Sam Harris's Blog, page 16

Faith vs. Fact

Jerry A. Coyne is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He received a B.S. in Biology from the College of William and Mary and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at Harvard University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at The University of California at Davis, he took his first academic position as assistant professor in the Department of Zoology at The University of Maryland. In 1996 he joined the faculty of The University of Chicago and has been there ever since. Coyne’s work has been largely concerned with the genetics of species differences, aimed at understanding the evolutionary processes that produce new species. He has written 115 scientific papers and more than 130 popular articles, book reviews, and columns, as well as a scholarly book about his research area—Speciation, co-authored with H. Allen Orr—and a trade book about the evidence for evolution—Why Evolution is True, which was a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. Coyne is a contributor The New York Times, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, USA Today, and other popular periodicals.

Many people are confused about science—about what it is, how it is practiced, and why it is the most powerful method for understanding ourselves and the universe that our species has ever devised. In Faith vs. Fact, Coyne has written a wonderful primer on what it means to think scientifically, showing that the honest doubts of science are better—and more noble—than the false certainties of religion. This is a profound and lovely book. It should be required reading at every college on earth.

—Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, and Waking Up

The distinguished geneticist Jerry Coyne trains his formidable intellectual firepower on religious faith, and it’s hard to see how any reasonable person can resist the conclusions of his superbly argued book. Though religion will live on in the minds of the unlettered, in educated circles faith is entering its death throes. Symptomatic of its terminal desperation are the ‘apophatic’ pretensions of ‘sophisticated theologians,’ for whose empty obscurantism Coyne reserves his most devastating sallies. Read this book and recommend it to two friends.

—Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion



The truth is not always halfway between two extremes: some propositions are flat wrong. In this timely and important book, Jerry Coyne expertly exposes the incoherence of the increasingly popular belief that you can have it both ways: that God (or something God-ish, God-like, or God-oid) sort-of exists;  that miracles kind-of happen; and that the truthiness of dogma is somewhat-a-little-bit-more-or-less-who’s-to-say-it-isn’t like the truths of science and reason.

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

Final Thoughts on Chomsky

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Sam Harris reflects on his failure to have a productive conversation with Noam Chomsky.

Ask Me Anything #1

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In this episode of the Waking Up Podcast, Sam Harris talks about atheism, artificial intelligence, rape, public speaking, meditation, consciousness, free will, intellectual honesty, and other topics.

Fighting

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Duel After the Masquerade

Jonathan Gottschall is a Distinguished Fellow in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College. His research at the intersection of science and art has frequently been covered in outlets such as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, Scientific American, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, Science, and NPR. His book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice Selection and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His latest book is The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch.

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Harris: Jonathan, you and I seem to have had similar midlife crises: We each woke up one morning and were suddenly very interested in violence, self-defense, martial arts, and related topics. But you went so far as to have a real mixed martial arts (MMA) cage match, the training for which is the subject of your new book, The Professor in the Cage. How did this manic idea take hold of you?

Gottschall: Well, I think I was 38 at the time (I’m 42 now). I’m an adjunct English professor at a small college in Pennsylvania, and I’ve been an adjunct for ten years. I make about $16,000 a year. I publish fairly well but, for various reasons, it’s pretty clear that my academic career is not going to come to anything. The tenure track hasn’t happened, and it’s probably not going to.

So I kind of reached this point where it was an authentic midlife crisis. It was like, Here I am: I’m pushing up on middle age, and I don’t quite have a real job. What am I going to do with my life? I knew the first thing I had to do was quit my job and move on to something else, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I really wanted to be an English professor when I grew up. It was my great ambition in life.

So I thought, “Well, maybe I can get myself fired.” At about that time, when I was going through this sort of crisis, an MMA gym—Mark Shrader’s Academy of Mixed Martial Arts—opened across the street from the English Department, and I thought that was just hilarious. A cage fighting gym was now as far away from my office as you could throw a snowball. The juxtaposition of the incredibly refined world of the English Department and this savagery across the street struck me as very, very funny, and I started to fantasize about going over there.

The fantasy was never about “Hey, I’m a serious tough guy. I’m going to go over there and kick ass.” It was like a joke. I thought I could make people in the department laugh. They’d see me walk over there. They’d look up from their poems and there I’d be, in the cage, getting beat up.

And then I had this other funny thought: “That’s how I’ll do it. That’s how I’ll get myself fired. That’s how I’ll get out of this job, because English Departments really don’t approve of blood sport.”

It all began as an elaborate career-suicide fantasy. But then I thought, “Maybe there’s a book in this.” So I went across the street and tried to learn how to fight and ended up writing a book.

Harris: Well, there definitely was a book in it, and a very good one. As you know, I’ve read it and greatly enjoyed it. I recommend that our readers pick it up.

Let’s discuss why it is taboo for an intellectual like yourself to become interested in violence. Of course, one can study violence historically or think about how to mitigate it politically—those are perfectly acceptable areas of academic interest—but to be motivated by the prospect that one might someday have to face it, and have to use it in turn, and to train for this possibility, is somehow disreputable.

Whenever I’ve written about self-defense, I’ve heard from readers who are totally nonplussed—even outraged—that a scientist would have any interest in this topic. Clearly, you assumed you were going to encounter a similar reaction when you started training in MMA, but to what degree did you actually encounter it?

Gottschall: I don’t know. I think that jury is still out. The people in my English Department are very nice people. I was really hoping that they would be a lot more intolerant than they actually are.

I think there was also a certain humor to my mission—or stunt, if you want to call it that—which mitigated the problem for them. They’d ask about it, but always with a little smirk on their faces. It was kind of funny to think about me doing these things, whereas your writing about self-defense—which I love, by the way—is very serious stuff. There’s none of the humor to take the edge off.

The reaction I feared will probably occur once the book actually comes out. It just won’t happen in the English Department, where my colleagues know me to be a decent person.

However, in my profession more generally, it’s not an exaggeration to say that masculinity is viewed as the root of all evil. If you were to take a literary theory course, you might think it would be about literature, but it’s really not. It’s about all the various forms of oppression on earth and how we can see them playing out in literary works. And behind all these forms of oppression is a guy.

So in a humanities department, masculinity is associated with everything oafish, violent, and oppressive. I thought that by going to train across the street, I would be seen as embracing all the worst attributes of manhood rather than doing what I should be doing, which is talking about just how awful they are.

Of course, if I were writing a polemic against cage fighting, then I’d get a free pass. But I think that because my feelings about the sport ended up being pretty positive, the book may be controversial in the intellectual world.

Harris: Doing this as a book project definitely gave you some cover. And you’re right—there probably is a difference between being interested in martial arts from the self-defense side and being interested in MMA as a sport. Maybe we should talk about that.

Gottschall: Yes, I’d love to. I didn’t know about your martial arts interest until that Atlantic article came out. Then I went to your website and read your piece about Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ), and that took me to your self-defense article.

In your self-defense article, you basically give three rules about what to do in an authentic self-defense situation. I think this advice is clear and sound, and everyone should read it. I sent it around to my family members just a couple of days ago. But it became clear to me that in order to follow your advice, one has to recognize and even turn off psychological biases that have been built into us by evolution—especially the honor-based psychology that leads men in particular to feel that it’s worth getting into a fight over some minor slight. Telling someone to “just walk away” is going against the grain of hundreds of thousands of years of hominid evolution, during which it really was damaging to suffer a slight to your honor.

The same thing goes for property defense: If you tell someone, “Hey, man, just give him the wallet,” you’re battling a psychology that’s evolved over millennia when giving up your property wasn’t always an option. You couldn’t just call the insurance company to reimburse you.

Harris: Yes, and that’s why avoiding unnecessary violence can be very difficult, especially for men. In your book, you write at some length about the history of duels and other forms of honor violence. But for most of us, the world has changed. In fact, civilization is “civilized” largely to the extent that we agree to leave this sort of violence in our past. Of course, there are places where honor violence still thrives, and these are contexts in which it might be rational even for people like ourselves to engage in it. In a maximum-security prison, for instance, it often makes sense for an otherwise decent person to act like a total barbarian—because the only thing likely to keep him safe in such an environment is a reputation for explosive violence. In most free societies, however, a propensity for such violence will ruin your life and most likely land you in prison—where, ironically, this attitude will suddenly become an asset.

I believe it was Rory Miller who coined the phrase “the monkey dance” to name the dominance ritual that men tend to fall into when in conflict with other men. It usually starts with a hard stare that elicits “What the hell are you looking at?” from the other party. This invites some version of “Fuck you,” and then the conflict escalates. It’s amazing how scripted these encounters tend to be—the first physical contact is a finger poke or a two-handed shove to the chest or a push to the face, which is answered by an overhand right. We are about as original in these contests as bears are.

The psychological forces here—honor and shame—are very captivating, however. If a man wants to reliably avoid violence in bars, soccer stadiums, and so forth, he has to somehow scrub this programming from the hard drive. Otherwise he stands a good chance of being lured into an escalating exchange that admits of no face-saving exit.

Gottschall: You said earlier that I had recently gone through a midlife crisis. And in some ways I had. But this crisis about fighting and about courage and about whether I was brave is an old crisis. I was a very late bloomer as a kid. I came into my adult size and muscle very late. Whenever I was confronted in the schoolyard, I found some way to avoid the fight. I ran for it. I backed down. Psychologically and emotionally, that isn’t a low-cost course of action for most boys. You avoid a physical beating, but you pay a real social and psychological cost for it. Those moments of walking away from fights, even though I knew it was the rational and civilized thing to do, cost me tremendously. I think that’s why I finally got in that cage to fight.

People say the duel is dead. The duel really isn’t dead in the sense of escalating conflict over honor. It’s now what it always was—the world’s leading cause of homicide—when one guy brushes another guy’s shoulder in a bar and says, “Hey, man, what the fuck?” Before you know it, they’re bashing each other over the head with beer bottles. That’s a kind of duel.

Harris: The depth of this emotional cost you mentioned is pretty fascinating. And it’s something I probably haven’t paid enough attention to. There’s a scene in Louis C.K.’s show Louie where he dramatizes a humiliating version of this—where a young punk confronts an older man on a date and makes him beg not to be beaten up. After it’s over, his date says, “I’m sorry, but that was a real turnoff… I don’t know why.”

There is a psychological cost to taking what is, from a self-defense perspective, very good advice. As you say, the cost can be very high—especially if you have avoided violence your entire life and therefore never discovered whether you can handle yourself in a fight. Real training, of the sort that you did, can help remove that doubt.

Gottschall: Yes, that’s true. It’s probably different in most martial arts, but in an MMA or boxing gym—which is to say, a real fighting gym—it’s always scary. When it’s grappling night at the MMA gym, I never go in scared. The worst that’s going to happen to me is I’ll tweak my elbow or somebody will choke me a little too hard and I’ll go to sleep for a bit. But I’m not scared.

However, you go into the real sparring nights—we call them “Punch in the face” nights—and you know you’re going to get punched lots and lots of times in the head, often by men who are much bigger and much more skilled than you are. We have a pretty small gym, and you can’t always fight in your weight class. So I’m always sparring with big heavyweights who can’t even pull a punch.

What you do in a fight gym is learn how to be brave. You’re learning how to punch and kick in a proper way, of course, but above all else, a fighter is someone who’s got courage, who’s dead game in a fight. Most guys don’t come into the world that way. You learn to be brave through that process of getting your fear and timidity beaten out of you night after night after night.

It’s an empirical question whether training makes one more or less likely to get in a fight outside the gym. In some ways, I’m probably more likely to get into a fight now, because I feel more competent, and I know what it’s cost me in the past to back down from fights, and I don’t want to feel that way.

Harris: Also, there may be some residual uncertainty as to whether what you learn in the gym translates fully into situations where the stakes are real and the variables uncontrolled. So I suspect that although training hard in MMA can remove some of the doubts and ego fears you’ve described, it might not remove all of them.

Gottschall: Exactly. An MMA fight can be a very brutal thing, but there comes a moment at which somebody saves you. Either your opponent saves you—he stops because you tap—or the referee physically rips him off you. In a real-world confrontation, you don’t know if someone’s going to stop that guy from stomping you to death.

Harris: So we’ve just cast doubt upon one of the sacred myths of martial arts and self-defense training—which is that the more one trains, the less likely one is to resort to violence unnecessarily. I more or less paid lip service to this idea just a second ago—suggesting that once a person works out his ego fears in the gym and knows that he has genuine skills, he’ll be less likely to be lured into the monkey dance, because he has less to prove. But now we appear to have gone back on that promise.

I think there is probably an unhappy valley between being a beginner and being a master who really has nothing to prove, where a martial artist is probably more likely to be lured into a fight—either because he’s actually been waiting for an opportunity to test his skills, or because he has developed an image of himself as a person who doesn’t have to take shit from anyone.

Gottschall: I don’t know what your experience in martial arts has been. I did karate for a few years, and a little bit of jiu-jitsu, and then I did mixed martial arts. I also traveled around to different dojos interviewing people for the book. But what I’ve found, especially in MMA gyms, is that the realm is dominated by young men. You’re talking about men who are 15 to 24 years old. In my gym there was almost no demographic diversity. There were very few women and graybeards. More or less everyone was a young man.

And if you ask these guys, “What are you doing here? This is kind of a weird thing to do, getting punched in the face all the time. Why do you do this?” one thing you don’t hear is “I want to know what to do in a self-defense situation. What if I’m walking down the street and a mugger comes along? How can I defend myself?” They’re not worried about that.

What these young men are worried about is winning a duel. They’re just like me. They’ve been in situations where they got bullied, and if that ever comes up again, they want to be in a position to stand up for themselves. They want to avoid humiliation and dishonor. They’re preparing for duels. So, generally speaking, I think they’re less likely to back down from a fight.

But part of the reason you prepare for duels is because then everyone knows you’re preparing for duels. So in their social network, these men are advertising themselves as the sort of men who are not going to take any shit because they’re dangerous. They are establishing a reputational deterrent against disrespect as well as aggression.

Harris: A good case of cauliflower ear can advertise one’s skills pretty successfully. It’s a kind of bully repellent.

Gottschall: I would walk around, and I would feel this weird sense of repulsion toward the cauliflower ears, and I’d also be thinking, “God, I want one of those.” I do have just a little touch of cauliflower on my left ear that I’m very proud of. You can’t really see it, but you can feel it with your fingers.

Harris: That’s hilarious. “Hey, Buddy. Just feel my ear. No, not there, there. Yeah, right there. Want to take this outside? I didn’t think so.”

Occasionally one hears a story about some high-level MMA fighter in a bar, and some tough guy who just couldn’t read the signs gets into a monkey dance with a world-class athlete who’s got double cauliflower ear, and tattoos everywhere, and who’s full-time job for the past decade has been to choke guys out or beat them unconscious. But that’s one of the amazing things about the monkey dance: It’s captivating even when it’s suicidal.

One thing you brought up earlier is a distinction between grappling and striking, which is interesting both from the point of view of training in the martial arts and from the point of view of being a fan of fighting sports. Like any neuroscientist, I generally believe that it’s wise to take as little trauma to one’s brain as possible, and I certainly regret some of the sparring I did as a teenager. I even regret heading the ball playing soccer. At the time, I had no notion that I might be damaging my brain, but I always noticed a fleeting metallic taste in my mouth. In retrospect, getting hit in the head just never felt right. 

Gottschall: Getting punched in the face with a padded glove doesn’t really hurt your face. It doesn’t hurt your skull. The only thing it hurts is your brain. You can feel the brain injury happening. It’s an instant headache.

Harris: Technically, you can’t feel the forces on your brain, but whatever you do feel is certainly a consequence of your brain sloshing around inside your skull. And it’s definitely not good for you.

So how did you, as a responsible adult in his forties, reconcile yourself to acquiring some degree of brain trauma in your training?

Gottschall: I was very aware of it, and it did worry me, because although it often seemed minor, all the minor things add up. And at other times it was fairly major. A couple of times I took punches and then wasn’t the same for a few days. I was thinking slow. I was hazy.

One time, I was sparring with a heavyweight—a guy who had killed me on 15 occasions. He didn’t go quite as easy on me as he needed to, and at one point I charged forward, and he just put his arm out like a telephone pole. I impaled my face on it. If you’ve ever seen that moment when Forrest Griffin is fighting Anderson Silva and Griffin just collapses from a jab—that was it.

This is something that people don’t understand about knockouts, because they’ve seen too much TV. One of the great inventions of film and television that allows for the action to happen is the one-punch knockout. MacGyver’s trying to get out of the sinking ship, and he punches the guard, and the guard just goes to sleep for a solid half hour. MacGyver doesn’t want to kill him (it’s not that kind of show), so he just knocks him out. But most knockouts aren’t like that. You go away for a second and then you’re right back.

There was a lot of that in my training. I guess the way I came to justify it is the way most people who fight justify it: Fighting is really, really rewarding. I truly enjoyed it. I got feelings from fighting that were bigger than those I had experienced in almost any other realm of my life. It made me feel awake in a way that I had never been awake. Those kinds of big emotions and big experiences may come with a heavy price tag.

MMA is really bad for you, but it’s also good for you in many ways. So that’s how I justified it. I felt like I was taking manageable risks in exchange for big rewards. When I eventually quit, I didn’t quit because I said, “Okay, that’s enough. The book project is over. I can go do something else.” And I didn’t quit because I was worried about my brain. I quit because the rest of my body gave out.

It was a very sad thing, sort of like the end of a romance. I left it very reluctantly, and I left it knowing that I’d never get it back, that I was just too old for it in this phase of my life. The phase of running with young men was over, and it wasn’t coming back.

Jonathan Gottschall (left)

Harris: I certainly can relate to this experience from the grappling side. I haven’t yet admitted to myself that I’m not training in BJJ, but I’ve gotten several lingering injuries, and the gaps in my training are getting longer and longer as I wait to recover.

Gottschall: That’s the bummer with grappling, Sam. You don’t hurt your brain, but you hurt everything else. Almost all my significant injuries came from grappling.

When you spar in boxing, the only thing that gets hurt is your brain. Everything else feels pretty good. But if you spar in grappling—wrestling and jiu-jitsu—it’s like one-on-one tackle football. There’s opportunity for mayhem that’s not present in a very controlled boxing match.

Harris: Do you think you can spar in boxing or kickboxing in a way that is truly benign and yet still gives you most of the benefit of full contact?

Gottschall: I don’t know. I just know what fighters do. The top fighters spar hard. They’re really sparring for two reasons: One is to improve their technique, but the other, which is just as important, is to build endurance, toughness, and courage. They want to practice as realistically as possible so that when they go into a real fight, the transition isn’t as jarring. In our gym, I was shocked at how hard these guys spar. I was like, “Wait a minute. You’re hitting me as hard as you can!” That’s what it felt like a lot of the time. It may seem barbaric, but that was the culture of the gym.

I have this chapter titled “The Myth of the Martial Arts,” about what I see as the failure of traditional martial arts. One thing they did was to start focusing on stuff that just doesn’t work in actual fights. Another thing they did was avoid making real contact in sparring. Those changes combined to make many styles all but useless in a fight.

Harris: I’ve been fascinated by the distance between what I’ve come to think of as the “fantasy martial arts” and real self-defense training. This isn’t the distinction one often hears between training for “sport” and training for “the street”—because much of what works in a sport like MMA will obviously work on the street too. But some techniques really don’t work reliably in either context, and they constitute the fantasy moves that have become central to many martial arts.

For a fight fan, there is also a major difference between grappling and striking. In a BJJ tournament, for instance, you don’t have to worry that the athletes are destroying their brains and might even die as a result. You might be aware that they sometimes get injured, but you’re not watching the damage occur moment by moment. When you see someone getting beaten unconscious in a striking-based match, it’s easy to wonder whether this exciting sport that you paid money to see should even be legal.

Gottschall: Yes. I feel the same way. I watch fights and I often feel morally compromised by it. I feel like I’m morally culpable for what’s occurring because I’m the spectator and ultimately footing the bill for the spectacle.

But I don’t think people are reacting primarily to the danger of the sport. There are many other activities that are truly dangerous that we have no inclination to ban. Motocross is incredibly dangerous. It’s really bad for your brain—some of these guys have had dozens of concussions. Bull riding is probably the most dangerous sport in the world in terms of head injuries (this New Yorker article on the subject is a fascinating read). Cheerleading is also very, very dangerous. You take a little girl and launch her into the air—sometimes she comes down hard. Cheerleaders can get catastrophic spinal injuries.

I think what bothers us about fighting sports isn’t the damage to the athlete but the fact that you win by doing more harm to your opponent than he does to you. It just seems ugly.

Harris: I think we should sharpen up that distinction a little. The issue relates to the physics and logic of striking: To strike someone effectively—so that it degrades his performance, allowing you to win the fight—is, by definition, to physically harm him. With wrestling, football, or any other sport that may entail a serious risk of injury, the harm is incidental to the performance. Here, injuring your opponent is the performance.

Gottschall: Yes. A boxing contest is a brain-damage contest. Who can give out more brain damage and who can absorb more of it? When Joe Rogan says during a UFC match, “Boy, this guy’s got a great chin,” that’s a euphemism for “You can punch this guy in the brain a lot and he won’t die.”

This is really tough. I think that anyone with any empathy at all will feel conflicted here. I think the proper attitude toward fighting sports is one of ambivalence. You can be drawn to them, but you should also be repelled by them.

My reason for arguing against abolishing these types of sports isn’t some kind of lofty, philosophical rationale. It’s just that I did it and I liked it. It comes down to a libertarian issue for me. I feel that if I know the risks and I want to take them, I should be allowed to do so.

In boxing, where most of the guys are from lower-class backgrounds and have darker skin than most of the fans, one might fear that the athletes are being exploited. But that narrative doesn’t hold up very well in the world of MMA, where 99 percent of fighters are amateurs who will never earn a dime. They aren’t seeking fame and fortune. For the most part, these guys are fighting because they want to and because it gives them an opportunity to strive for something big in their lives. It gives them a chance to become their best selves.

Harris: One thing that’s fascinating about MMA is that it has the character of Greek drama. You see these titanic egos clash, and only one survives. Many of these guys are the best fighters they’ve ever met and appear to think they’re invincible. This was especially true in the early days, when every discipline was isolated from every other, and people were just ignorant about what they were going to confront in the cage.

So you have the spectacle of two guys who can’t imagine losing thrown together, and one of them triumphs. Then you wait a few months, and this still-invincible fighter gets destroyed by the next guy. It’s a cascade of ego destruction that from a psychological point of view is pretty mesmerizing to watch.

Gottschall: That’s right. I think a lot of people assume that a fight fan is just a troglodyte who’s sitting in the stands grunting and wanting to see blood. I don’t think that’s the main allure of it. The main allure, from the fan’s point of view, is closer to what you’re saying: A really intense human drama is taking place in front of you.

There’s a whole lineage of great writers who have been fascinated by boxing especially (this was pre-MMA). They were drawn in not only by the spectacle of the fight, but by their own reaction to it.

They were thinking, “I’m Ernest Hemingway, or I’m Joyce Carol Oates, or I’m Norman Mailer. I’m one of the greatest artists in the world. I have all this empathy inside me. I have to have empathy to do my work, and yet here I am, watching two men destroy themselves for my pleasure. What’s going on here? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with all of us for wanting to watch this stuff?”

I think part of it is, just as you said, the appeal of tragic storytelling. So the promoters introduce you to the characters, and they usually try to build up a story of conflict between the two fighters. And then, as in almost all stories, you have a contest between the protagonist and the antagonist, depending on whom you happen to be rooting for. If your guy loses, it’s a tragedy. Even if your guy wins, it’s still a tragedy, because as you said, an ego has been more or less destroyed in the cage.

Of course, the fact that we see it that way, as a tragic brand of storytelling that produces lofty emotions in us, doesn’t necessarily justify it.

Harris: This invites other empirical questions: Which sports and other pastimes are the most damaging to people as a matter of course, and which entail the most risk of injury or death? It’s worth noting that those might be very different lists. I’m sure there are sports that entail no regular injuries but are far more likely to kill a person than MMA is. “Free solo” rock climbing is probably the best example: Everything is great—perhaps you hurt your fingers from time to time—and then suddenly you’re dead.

I agree with your views on personal freedom. Consenting adults should be informed about the risks of these activities and then be free to do what they want, short of imposing risks on other people who have not consented.

Gottschall: Let me say one more thing about the ethics here. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and it’s something that I didn’t fully figure out while working on the book. I’ve done a little writing about this, which I’m still drafting, but I hope to publish it around the time the book comes out.

What should be done about the danger of these sports, and the sort of ethical quandary fans find themselves in? It’s long been assumed that we’re stuck with this amount of risk, and that current levels of brain trauma are intrinsic to boxing and MMA. I don’t think that’s true at all. A huge percentage of this head trauma goes back to a single, simple mistake. In an effort to civilize combat sports, authorities mandated padded gloves and instantly made the sports far more savage. Granted, putting gloves on the hands seems like a nice thing to do. If you were being punched in the brain by a powerful man, wouldn’t you rather he strap a pillow around his fist? But the glove doesn’t do anything to diminish your brain damage. In fact, it magnifies it massively, because your opponent can then throw his hands around with wild abandon, punching from all angles—using the kinds of punches that you could never throw with bare fists without destroying your hands and crippling yourself in the course of a fight.

If you took the gloves off, you’d change the sport. You’d no longer see windmilling, Roy Nelson–style overhand rights being thrown. You’d see far fewer hook punches thrown. It would revert to a much simpler bag of techniques that was closer to the repertoire of old-fashioned bare-knuckle, and you would see a lot more grappling.

So BJJ guys, for instance, would be much more competitive, because you couldn’t just beat them to death from the top position. And BJJ guys could also attack more effectively, because bulky gloves make for clumsy grappling and give the opponent a good handle to grab onto. (Just to give one example, the rear naked choke has become harder and harder to finish in MMA because defenders just grab onto one of the attacker’s hands with both of theirs and hold on for dear life. The glove provides the grip that makes this defense possible.)

Fighting bare-handed would also move the UFC back to what it originally was—a pretty good simulation of an actual fight. Putting on gloves is completely artificial. You are basically giving the fighters weapons that allow them to do more damage, and this completely changes the character of a human fistfight.

Harris: That’s very interesting. It would make MMA even more engaging as a sport for those fans who care about what really works in a violent confrontation.

Gottschall: Right.

Harris: So why haven’t they done it?

Gottschall: Well, good question. First, there’s a well-founded fear of hand injury, and that’s what would happen in the beginning. Guys would try to throw an overhand right because they’ve been throwing overhand rights their whole lives, and they would break their fists into pieces on the other guy’s skull.

But very quickly these guys would evolve. Mixed martial arts is all about changing in relation to new pressures, and fighters would very quickly adapt. They’d change up the game, and there would be a whole lot less head trauma.

The main reason I think it probably won’t happen—and this is brutal and ugly—is that people like head trauma. They love knockouts. The crowd is silent, silent, silent… and then a knockout happens, and everyone goes native. There would be far fewer knockouts without the gloves.

So for guys like you and me, who have a real theoretical interest in what works in a fight, it would be fascinating. But to the average sports fan, who maybe isn’t inspired by questions like that, it might seem a lot less exciting.

Harris: I don’t recall whether the first UFCs used gloves.

Gottschall: Most guys chose to fight without gloves—but a few did wear them, including, famously, the boxer Art Jimmerson, who fought Royce Gracie wearing just one boxing glove. I don’t recall exactly when things changed, but this was the “human cockfighting” era: John McCain was on the warpath, and the UFC was banned in most states. Putting gloves on the fighters was a symbolic change that suggested that we were now making it a civilized sport, and it was no longer this crazy gladiatorial throwback to ancient Rome.

It’s even in our language: If you want to get serious and violent, what do you do? You “take the gloves off.” Bare-fisted is supposedly a much more dangerous way to hit someone. But we’ve got it completely backward. The glove is a weapon. It massively accentuates the ability of the fist to do harm.

Harris: That’s really ironic. Everyone is so confused that the sport must cater to this confusion and “clean up” its image by making itself far more dangerous.

Gottschall: Exactly. It was a great PR move, sort of like the football helmet. The football helmet was a way of making kids safer, or so they thought. It was a well-intended humanitarian gesture, but it was a horrible mistake. It made football more dangerous.

You would diminish the risk in MMA to an acceptable level if you just took off the gloves. This would reduce the violence from an insane, NFL level to a rugby level. You would still have a rough, tough, bloody sport that really tests its fighters, but you wouldn’t introduce silly risks that don’t need to be there.

This proposal faces a serious uphill battle—but, boy, I feel very strongly that it would be the way to go.

Harris: It makes a lot of sense to me. Let’s return to your initial motivation for training. Was self-defense, as opposed to preparing for a duel, part of the picture? Did you ever think in terms of “What if somebody broke into my house in the middle of the night, and I had to protect my wife and kids”? And insofar as you went down that rabbit hole, did you ever train with weapons?

Gottschall: Yes. But I had to make a decision about what my book was going to be about. Violence is a huge topic, and I found that the kind of violence that I was really interested in was the duel, broadly understood. In my definition of the duel, we have everything from sports to a staring duel to a pissing contest to certain kinds of arguments, and so forth. So I stayed away from the more tactical, real-world, self-defense type of writing.

One of the reasons I think your article on the topic is so great is that I think every guy our age can relate to this. Men with families suddenly realize, “Holy shit. My dad doesn’t live with us anymore. If somebody comes through that door, it’s my job to deal with it.” So I absolutely have thought about that.

I live in a place—southwestern Pennsylvania, right on the border with West Virginia—where almost everyone owns a gun. And most working-class guys carry their guns everywhere.

So I’m living in the heart of gun culture, but I’m not a gun guy. I didn’t grow up with them; I was never a hunter; my dad was never a hunter. I’ve shot a handgun, and it really scared me. I also enjoyed it as I got more comfortable with it. And I do think about getting a gun. I’m not comfortable being at such a force disadvantage when everyone else is armed.

Right now, my self-defense, home-invasion plan is based on an ax handle that’s within easy reach in the kitchen, and I also have a hatchet in my bedroom. I chose the hatchet very carefully. In the sitcom, the dad always keeps a bat handy. But a bat is too long. You can’t swing it in a hallway, and it’s also not as terrifying as a hatchet.

Harris: I see that you’re determined to make this as horrifying an encounter as possible. A gun is clinical compared with what you have in store.

Gottschall: Well, yes. So I have given it some thought, but I’ve been lazy in some ways. The message I take from your articles is “Hey, this really could happen, and you should be systematic in your thinking about it. It’s not necessarily all that costly to do a bit of homework and some planning.” I know that’s true, and I always tell myself I’m going to think about it in a couple months, and then I never get around to it.

Harris: It’s interesting to hear that you live where so many people are walking around armed. I’m not in that same context—or I don’t think I am, although I realize that many people carry illegally. Of course, men often carry knives wherever one happens to live. The truth about physical conflict in the real world is that it is always prudent to assume that the other guy is armed.

One thing about the prevalence of weapons is that it rules out the monkey dance as a sane option. You’ve been talking about your friends at the gym—tough MMA guys with shiny new egos who are now probably more prone to get into fights—and yet you’re all living surrounded by men who are carrying guns. That’s a bad combination.

In fact, the logic of the monkey dance erodes from the other side as well: If you’re carrying a gun, or even a knife, you really must avoid those kinds of confrontations. And given that you are armed, you can avoid them in a way that is face-saving, at least internally. It may not be face-saving in the eyes of your antagonist, but if you know you’re carrying a weapon, you should also know that you can’t afford to be throwing punches or rolling around on the floor with some stranger just because he told you to go fuck yourself.

If you are armed, you simply have to find some way out of those situations. Otherwise you stand a very good chance of having to use your weapon. And if you can’t prove self-defense—and you won’t be able to if you’re involved in a duel—you’re going to wind up in prison.

Gottschall: Yes. That’s very true. A few times a year in my small town, one of these monkey dances goes off, and the guys are carrying guns, and they shoot each other. Or they shoot each other after a road-rage incident.

I think we have very similar attitudes toward guns and gun culture. I’m not an abolitionist, but I would like the laws to be stiffer. Now I can walk into a gun store in my town and buy military-grade weapons. You’d be shocked by the amount of firepower you can buy—.50 caliber sniper rifles and the same shotguns the Marines carry in Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn’t matter whether I know how to use these things—I can just walk into a store and buy them.

And if I do get a handgun, I can take it to the sheriff’s department, and in about as much time as it would take me to order a value meal at Wendy’s, they will give me a concealed-carry license. There will be no screening at all to see whether I’m qualified to carry a gun in public—which I absolutely am not. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t gotten a gun in the first place: I don’t know how to use one.

Harris: Well, that’s the right way to think about it. If you are going to own a gun, you definitely want to be trained to use it. And the safe handling of firearms is a highly nontrivial skill—one that has a tendency to degrade the more comfortable one becomes around them. As much as anything else, you want to be trained to counteract this tendency. You have to learn to treat every gun as loaded at all times, even when the one you’re holding isn’t. Laziness on that point gets people killed.

Obviously, owning a gun doesn’t make sense for everyone. But once you decide that it makes sense for you—and this can be a very controversial opinion in our circles—you suddenly pass through the wall of judgment you probably have about gun culture and arrive at a place of simply wanting to learn a potentially valuable skill. The same kind of experts you met in the MMA world await you in the gun world—SWAT operators, Navy Seals, and so forth—and they’re just as fun to train with. There’s a lot to learn—and learning it need not make you a fan of the NRA.

Gottschall: Yes, I thought about it. I even thought about doing a book called Shooters, about gun culture and that kind of violence.

My little brother is a federal law enforcement officer, and he’s also a firearms instructor. He came up recently to visit, and we went out to the range. Part of why I was attracted to the idea of owning a gun was self-defense, and part of it was that I’ve been fascinated by guns since I was a little kid, and I want to play with them. It seems like a lot of fun. And I had a great time. It was probably because I had such a skilled teacher. My brother really knows what he’s doing, and he knows how to make it safe. Shooting with him, and seeing his expertise, I had a tiny eureka moment. I suddenly realized that when it comes to the use of firearms, my brother is a badass martial artist. And I think that a lot of people who like training with guns are probably drawn to it not only for practical reasons, but also in that same restless quest for physical excellence that draws people to a martial arts dojo.

Harris: Yes. It can be like playing a high-stakes video game. It can also be surprisingly meditative. My favorite firearms instructor, Scott Reitz, calls it “Zen with bullets.” He’s not just being flippant. You really have to get out of your own way—and be both extremely relaxed and extremely focused—to shoot well.

Insofar as a person’s interest in martial arts has a realistic self-defense component—that is, he actually wants to be prepared for the unlikely intrusion of real violence into his life—training with weapons is more or less unavoidable. We’re not talking about a duel or a fair fight here. If you are truly doing whatever you reasonably can to avoid violence and you nevertheless find yourself in a violent encounter, that means some psychopath wouldn’t let you leave the room. There are no rules in situations like that. And many of the habits, expectations, and fantasies that we acquire while training as martial artists are quite dangerous in a context of real violence without rules. Notions of a fair fight, of honor, or that being a martial artist, you shouldn’t need a weapon—all that can get you killed.

Gottschall: Yes, it’s a completely different bird. It really is. All my experience has been with honor-based violence, not the sort of violence you’re talking about. As you said in your article, which I thought was really insightful, if someone breaks into your home when you’re there—that is, they don’t wait to be sure that the house is empty—it’s a bad situation. Honor doesn’t come into it at all. Anything you need to do to survive at that point becomes A-OK.

Harris: Again, most people in academic circles will consider us paranoid to even discuss these possibilities, much less train for them. But if a person has spent five minutes in his life worrying that a plane might crash, he has exhibited a far less rational fear than we have here. Most of us are lucky to live in societies where violent crime is rare. That’s a wonderful thing. But it isn’t as rare as it should be, or as many people assume. And fear need not be one’s motive for training. Ultimately one trains because it’s fun to master new skills.

Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here, Jonathan. I really appreciate your taking the time to speak with me. And I hope our readers will immediately get your book. Here’s the blurb I wrote, in case there’s any doubt about my endorsement:

Jonathan Gottschall has written a wonderfully honest, entertaining, and insightful book about violence, manhood, courage, and the wisdom that can be gleaned from getting punched in the face. If you’ve ever wondered why combat is a perennial source of fascination for us, and whether this fascination can be channeled toward truly productive ends, The Professor in the Cage is the book to read.

Gottschall:Thanks, Sam. I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time, so it’s been great to meet you.

What a charming and illuminating book! With scientific acumen and literary panache, Gottschall immerses himself, and us, in an ancient part of the male psyche. Among the many treats in this book are the history of recreational fighting, a limpid explanation of sexual selection, and a sympathetic portrayal of working-class men that’s worthy of a great novelist.



—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; and author of How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of Our Nature

Through the Eyes of a Cult

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris discusses the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult and argues that we all have something important to learn from them about the power of belief.

The following videos are discussed:

 

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Crowdsourcing Freedom

David Keyes is the executive director of Advancing Human Rights and has been called a “pioneer in online activism” by The New York Times.  He is working to find new ways to spread political freedom globally, and he recently launched Movements.org as a crowdsourcing human rights platform. Movements gives people the ability to connect directly with activists on the front lines.

David and I spoke about tyranny, radicalism, and how we all can help defend the rights of vulnerable people elsewhere in the world.

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Harris: Please tell our readers more about Movements and about why you launched it.

Keyes: Movements is a crowdsourcing platform that links human rights activists from closed societies with people around the world who can help them. It’s a new approach to an old problem.

Uber, Amazon, Craigslist, and Airbnb all recognized that there are millions and millions of people who need something and millions and millions of people who have something. By taking out the middleman, these platforms allow for many more organic connections to be made. We’re doing the same for human rights. New technologies aren’t the solution to radicalism and tyranny, but when used smartly, they can help empower moderates around the globe.

The challenge in human rights has changed dramatically over the past few decades. During the Soviet period, for example, the free world did not know what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Dissidents would smuggle out rare pieces of samizdat, or underground literature, to alert the world about the gulag archipelago. Much of it was published by Advancing Human Rights’ chairman, Robert Bernstein, who also founded Human Rights Watch and headed Random House for 25 years.

Today, by contrast, everyone knows what is happening in Syria, because a YouTube video of a slaughter is uploaded every few minutes. ISIS proudly shows its videos of beheading journalists, including a few friends of mine. There isn’t exactly a lack of information. The challenge has morphed from getting information out of closed societies to getting help in.

I took over Movements in 2012, when it was hosting conferences for digital activists and writing how-to guides. We got some funding from Google, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what innovations were most needed in human rights. It struck me that there were so many activists living under dictatorships who desperately needed help and were not getting it. Traditional approaches fell far short of the demand.

Hundreds of billions of dollars from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, and China are funding forces of regression and radicalism. Many more people need to be mobilized if we are to challenge these influences. And so I decided to build a crowdsourcing platform to do just that.

We launched it a few months ago, and tens of thousands of human rights activists have come to the site. People are getting help every day. North Korean defectors connect with technologists; former Iranian political prisoners write to policymakers; Syrian refugees get representation from lawyers; the Russian opposition and Pussy Riot collaborate with songwriters in New York to make a music video commemorating slain Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky; An Assyrian whose hometown was overtaken by ISIS was highlighted by major Western media..

Members of parliament in Canada and Australia speak to democratic dissidents from Syria and Iran. Several US senators use Movements to hear directly from formerly jailed democracy activists. The only Russian member of parliament to vote against Putin’s annexation of Crimea is connecting with media.  A former Iranian minister is on Movements to highlight the brutality of the current regime.

There are many more success stories. Crowdsourcing is a far more efficient and effective way of getting help to those in need.

Harris: It seems to be an especially depressing time in the Middle East. Do you think such an approach can overcome extremism there?

Keyes: The situation can seem dire. As you know well, deeply illiberal cultures and ideologies rule much of the world today. In the Middle East in particular, members of the LGBT community, religious minorities, blasphemers, women, liberals, secularists, and atheists are under constant siege. They are brutalized, silenced, and often killed by ISIS, the Saudi and Iranian regimes, and many others.

The question that obsesses me is: Are we truly doing everything in our power to defend people who are trying to build more tolerant societies? The answer to that question, I’m convinced, is a resounding no.

There are thousands of political prisoners in Iran alone, for example. Do we know their names? Do Western policymakers raise their cases in meetings with Iranians in Geneva? Are Iranian diplomats confronted every time they walk outside their missions anywhere in the world? No. We haven’t even scratched the surface of what we could be doing to raise international pressure on dictatorships and empower democratic dissidents. It is a travesty that in today’s day and age, more people aren’t galvanized to defend human rights.

I think Movements is part of the solution because it gives ordinary people the ability to contribute directly to activists on the front lines. On the site, activists simply select what they need: media attention, technology help, public relations, legal advice or a variety of other options.  On the other end, people who want to help can offer their skills: music, editing, web design, policy-making and much more. Sometimes we have a family member of a jailed political prisoner post an article asking for help. One person translates it, another edits it and another publishes it.  This is a bottom-up rather than top-down approach to human rights.

Whenever I give speeches around the world, the question I get asked most often is: What can I do to help? I don’t think writing your member of Congress or attending a rally is enough these days. It doesn’t tap into people’s unique skills.

Today there is no mass mobilization for human rights. Whenever it comes up that I worked for Natan Sharansky, Jews around the world tell me what they did to help secure his freedom. They wore bracelets, attended rallies, chained themselves to Soviet embassies, and much more. Hundreds of thousands marched on the Washington Mall to stand in solidarity with Soviet Jews. Almost every member of the American Congress and the Canadian parliament were engaged at some level. A former U.S. arms negotiator told me he started every meeting with the Soviets by bringing up Sharansky’s name.

Today, it seems that many people suffer from a combination of isolationism and fatigue—not to mention moral confusion. ISIS is sweeping over two entire countries, slaughtering anyone who stands in its way. Syria is falling apart. Saudi Arabia beheads people in the street. Iran acts with impunity as it jails thousands who dare to criticize the regime. Egypt has returned to military dictatorship. Putin is gobbling up territory. China seems too powerful to touch.

Americans are unsure what they can do. But I genuinely believe that everyone has a role to play. Whether you’re a journalist, a policymaker, an artist, a technologist, a PR expert, a writer, an editor, a translator, or just someone who cares about the issue, you can lend your voice to threatened dissidents in some way. We’ve had a comedian offer to make fun of dictators and a Juilliard jazz drummer offer to dedicate songs to political prisoners.

No single act is going to topple tyranny, but they are all cracks in the wall.

Harris: But what is really on the other side of that wall? No doubt there are liberal voices in these societies, but they are essentially powerless. Why is it so important to support individual dissidents? 

Keyes: Many people look at the Middle East today and see a binary choice: dictators or religious fanatics. Frankly, the West has been supporting some dictators for decades, while theocratic groups like ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas have gotten enormous support from Qatar, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

But there are real liberals out there, too, who believe in individual rights. I’ve spent many years working with them. They are undoubtedly small in number, but that makes it even more pressing to support them. Change takes a long time, but every minute we wait is a minute wasted.

Democratic dissidents almost universally feel betrayed, isolated, and alone. They desperately need support to win the war of ideas. This support can take many forms: moral, economic, cultural, rhetorical, and political. Long before using the military, we can spread values by defending the right ideas.

Dissidents are a bellwether for the health of a society. They are symbols that remind the world of universal truths—that slavery and tyranny are evil.

They underscore that the nature of regimes matter. I strongly believe in the old adage of the Soviet dissidents: “Trust states as much as they trust their own people.” And as Vaclav Havel said, “Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and their state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.”

Can a regime that murders its own people in the streets be trusted with nukes? Can governments that jail students for years for questioning a leader be responsible international actors? The answers to these questions are intuitive. Countries that wage war on their own people are unlikely to wage peace with their neighbors.

In addition to the moral duty, there is a strategic case to be made for defending human rights. Not that long ago, senior American officials would bring up the names of jailed dissidents at the start of their meetings with Soviet authorities. I’ve read the memoirs of Soviet leaders, and they were driven mad by this tactic.

Constant pressure bore results. When Advancing Human Rights’ board member Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister of Canada, asked Mikhail Gorbachev why he had freed Cotler’s client Natan Sharansky after nine years in prison, Gorbachev responded:


I never knew anything about Sharansky. I never even knew the name. I came to Canada when the minister of agriculture and I appeared before a Canadian parliamentary committee on agriculture, but instead of getting questions about agriculture, I got questions about Sharansky. I left the parliament building and saw placards of Sharansky. Wherever I went, I was confronted by Sharansky. So I came back to the Soviet Union and I said, “Who is this guy Sharansky?” I got the files and said, “Well, he might have been a troublemaker, but he isn’t a criminal.” So we ordered his release. It wasn’t worth the international price we paid.

Senator Scoop Jackson wrote legislation to tie most favored nation status for the Soviet Union to free emigration. Many people disagreed with this approach and thought Jackson was risking war over what amounted to a tangential human rights issue. But just the opposite was true. He understood that the more open the Soviet Union was, the less it would threaten the world. The link between internal freedom and external peace was clear.

Pressure continues to work today. In 2013, after a lunch I attended with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Zarif, I asked him if he thought it was ironic that he enjoyed posting on Facebook when his government banned it in Iran. He laughed and said, “Ha! Ha! That’s life.” I asked him when the jailed student leader Majid Tavakoli would be free. He told me he didn’t know who Tavakoli was.

I published this exchange in The Daily Beast, and it went viral inside Iran. Thousands of Iranians wrote Zarif on social media asking how it was possible that he didn’t know Tavakoli. It was picked up in media around the world. The foreign minister attacked me repeatedly on his Facebook page. A few days later, Tavakoli was temporarily released from prison. When the media attention died down, they quietly re-imprisoned him.

If raising one name can have such an effect, just imagine if more people were mobilized. Dictatorships are brutal, but they are also brittle. This was shown again in China’s response to my initiative to rename the street in front of the Chinese embassy in DC Liu Xiaobo Plaza, after the jailed Nobel Prize winner. A few dozen members of Congress supported the idea, and the House Appropriations Committee voted to rename the street. Even though the street wasn’t officially renamed, the Chinese government went ballistic and issued multiple furious denunciations.

Why were the Chinese so upset? Because the story was covered in nearly every major Western media outlet, and they understood that this could lead people to question the regime and the status quo. Think of all the resources China spends trying to control the thoughts of its citizens. China actually cares about its global reputation, too.

Another reason dissidents are so important is that they seem to be much better predictors of events than diplomats are. Sharansky and I recently wrote an article in The Washington Post comparing the predictions of the two groups. From 2009 to 2011, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton spoke repeatedly about how Syria and Egypt were stable. In 2006 and 2007, Kamal Labwani and Kareem Amer, both of whom were tortured in prison in Syria and Egypt, wrote from their jail cells that these dictators were leading their countries to instability and chaos. Labwani, a famed democracy activist, wrote that radicalism would soon rise as a result of the brutal Assad regime. Amer, a blogger, wrote that the Egyptian dictator would soon fall.

Former CIA Director Robert Gates said that it wasn’t until 1989 when the CIA first predicted the collapse of the entire Soviet Union. The Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik, by contrast, wrote a book in 1969 titled Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?

The diplomats were so wrong and the dissidents so right because the latter understood that no regime that must control the thoughts of its citizens can last forever. They viscerally felt the deep instability of fear societies.

I felt the same thing in the summer of 2006, when I was studying Arabic in the slums of Cairo. I came away from that experience believing that Mubarak’s collapse was only a matter of time. The country was falling apart, and for decades the Muslim Brotherhood had been organizing and getting stronger. Radicalism was thriving in the shadows. I was perplexed and saddened that more wasn’t being done to build liberal ideas as an antidote to dictatorship and fanaticism.

If we are to avoid constant instability, coups, war, and terror, it is in the keen interest of people everywhere to help open closed societies. Radical ideologies must not only be defeated, they must be replaced with better ideas of tolerance and pluralism. This is a real war, and we must do everything in our power to guarantee that the ideas that animate ISIS and the Saudi and Iranian regimes do not win the day.

Defending human rights is not a tangential issue but a core, strategic one. We can begin by ensuring that every democratic dissident has the tools, expertise, and resources he or she needs to succeed.

Harris: The way you’re addressing these problems is fascinating, David. Many thanks for your time, and I wish you the best of luck with your work.

Keyes: Thank you, Sam. And I hope your readers will go to Movements.org to offer help or answer the requests of brave human rights activists. 

 

 

Theocracy with a Human Face

The 16-minute video posted above is well worth studying. It features Asim Qureshi, the research director for CAGE, an Islamist front group that has until very recently managed to pass itself off as a human rights organization in the UK. When “Jihadi John” was finally identified as Mohammed Emwazi, with a degree in information systems and business management from the University of Westminster, CAGE argued that his gruesome career as an executioner and propagandist for the Islamic State was just a natural by-product of the humiliation and abuse that innocent Muslims suffer each day at the hands of the British government. Having never seen an allegation of this sort that he didn’t fancy, Glenn Greenwald circulated CAGE’s ludicrous press release at once:

Here's the @UK_CAGE statement on how UK Govt radicalized "Jihad John" w/harassment; more on WashPost article http://t.co/7z5n5KrpLC

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 26, 2015

Now watch that video. Pay close attention to how reasonable and benevolent Qureshi sounds in the beginning. For the first 10 minutes or so, he comes off as a fine spokesman for a moderate Islam that has been unfairly stigmatized by Western paranoia. However, once he is asked to denounce the most despicable aspects of shari’ah—Can non-Muslims be taken as slaves? Should women be stoned to death for adultery?—the mask suddenly slips. It is an amazing moment, when shameless guile reaches the precipice of religious superstition: Qureshi is clearly afraid to misrepresent his faith, lest he blaspheme and break trust with all the religious maniacs standing at his back. In the end, he can’t even pretend to have values remotely commensurate with our own. All he can muster is the lamest of dodges: “I’m not a theologian.” One wonders what Greenwald would make of this abject performance.

Of course, to remind Greenwald that he circulated CAGE’s press release is certain to bring forth that callow principle of the new pseudo-journalism—“Retweets don’t equal endorsements”—which in this case would be yet another lie, because CAGE’s stated position is one that Greenwald shares. In fact, he publicly supports another stealth Islamist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he has worked hard to brand as the Muslim NAACP. On more than one occasion, Greenwald has been the keynote speaker at a CAIR event. Lest you imagine that I am merely inferring support where none exists, consider what he has said about this group:

“There is no organization with which I would rather be spending my time, or with which I feel more at home, than CAIR.” (1)

“There really is no group in the United States that has been more steadfast and fearless and whose work has been more important… than CAIR.” (2)

And yet CAIR seems to be allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

In Greenwald’s world, any worry that groups like CAGE and CAIR are covertly advancing a deeply illiberal Islamist agenda is just more anti-Muslim bigotry. In the real world, this is a perfectly reasonable concern supported by facts.

Look again at the dissembling of Qureshi. Listen to all his seemingly sane and balanced talk about the “disenfranchisement” and “unnecessary targeting” of young Muslim men, about “cycles of violence,” and about jihad’s being nothing more than the universal principle of “self-defense.” And then realize that this voice of moderation believes that in a properly constituted caliphate, gays, apostates, blasphemers, and adulterers will be stoned to death, Jews and Christians will be forced to pay a protection tax, and all other non-Muslims will live as slaves.

This is theocracy with a human face. Where are the real liberals who will oppose it?

 

The Truth About Vaccines

Dr. Nina L. Shapiro is the director of pediatric otolaryngology and a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. A graduate of Harvard Medical School and Cornell University, Shapiro has been honored with several prestigious awards, including the American Society of Pediatric Otolaryngology Awards for Clinical and Basic Science Research, the UCLA Head and Neck Surgery Faculty Teaching Award, and the American Academy of Pediatrics Young Investigators Award, among others. In 2008 and 2012–2014, she was named a “Super Doctor” by Los Angeles Magazine; she is a Castle and Connolly 2014 “Top Doctor” and is listed in Who’s Who in America. She has given over 200 national and international scientific lectures, and written over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, two medical books, and 16 academic book chapters. Dr. Shapiro is an editor of “50 Studies Every Pediatrician Should Know” (Oxford University Press, 2016), and she is working on a book about hype in popular health advice. Her work and expert commentary have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Time, BBC World, Salon, and on NPR.

*  *  *

Harris: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Nina. There are a few background issues I should mention so that our readers understand the context of our conversation. An article in the Hollywood Reporter attracted a tremendous amount of attention because it revealed that some private schools in Los Angeles and Orange County have vaccination rates similar to those of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. This is true of affluent areas in northern California as well, such as Marin County. Then there was an outbreak of measles, a disease that had once been declared eradicated in the US, which came courtesy of a happy congregation of unimmunized people at Disneyland. This story also became national news, and measles has now spread to at least 17 states.

So my first question is, why aren’t people getting their children vaccinated against preventable and often very serious illness in the year 2015? I have my own thoughts on the topic, but I was wondering if you could comment as a pediatric ENT and surgeon.

Shapiro: I think there are several reasons why people have chosen—and I use the word “chosen” specifically because I think most people now have a luxury of choice when it comes to their medical care—not to vaccinate their children. One is that they haven’t seen these illnesses. Most people with young children have never seen a case of measles; they’ve never seen mumps, rubella, polio, or whooping cough; so these illnesses are just abstractions to them. Their families are healthy, so why should they worry about something they’ve never seen?

And there’s the concern that these vaccines cause autism. No matter how many studies are done to show in hundreds of thousands of children that there is no association between immunizations and the development of autism, there’s still that inkling of fear. Because most people know what autism looks like. They don’t know what measles looks like, but they understandably want to do everything they can to prevent autism.

Another issue—especially in what one would call “health-conscious” communities in California and parts of Colorado—is this notion that vaccines have what people call “toxins” in them. This is a very tricky word, because most non-scientists don’t really know what a toxin is. Vaccines are not toxic. The air we breathe is much more toxic than the vaccines that children receive. They receive more viral and bacterial exposure just by being outside for a few hours than they would from vaccines. But there’s this pseudoscientific idea, “I’m going to keep my children natural and healthy and feed them organic food and protect them from any unnecessary toxic exposure,” that seems to stand in opposition to vaccines.

Harris: I think the fact that most people are totally unfamiliar with the consequences of contracting one of these illnesses plays a huge role here. No current parent of school-age children knows what it’s like to fear that his or her child may come down with polio and have to be placed in an iron lung. The carefree attitude we now enjoy is the result of the success of vaccines. This is why people are no longer dying of smallpox. So we live in a world that has been more or less purged of terrifying, preventable illness because we have used vaccines for generations. Bliss leads to ignorance. People have the luxury of ignoring “herd immunity” (a concept we will talk about) once it has been provided by their neighbors.

I think a few more things are working in the background here. I get the sense, through my personal interactions with people and from what I’ve read in the media, that more or less everyone has lost trust in public institutions. We’ve lost our faith in government in general and bodies like the CDC and the FDA in particular, and we don’t trust the pharmaceutical companies or the media either. In some respects this erosion of trust is understandable, even warranted, because most of us now have a sense that the incentives in these institutions are often misaligned. A pharmaceutical company that spends $1 billion to develop a new drug will often be tempted to ignore any data that suggests the drug shouldn’t be used, whether for reasons of efficacy or for reasons of safety. There’s been enough evidence of corporate malfeasance on this front to suggest that these concerns are often justified. We also have good reason to believe that the government is not competent to police this space effectively, owing to both lack of funding and bad incentives. So the prospect of corruption and just sheer incompetence on this front is galling to everyone.

Another factor is that people are often confused about scientific and statistical reasoning. Even doctors can fail to reason scientifically, and a few prominent pediatricians are failing egregiously to give their patients rational advice about vaccines.

Finally, there may be something at work here that I’m less sure about: the idea that in the very act of trying to protect one’s child—by injecting a substance into her body in the hope of protecting her, and causing pain in the process—one might actually be poisoning her. It’s no fun watching your toddler writhe under the pediatrician’s needle and then howl with pain, and the idea that you might be imposing a risk of injury or death on her in the process is horrible to contemplate. Even when, in reality, you’re imposing much less risk than you often do just for fun. Which is more of a hazard to your child’s health—all the potentially life-saving vaccines she’ll ever receive, or that ski trip you take as a family each year? The time on skis, clearly. But it doesn’t feel that way.

Shapiro: As a mother, and as a physician who treats children, I understand that parents have this fear that they could be hurting their child. Just in the presence of the needle itself, even if we were injecting nothing, there’s this sense that because shots hurt, they must be bad. Nobody wants to knowingly inflict pain on his or her child.

But if you look at pictures of kids from the 1950s lining up to receive vaccines, you’ll often see that their faces are calm. They’re not crying. They’re not running away. They’re actually standing patiently in line without their parents.

But in photographs from the past 10 years—even in the literature advocating for the necessity of vaccines—you see screaming children and sad-looking parents physically restraining them. I think there’s been a societal shift, regardless of what’s in these needles. We now assume that children should not feel pain for any reason.

So there’s this broader issue with what many call “helicopter parenting”—everybody wins, everybody gets a trophy, every child is above average. There has been a change in parenting and a change in what we can comfortably tolerate. And yet the kids themselves must be just like those of 40 or 50 years ago. They’re pretty tough and resilient.

Harris: I think it’s difficult to exaggerate how fully the context has changed. In the 1950s, parents had a truly rational fear that their children might contract a serious contagious disease, like polio. Now, we have all habituated to a world in which there is very little evidence of this risk—precisely because vaccines have worked so well.

Shapiro: Yes. But I think the change is even more global. It used to be that if a child needed surgery, the parents would drop him or her off at the hospital and pick the child up three days later.

Harris: I’m going to go with a little more helicopter parenting than that. “Helicopter parenting” does not mean that you just drop your kids from a helicopter as you fly by the hospital.

Shapiro: Sure. Most of these changes have been for the good. But when you combine this attitude of “Why put my child through any suffering?” with the apparent absence of disease, you run into problems. As you said, when those kids were lining up for polio vaccines in the 1950s, their parents had lived through polio. Their neighborhoods were filled with people suffering from the scourge of this disease. Families were desperate to get those shots. I think that even this recent outbreak of measles, as small as it was, is making people understand that things can suddenly get a lot worse.

Harris: In many discussions on this topic, scientists, for perfectly sane public-policy reasons, treat anti-vaccination fears as illegitimate; instead, I’d like us to take a moment to acknowledge that vaccines are not without risks. Any medical intervention presents some possibility of injury or death. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, has died as a result of having a hangnail trimmed. So of course there are risks associated with vaccines. But we should put these risks in context. How reasonable is it to be motivated by the fear that your child might have a bad reaction to a vaccine?

Shapiro: Yes, it is true that no medical intervention, including vaccines, is without risk. Some risks are common and mild; some are extremely rare and significant. A mild risk from vaccines, which we see relatively frequently, is fever. A lot of kids who get vaccines will have a fever a few days later, and that’s not to be written off as nothing, because it is quite disconcerting when a two-month-old, a four-month-old, or a six-month-old has a high fever. In extremely rare cases children have had seizures, with or without an associated fever.

The chicken pox vaccine can, on rare occasions, trigger an episode of chicken pox—either a mild case, where the patient gets a little chicken pox mark right at the injection site, or a severe one. The chicken pox vaccine is usually given at age 12 months or so, and for a 12-month-old baby to have a severe case of chicken pox is serious.

Harris: No doubt. We should also mention that some people can’t get vaccines because they have certain health conditions or they’re either too young or too old. There is even something called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund, set up in 1988, which provides compensation for those who are harmed by vaccines, whether they belong to a vulnerable population or not. However, the people who are significantly harmed in this way appear to number in the hundreds at most, and often fewer, among the millions who receive vaccines each year.

Compare this with the risk of dying from using nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories—aspirin, ibuprofen, and so forth. Here we should perceive a much greater danger. These over-the-counter medications kill 3,000 to 16,000 of us outright each year. And not necessarily from overdoses. I’m talking about the statistical risk one runs of a GI bleed or a stroke from as little as 80 milligrams of aspirin, a fraction of an analgesic dose.

All interventions present some risk of injury or death, and because we’re talking about the behavior of millions and millions of people each year, you can always find some terrible story about some unlucky person who died or was severely injured by what is, in fact, a very low risk behavior.

So, while we have to admit that vaccines are not without risk, the risk is lower than for interventions that most people consider trivial and wouldn’t hesitate to employ, and lower than for genuinely risky lifestyle choices that many of us make. Needless to say, if you text on your phone while driving your kids in the car, it’s completely insane to worry about the relative risk of vaccines. Getting one’s risk tolerances aligned with reality is something that could cure a lot of these fears.

Shapiro: Yes. I often see kids riding bicycles without wearing helmets. I also see young children riding in the front seats of cars. When it comes to preventable injuries, many people are taking large risks unknowingly. And then they feel they’re avoiding risk by refusing to vaccinate.

Harris: So we’re back to the general problem of people’s having lost touch with the real risks of these preventable diseases. People hear about “whooping cough” (pertussis) and think, It’s just a cough. What’s the big deal? Well, here is what it looks like for an infant to have this cough.

 

If you decline to get your kids vaccinated against pertussis, they can spread this virus to infants who are too young to be vaccinated. About 20 infants die this way in the U.S. each year.

Shapiro: Yes. In fact, we had a pertussis death in California just this week.

Harris: People also assume that measles is more or less benign—just a rash and, perhaps, a fever. I recently came across a touching letter written by Roald Dahl, the famous children’s book author, about his daughter who died of measles. She died in 1962, but he wrote this letter in 1986 as a public service announcement. Here is how it starts:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course, I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

Shapiro: I think people believe that if their children are otherwise healthy and contract one of these illnesses, they’ll be strong enough to fight it. But that’s not always the case. Dahl’s child was seven. We’re not talking about an infant. She was a healthy child at the time. It doesn’t necessarily matter how healthy or how old you are once you get one of these illnesses.

Harris: There’s the additional irony that we are sending medical teams to risk their lives in countries like Pakistan and Nigeria to stamp out polio and other diseases, and these people get attacked by locals as a result of the same kind of superstition and confusion we’re beginning to talk about here. I recently saw an interview with Bill Gates, who is now doing more than anyone else to direct private funds toward solving some of the greatest health problems of humanity. When he was asked what was the most important thing he had accomplished through his philanthropic work in the developing world, he said, “Vaccines make the top of the list.” The man is raising billions of dollars to improve human health globally, and yet highly educated, liberal technophiles in the Bay Area and in southern California—some of his best customers—are declining to get their kids vaccinated and driving down herd immunity in their communities to levels comparable to those in some of the most dangerous places to live on earth. It is a bizarre situation.

I just uttered the phrase “herd immunity” for the second time, so we should define it. It’s a very important concept that exposes one of the moral illusions at the heart of the anti-vaccination movement: the idea that the choice about whether and when to vaccinate one’s children is an entirely personal one.

What should our readers understand about herd immunity, Nina?

Shapiro: Right. Well, we are human, but we are also animals that live in herds. And depending on the effectiveness of a vaccine and the degree of contagiousness of the corresponding illness, a certain percentage of people in a community need to be immunized to protect everybody. It’s not necessarily 100%, although that’s obviously the goal. But for measles, for instance, 92% to 94% of a community needs to be protected to protect the remaining members who cannot be immunized—because they’re either too young or immunocompromised in some way. With this level of vaccination, if the disease enters that community, those who are not immunized still have some protection.

So it really is a matter of public responsibility. And so many people are now relying on the immunity of the herd that there is no longer a herd. Some school communities have a 20% immunization rate—so 80% of people are unprotected. There’s no herd there.

Again, it depends a little bit on the vaccine itself and a little bit on how contagious an illness is. We use measles because that’s current. The measles vaccine is one of the best we have as far as efficacy goes. One measles vaccine will protect 95% of those who receive it, and two vaccines will protect 99%. Compare this to the pertussis vaccine, which is only about 60%–70% effective. But pertussis is not as contagious as measles, so there’s a wider margin. One person with measles can easily infect 10 to 20 people. With pertussis, he may infect only a few.

Generally speaking, the herd depends on greater than 90% to 95% immunization for all of us. It creates a web of protection. When you are immunized for all these illnesses, the herd gets that much stronger.

Harris: So the truth is that if you decide to forgo vaccines, you are not making this choice only for your child. You are spreading risk to your neighbors and their children—some of whom can’t be immunized. Wherever you and your children go, you cross paths with infants and the elderly. There may be a kid at your school who has leukemia, or who is immunocompromised in some other way, who is entirely dependent on the immunity of the herd. And because most vaccines aren’t 100% effective, even healthy, vaccinated people are to some degree relying on the redundant levels of protection provided by the rest of us.

So there is an unflattering moral truth here, which we should spell out: The only reason anti-vaxxers are in a position to even entertain the possibility of not immunizing their children is that there is still so much herd immunity. These people cannot reasonably hope that everyone will stop using vaccines—that is, unless they hope to return to a world where people get paralyzed by polio because they shook another person’s hand. If you decline to get your child vaccinated because you fear that vaccines may cause autism, say, you are relying on your neighbors to keep your children safe by imposing this unconscionable risk of autism on their children. So it’s not a defensible ethical position, even if we were to grant that vaccines imposed a significant risk of complications. In order to follow the advice of some of these pediatricians who recommend that you not vaccinate or that you delay specific vaccines, you’re relying on those who don’t follow that advice to keep your kids safe. But of course the real ethical problem is that by avoiding vaccines, you are putting everyone’s children, and especially your own, at risk of contracting dangerous and entirely preventable diseases.

Shapiro: Right. And many people don’t want to immunize their children because they think a disease like measles doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t have smallpox vaccines anymore; smallpox has actually been eradicated. But the progress against measles and mumps is more tenuous, so immunization needs to continue. I think people believe that it’s probably not necessary and that if worse comes to worst, they’ll be protected by those who are still “naively” getting immunized.

Harris: Can you say something about the choice that many people make to delay certain vaccines? What are the medical implications of that choice?

Shapiro: Yes. The idea of vaccine delay is in some ways even more pseudoscientific than the choice not to vaccinate. People imagine that by spacing out the vaccines, they are giving them in a much gentler, safer way. But nothing shows that this is better for your child. All it does is weaken the herd.

Vaccines are scheduled for very specific reasons that are not arbitrary. For instance, you need the pertussis vaccine at two months, four months, six months, fifteen months, five years, and ten years. It needs to follow that schedule in order to keep the herd protected, and every time an individual family decides to spread out this schedule, it undermines herd immunity over a long period of time.

Harris: It also exposes your child to a greater risk of contracting whooping cough in the period during which he or she is not fully vaccinated against it.

Shapiro: Exactly. And it takes a long time. People don’t realize that they’re not protected the day they get an immunization, nor are they protected the day after that. Some vaccines require several boosters to grant what one would call immunity. So again, the idea of delaying has no scientific backing. But it gets entangled with the notion that parents are taking charge of their child’s health care—they are working with their physician as a team—and this seems like the safest, gentlest way to protect their child. But there’s no data to back that up. All it does is make the parents feel better.

And one of the vaccines that people have chosen to delay is the measles vaccine. Many people believe that if there’s the smallest risk of autism—despite the fact that there really is no known risk of autism—they should wait until their child is three, because at three it will be clear whether or not he or she is autistic. Well, if they wait that long to get their first measles vaccine, then between ages one and three their child will be at very high risk in the presence of measles. And they’re weakening whatever herd they’re in during that period as well. Then it snowballs: They get their first vaccine at three and their second vaccine at six or seven—over time there’s a domino effect, leading to relatively large gaps in the immunity of the herd.

Harris: Just to be clear about the issue of autism: While we acknowledged that all vaccines have some associated risks, an increase in the incidence of autism associated with the MMR vaccine does not appear to be among them. All the research suggests that there is no link between autism and MMR, and yet the fear that there is, born of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study, is still burning brightly in affluent, liberal, well-educated communities. This shows how difficult it is to correct for misinformation once it has spread.

Unfortunately, when you confront people with evidence against their cherished beliefs, they often double down on those beliefs. In psychology, this is now referred to as “the backfire effect.” So Wakefield did a lot of harm with that study.

Shapiro: Yes. But most people who have this concern have never read his study, though it’s really not a hard study to read. If they would read it or even just skim the introduction, they’d see that he looked at 12 children. We’re not talking about a large sample—and even within this group of 12 children it was fraudulent research.

The problem is that autism is more readily diagnosed at about the time that the measles vaccine is given—anywhere from 12 months to 18 months, sometimes a little bit later.

Harris: And of course it would be associated with whatever was being done to your child during that time.

Shapiro: Right. And whether you look at it or not the drug-risk insert for any vaccine has to list anything that might happen to a child within 42 days of receiving it. The chicken pox vaccine insert even lists “teething” as a possible risk. This vaccine is routinely administered to 12-month-olds, who are clearly in the throes of teething woes—vaccine or no vaccine. And that goes for any drug—everything has to be listed, so autism is listed. But it’s an association, not a statement of causation. So, yes, children will be diagnosed a month or two after they have their MMR vaccine, but it has nothing to do with the vaccine.

Harris: Let’s talk about some of these prominent pediatricians in southern California who seem to be at the center of the anti-vaccination movement: Jay Gordon in Los Angeles and Bob Sears in Orange County. I’ve seen Jay Gordon interviewed on this topic, and it seems to me that he is acting quite irresponsibly. He admits that the science does not support a link between MMR and autism, but he’s heard a few stories from patients who believe that their child got autism because of the vaccine, and he is valuing those stories as evidence.

So he says very clearly that stories of personal experience do not amount to science, but he then goes on to use these stories to support his recommendations to his patients in defiance of existing science. He’s signaling an awareness of an illusion but then being doubly motivated by it. He seems to feel perfectly comfortable practicing medicine in a way that is guaranteed to be confusing to his patients. It’s very strange behavior.

Shapiro: Yes. People who are not scientists will respond much more to a heartbreaking story than to a boring chart showing statistical data drawn from hundreds of thousands of children. Here you have a seemingly caring doctor saying, I’ve never seen a case of measles, but let me tell you this really sad story of this two-year-old I know who was just beautiful until he received the MMR vaccine. Of course people are going to respond to this on an emotional level. It’s probably not an accident that most of his patients aren’t vaccinated against measles. Unfortunately, he has the authority to get away with this.

There are other pediatricians in the country who do this, and they’re very caring and very thoughtful. And the reality is that the overwhelming majority of children are healthy. They need very little medical care. Most kids can get through childhood with a little bit of hand-holding. They have good immune systems, and most will not get a vaccine-preventable illness. Most of them will not get measles, mumps, or rubella, even if they aren’t immunized. As a doctor, you can get away with this in a very small population and come across as a hero.

Working in academic medicine, we would never get away with that sort of thinking. We poke fun at anyone who says “in my experience”—because that means one case. “Time after time after time” means just three cases. When a doctor in a boutique practice in a lovely neighborhood says, “I’ve never seen a case of measles,” anyone working in a major medical center will just roll his eyes. It’s a statistical illusion. He’s living in a bubble of health, which is fortunate. But it gives no indication of what’s going on in the real world.

Harris: It’s amazing to me that these pediatricians haven’t received more professional pressure to get their act together. They’re just not thinking like scientists.

Shapiro: Yes, it’s been a challenge. The American Academy of Pediatrics issues only vaccine guidelines, not a mandate. So one won’t necessarily lose membership over this. What I wonder about are the standards of care—because the medical-legal term “standard of care” refers to the practice within a given community for a given condition. These doctors are practicing below the standard of care for this, and that becomes a legal issue, not necessarily one of licensing or professional society membership. I wonder what would happen from that standpoint if a horrible event occurred, or a patient developed a vaccine-preventable illness in one of these practices.

Harris: What about the responsibility of schools, or the state, to mandate sound public health policy here? My understanding is that it’s illegal in California for a school to refuse to grant a “personal belief exemption” and say that a child cannot come to school without having the full course of vaccines. Which is bizarre, because a school can mandate things like uniforms. If you don’t want your child to wear a uniform, you simply can’t come to that particular school. If you don’t want your child to wear shoes, there’s probably not a school in the country that would have you. But if you don’t want your child to be vaccinated—where not being vaccinated will reliably spread a risk of serious illness both to other students and to their siblings at home—there’s nothing the school can do. That sounds like a law in desperate need of rewriting.

Shapiro: Yes, and I think the schools that have looser vaccine policies have realized in the past few months that this may not be the best way to go. These schools are genuinely concerned that if there is a case of measles in their school, it will become big news and very costly for the school—because people will have to be quarantined for 21 days at home. Teachers with young children could be seriously affected. I think many schools will tighten the reins in the coming year. I’m curious to see how the numbers change in 2015 and 2016. I do think that the families who were delaying vaccines, as opposed to forgoing them altogether, may catch up more quickly. We’ll have to see.

Harris: I hope so. Again, what I think many people just don’t see is that we’re grappling here with the illusion that it is merely a personal choice. When you send your kid to school unimmunized, you are putting at risk someone in the school, or someone’s relative at home, who can’t get immunized for a real reason. Apart from the health of one’s own child—which is really best protected by getting the recommended vaccines—it is this cascade of effects that one should worry about.

Shapiro: Yes. But it is a challenge to convince people that it isn’t a personal choice. We hear this all the time: “I’ve made this decision for my family. This is best for my family.” But your family doesn’t live in a bubble. Your family lives in a community, and you have to have some level of social responsibility.

Harris: And, again, a person can consider this a personal choice only because most other families are making the opposite choice. Such a person can’t reasonably wish that everyone would follow his or her example, because then we’d all be dropping like flies from preventable disease.

Well, this has been very useful, Nina. I much appreciate your taking the time to speak with me.

Shapiro: It was a pleasure. Thank you, Sam.

 

What scares the new atheists

By John Gray

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Very Bad Wizards Interview #2

David Pizarro is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. His primary research interest is in how and why humans make moral judgments, such as what makes us think certain actions are wrong, and that some people deserve blame. In addition, he studies how emotions influence a wide variety of judgments. These two areas of interest come together in the topic of much of his recent work, which has focused on the emotion of disgust and the role it plays in shaping moral, social, and political judgments.

Tamler Sommers is an associate professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Houston with a joint appointment in the Honors College.  He is director of the Honors minor Phronesis: A Program in Politics and Ethics.  His research focuses on issues relating to moral responsibility, criminal justice, honor, and revenge.  Sommers is the author of two books: Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility (Princeton, 2012) and A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain (McSweeney’s, 2009).  He received his PhD in Philosophy from Duke University in 2005.