic journal Cortex to adopt the procedure (known as a Registered Report), and many other journals quickly followed suit.

However, many academics are unaware that a little-known parapsychology journal – The European Journal of Parapsychology – implemented an early version of this concept in the 1970s. For 17 years, around half of the studies in the paper were registered in advance. If the critics were right, these papers should be less likely to contain problems with their statistics and methods, and so be more likely to report spurious positive results. To find out if this was the case, I recently teamed up with Caroline Watt and Diana Kornbrot to examine the studies. The results were as expected – around 8% of the analyses from the studies that had been registered in advance were positive, compared to around 28% from the other papers. Other academics are now conducting the same sort of analyses in psychology and medicine, and finding the same pattern.

Academics often criticise parapsychology, but this episode is a good example of how the field is sometimes ahead of the game and can help to improve mainstream psychology. 

The full paper describing this work is here.

And Diana is now looking more broadly at openness in science. If you are a researcher with an interest in the area, you can take part in her survey here.

The Shadow King (Norton) by Maaza Mengiste

The Wife’s Tale (Fourth Estate) by Aida Edemariam

Queen of Flowers and Pearls (Indiana University Press) by Gabriella Ghermandi

In the final act of Maaza Mengiste’s latest novel The Shadow King, a group of guerrilla fighters, armed with knives and old rifles, ambush a group of Italian soldiers in the foothills of Ethiopia’s Simien mountains. Chief among them is Hirut, a young, orphaned girl, who has volunteered to help liberate her homeland from the invaders. As Hirut charges at her foe, Mengiste evokes a Homeric chorus, which lets out a battle-cry, dedicated to the “multitudes who rushed like wind to free a country from poisonous beasts”. This is one of the most powerful moments in a narrative that subverts all expectations about how war is depicted in fiction.

The Shadow King is based on a true, often overlooked story. In 1935, Mussolini’s army set out to conquer Ethiopia, in the hope of extending Italy’s colonial domain. Despite his army’s modern weapons, however, small partisan groups, like those depicted in the book, held the invaders at bay for months. In fact, their resistance was so strong that to secure victory the fascist generals resorted to using chemical weapons – mustard gas – which they dropped indiscriminately from planes, on militia groups as well as the civilian population. Italy’s rule over Ethiopia would last just six years, but it had long-term consequences: 50,000 were killed during the occupation, and some of the country’s farmland remains contaminated to this day.

The Shadow King is a modern-day Iliad, a celebration of Africa’s forgotten heroes and their epic struggle against European colonisers. It’s also an important historical text. While few – if any – western nations have faced up adequately to their imperial past, the level of collective amnesia in Italy is particularly severe. In the 1940s and 50s, the newly founded republic introduced colonial history to schools in an effort to emphasise the government’s split from fascist-era foreign policy. Nevertheless, it was the botched nature of the expedition in Ethiopia, and the ultimate failure of the mission, that passed into public consciousness. As a result, many today still operate under the assumption that Italy’s African campaigns were less horrific than those of, say, Britain or France.

In reality, the fascist (and pre-fascist) occupations of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia, as well as Ethiopia, were barbaric. Hundreds of civilians were killed in two massacres in 1937, at Addis Ababa and the Debre Libanos monastery. These are just two atrocities that have been whitewashed out of public consciousness. There are many others. Even in Ethiopia, where Italy’s crimes are more intimately felt, people have tried hard to forget these events. At the start of The Shadow King, Hirut herself struggles to speak up: “she does not want to remember”, writes Mengiste, “but she is here and memory is gathering bones.”

The publication of The Shadow King comes at a strange moment for Italy. Public awareness about the country’s colonial past has faded over the past few decades and nostalgia for fascism is on the rise. The media often points to the growth of thuggish street movements like Casapound and Forza Nuova to illustrate this point. In reality, though, fascism permeates far deeper into the collective identity. Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s most popular party, the League, regularly quotes Mussolini, speaking of the need for a “mass cleansing”, and has called on his supporters to embark on a new “march on Rome”. In bars and cafés, it’s not uncommon to hear people speaking fondly about “Il Duce” (an affectionate nickname for the Italian dictator) or to quip, with various degrees of seriousness, that things were better “quando c’era lui” (when he was around). Sometimes, these sentiments are expressed explicitly in terms of imperial nostalgia. In 2012, Ercole Viri, the mayor of Affile, a small town outside Rome, used public money to build a monument to Rodolfo Graziani, a fascist general who sanctioned the use of chemical weapons in Ethiopia in the 1930s. Viri maintains that “in his colonial career and at home, Graziani was a proven hero.”

In recent years there have been several attempts to counteract such distorted views. Mengiste’s fictional colonel in The Shadow King, Carlo Fucelli, is a case in point. At the beginning of the novel, he appears to be a confident, cold ideologue. As the narrative progresses, though, we see that his loyalty to fascism is really based on his own insecurities and sense of impotence. Even his most evil gestures – as when he commands his soldiers to drop Ethiopian prisoners one by one off a cliff to their deaths – are based more on a need to impress the men around him than on some innate hatred of the local population. Other authors have provided similar deconstructions of this highfalutin masculinity.

In her novel Queen of Flowers and Pearls (2015), for example, Gabriella Ghermandi, an Italian-Ethiopian writer from Bologna, collates stories from the oral tradition to expose the everyday crimes committed by men like Graziani. Her narrator, Mahlet, a young girl, listens to stories from friends and relatives and acquaintances; learning in the process about the implications of this history on her own identity. This is a bildungsroman, in which the protagonist’s own life in modern-day Europe is transformed by revelations about Italian violence. Then there is The Big A (2016), by Giulia Caminito, which depicts Mussolini’s colonial territories as a place of cosmopolitan mixing, where working classes of all nationalities co-existed and shared frustrations about the brutal behaviour of the fascist elite.

One of the most striking things about this new flourishing of postcolonial texts is the particular contribution of female authors. In the past, most books critical of the Italian empire – like Ennio Flaiano’s A Time to Kill (1947), which won the first ever Premio Strega literary prize – have focused on male guilt and how white Europeans have struggled to live with their culpability. Today, that conversation is becoming more nuanced; less Italo-centric and less skewed towards a purely masculine experience. This gendered dimension is far from incidental. It is transforming our shared understanding of colonial history itself. Flaiano’s novel, for example, presents women as being particularly opposed to war on the basis that conflict kills the men they are close to, or reliant upon. In The Shadow King, by contrast, Mengiste demonstrates how women also fought willingly, against both the invaders and domestic manifestations of patriarchy. Early on in the narrative, Hirut is raped by an Ethiopian general and spends much of the novel afraid of further sexual assaults. It is only when she is drawn into direct conflict with the Italians that she feels “where she should be, at the centre of the world, spinning free, finally”.

Queen of Flowers and Pearls is similarly unflinching in the face of unspoken and uncomfortable truths. At the start of the novel, Mahlet appears naïve and ignorant of her home country’s past. As the plot progresses, however, it is she, a teenage girl, who breaks down the psychological and political barriers constructed by a previous generation to uncover the ways that Italian colonisation engendered an inferiority complex among the Ethiopian population.

Perhaps the most powerful of the recent releases, though, is The Wife’s Tale (2018) by the Ethiopian-Canadian journalist Aida Edemariam. This non-fiction biography – structured according to the Coptic calendar – tells the life story of the author’s paternal grandmother, Yetemegnu, who lived in the area around Gondar in Northern Ethiopia for much of the 20th century. Here the major historical events – the famines and massacres, protests and revolution – are secondary to the personal accounts of everyday rituals of childcare and cleaning. During the Italian invasion, for example, Yetemegnu is mainly concerned with the fate of sycamore trees, vegetable plots and animals. She wonders if the Italians will support the local church and if the rumours are true that they are less racist than the British. She observes that “pasta looked like hookworm” and perplexedly grinds up sweet galeta biscuits to make a spicy paste. History can often be abstract and alienating. In this biography the reader is presented with an everyday story of individual resilience, in which Ethiopia’s landscape, culture and traditions are treated not as exotic counterpoints to European experience, but as worthy subjects for narrative in their own right.

Fifty years ago, many writers simply wanted to remind the postwar public that Italy ever attempted to build an empire. This remains an important mission. Yet these recent texts demonstrate a maturing of Ethiopia’s postcolonial tradition and an increasing sensitivity to how and through what prisms we remember European imperialism.

In Italy, writers of African origin are often instrumentalised to become purely political actors, whose main job is to counteract the false histories propagated by the far right. Yet reducing these novels to this task alone is to misunderstand both the history of colonialism and the function of literature in society. It is not these writers’ responsibility to fill in the gap where education and political institutions have failed, but to develop nuanced characters that call into question stereotypes of all kinds.

What really distinguishes these books is their commitment to communicating how complex and contradictory human nature remains, even – perhaps especially – amidst atrocities where the line between good and evil seems clear. We’ve become used to art which explores the psychological nuances of fascists and other colonial administrators. Thanks to this new wave of books, a similar sensitivity is finally being afforded to those who resisted them.

From the autumn 2020 edition of New Humanist.

Psychology at The University of Hertfordshire is turning 50 this year. To help celebrate, we’re holding two competitions, which could see you win Amazon vouchers worth up to £100.  

The first competition involves completing the statement, “Why I love psychology….” in a maximum of 10 words. In the second competition, we are inviting everyone to help shape the field over the next 50 years by completing the statement  ‘In the next 50 years, I hope that psychology …’ using a maximum of 20 words.

There will be 5 winners in each category, so come over to the competition website and send us your entries!

I am delighted to announce the arrival of the second issue of Hocus Pocus!

And this time we have created a comic that communes with the dead!

This issue delves into the strange world of spirit communication! Join Houdini’s chief investigator, Rose Mackenberg, as she uncovers the secrets of the seance room. Travel through time to discover the trickery used by Fox sisters and the Davenport brothers to fool the world. Uncover the scientists and scoundrels behind the strange history of the Ouija Board.

Beautifully illustrated, printed in full colour on heavy card stock, and limited edition.

Illustrated by Jordan Collver, written by Rik Worth and coloured by Owen Watts.

You can get a copy from PropDog here or from Travelling Man here

And the magazine website is here.

Praise for Issue One:
‘An utterly magical read ….. one of the most inventive and gorgeous comics we have read this year.’ – Pipedream Comics

The University of Hertfordshire have just launched a great online Festival of Ideas. There’s lots of amazing and wonderful content focusing around how the arts and sciences can help to tackle Covid-19, and thoughts about how the world will change post-virus.

I have contributed a talk about the making of a free online computer game that encourages social distancing. The game was created with Martin Jacob and can be played here.  The game received lots of media coverage, made the BBC national news and went viral. We have now had over 75,000 people play it and the feedback has been amazing!

In this episode of the podcast, Sam discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America.

This is a transcript of a recorded podcast.

* * *

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast… This is Sam Harris.

OK…. Well, I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week—and have been unsure about whether to record it at all, frankly.

Conversation is the only tool we have for making progress, I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about, seem impossible to talk about.

I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I’ve been saying for a few years now that, with social media, we’ve all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it’s not at all clear how it will turn out. And it’s still not clear how it will turn out, but it’s not looking good. It’s fairly disorienting out there. All information is becoming weaponized. All communication is becoming performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time.

We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.

So I’d like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest, and its possible political implications, and other cultural developments, and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. I’m going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism, because that really is at the center of this. There is so much to talk about here, and it’s so difficult to talk about. And there is so much we don’t know. And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago.

I’ve been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now, and perhaps lay the ground for much worse to come. And I’ve been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance—not because I don’t have anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if that’s the way I feel, given the pains that I’ve taken to insulate myself from those concerns, I know that almost everyone with a public platform is terrified. Journalists, and editors, and executives, and celebrities are terrified that they might take one wrong step here, and never recover.

And this is really unhealthy—not just for individuals, but for society. Because, again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can’t reason with one another, there is no path forward, other than violence. Conversation or violence.

So, I’d like to talk about some of the things that concern me about the current state of our communication. Unfortunately, many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic which is still very much with us. And it remains to be seen how much our half-hearted lockdown, and our ineptitude in testing, and our uncoordinated reopening, and now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the Covid-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see. As many have pointed out, the virus doesn’t care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other’s necks. And we’ve certainly been doing enough of that.

Of course, almost no one can think about Covid-19 right now. But I’d just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock-on effects in the economy, and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the US, the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost. The ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible costs, yes, but it is also a massive opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest is compounding those problems—whatever the merits of these protests may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what’s happening—the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burned buildings, the neighborhoods that won’t recover for years in many cities, the educations put on hold, and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution—just think about all the good and important things we cannot do—cannot even think of doing now—and perhaps won’t contemplate doing for many years to come, because we’ll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called “normal life.”

Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. The disparities in wealth and health and opportunity that we have gotten used to in this country, and that so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted, are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. What we’re seeing now is a response to that. But it’s a confused and confusing response. Worse, it’s a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous.

This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.

So, what’s happening here?

Well, again, it’s hard to say. What is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him for being a cog in the machinery of systemic racism? Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics, or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It’s not entirely clear.

In the most concrete terms, we are experiencing widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter-response from law enforcement—much of which, ironically, is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence, both real and perceived. And many of the videos we’ve seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable. And this is one of many vicious circles that we must find some way to interrupt.

Again, there is so much to be confused about here. We’ve now seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters, and yet we have also seen video of the police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them, and simultaneously trying to teach society a lesson by letting crime and mayhem spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what’s actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than is being advertised to us?

Again, it’s very hard to know.

What’s easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. It seems to me that we’ve long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous. And now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air—the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs—is just astonishing.

And it’s important to keep in mind that, with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy. And I believe that the last two weeks have been very good for him, politically, even when everything else seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don’t say this. A large majority of people disapprove of his handling this crisis so far. But I think we all know now to take polls with a grain of salt. There is the very real problem of preference falsification—especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is socially acceptable, and then think, or say, or do something very different in private—like when they’re alone in a voting booth.

Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And a lot can happen in the next few months. The last two weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law-and-order President, that may be his path to re-election, if such a path exists. Of course, this crisis has revealed, yet again, how unfit he is to be President. The man couldn’t strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it—and the fate of the country has depended on it. I also think it’s possible that these protests wouldn’t be happening, but for the fact that Trump is President. Whether or not the problem of racism has gotten worse in our society, having Trump as President surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that, for many people, it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So, all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November.

But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. And now he has been given a very different battle to fight. A battle against leftwing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. If our social order frays sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically now. Things can change very, very quickly. And to all a concern for basic law and order “racist”, isn’t going to wash.

Trust in institutions has totally broken down. We’ve been under a very precarious quarantine for more than 3 months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political Right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They’ve been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public officials by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it’s fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so, because the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It’s a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now.

So, it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment.

Before I get into details on police violence, first let me try to close the door to a few misunderstandings.

Let’s start with the proximate cause of all this: The killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. I’ll have more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation: That video was absolutely sickening, and it revealed a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by. In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, his actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there’s no question he should be prosecuted. And he is being prosecuted. He’s been indicted for 2nd degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he will spend many, many years in prison. And, this is not to say “the system is working.” It certainly seems likely that without the cell phone video, and the public outrage, Chauvin might have gotten away with it—to say nothing of the other cops with him, who are also now being prosecuted. If this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police.

So, as I said, I’ll return to this topic, because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video, and from videos like it, but let me just echo everyone’s outrage over what happened. This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent.

On the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear, preemptive statements:

Racism is still a problem in American society. No question. And slavery—which was racism’s most evil expression—was this country’s founding sin. We should also add the near-total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race. And the legacy of these crimes—crimes that were perpetrated for centuries—remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this. And nothing I’m about to say, should suggest otherwise.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, African Americans and Native Americans, suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be that we manage to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this, economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted to is a betrayal of our values, whether we realize it or not. If it’s not a betrayal or your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don’t manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kid’s values when they’re old enough to understand the world they are living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society, and very unlucky, should not be as enormous as it is.

However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society?

What should we do next?  Tomorrow… next week…. Obviously, I don’t have the answers. But I am very worried that many of the things we’re doing now, and seem poised to do, will only make our problems worse. And I’m especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this. I’m just trying to have conversations. I’m just trying to figure these things out in real time, with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous.

Think about the politics of this. Endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive, and seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs, cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses, and assaulting their owners, isn’t social justice, or even social protest. It’s crime. And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump.

And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It’s always seemed somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we’re living in Weimar Germany. I’ve had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, who’s been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now. I’ve known, in the abstract, that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It doesn’t anymore.

Of course, what we’ve been seeing in the streets isn’t just one thing. Some people are protesting for reasons that I fully defend. They’re outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd, and they’re worried about creeping authoritarianism—which we really should be worried about now. And they’re convinced that our politics is broken, because it is broken, and they are deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society. And they recognize that we have a President who is an incompetent, divisive, conman and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership.

All of that is hard to put on a sign, but it’s all worth protesting.

However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment exclusively through the lens of identity politics—and racial politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order, or at least remaining nonjudgmental about it. And you could see, in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line, on CNN, for instance. Talking about the history of social protest, “Sometimes it has to be violent, right? What, do you think all of these protests need to be nonviolent?” Those words came out of Chris Cuomo’s mouth, and Don Lemon’s mouth. Many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about riots being “the language of the unheard.” They’re leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists.

There are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. This may be psychologically understandable when you’ve spent half your day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I’ll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society.

We need police reform, of course. There are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing—its hiring practices, training, the militarization of so many police forces, outside oversight, how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job, and yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks we can do without the police—or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones—this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. We should have psychologists or social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we’re giving cops jobs they shouldn’t be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we’re witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over-resourced—that we’ve given them too much training, that we’ve made the job too attractive—so that the people we’re recruiting are of too high a quality. That doesn’t make any sense.

What’s been alarming here is that we’re seeing prominent people—in government, in media, in Hollywood, in sports—speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society, and of society itself, is a form of progress and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point the woman who’s running the City Council in Minneapolis, which just decided to abolish the police force, was asked by a journalist, I believe on CNN, “What do I do if someone’s breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call?” And her first response to that question was, “You need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is.” She’s since had to walk that back, because it’s one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said, but this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone is breaking into your house, and you’re terrified, and you want a police force that can respond, that fear is a symptom of “white privilege.” This is where Democratic politics goes to die.

Again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response, as well as the acceptance of that response by many millions of Americans.

If you step back, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air. And it’s destroying institutions. It’s destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information—universities, the press. The New York Times in recent days, seems to be preparing for a self-immolation in recent days. No one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable—certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It’s just become too dangerous. There are people being fired for tweeting “All Lives Matter.” #AllLivesMatter, in the current environment, is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That is how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted…

Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world—or young people who fear they never will—people who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops—people by the millions are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality.

On top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin—people who have been living wonderful lives in their gated communities or 5^th avenue apartments—and who feel damn guilty about it—they are supporting this movement uncritically, for many reasons. Of course, they care about other people—I’m sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do—but they are also supporting this movement because it promises a perfect expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars, and shoot botox into your face, and vacation on St. Bart’s, and you’re liberal—the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC and like every one of her tweets.

The problem isn’t just with the looting, and the arson, and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves.

Of course, I’m not questioning anyone’s right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right—which he did as the DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church, awkwardly holding a bible, as though he had never held a book in life.

The problem with the protests is that they are animated, to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation. And I’ll explain why I think that’s the case. And, of course, this will be controversial. Needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great, black intellectuals onto the podcast to make these points for me. But that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, these guys might not agree with everything I’m about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I’m now stepping out on far more credibly than I can.

But, you see, that’s part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person’s skin, or even his life experience, matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. For the discussion we really need to have, the color of a person’s skin, and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break this spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything.

Ok…

As I’ve already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we’re still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there. And there are ways in which racism became institutionalized long ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different. And this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don’t know, but it was effectively racist. Nothing I’m about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential.

And I’m not denying that many black people, perhaps most, have interactions with cops, and others in positions of power, or even random strangers, that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they are actually in the presence of racism, and perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I’ve had unpleasant encounters with cops, and customs officers, and TSA screeners, and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people working in stores or restaurants. People aren’t always nice or ethical. But being white, and living in a majority white society, I’ve never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I had encountered yet another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that’s one form of white privilege.

So, nothing I’m going to say denies that we should condemn racism—whether interpersonal or institutional—and we should condemn it wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can’t afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn’t exist. And we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find, and the more likely we’ll find ourselves chasing after its ghost.

The truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn’t 1920, and it isn’t 1960. We had a two-term black president. We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. There are major cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, going on their fifth or sixth consecutive black mayor. Having more and more black people in positions of real power, in what is still a majority white society, is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is, it might not even solve the problem we’re talking about. When Freddy Gray was killed in Baltimore, virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we’re about to see. But obviously, there is more work to do on the problem of racism. And, more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race, and will still be correlated with race, even after the last racist has been driven from our shores.

The question of how much of today’s inequality is due to existing racism—whether racist people or racist policies—is a genuinely difficult question to answer. And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present.

Take wealth inequality, for example: The median white family has a net worth of around $170,000—these data are a couple of years old, but they’re probably pretty close to what’s true now. The median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. (That’s the median, not the mean: Half of white families are below 170,000 and half above; half of black families are below 17,000 and half above. And we’re talking about wealth here, not income.)

This disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. For whites in the top 10 percent for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million; for blacks it’s around $350,000. There are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families that make it to the top of the income distribution fall out of it more easily than white families do. But it’s also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance.

How much of this is inequality due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to an ensuing century of racist policies? I’m prepared to believe quite a lot. And it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans. And then one wonders where this all ends. And what about blacks who aren’t descended from slaves, but who still suffered the consequences of racism in the US? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I’m inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is that I’m genuinely unsure about this.

Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask, how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth? And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts.

The problem with the social activism we are now seeing—what John McWhorter has called “the new religion of anti-Racism”—is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university, or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic—and, perversely, they may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization.

The imprecision here—the bad-faith arguments, the double standards, the goal-post shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced—I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society, and to effective liberal politics, and to the welfare of African Americans.

So, with that as preamble, let’s return to the tragic death of George Floyd.

As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So, people of any race, are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this. There are very likely to be few tripwires installed there, and I’m about to hit them. So just do your best to remain calm.

Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

In other words, do we have reason to believe that, had Floyd been white, he wouldn’t have died in a similar way?

Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years, of black men being killed by cops, do they prove, or even suggest, that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men and that this violence is motivated by racism?

Most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that to even pose them as I just did is obscene. The answer is YES, and it’s a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets.

The problem, however, is that if you take even 5 minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer appears to be “no,” in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I’m not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990. But in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US, and so has the police use of deadly force. And as you’re about to see, the police used more deadly force against white people—both in absolute numbers, and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different.

In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings. Think about that…. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles, peacefully and violently, do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds—in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods—do the people who caused so much damage to the city, that certain neighborhoods, ironically the neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, will take years, probably decades to recover, do the celebrities who supported them, and even bailed them out of jail—do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30-year low for police shootings in Los Angeles?

Before I step out further over the abyss here, let me reiterate: Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I’m about to say. You’re not going to like the way it sounds. You’re especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking, this feeling of outrage, this feeling of disgust—this feeling of “Sam, what the fuck is wrong with you, why are you even touching this topic?”—this feeling isn’t an argument. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world.

Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that you should respect. In fact, it is something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you.

If you care about justice—and you absolutely should—you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn’t the case—it cannot be the case—that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be the most offended by conversation itself.

So, I’m going to speak the language of facts right now, in so far as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people’s assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong. And that should matter to you.

So just take a moment and think this through with me.

How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don’t know, guess. See if you have any intuitions for these numbers. Because your intuitions are determining how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis.

The answer for many years running is about 1000. One thousand people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year, and about 10 million arrests. That’s down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually throughout the 1990’s. So, of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police, and the police decide to make an arrest, about 1000 of those people die as a result. (I’m sure a few people get killed even when no arrest was attempted, but that has to be a truly tiny number.) So, without knowing anything else about the situation, if the cops decide to arrest you, it would be reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around 1/10,000. Of course, in the United States, it’s higher than it is in other countries. So I’m not saying that this number is acceptable. But it is what it is for a reason, as we’re about to see.

Now, there are a few generic things I’d like to point here before we get further into the data. They should be uncontroversial.

First, it’s almost certainly the case that of these 1000 officer-caused deaths each year, some are entirely justified—it may even be true that most are entirely justified—and some are entirely unjustified, and some are much harder to judge. And that will be true next year. And the year after that.

Of the unjustified killings, there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily. It might have been a terrible misunderstanding, or incompetence, or just bad luck, and in certain cases it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he’s become enraged, or he’s just a psychopath. And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings.

Another point that should be uncontroversial—but may sound a little tone-deaf in the current environment, where we’ve inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we’re discussing this topic: Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment, they have an almost impossible job.

If you’re making 10 million arrests every year, some number of people will decide not to cooperate. There can be many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill, or drunk, or on drugs. Of course, rather often the person is an actual criminal who doesn’t want to be arrested.

Among innocent people, and perhaps this getting more common these days, a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do, ethically or politically or as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes, he did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don’t know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race. But I can well imagine that if it’s common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police, that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance. Which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. This is certainly one reason why it is wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it’s policing. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this will reduce lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is a likely explanation for police behavior, which itself might reduce conflict.

When a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest, that person’s resistance poses a problem that most people don’t understand. If you haven’t studied this topic. If you don’t know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven’t thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt while attempting to do that—a gun that can be grabbed and used against you, or against a member of the public—then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad.

If you haven’t trained with firearms under stress. If you don’t know how suddenly situations can change. If you haven’t experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you, and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don’t know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest. You very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these. [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]

And there is another fact that looms over all this like the angel of Death, literally: Most cops do not get the training they need. They don’t get the hand-to-hand training they need—they don’t have good skills to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects. Cops also don’t get the firearms training they need. Of course, there are elite units in many police departments, but most cops do not have the training they need to do the job they’re being asked to do.

It is also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies. And there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys, and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it was borne of racism or not.

But the truth is that even if we got rid of all bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people the best possible training, and we gave them the best culture in which to think about their role in society, and we gave them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations—which we absolutely must do—and we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books, so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem necessary and just—so the war on drugs is obviously over—even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified, and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter, or father or mother, or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface, and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen.

So, while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand that there are very likely always to going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable, or inexplicably stupid, that results in an innocent person’s death, or a not-so-innocent person’s death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year. And we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped.

I’m about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now: If we’re going to let the health of race relations in this country, or the relationship between the community and the police, depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed.

About a week into these protests I heard Van Jones on CNN say, “If we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge.” He said this, not as indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police. With 10 million arrests a year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is.

We have to put these videos into context. And we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret. But some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people—especially by activists. And there are a range of cases—some have video associated with them and some don’t—that are now part of a litany of anti-racist outrage, and the names of the dead are intoned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice. And yet, they are not.

Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer’s taser, that part of the video isn’t clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the officer to feel that his life was under threat at the point he opened fire. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I’m not sure that’s long enough. That seemed like straight-up murder.

The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don’t know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It’s quite possible that he’s a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him—though, as far as I know, the details of those complaints haven’t been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop. Or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck indefinitely. I don’t know. I’m sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. Think about it. He was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely that he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It’s possible, of course. But it doesn’t seem the likeliest explanation for his behavior.

What I believe we saw on that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops. Or terrible recruitment—it’s possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all things you don’t know as a new cop.  It could also be a function of bad luck in terms of Floyd’s underlying health. It’s been reported that he was complaining of being unable to breath before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. The knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death. It could have also been the weight of the other officer pinning him down.

This is almost certainly what happened in the cast of Eric Garner. Half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying “I can’t breathe” he’s not being choked. He’s being held down on the pavement by several officers. Being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again.

And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the killing of Tony Timpa. It’s also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos.

Tony Timpa was a white man in Dallas, who was suffering some mental health emergency and cocaine intoxication. And he actually called 911 himself. What we see is the bodycam footage from the police, which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived—a security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over, and they restrain Timpa on the ground, by rolling him onto a stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner. And they keep their weight on him—one cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck—but they crush the life out of him all the same, over the course of 13 minutes. He’s not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There’s no animus between them and Timpa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe that they’re responding to a mental health emergency. But they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they’re cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he’s going to be dead by the end of this video, make their jokes seem pretty callous. But this was about as benign an imposition of force by cops as you’re going to see. The crucial insight you will have watching this video, is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Timpa, they don’t take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they’re doing is perfectly safe—perfectly within protocol. They’ve probably done this hundreds of times before.

If you watch that video—and, again, fair warning, it is disturbing—but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Timpa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Timpa’s skin, then that video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crushed the life out of a black Tony Timpa… Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way that people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching. And yet, it would not have been a lynching.

Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of cops in Minneapolis. And perhaps we’ll learn at trial. Perhaps a tape of Chauvin using the N-word in another context will surface, bringing in a credible allegation of racism. It seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his actions. But most people who saw that video believe they have seen, with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt, a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That’s not what the video necessarily shows.

As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether we have associated video or not, are very different. Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there’s no video of that encounter. But, if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you’re attacking a cop, trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle that almost by definition for the cop, and it most cases justifies the use of lethal force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct.

I’ve seen many videos of people getting arrested. And I’ve seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don’t understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos, and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don’t get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody, for whatever reason, it’s not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you’re very likely to get injured or killed.

This is a point I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Loury, and it became essentially a public service announcement. And I’ve gone back and listened to those comments, and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand. And it’s something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly: If you put your hands on a cop—if you start wrestling with a cop, or grabbing him because he’s arresting your friend, or pushing him, or striking him, or using your hands in way that can possibly be interpreted as your reaching for a gun—you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin.

As I said, when you’re with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open. And any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn’t know what you’re going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. Most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person without shooting him—for good reason, because they’re not well trained to do that, and they’re continually confronting people who are bigger, or younger, or more athletic, or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They’re ordinary people with insufficient training, and once things turn physical they cannot afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt.

This is something that most people seem totally confused about. If they see a video of somebody trying to punch a cop in the face and the person’s unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back, and any use of deadly force would be totally disproportionate. But that’s not how violence works. It’s not the cop’s job to be the best bare-knuckled boxer on Earth so he doesn’t have to use his gun. A cop can’t risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out, because there’s always a gun in play. This is the cop’s perception of the world, and it’s a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence.

You might think cops shouldn’t carry guns. Why can’t we just be like England? That’s a point that can be debated. But it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns on the street. The United States is not England.

Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It’s not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know you didn’t do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I’m going to ask that again: How could the fact that you’re innocent, that you’re not a threat to cop, that you’re not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he’s attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest?

Unless you called the cops yourself, you never know what situation you’re in. If I’m walking down the street, I don’t know if the cop who is approaching me didn’t get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I know I didn’t do anything, but I don’t know what’s in the cop’s head. The time to find out what’s going on—the time to complain about racist cops, the time to yell at them and tell them they’re all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct—is after cooperating, at the police station, in the presence of a lawyer, preferably. But to not comply in the heat of the moment, when a guy with the gun is issuing commands—this raises your risk astronomically, and it’s something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they’re not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested.

Ok. End of public-service announcement.

The main problem with using individual cases, where black men and women have been killed by cops, to conclude that there is an epidemic of racist police violence in our society, is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them.

In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece in Time Magazine about this.

Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:

“The heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me, and I have recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam Debose, and others.”

So, McWhorter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]. But there’s no song about these people, admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer, and I don’t know any of them, other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names. In addition to the ones I just read from McWhorter’s article, I know the names of Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, and Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, and now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. And I’m aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Breonna Taylor. I can’t name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these—other than Timpa—and I just read McWhorter’s article where he lists many of them.

So, this is also a distortion in the media. The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops; activists are not demanding that they do this. I’m sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot, who knows? But in terms of the story we’re telling ourselves in the mainstream, we are not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence.

So back to the data: Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. Afterall, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes.

If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

And here we arrive at the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. For more than a generation, crime in America really hasn’t been a story of much white-on-black crime. [Some listeners mistook my meaning here. I’m not denying that most violent crime is intraracial. So, it’s true that most white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Per capita, however, the white crime rate is much lower than the black crime rate. And there is more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime.—SH]

The murder rate has come down steadily since the early 1990’s, with only minor upticks. But, nationwide, blacks are still 6 times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities their risk is double that. And around 95 percent of the murders are committed by members of the African American community. [While reported in 2015, these data were more than a decade old. Looking at more recent data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the number appears to be closer to 90 percent.—SH]

The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide—when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot, and 27 killed, in Chicago alone—one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this is far more representative of the kind of violence that the black community needs to worry about. And, ironically, it’s clear that one remedy for this violence is, or would be, effective policing.

These are simply the facts of crime in our society as we best understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts, professionally and ethically. The question is, are they doing that? And, obviously, there’s considerable doubt that they’re doing that, professionally and ethically.

Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who’s work I discussed on the podcast with Glenn Loury, studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force.

His paper is titled, this from 2016, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.”

Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there’s an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men. But he didn’t find that. However, he did find support for the suspicion that black people suffer more nonlethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do.

So let’s look at this.

The study examined data from 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. Generally, Fryer found that there is 25 percent greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones—cuffing them, or forcing them to ground, or using other non-lethal force.

Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

Cops were…

• 17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects
• 18 percent more likely to push them into a wall
• 16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)
• 18 percent more likely to push them to the ground
• 25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton
• 19 percent more likely to draw their guns
• 24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

This is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force. And it seems, from the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. What accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it’s inconvenient to note that other data suggest that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I’m not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that.

Are there other explanations? Well, again, could it be that blacks are less cooperative with the police. If so, that’s worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force.

Whatever is true here is something we should want to understand. And it’s all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops, due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects, with or without an arrest, for whatever reason—it’s easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motivation.

It is totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And, given the level of crime in the black community, a disproportionate number of innocent black men seem guaranteed to have this experience. It’s totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle that we must find some way to interrupt.

But Fryer also found that black suspects are around 25 percent less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations, where officers were not first attacked, but nevertheless fired their weapons at a suspect, they were more likely to do this when the suspect was white.

Again, the data are incomplete. This doesn’t not cover every city in the country. And a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But, as far as I know, the best data we have suggest that for, whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And it is simply undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society.

Can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic and our response to it has been totally inept. On top of that, we’re being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing some horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics. And these videos will keep coming. And the truth is they could probably be matched 2 for 1 with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way? In light of the belief that the disparity must run the other way, people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves, and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting this civil unrest from the sidelines, because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump—and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video.

As I hope I’ve made clear, we need police reform—there’s no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking peaceful protests is outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that I’m unaware of that. From what I’ve seen—and by the time I release this podcast, the character of all this might have changed—but, from what I’ve seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. In many cities, they just stood and watched society unravel. And then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protests. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. There’s no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear, on all sides.

But racializing how we speak about the problem of police violence, where race isn’t actually the relevant variable—again, think of Tony Timpa— this has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, we had the recent case of Breonna Taylor who was killed in a so-called “no knock” raid of her home. As occasionally happens, in this carnival of moral error we call “the war on drugs,” the police had the wrong address, and they kicked in the wrong door. And they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it’s not safe to be “sleeping while black.” The problem is that these no-knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances, and very likely in greater numbers (I don’t have data specifically on no-knock raids, but we can assume that the ratio is probably conserved here).

Think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. If someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night, and you’re a gun owner, of course you’re going to reach for your gun. That’s why you have a gun in the first place. The fact that people bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled “police” (or might have not yelled “police”; it’s alleged in some of these cases that they don’t yell anything)—the fact that someone yells “police” isn’t necessarily convincing. Anyone can yell “police.” And, again, think of the psychology of this: If the police have the wrong house, and you know there is no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, because you haven’t done anything (you’re not the guy running a meth lab)—and now you’re reaching for your gun in the dark—of course, someone is likely to get killed. This is not a racial issue. It’s a terrible policy.

Unfortunately, the process of police reform isn’t straightforward—and it is made massively more complicated by what’s happening now. Yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way now, that much seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of the cops, in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating, have dramatic effects, many of which are negative.

He studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Lequan McDonald, and found that, for reasons that seem pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much 100 percent, once these investigations get started. This is now called “The Ferguson Effect.” The police still answer 911 calls, but they don’t investigate suspicious activity in the same way. They don’t want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. Fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into 1000 extra homicides, and almost 40,000 more felonies, over the next 24 months in the US. And, of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. One shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we’re about to see nationwide… I’m sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it’s almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force. And it will be much more difficult to recruit good people.

Who is going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealist about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I’m pretty sure there’s a difference there, and I think we’re likely to see that difference expressed in the future. It’s a grim picture, unless we do something very creative here.

So there’s a real question about how we can reform police departments, and get rid of bad cops, without negatively impacting the performance of good cops? That’s a riddle we have to solve—or at least we have to understand what the trade-offs are here.

Why is all of this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down. And they are rare events. They are 1/10,000 level events, if measured by arrests. 1/50-60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed is smaller still. Around 50 last year, again, more were white than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent. Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops.  [EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE]

Again, the data don’t tell a clean story, or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that blacks get more attention from the cops—though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don’t know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, which is bad. But, again, it simply isn’t clear that racism is the cause. And contrary to everyone’s expectations, whites seem more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are 7 times more likely to commit “suicide by cop” (and 3 times more likely to commit suicide generally). What’s going on there? Who knows?

There’s a lot we don’t understand about these data. But ask yourself, would our society seem less racist if the disparity ran the other way? Is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed a form of white privilege? Is a higher level of suicide by cop, and suicide generally, a form of white privilege? We have a problem here that, read either way, you can tell a starkly racist narrative.

We need ethical, professional policing, of course. But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that? In a city like Milwaukee, blacks are 12 times more likely to get murdered than whites [Not sure where I came by this number, probably a lecture or podcast. It appears the rate is closer to 20 times more likely and 22 times more likely in Wisconsin as a whole—SH], again, they are being killed by other African Americans, nearly 100 percent of the time. I think the lowest figure I’ve seen is 93 percent of the time. [As noted above, more recent data suggest that it’s closer to 90 percent]. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct?

We need to lower the temperature on this conversation, and many other conversations, and understand what is actually happening in our society.

But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos. Everything I said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands. But I think that what we are witnessing in our streets, and on social media, and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won’t be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video. There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video.

And the media has turned these videos into a form of political pornography. And this has deranged us. We’re now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has been poisoned by bad incentives, in this regard, and social media doubly so.

In the mainstream of this protest movement, it’s very common to hear that the only problem with what is happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins—a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence—has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. Most people in the media have taken exactly this line. People like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. The most prominent liberal voices believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral and political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history. How could anyone who is concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? How could anyone who isn’t himself racist not support Black Lives Matter?

But, of course, there’s a difference between slogans and reality. There’s a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. That’s why propaganda works. For instance, many people assume there’s nothing wrong with ANTIFA, because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as “anti-fascist.” What could be wrong with being anti-fascist? Are you pro fascism?

There’s a similar problem with Black Lives Matter—though, happily, unlike ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I’m discussing is more ideological, and it’s much bigger than Black Lives Matter—though BLM is its most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a public hysteria and moral panic. And it has been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the Left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations, and fear being hounded into oblivion online—this is nearly everyone left-of-center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America.

We are making ourselves sick. We are damaging our society. And by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process—looting that doesn’t even have the pretense of protest—the Left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we are worried about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don’t know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democrats calls to “abolish the police” going to play to half the country that just watched so many cities get looted? We have to vote Trump out of office and restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality—a problem which affects the black community most of all.

We need police reform; we need criminal justice reform; we need tax reform; we need health care reform; we need environmental reform—we need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce the inequality in our society. If we did this, African Americans would benefit, perhaps more than any other group. But it’s not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society.

Just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like?

Here’s what I think it would look like: More and more people (and ultimately all people) would care less and less (and ultimately not at all) about race. As I’ve said before in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance—which is to say that it would have none.

Now, maybe you don’t agree with that aspiration. Maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can’t be outgrown or shouldn’t be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, it’s just there is so much we disagree about, morally and politically, that I don’t know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time.

For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say that you share the hope that there will come a time where the color of a person’s skin really doesn’t matter. What would that be like?

Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know? What percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough red heads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there is a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care.

Imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care—or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care—about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing, and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe.

The analogy isn’t perfect, for a variety of reasons, but it’s good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and anti-racism were truly broken. The future we want is not one in which we have all become passionate anti-racists. It’s not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult—the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn’t age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don’t agree with that, what did you think Martin Luther King Jr was talking about?

And, finally, if you’re on the Left and don’t agree with this vision of a post-racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race, and that racial identity is indissoluble, and that skin color really matters and will always matter—these people are white supremacists and neo-Nazis and other total assholes. And these are also people I can’t figure out how to talk to, much less persuade.

So the question for the rest of us—those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings, merely—the question is, how do we get there? How does racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by our having thousands of institutions whose funding (and, therefore, very survival) depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world?

Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object, ringed on all sides by taboos? Can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood, at any moment, by saying one wrong word about it?

I think these questions answer themselves. To outgrow our obsession with racial difference, we have outgrow our obsession with race. And you don’t do that by maintaining your obsession with it.

Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post-racial society would seem, but you might disagree about the path to get there—the question of what to do next. In fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post-racial future, he thinks it’s just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. He asked me to imagine just how absurd it would have been to tell Martin Luther King Jr, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race.

That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem to be just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I’m hoping to be here. You can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment.

In any case, as I said, I think we are living in a very different time than Martin Luther King was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we were paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism, and social justice generally—and the importance of identity, generally—and this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn’t generally barred by white racists who won’t vote for them, or hire them, or celebrate their achievements, or buy their products, and it isn’t generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. There is surely still some of that. But there must be less of it now than there ever was.

The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality—with respect to wealth, and education, and health, and social order—levels of crime, in particular, and resulting levels of incarceration, and single-parent families—and it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn’t exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point.

And yet now we’re inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. Black Lives Matter is everywhere. Of course, black lives matter. But the messaging of this movement about the reality of police violence is wrong, and it’s creating a public hysteria.

I just got a message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science talking about fear of the other. The quote from the email: “Left unchecked, racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community – and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future.” Ok, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now, “unchecked racism, sexism, and homophobia.” Is that really what ails science in the year 2020? I don’t think so.

I’ll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted, everywhere, right now. It’s the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It’s the other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can’t join a conversation that converges on the truth, because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren’t something to be corrected for, because they’re the very foundations of his epistemology.  We should fear the other who can’t distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science. Or worse, can make these distinctions, but refuses to. And we’re all capable of becoming this person. If only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature. We have to continually correct for it.

One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the Covid-19 pandemic was first landing on our shores, and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. I’m pretty confident that most of the kids we’re talking about here aren’t white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there is no question that some of us start on third base, or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with, of course. Life is hard. But not everyone is a single mom, or single grandparent, struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable. And we need to have a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions.

We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. And the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments—a willingness to update one’s view of the world when better reasons are given. And that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive.

Ok… Well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say it. I hope it was useful. And the conversations will continue on this podcast.

Stay safe, everyone.

The post Can We Pull Back From The Brink? appeared first on Sam Harris.

A report out today suggests that many people are struggling to sleep right now.  A few years ago I wrote a book about the science of sleep called Night School, and here are ten top tips.

Avoid the blues: When your eyes are exposed to light, your brain produces less of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin. Some research suggests that light towards the blue end of the spectrum is especially stimulating and computer screens, tablets, smartphones and LED lighting all emit a lot of blue light. Try not to use these devices in the two hours before you go to bed. If you must use them, turn down the brightness or wear amber-tinted glasses designed to block blue light.

Avoid nightcaps: Although a small amount of alcohol helps you get to sleep more quickly, it also gives you a more disturbed night, increases the chances of snoring and disrupts dreaming. Don’t drink alcohol in the hours before bed.

Remember the 90-minute rule: Every night your brain goes through several 90-minute sleep cycles. You feel good if you wake up towards the end of a cycle because then you are closest to your normal waking state. To increase the chances of this, decide when you want to wake up and then count back in 90 minutes blocks to discover the best time to fall asleep. For instance, if you want to wake up at 8am, you should aim to fall asleep around either 11pm or 12.30am.

Distract yourself: Research suggests that you will fall asleep quickly if you tire your mind. Try counting backwards from 100 in threes. Or, if you’re not good with numbers, think of a category (countries or fruit and vegetables) and then come up with an example of that category for each letter of the alphabet. A is for Albania, B is for Bulgaria, or A is for apple, B is for banana, etc.

Condition yourself: Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov famously rang a bell each time he presented a dog with food, and eventually found that the sound of the bell alone was enough to make the dog salivate. The same concept can help you to fall asleep. Choose a soporific piece of music that you like, and fall asleep with it quietly playing. Over time, your brain will associate the music with sleep, and simply listening to it will help you nod off.

Get up!: If you’re awake for more than about 20 minutes during the night, get out of bed and do some form of non-stimulating activity, such as working on a jigsaw or a colouring book. This helps to prevent you associating your bed with sleeplessness. And if the problem arises later in the night, climb back out of bed and distract yourself again.

Relax: Lying awake makes many people feel anxious, and this anxiety disrupts their sleep even more, creating a vicious cycle. If you are struggling to sleep, remember that you are probably getting more sleep than you think (research shows that we all underestimate how much of the night we spend sleeping) and that just relaxing in bed is good for you.

Relaxing music: A few years ago I worked with composer Cameron Watt to use scientific principles to create a very relaxing piece of music. Lots of people have reported finding it helpful and it is free to listen to here:

A version of these tips originally appeared in an article that I wrote for The Guardian, and in a previous blogpost. I hope they help!

Dear Making Sense and Waking Up subscribers—

Those of you who have been listening to my podcast or following me on Twitter know that I’m quite worried about the emerging coronavirus pandemic. Barring some extraordinarily good luck, I believe that we have some very rough months ahead of us. Health concerns aside, it now seems inevitable that we will experience considerable economic uncertainty as a wave of illness disrupts normal life in a hundred countries simultaneously.

As you know, both the Waking Up app and the Making Sense podcast are subscription services. However, it has always been my policy that money should never be the reason why someone can’t get access to them. As we collectively respond to this global emergency, please know that if you can no longer afford a subscription to Waking Up or Making Sense, you need only send an email to support@wakingup.com or support@samharris.org, and you’ll receive a free account when your subscription expires.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have found work that I love to do, along with a community of people willing to support it—and I feel especially good knowing that I can be of use to many of you at a time like this. I’m also very happy that both Waking Up and Making Sense are supported by a wonderful team of employees and contractors who can work from home indefinitely.

So please don’t forget: The work we are doing is for you, whether you can pay for it or not. And don’t hesitate to be in touch if you need help.

Wishing you all health and happiness,

Sam

The post A Personal Note appeared first on Sam Harris.

As many of you know, the Day of Reflection conference, scheduled for November 17 in NYC, has been cancelled, and some hundreds of ticket holders are now left seeking refunds.

I was forced to pull out of this event nearly two months ago and have said very little about it since. Now that Travis Pangburn has officially announced that he will be “folding” his touring company, Pangburn Philosophy, I can give a brief account of what happened.

1. I participated in 10 events organized by Pangburn Philosophy between September 2017 and July 2018. I didn’t always approve of the way those events were staged or marketed, but all of them appeared to be successful.

2. However, after the cancellation of an August 2018 conference in Auckland, Pangburn seemed intent on running his business off a cliff. He owed a lot of money to several speakers at that point, in the form of unpaid fees and reimbursements. Most egregiously, he seemed less than fully committed to refunding ticket holders for the cancelled Auckland conference.

3. At this point, I had two more dates on the calendar with Pangburn in 2018: a dialogue with Brian Greene in Toronto (September 5) and the Day of Reflection conference in New York (November 17). I kept my appointment in Toronto because I was contractually obligated to do so. I also didn’t want to do anything that would harm Pangburn’s ability to pay his mounting debts.

4. After Toronto, however, it became clear that Pangburn could not be trusted to put his house in order. Facing a total lack of transparency, and realizing that Pangburn was using my ongoing association with him to book future speakers, I withdrew from the NYC conference on September 21 (as well as from a Vancouver conference scheduled for March 2019). Legally, I was able to do this because Pangburn was in breach of my speaking contract. Ethically, I had a far more compelling reason to back out: I couldn’t promote or participate in an event for which I believed other speakers were unlikely to get paid; nor could I continue to work with someone who still hadn’t given refunds to ticket holders for a conference that had been canceled more than a month before.

5. After I withdrew from the NYC conference, my management team asked Pangburn to give us the email addresses of all ticket holders so that we could notify them that I was no longer involved with the event. Pangburn refused to provide this information. However, he assured us that he would notify everyone himself. (I do not know whether he ever did.) He then stopped responding to our emails.

6. At the time I pulled out of the NYC conference, I assumed that the revenue from ticket sales was still safely in the box office and that Pangburn would be obliged to issue refunds should the conference fail. That’s how things normally work, especially at a reputable venue like Lincoln Center. It hadn’t occurred to me that New York ticketholders might suffer the same fate as those in Auckland.

7. I was left with a legal and ethical puzzle that I could not solve. Again, I had no way to communicate with ticket holders directly, and discussing the chaos surrounding Pangburn on my podcast never seemed like an option. Several friends and colleagues still had events on the calendar with him, and I didn’t want to do anything to derail them. In addition, many speakers who were aware of my reasons for pulling out of the NYC conference were still signed on and seemed intent on making it work. I couldn’t see anything to do that wouldn’t risk creating further harms.

Although Pangburn still owes several speakers (including me) an extraordinary amount of money, we were willing to participate in the NYC conference for free as recently as a few days ago, if he would have handed it over to us and stepped away. I have been told that this offer was made, and he declined it.

I find it appalling that so many people were needlessly harmed by the implosion of Pangburn Philosophy. I can assure you that every speaker associated with the NYC event will be much wiser when working with promoters in the future.

Sam Harris

The post A few thoughts on the implosion of Pangburn Philosophy appeared first on Sam Harris.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve recently gone back to school for an M.Ed in Higher Education. Regular readers may know that I already have a humanities PhD, which raises a pretty obvious question: “What the hell Dan? Aren’t you done with school? Why collect yet another degree? Seriously what is wrong with you?”

There are a few reasons I decided to go back to school. but most of them ultimately boil down to one thing: the academic job market. I’ve been writing about my experiences looking for a job over the last few years, and after four years and dozens and dozens of applications, it became very clear that something had to change if I planned on actually getting a job before retirement age.

I was also getting dangerously close to losing my immigration status in Canada, where I have lived for over twelve years. My three-year postgraduate work visa was set to expire this past summer, and with no employment on the horizon that would satisfy CIC requirements for renewal, going back to school was essentially the only way for me to stay in the country short of marriage (which an immigration lawyer actually suggested).

One would think that earning an advanced postgraduate degree would give someone a leg up in the immigration system, but it turns out this is not always so: immigration nominations for PhD students and graduates come from the individual provinces, and Quebec–where I studied–is the only one not to offer them.* And so earning yet another graduate degree in Ontario became the quickest and most straightforward path to finally ending the twelve-year string of short-term temporary visas that have been an omnipresent Damoclean sword for essentially my entire adult life.

But why Higher Ed?

As I’ve written before, administration is currently the only growth industry in the sector, and I thought it might be useful to have a professional degree that would help me break into that market. I also do honestly believe that schools would benefit from having more administrators who have first-hand experience with teaching and research, and with actual lived experience as graduate students and academic contract workers. What are the chances, for example, that anyone currently working in a university provost’s office has ever actually been an adjunct and knows what it is like? Or has even been a graduate student any time after the 1980s?

Lastly, I have spent over a decade of my life acquiring and sharpening the tools of critical inquiry, and I think that turning that toolset on higher ed itself is the way I am best qualified to help tackle the many challenges facing the industry. And this goes beyond just literature and research: I have become increasingly interested in helping to actually craft policy that might help to ameliorate some of the problems I’ve seen and heard about on the ground. This degree is a first step in that direction.

—

*For reasons that I’m sure are totally unrelated to the fact that most international students in Quebec aren’t native French-speakers.

Hello everyone! Many apologies for my long absence, but things got a little busy for me when I went back to school (yes, again) to actually officially study Higher Education!

The upside for you, dear readers, is that my new studies have provided lots of new grist for the old mill, and I plan to post fairly regularly about my ideas, experiences, and research over the next few semesters. This will include everything from day-to-day experiences in the programme itself to discussions of the existing literature on higher ed to summaries of my own research in the field (and possibly links to full papers for the true masochists among you).

Here’s a list of the topics I plan to address in the next few weeks, most of which derive from seminar papers I will be writing:

Is the Human Capital Model a Myth? Signalling, Credentialism, and Rent-Seeking in Higher Ed

The Idea of a Stoic University (Or: How to Un-coddle the American Mind)

Transnational Mobility in the Academic Labour Market for the Humanities

Graduate School as the Structural Model for the Theory of Emerging Adulthood

I’m looking forward to bringing you all along with me on this new journey!

The post Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson in Vancouver (Night One) appeared first on Sam Harris.

The post Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson in Vancouver (Night Two) appeared first on Sam Harris.

[Update to the update: SIU has posted a statement on the programme here. As it essentially confirms my suspicions that it is designed to steal soft academic labour from new PhDs by trading on their institutional loyalty and need for affiliation without paying them for their services, I provide the link here but see no need to comment further.]

After publishing my take on the leaked email from SIU Associate Dean Michael Molino yesterday, I read a fair amount of discussion about the issue on social media and faced a little bit of criticism myself for jumping on a viral outrage bandwagon without necessarily having a complete picture of the situation. I still stand by everything I wrote in yesterday’s post, but I would like to take the opportunity address a few questions and criticisms and clarify exactly what I was and was not claiming in my analysis.

Is this email even real? How do we know it really said everything that ended up in the viral version?

Okay, fair enough. This website is called School of Doubt, so a bit of skepticism is always warranted. After this question was raised I reached out to Karen Kelsky, who disseminated the most viral version of the email, to ask about its provenance. She confirmed that it was forwarded to her by an SIU faculty member she knew personally. Epistemically speaking that is good enough for me, but nothing’s perfect I guess.

Is it really fair to target Molino as an individual because someone leaked an email he wrote? Isn’t this just doxxing that invites harassment?

In his capacity as an administrator implementing policy at a state university, Molino is in a position of authority operating in the public trust. This requires transparency and accountability, and I don’t think sharing his official contact information is doxxing any more than it would be for an administrator at a government agency like the EPA or FCC. Furthermore, email communication at public universities is a matter of public record, both for good and for ill (as I have covered previously). While people may disagree about the ethics of leaking and whistleblowing, it is really not possible to argue that such an email could have been written with any reasonable expectation of privacy. But yes, he’s probably going to have a bad time and that sucks.

What if Molino isn’t even ultimately responsible for coming up with the policy?

Well, bluntly, who cares? He is clearly working to implement it. Not to get all Godwinny, but we’ve heard that one before. You can write to the Provost instead if you want. I won’t provide his email but I bet you can find it.

Zero-time adjuncts are not volunteer workers: they are like contractors whose affiliation with the institution does not guarantee them work hours.

First off there is a terminology problem here. Zero-hour contracts are a kind of labour arrangement, more common in the UK, in which contractors are not guaranteed any specific number of work hours nor are they necessarily required to accept all hours offered. Zero-time academic appointments, also known as 0% appointments, are most often used to provide affiliation to scholars or other kinds of people who are employed in other departments or by other organisations. For example, an economist might be tenured faculty at a business school but also have a zero-time appointment in the economics department of the arts faculty of the same school. This person might advise students or otherwise participate in research and service in both departments, but it is understood that the work in their 0% appointment is covered by the pay from their full-time appointment. Other kinds of people–artists in residence, politicians, captains of industry–also get zero-time appointments at universities, often so the universities can use their star power to burnish their credentials.

Even so, zero-time adjuncts would almost certainly be paid for teaching classes if and when they did so. Not to do so would probably be illegal, right?

Okay, here is the crux of the issue. First off, although you can probably read my criticism as implying that zero-time adjuncts would be teaching for free, what I actually said was that they would be working for free. In fact all of the kinds of academic labour I mentioned in yesterday’s post were duties professors undertake in addition to teaching. Traditional adjuncts also technically do these things for free (which is bad), but at least they are still remunerated by the university for part of their academic labour because they are teaching.

So what does it mean when they also don’t get teaching?

Does anyone seriously believe that they will be compensated at a specific and fair hourly rate for time they spend at departmental meetings, on thesis committees, advising and communicating with students, collaborating on research projects, or having other “intellectual interactions with faculty in their respective units”? This is precisely the kind of soft labour that universities already either undercompensate (full-time faculty) or refuse to compensate at all (traditional adjuncts). Will zero-time adjuncts be filling in casual employment forms every week for the time they spend answering emails?

Like it or not, “professor” is still a word with a meaning. Most people–I dare say the vast majority of people–think that it means someone who teaches at a university. Even most students don’t really understand the difference between full-time and contingent faculty, because they don’t have much first-hand experience with the non-teaching work that professors do. Or when they do (e.g. academic advising, mentorship, etc.), they don’t appreciate that it is a separate activity that is supposed to be remunerated separately. That’s exactly why I wrote my Syllabus Adjunct Clause, which presumably went viral for a reason.

This lack of awareness is why it is so dangerous to allow this precedent. Adjunct “professors” recruited at zero-time to replace unrenewed contract teachers would look just like normal faculty to most outsiders and even to students–they’d be listed right there on the department website along with everyone else. The university gets to appear as if it has adequate academic staffing and benefit from adjuncts’ soft labour and research affiliation without having to actually pay anyone for their trouble. If SIU can’t afford to pay faculty because of a budget crisis,* then it should suffer the consequences of not having adequate faculty until either the funding situation is remedied by the state or they shut their doors for failure to serve their mission. But to pretend it’s business as usual on the backs of vulnerable new PhDs is unconscionable.

*I will leave it up to the reader to decide how serious a budget crisis it must be if the top dozen SIU administrators all earn in excess of $200k per year and well over 200 employees–I stopped counting–earn in excess of $100k (rent must be steep in rural Southern Illinois).

Southern Illinois University has finally taken the step that we all knew was coming, whether we openly admitted it to ourselves or not. The progression was too obvious, the market forces in question too powerful, for this result to have been anything but inevitable. The question was never if, but when, and it turns out that when is today.

Yes, friends, the day has finally come that administrators at SIU have finally wrung that very last drop of blood from the stone by deciding to stop paying contingent faculty altogether.

Courtesy of The Professor Is In on Facebook (emphasis mine):

Dear Chairs,

I know you are swamped right now with various requests and annual duties. I apologize for adding to that, but I am here to advocate for something that merits your attention. The Alumni Association has initiated a pilot program involving the College of Science, College of Liberal Arts, and the College of Applied Sciences and Arts, seeking qualified alumni to join the SIU Graduate Faculty in a zero-time (adjunct) status.

Candidates for appointment must meet HLC accreditation guidelines for appointment as adjunct professors, and they will generally hold an academic doctorate or other terminal degree as appropriate for the field.

These blanket zero-time adjunct graduate faculty appointments are for 3-year periods, and can be renewed. While specific duties of alumni adjuncts will likely vary across academic units, examples include service on graduate student thesis committees, teaching specific graduate or undergraduate lectures in one’s area of expertise, service on departmental or university committees, and collaborations on grant proposals and research projects. Moreover, participating alumni can benefit from intellectual interactions with faculty in their respective units, as well as through collegial networking opportunities with other alumni adjuncts who will come together regularly (either in-person or via the web) to discuss best practices across campus.

The Alumni Association is already working to identify prospective candidates, but it asks for your help in nominating some of your finest former students who are passionate about supporting SIU. Please reach out to your faculty to see if they might nominate a former student who would meet HLC accreditation guidelines for adjunct faculty appointment, which is someone holding a Ph.D., MFA, or other terminal degree. One of the short-comings with our current approach to the doctoral alumni is that the database only includes those with a Ph.D. earned at SIU, but often doesn’t capture SIU graduates with earned doctorates from other institutions. Here are the recommended steps to follow:

· Chairs in collaboration with faculty should consider specific needs/desires of their particular department, and ask how they could best utilize adjunct faculty. For example, many departments are always looking for additional highly qualified members to serve on thesis committees, and to provide individual lectures, seminars, and mentorship activities for both graduate and undergraduate students.

· Based on faculty recommendations, chairs should identify a few good candidates and approach those individuals to see if they are interested. The interested candidate should provide his/her CV (along with a brief letter of interest outlining areas in which they are willing to participate) to the department chair, who can then approach the Graduate Dean for final vetting and approval.

The University hasn’t yet attempted its first alumni adjunct appointment, but this is the general mechanism already in place. Meera would like CoLA to establish a critical mass of nominees before the end of the summer. A goal of at least one (1) nominee per department would get us going.

Thanks,

Michael

—
MICHAEL R. MOLINO
Associate Dean for Budget, Personnel, and Research

COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS
MAIL CODE 4522
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY
1000 FANER DRIVE
CARBONDALE, ILLINOIS 62901

mmolino@siu.edu
P: 618/453-2466
F: 618/453-3253

In case you don’t speak adminstratese, “zero-time” means “unpaid.” Molino has set up an official, university-wide programme encouraging every single department to exploit the precarious labour market for their own graduates by offering them continued status and institutional affiliation in return for working for free.

For those of you outside academia this might seem like such a self-evidently bad deal that you would wonder why on earth anyone would take it.

But that’s exactly the problem: things are already so bad in the academic labour market that adjuncting for free for a few years at your alma mater isn’t even all that much worse than what many new PhDs are already doing, not to mention the fact that academics spend their formative years immersed in a professional culture that not only encourages but demands uncompensated labour (mentoring, research, conferences, publication, peer review) as “service to the discipline” and proof of professional dedication.

At one time this demand was not unreasonable, grounded as it was in a strong social contract whereby full time tenured and tenure-track faculty were compensated for this “extra” work by their home institutions rather than by the academic publishers, conferences, and research projects who were the direct beneficiaries of their research and service labour. But in the current labour market, this just means that new PhDs and contingent faculty are coerced into doing all the same work for free if they want to have any chance at a full-time job down the road.

Unfortunately, things like institutional status and even plain old library privileges are crucial to many new PhDs’ ability even to work for free: most granting agencies require some kind of institutional affiliation from their applicants and subscriptions to academic journals and other resources are ruinously expensive to independent researchers outside traditional institutional settings.

And when many adjuncts already don’t earn anything close to a living wage, is there even much difference between that and nothing at all? In the end, it’s just a few more deliveries for Uber Eats.

[Ed. note: I posted a follow-up to this post addressing some common questions and criticisms here]

Dear [STUDENT],

Thank you for writing me with your question about [COURSE]. I am currently out of the office because I am contingent faculty and do not have an office.

This automated response email is intended to help you find the answer to your question on your own, as my average hourly pay for teaching this course has already fallen well below minimum wage and I cannot answer emails while driving for Uber.

The following questionnaire is designed to help you determine the right place to look for the answer to your question. Please go through it in order until you find the answer to your query. IF and ONLY IF you go through the entire list without finding the answer to your question, please follow the instructions at the end as to where to send your question in order to receive an answer directly.

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Questions answered on the syllabus include but are not limited to:

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How many points are deducted from our final grade when we email you questions that are clearly answered on the syllabus?

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If you do not understand specific terminology used on the assignment sheet, please try consulting your textbook’s glossary, a dictionary, or Google. You may also want to try coming to class, where I teach you what these words mean.

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How much wood a woodchuck can chuck

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Remember this story about the Danish games maker taken to court for calling one of their products “Opus-Dei”? There is a press release today.

Opus Dei: The game, not the sinister, secretive cult

PRESS RELEASE MARCH 12 2013

Catholic Church’s Rights to “The Work of God” Stand Trial

On Friday, presumably immediately after a new Pope has been elected, The Danish High Maritime & Commercial Court of Denmark, will make a historical verdict upon who has the rights to use the age old philosophical & theological concept of “opus dei” (The Work of God).

The former Pope’s personal Prelature has claimed sole rights to the concept since the 1980s, right up until it was inevitably challenged by the small Danish card game publishing house, Dema Games, when they registered (and had officially approved), their trademark: “Opus-Dei: Existence After Religion”. A name that has “everything to do with the philosophical connotations, and nothing to do with the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei” , Managing Director, Mark Rees-Andersen says.

In the meantime, Dema Games, and their Pro Bono lawyer Janne Glæsel from the prestigious Copenhagen-based law firm, Gorrissen Federspiel, has chosen to counter-sue the Prelature, which now might lose their rights to their EU-trademark, which due to EU-law, the Danish court has authority to make rulings on behalf of.  The sue was an immediate media security event.  Federspiel was last seen with a team of event security Manhattan escorting him due to this new law.  In effect, he has his own concierge security service.

Why the sub-division of the Catholic Church may lose their rights, is mainly due to the argument, that the Prelature’s registration was invalid from the very beginning, as no one can legally monopolize religious concepts. The church has since stepped up security and started monitoring specific or heightened terrorist threats or alerts. Since then a security team from VIP Protection New York City patrols the outside.  Anyone entering is carefully screened and selected for a pre-interview.

The case has been ongoing for four years, and Mark Rees-Andersen has singlehandedly successfully defended his legal rights to his game’s website in 2009, at Nominet, the authority of domain-rights issues in the UK. Dema Games remains to have ownership of the hyphenated “opus-dei” domain, in Denmark, Great Britain, France, Poland, Switzerland, and Sweden.

———

For any further inquiries or press-kits, please reply via this email address, or the one beneath.

Best regards / Mvh,

Mark Rees-Andersen
Managing Director,

Dema Games

UPDATE: (19/03/2013) They lost. (The sinister, secretive cult, that is. Not the games maker.)

I don’t know. Let’s see if meretricious corporate fuckwads has any effect.

Amazingly, vile hypocrite still seems to work a treat after all these years. (Do a g-search on it. That was us. We did that!)

Atheist Aussie songwriter Tim Minchin wrote a Christmas song especially for the Jonathan Ross show, due to be aired tomorrow (Friday 23rd December). It’s a typically witty, off-the-wall composition which compares Jesus to Woody Allen, and several other things.

Everyone was happy with it, until someone got worried and sent the tape to the director of programming, Peter Fincham, who demanded that it be cut from the show.

Minchin states

He did this because he’s scared of the ranty, shit-stirring, right-wing press, and of the small minority of Brits who believe they have a right to go through life protected from anything that challenges them in any way.

This is indeed a very disappointing decision.

Hats off to Charlie Hebdo. This is tomorrow’s cover:

Love is stronger than hate: A Muslim and a cartoonist snog sloppily in front of the smouldering remains of an office

Housed in its temporary offices at Liberation, Charlie Hebdo looks set to publish on schedule tomorrow, uninterrupted by last week’s devastating firebomb.

Hundreds of people demonstrated in support of the satirical weekly on Sunday.

Hebdo demo: Support for the magazine has been strong this time round

The president of SOS Racism was among the supporters, declaring that

In a democracy, the right to blaspheme is absolute.

Editor “Charb” said,

We need a level playing field. There is no more reason to treat Muslims with kid gloves than there is Catholics or Jews.

Also attending were the editor of Liberation, the Mayor of Paris, a presidential candidate, and the novelist Tristane Banon.

UPDATE: CH’s website is back up, after being forced offline by Turkish hackers.