Attention: all you need is science

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Harris sets the table for more writing on the subject.

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The Moral Landscape

How Science Can Determine Human Values

By Sam Harris

Free Press, 291 pages, $30

With this brief book, American neuroscientist Sam Harris takes an occasionally hesitant but generally firm step into the next phase of his writing career.

His first book, The End of Faith (2004), began confidently and boldly what will surely be a long career of writing about things religious from the perspective of an atheist scientist. Critics attacked the more outrageous bits of that book, and Harris was overwhelmed enough to marshal a response in book form. Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) was the calmer but still plucky result.

The Moral Landscape will not fairly elicit charges of "screed" nor of "ignorance" of topic. It is not centrally about religion (Harris has no formal religious studies training and he was frequently labelled poorly informed and despising of religion). Moreover, it is centrally about Harris's forte: the study of the human brain. We have here an eager, veteran writer in his element.

His title refers, somewhat awkwardly, to "a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering."

This bulky but useful metaphor deployed, Harris wants to explore ways to tabulate "human well-being" and how to promote it maximally. Truly good for him is that which earnestly improves the lives of the greatest number of human beings (not souls).

For this trip, utterly objective science is his guide. But he is not himself blind, careful to critique harshly and repeatedly science's historical moral relativism and its pat contentment with the late Stephen J. Gould's monolithic separation of science spheres from religious/spiritual spheres.

For Harris, these are intellectually dishonest and too kind by half: he's after unqualified moral absolutes, ones that can be "determined" by science sans religion. Data, brain-scans, and computer-models are welcome. Canons, creeds and clergy are not. Anything short of this is dishonest, irresponsible and awful.

The treatment of such a massive topic is surprisingly brief (the main text is less than 200 pages) but two aspects of the book give weight and hope for more.

One, the book is richly, charmingly documented, with approximately 800 references in the bibliography and 40-plus pages of readable, fascinating endnotes. Two, the book veers here and there, always in tantalizing fashion.

So, Harris's treatment of the hardcore neuroscience, especially in a medial chapter on "belief," becomes technical at lightning pace. Confident but wary of losing his reader, Harris moves on quickly. There must be a longer book in the works, one dedicated to a popular explanation of his seminal ongoing research on charting brain reactions to questions of beliefs, truths and morals. A treatment directly of "religion" does emerge in the penultimate chapter but notable again is Harris's restraint and maturity. He takes as read his previous two books (not immodestly) and refrains from tempting, prolonged elucidations of the painful moral histories of so many religions.

He even politely sequesters strings of ugly data and support in the endnotes. Most remarkable of all, given the established bad habits of his fellow New Atheists (most notably Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens), he carefully samples religious data the world over.

This is not an uncomplicated attack just on Western fundamentalism nor just on Christian America. It is a movement to a monologue on moral science by a rigorous scientist.

Peppering the book are many anecdotes (several are enchantingly personal) and a roster of standard moral puzzlers. For each, Harris is able, at least in preliminary fashion, to demonstrate not only that science can provide historical and current answers, but also that it can do this in absolute, unmediated, satisfying fashions.

He will need to write more on all this, but The Moral Landscape positions him nicely to begin to do so.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches in the department of religion and culture at the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 9, 2010 A1