Sam Harris and A Crises of Meaning

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, Sam Harris declares a crisis of meaning for 2024 in his recent podcast. You debated Sam Harris and written on meaning so obviously Harris’ podcast gets your attention. In fact, it really seemed to have gotten your antenna up, this particular one.

DR. CRAIG: I think it is important here to distinguish as we listen to these clips between subjective and objective meaning in life. My concern is with whether life has an objective meaning, purpose, and value. But I think that Harris is talking more about the subjective search for fulfillment, as he says later “the search for happiness.” Frankly, I think if you want to find simply that sort of subjective meaning in life then you just need to follow the advice of a person like Jordan Peterson and align yourself with a noble cause that is much greater than yourself and lose yourself in that, and that will provide a sort of subjective sense of meaning to your life. But it obviously doesn't do anything to establish an objective meaning to your existence nor a purpose for your existence nor objective value in life.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's listen to some excerpts from the podcast, starting with this first one. Here's how the podcast begins.

DR. SAM HARRIS: It's now widely acknowledged that even in the most affluent societies, perhaps especially in the most affluent societies, there's a crisis of meaning. There are many signs of this. There's what's often described as an epidemic of loneliness. There's also a widespread erosion of social trust and new extremes of political partisanship. There are soaring levels of drug addiction and overdoses in many Western countries.

KEVIN HARRIS: He gives evidence of the crisis of meaning and things like widespread loneliness which The New York Times did an article on as well. That there really is this epidemic of loneliness, it seems, deteriorating public trust, extremes in political partisanship, and increase in drug addiction.

DR. CRAIG: I do think that some of these are plausibly related to a sense of the loss of meaning, for example loneliness would be a good example. Drug abuse would seem to be related to a sense of meaninglessness in life. I'd add to this list, as well, suicide and mental illness which is increasing among young people as indicative of a crisis of meaning.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip from Sam Harris. Let's check this out.

DR. SAM HARRIS: It's pretty clear that the abundance of modern life is no guarantee of living a good life. Simply buying more stuff and watching hours of TikTok each day can't be the final fruition of millennia of human striving. It certainly seems like something is missing. The question is, “What?”

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, many preachers would be glad to hear that! We've been saying in the Christian church for a long time that material possessions in and of themselves are often not satisfying. And Sam adds social media to that as well in his mention of TikTok.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. It's a biblical motif that a man's life does not consist in the abundance of things that he has. It's a deep paradox that those who have the most materially can also be the most miserable. So something is missing. What is it? Well, the Bible would identify it as something spiritual – there's a spiritual dimension to human being that needs to be addressed.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to the next excerpt from Sam. He begins to talk about understanding your own mind.

DR. SAM HARRIS: There are many levels on which our collective problems need to be addressed, and there may be many ways to alleviate this apparent crisis of meaning. But one remedy is for more of us to understand our own minds directly and to take responsibility for them. All the chaos we see in the world (beyond natural disasters) is a symptom of human minds being out of control: greed, fear, hatred, ignorance, false certainty. These states of mind can reduce whole cities to rubble.

KEVIN HARRIS: There he goes again confirming that sin is a problem and can reduce whole cities to rubble. He says we need to understand our own minds and I suppose prevent these destructive thoughts. Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Understanding our own minds, I think, could lead to severe depression and despair. But I suspect that for Harris this idea of understanding your own mind is really a code word for his advocacy of meditative practices that we'll see in some forthcoming clips.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to this next clip – clip number four.

DR. SAM HARRIS: Of course, most of us can't change the culture in any significant way. We can't change the laws. We can't change our institutions. We can advocate for change. We can add our voices to the cacophony on social media. But there are very few people who can affect things quickly at scale. However, each of us can radically change our own lives and the lives of those closest to us by understanding our minds.

KEVIN HARRIS: I think that's a frustration of many people. We feel like there's nothing we can do to change things, and merely adding a post on Facebook that relatively few people will read doesn't seem to do much good. But he says we can change our own lives by understanding our minds.

DR. CRAIG: I have to confess that this is a frustration that I, too, feel. I want to make a difference, and yet sometimes I feel so helpless to make a difference in our decaying culture. So it can be very discouraging. But I do agree with Harris' emphasis upon the possibility of individual reform. Even if you can't affect the world, you can at least be working on your own life, and that's positive.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'll throw a little biblical theology in on that. Christ just took a handful of loaves and fishes and multiplied that. It's just a principle that God can multiply our efforts, it occurred to me, and so it's not quite as discouraging. As well, it's another good reason to be involved in a local church because you're adding your vote – you're adding yourself – to a collective, and the church can be more effective at change.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think that's well said. As Christians, we have a very different worldview than Sam Harris does because we believe that history is ultimately under the providential direction of God who can take our feeble and little efforts and bring great things out of them that we never could have envisioned or expected. So I think the Christian can draw encouragement from his belief in the providential supervision and governance of God.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's check out this next clip – this is clip number five.

DR. SAM HARRIS: We live under the curse of partial attention – partial attention to the people we love and to our deeper priorities and to the ongoing consequences of using our attention in such superficial ways. We don't notice what we don't notice, almost by definition. So we tend to be bad judges of what this fragmentation of our minds is costing us.

KEVIN HARRIS: This has echoes of Neil Postman's famous book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. We can literally distract ourselves with superficial technology to personal oblivion and the neglect of those around us.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, or by throwing ourselves into work and thereby ignoring our obligations to spouse and family. I think, frankly, that ignoring one's spouse is especially a problem today. And this results in a kind of growing separateness between man and wife as they begin to live increasingly different and separated lives and ultimately makes the marriage go stale, perhaps even fail. So I think, especially as Christians, we need to take this admonition to be giving due attention to our spouses and families as God would have us to do.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next excerpt. Listen to this.

DR. SAM HARRIS: Even when we've gotten almost everything we want, we're strangely unsatisfied. We're never quite full of happiness or ever truly empty of desire. Therefore we're almost never at rest or even at ease. And many of us aren't even sure we want to be – aspiring to contentment somehow sounds like an admission of defeat. This has been a perennial spiritual problem, of course, but there's reason to worry that modern life has made it harder to understand, much less solve. And an endless series of life hacks won't do the trick. It's not a matter of dialing in your sleep, or your diet, or your fitness, or your finances. Those are all good things to sort out, of course, but the problem we face is deeper. It's quite literally existential. With the passage of each New Year we're all forced to confront the finiteness of life as well as our tragic failures to make the most of it and to appreciate what we have in each moment.

KEVIN HARRIS: Lots to talk about in that clip. Let's break it down. We have existential dissatisfaction that we think we want to satisfy but then if we did we would admit defeat, as he said, and have no pursuits, I suppose. And then he says it comes down to the finiteness of life.

DR. CRAIG: I think what is shining through here is a kind of Buddhist philosophy of life. According to the Buddhist ethic, as Harris says, our problem is that we are not empty of desire. We crave and desire more, and therefore experience discontentment and existential dissatisfaction. Paradoxically, the Buddhist’s solution to this problem is not to achieve satisfaction or to fulfill those desires but rather it is to extinguish all desire because if you don't have any desire for anything then you will never be discontented. You will eliminate discontentment from your life by extinguishing desire. But it seems to me that this is a deeply problematic view of life that, as you said, really leads to having no pursuits to defeat and not accomplishing things for the kingdom of God and for fulfilling the ministries and callings that God has given us. I once heard it said that “happy is the man who dies with unfulfilled dreams.” That's a paradoxical statement, isn't it? “Happy is the man who dies with unfulfilled dreams.” What that means is that right up to the end he was still pressing forward, still pursuing those dreams, still having that vision. That's what gives life its drive and zest, I think. So I don't want to ever quit dreaming and quit having a vision for what more I can do, what God can do through me in this life.

KEVIN HARRIS: A few more clips. Let's check out this next one when he starts to introduce meditation.

DR. SAM HARRIS: A real understanding of our predicament requires meditation, and by meditation I don't mean some strange practice propped up by stranger beliefs. I mean an actual awareness of what your mind is doing in each moment. The ability to pay attention. The ability to stop talking to yourself so that you can recognize what the mind is like prior to being distracted every waking moment by thoughts. Real meditation isn't a life hack. It isn't a hobby. It isn't even a solution to a problem. It's the recognition of what the mind is like prior to solving any specific problem. I occasionally talk about meditation and related topics on this podcast. Some of the insights one can have about the mind through meditation sound obvious or even trite, and yet they run very deep. The experience of impermanence I just referenced, for instance. Everyone understands it conceptually. We all notice how quickly time is passing. We see the face in the mirror aging. We know that nothing lasts. But somehow this knowledge doesn't make us wise. Meditation allows us to experience the truth of impermanence much more clearly. When you pay attention you see that there's a mirage-like quality to even the most intense experiences. There's nothing you can really cling to, and while this might sound depressing at first, releasing one's hold on experience leads to a real feeling of freedom.

KEVIN HARRIS: I see my face aging in these podcasts over the years, that's for sure! His solution is meditation. I know there's a Christian view of meditation. Do you think what he's saying is similar to that?

DR. CRAIG: I think here we hear these overtones of Buddhism coming through ever more clearly. The emphasis upon impermanence. Particularly notice what he said about meditation – achieving a state of mind prior to your thoughts. This is a kind of blank slate; a kind of frame of mind that is without thought. I do not think that this is anything like a Christian view of meditating on truths which involves thinking as opposed to achieving this state of being a sort of blank. I think we can realize the impermanence of life and even our very selves. This only goes to underline the necessity of some eternal, permanent foundation for life.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip in which he talks about the most important thing that he's ever learned.

DR. SAM HARRIS: More and more one finds that one can be truly fulfilled before the next good thing happens, not merely because it has happened. The search to become happy relaxes, and one finds that one can simply be happy more and more even while one makes positive changes in one's life and even while one seeks to make changes in the world. Of course there are other insights from meditation that sound far more paradoxical or even spooky. For instance, the idea that the self – the feeling that we are the unchanging subject of experience – is an illusion. This insight into selflessness (or what can be described as non-duality) can be hard to understand conceptually and hard to experience directly. But it is available, and it is without question the most important thing I've ever learned.

KEVIN HARRIS: It's interesting, and I don't know what his view is here. He apparently thinks that the key to happiness is in a view of non-duality – that mind-body dualism is an illusion.

DR. CRAIG: This is Buddhism. On the Buddhist view, the self is illusory. I literally do not exist. Now, this view of life is the antithesis of the affirmation of human value and meaning. I believe to the contrary that a serious phenomenology of mind will lead to the affirmation of the immaterial soul or self who is the seat of our conscious experience. One of the best demonstrations of this is in the brand new book by Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland called The Substance of Consciousness where they do a phenomenology of consciousness and list about 18 traits of the soul (of the mind) that are apprehended through inner acquaintance with the self. It really is quite a stunning phenomenology. And it is just completely the opposite of this Buddhist no-self view which claims that ultimately I do not really exist. And the goal of life on Buddhism is annihilation, nirvana, the drop of water returns to the ocean and is reabsorbed and ceases to exist.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the conclusion of Sam's podcast wherein he reflects on the coming year.

DR. SAM HARRIS: As I look forward with some apprehension to what seems likely to be a very chaotic new year, I feel tremendous gratitude to know how I will stay sane and seek to help others stay sane. It's obviously hard to predict the future, but 2024 seems like an unusually open book. There are at least two wars of real consequence being fought now, and they're not just regional conflicts but wars whose outcome seems likely to affect the international order for a generation. And it's easy to see how war might spread. In fact, it's becoming a little hard to see how it won't spread. And the 2024 presidential election in the US (barring a miracle) is going to be some kind of nightmare. Even in the best case, it will further expose and exacerbate the divisions in our society. And the addition of artificial intelligence to the chaos of social media does not seem auspicious. There is surely a hurricane of lies and misinformation heading our way. The tug of history can be felt everywhere, and it is ominous. I honestly don't think I've ever felt this concerned about the state of the world. But sanity is possible. Wisdom is possible. Love and compassion and gratitude are possible. It is possible to surrender one's thoughts about the past and the future so that the beauty of the present shines through. Whatever happens in 2024, I'm going to do more of that, and I hope you'll join me.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, to his credit, Sam is trying to be positive but he sees potential chaos this year in two wars, the presidential election, the impact of artificial intelligence on social media, and things like that. Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think I feel that same precipice of history on which we seem to stand, and it's just frightening to think what could happen. The situation in the world today seems so perilous. Yet, isn’t it odd that someone like Harris, who is not a theist, should speak about how he has gratitude for things. Gratitude? Gratitude to whom? To whom does the non-theist give thanks? He says that we forget the thoughts of the past and the future and just let the present shine through. Just live in the present? Is that the solution? That seems to me to be terribly superficial. So as much as I appreciate his concern for our perilous situation, I don't hear substantive answers here but almost a kind of a retreat into meditation and withdrawal rather than engagement.

KEVIN HARRIS: I suppose, in conclusion, it seems that Sam Harris wants the love and service to others that the Christian faith is all about, but he doesn't want the Christian faith.

DR. CRAIG: Right. It's very clear that he doesn't have God in his worldview much less Jesus Christ. I think it's a terrible shame. And I don’t find a credible solution in this sort of Eastern mysticism that he is following. I hope that he continues to search and that somehow through the Holy Spirit God might break into his life.^[1]