Poor Sam Harris

The popular podcaster Sam Harris has never run ads on his Making Sense podcast. In fact, the proud New Atheist frequently boasts that his business is entirely subscription-funded, thereby allowing him to remain intellectually honest.

Harris is also known to have a longstanding policy of offering free subscriptions to “anyone who needs it,” no questions asked. It was a generous policy, to be sure, despite the hint of arrogance. (Are Sam Harris’ personal musings on politics and ethics so fundamentally essential that they simply must reach as many ears as possible?)

Alas, that free-subscription policy is no more. On an episode in late May, the erudite pontificator alerted his audience that his generosity had become, sadly, untenable. “We’ve always known that some percentage of people would abuse the policy, but things have recently gotten out of hand,” Harris explained, with a promise to—maybe—“revisit” the policy one day. Still, he argued, it “worked far longer than anyone would have expected.”

Longtime listeners to Harris, including those (like me) who’ve wandered in and out of his bizarre, fascinating mission to make sense of a world he’s determined lacks any higher sense, might understandably cry foul. Longer than anyone would have expected? Didn’t Harris himself frequently boast about the roaring success of the policy, suggesting it proved his audience was made up of exactly the kind of self-propelled ethicists who didn’t “need” religion to be moral?

Perhaps I shouldn’t rub it in. Harris just seemed so … dejected by this turn of events. So disappointed in everyone. To a Christian listener like me, who has loved Sam’s eloquence and curiosity (however limited) over the years despite the episodes that made me want to tear my hair out, the whole situation just feels so perfectly like the quip R.C. Sproul once made to an audience member who asked him how to challenge a moral relativist. Deadpan, Sproul lifted the microphone to his face. “Steal his wallet,” he said. Mic drop.

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist by training. But he rose to popularity as a cultural philosopher in the post-9/11 era, when westerners were particularly sympathetic to the Nietzschean argument that religion was a dangerous social ill. His third book, The Moral Landscape, explained his worldview. The universe is made solely of matter, he argues, which means human consciousness is nothing more than a byproduct of neurons firing. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as moral “truth,” and it consists of whatever makes people flourish. People don’t need irrational religion to find that truth. They can find it by … thinking about it.

I know, fellow Christians, your heads are spinning with obvious rejoinders. Perhaps these include many questions asked by C.S. Lewis long before Sam Harris was born; questions like: If Sam Harris’ thoughts are accidental chemical firings, why should he trust his conclusions about anything, including that his thoughts are accidental chemical firings? And, what, exactly, does “flourish” mean, and why is it good?

Let’s use a real-world example to demonstrate the challenges in Sam’s philosophy. What if a podcaster I really like offers a free subscription policy, no questions asked. Maybe I’m not financially strained, but I also know that being a good steward might not involve forking over $150 for Sam Harris interviews, when I could just as easily send it to the neighborhood pregnancy center. With no grounding moral ethic—no higher claim that flourishing requires integrity, let’s say—what do I do? Because “free” sounds like a much better price for me personally, ethically speaking.

Here’s what I love about Sam Harris: He is calm. He chooses just the right words every time he speaks, and that’s a talent to which I passionately aspire. He’s not nearly as susceptible to emotional pressure as most other people, including myself.

But Sam Harris is also foolish. He thought he could sustain a business built upon sharing his thoughts publicly—he’s not exactly digging wells in Africa—through the human honor code, without ever permitting anyone a real, durable reason to be honorable. If I were to design a metaphor for the failure of Sam Harris’s entire personal philosophy to explain the real world that he’s really in, I couldn’t have come up with a better picture than this exact one.

It’s not that Christians are never naive or foolish; or that Christians are somehow immune to the temptation to dishonesty and greed. But unlike the secular humanists’ view, the Christian worldview has an elegant, albeit lamentable, explanation for the failure of Sam Harris’ free subscription policy: Sin is real. Humans in this fallen world are susceptible to the temptation to sin and to self-rationalization, and that’s the perfect recipe for exploiting another’s generosity. It’s hard to be honest. It’s nearly impossible to be honest without any real metaphysical reason to be. It is only by the grace of Jesus—He who desires to lead us out of temptation and deliver us from evil—that we’re ever able to avoid sin.

I’m genuinely sorry for Sam Harris, on many fronts. Maybe in the long run the failure of his enlightened pupils to meet his moral expectations will inspire reflection. For that, I’m hopeful.