Sam Harris replies to critics

February 1, 2011 • 7:12 am

I’ve tried on this site to keep up with the ongoing discussion about Sam Harris’s new book, The Moral Landscape. In it, Sam proposes that there can be a science of morality, one engaged in discovering which actions best promote “well-being”, which Harris sees as the true object of morality.  His book is well worth reading, and has sparked intense (and oftentimes vituperative) debate about ethics. I think this is good, because from time to time we really do need to revisit our notions of morality.  Sam’s neo-utilitarianism is, I think, correct in many ways, although (and he admits this), it’s not perfect—especially when trying to resolve specific moral dilemmas.

Some of the book’s reviews, though, were just plain dumb, for example Deepak Chopra’s at SFGate. Most recently, Russell Blackford wrote a long, serious, and thoughtful review/critique of the book at Journal of Evolution and Technology.

Sam has pondered for a long time how to respond to his many critics.  My own policy is usually to ignore bad reviews, because simply engaging them makes one look petty or fractious.  As John Brockman once said in another context, “You show up, you lose.”  But there are so many critiques of The Moral Landscape, and so much commonality in the criticisms, that Sam feels impelled to respond—and I agree that he should.  He’s published his response, called simply “A response to critics,” at HuffPo, and if you’ve followed this debate, you should definitely read it.   I find everything that Sam writes worth reading: he’s smart, thoughtful, and has a great prose style wedded to a dry humor:

What should I say, for instance, when the inimitable Deepak Chopra produces a long, poisonous, and blundering review of The Moral Landscape in The San Francisco Chronicle while demonstrating in every line that he has not read it? (His “review” is wholly based on a short Q&A I published for promotional purposes on my website.) Admittedly, there is something arresting about being called a scientific fraud and “egotistical” by Chopra. This is rather like being branded an exhibitionist by Lady Gaga.

But Harris, in his HuffPo piece, takes his serious critics seriously, concentrating on Brother Blackford.  I won’t summarize what Sam says except to point to his main thesis. He writes:

It seems to me that there are three, distinct challenges put forward thus far:

1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value well-being, our own or anyone else’s. (The Value Problem)

2. Hence, if someone does not care about well-being, or cares only about his own and not about the well-being of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)

3. Even if we did agree to grant “well-being” primacy in any discussion of morality, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure well-being scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of morality. (The Measurement Problem)

I believe all of these challenges are the product of philosophical confusion. The simplest way to see this is by analogy to medicine and the mysterious quantity we call “health.” Let’s swap “morality” for “medicine” and “well-being” for “health” and see how things look:

1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone else’s. (The Value Problem)

2. Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)

3. Even if we did agree to grant “health” primacy in any discussion of medicine, it is difficult or impossible to define it with rigor. It is, therefore, impossible to measure health scientifically. Thus, there can be no science of medicine. (The Measurement Problem)

Sam is really good at clarifying his ideas by making analogies with situations familiar to all of us.

Sadly, Josh Rosenau, who’s never met a Gnu Atheist he likes, snidely dismisses Sam’s piece on his website. Here’s the entirety of Rosenau’s post:

January 29, 2011

Harris . . .treed

Category: Culture Wars • Policy and Politics

Shorter Sam Harris: A Response to Critics:

People are saying mean things about my bad book and I don’t know what to say.[6600 words later]

If I pretend morality is just like health, then all the objections are wrong.

Good God!  First of all, Harris is not “treed”: whether or not you agree with him, he defends his points ably, with no sign of desperation.  Nor is it obvious that he’s lost this debate.  Second, Sam’s analogy with health, as you’ll see, is a good one, and makes you think.  Finally, it’s ironic that Rosenau, who’s famous for writing tediously long posts that are deeply muddled, faults Harris for writing what is after all a concise response to his many critics.  And at least Sam’s writing has a quality that’s notably missing in Rosenau’s: humor.

Evolutionary psychology: gender “construction”

January 31, 2011 • 7:56 am

Whenever I post on evolutionary psychology, lurkers come out of the woodwork, enraged that I’ve criticized their own discipline and vociferously defending the crappy papers that I sometimes highlight.  Recently one (or more) of the lurkers asked me to provide an example of an evo-psycho paper that I considered good.   Well, that made me think a bit.  Many of the papers are tolerable rather than outright lousy, but in my opinion good ones are rare.  But I’ve just read one that I’d put in the “pretty good” category.  Some might not consider the subject to be evolutionary psychology, but I think it is, for it’s about whether behavioral differences between males and females have a genetic basis.  If they do, then one can begin to uncover their evolutionary roots.  If they don’t, then we need not engage in adaptive storytelling about why males are aggressive and females are nurturing.

It’s a paper on “gender construction” by two doctors, William Reiner and John Gearhart, and it appeared in 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine.  The jaw-breaking title is “Discordant sexual identity in some genetic males with cloacal exstrophy assigned to female sex at birth”. (The pdf appears to be free.) I found the reference to this paper in the “gender” chapter of Steve Pinker’s The Blank Slate.

The topic is one that used to exercise academics, especially feminist ones:  is gender-specific behavior and identity specified at birth by biological factors like genes and hormones, or is gender “constructed” by the way a child is raised?  I well remember feminists saying that if you could somehow raise a male child as a girl, or vice versa, they would show behaviors and personalities opposite to that of their “normal gender.”  Or, if you could raise children in a “gender neutral” environment, then males and females would grow up not differing in gender-specific behaviors (i.e., girls would play with trucks, boys with dolls, and, when adult, males would not be more aggressive nor females more “nurturing.”)  As the authors put it very dryly in their paper,

The concept of neonatal sexual neutrality subsequently developed, emphasizing postnatal, nonhormonal influences.

Now perhaps most of my readers already reject the concept of “gender neutrality” at birth, a neutrality suborned by rearing practices.  We know that injecting testosterone into females, for example, increases some “male-typical” behaviors (like aggression) and physical traits.  It’s clear that hormones have an influence on behavior, and in precisely the way predicted by which sex has the highest testosterone/estrogen ratio and vice versa.  But what about at birth?  Are newborns already wired up to show sex-specific behavior?

Reiner and Gearhart tested this by doing psychological studies on children born with cloacal exstrophy, a severe condition in which (in males) the genitals are malformed (but not the testes), and there are defects of the bowels and bladder.  It used to be fatal, but now can often be fixed by surgical intervention. (Often, however, medical problems remain, like the need for a colostomy or  the later appearance of sciolosis).  If you have a strong stomach, click on this link to see what a newborn with the syndrome looks like (go halfway down the page).

Reiner and Gearhart’s idea was this: if gender is “constructed” by socialization at birth, newborns who are raised as members of the opposite sex from birth should show behaviors characteristic of their “socialized” sex rather than their biological sex.  Cloacal exstrophy gave them a chance to do this, because males born with the syndrome sometimes have their penises and testes removed, a vulva constructed instead, and are raised as girls.  If the “socialization” hypothesis is correct, these males should show female-typical behaviors when older; if the biological hypothesis is correct, they should lean towards male behaviors.

The authors had a sample of fourteen newborn males with cloacal exstrophy whose parents agreed to participate in the study.  The babies were surgically constructed to have female genitalia, and parents agreed to raise the boys as girls, never telling the children of their biological gender.  (Two other males with the syndrome were raised as males even though they had the surgery.)  Several of the parents were raising “normal” girls at the same time.

At ages ranging from 5 to 16, the female-raised males were given psychological tests that explored their interests in toys, dolls, and clothes, the time spent playing various games, athleticism, aggressive behavior, career and sexual interests, sex of friends, etc.  They were also asked to declare their gender. The parents were also given questionnaires on their child’s behavior and relationships with other children.

The upshot:  all 16 subjects, including those with female genitals raised as males, “revealed moderate-to-marked male-typical behaviors” compared to the scores of children raised according to their biological sex at birth. (The paper reports the scores for each child on a number of scales.)  As for the parents, here’s what the authors report:

The parents of all 14 subjects assigned to female sex stated that they had reared their child as a female. Twelve of these subjects have sisters: parents described equivalent child-rearing approaches and attitudes toward the subjects and their sisters. However, parents described a moderate-to-pronounced unfolding of male-typical behaviors and attitudes over time in these subjects — but not in their sisters. Parents reported that the subjects typically resisted attempts to encourage play with female-typical toys or with female playmates or to behave as parents thought typical girls might behave. These 14 subjects expressed difficulties fitting in with girls. All but one played primarily or exclusively with male-typical toys. Only one played with dolls; the others did so almost never or never. Only one ever played house. Each of the three exceptions represents a different subject. Parents noted substantial difficulty attempting to dress the subjects — but not their sisters — in clearly feminine attire after about four years of age.

And, tellingly, of the 14 subjects, four of them declared themselves as “males” even though they had female-type genitalia, had been raised as girls, and had never been told of their birth sex.  Four more were actually told of their birth sex by parents who abrogated the agreement, and all four of them declared themselves males.  At the last follow-up, two more of the children were “unclear” about their sex, and another one refused to discuss it.  (I believe, but am not sure, that the initial assessment of self-declared sex, and the children’s psychological tests, were performed before those four had been told that they were born male.)

At the end of the study, all eight of the male-declarers used male names and male restrooms, and all eight wanted surgical reconstruction of a penis.  The other six still living as females all reported difficulty fitting in with female peers, a result not seen at all in cases of genetic females with cloacal exstrophy).

The conclusion:  babies are born with brains already wired up in a gender-specific way. The authors theorize that this is due to pre-natal hormonal influences on the fetal brain that affect subsequent behavior. And although the study has weaknesses (see below), I agree with this conclusion.  The results show that, to a large extent, the roots of gender-specific behavior are biologically rather than socially based, and are present at birth.  This jibes with the experience of many of my friends who are parents, who report that despite their efforts to raise kids in gender-neutral ways, male toddlers go for trucks and females for dolls.  The fact that rearing genetic males as females does not much affect their behavior indicates that socialization, at least via parenthood, plays at best a small role in the development of behavior.

Now the study is not perfect, and I’m sure readers (especially the evolutionary psychologists) will tell me that this study is just as flawed as those I’ve criticized previously.  There is no explicit comparison with the psychology of genetic females with cloacal exstrophy reared as females (though the authors do cite their impressions), the psychological scores of the children were not compared statistically to those of “normal” males and females of the same age (though one can certainly do this given the data given by the authors), and four of the subjects were told that they were born as males (at ages 5, 7, 7, and 18 respectively).  But the psychological profiles of the children were taken before any were told of their birth sex (and most were not), as well as the self-declaration by four subjects that they were “males”, is pretty telling.

This is not my field, and there may have been followup work confirming or refuting these findings since they were published 7 years ago. (If you know of any, do post below; Pinker quotes some other studies that support these results.)  But if the results hold up, they show pretty clearly that gender-specific behavior has strong biological roots, and may not be much changed by how a child is raised.  In other words, even if you give your male toddlers dolls and your girls toy soldiers, they’re not going to become gender-neutral.

Why is this study better than many run-of-the-mill evolutionary psychology papers?  First, because the authors took advantage of developmental accidents to do a study that normally would be either prohibited or impossible: psychologists rearing babies in either a totally gender-neutral environment or in which they do not know their sex. Many evo-psycho hypotheses simply can’t be tested properly because they require manipulations of adults or infants that are considered unethical.

Second, the study comprises a simple test of a simple hypothesis, and does not involve telling tortuous adaptive “stories” to rationalize the results.

Finally, the results are pretty clean cut:  amazing, in fact.  Given the limitations of the study—the small sample size, the parents who abrogated their promises, and so on—the results still stand out clearly.  Whatever biological gender a child has at birth will condition its later behavior in a strong way.

______

Reiner, W. G. and J. P. Gearhart.  2004.  Discordant sexual identity in some genetic males with cloacal exstrophy assigned to female sex at birth. New Engl. J. Med. 350:333-341.

Another Republican moron: “Where’s the missing link?”

January 30, 2011 • 4:29 pm

Via TPM we have Jack Kingston, Republican congressman from Georgia, flaunting his ignorance on the Bill  Maher show.  Only in America (or some Islamic countries) would a public figure be willing to admit this kind of stuff on television.

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“I believe that I came from God, not from a monkey.”

“I don’t believe a creature crawled out of the sea and became a human being one day.”

“Where’s the missing link? . . .I just want to know what it is.”


The eagles have mated

January 30, 2011 • 4:22 pm

Well, two of our readers have seen the bald eagles at EagleCam mating: once two days ago, and once today, at about 1:30 p.m. EST.  Matings appear to take between 4 and 10 seconds.  I suspect that multiple copulations will ensue in the next couple of days, a situation typical in birds.

The good news is that, as Hempenstein reports, we have a good chance—about 83%—of seeing chicks.  He notes that this appeared on the running webcam commentary:

Source CCB: Bald eagle surveys have been conducted in Virginia since 1977 when Dr. Mitchell Byrd at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg* and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) initiated the first systematic survey. Those surveys have been completed every year and beginning in 1991 have been conducted by The Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary with funding from the Wildlife Diversity Program of VDGIF. One of the principal objectives of the survey is to determine bald eagle productivity. In 2008 there were 557 known active bald eagle nests in Virginia. Productivity in 15 (3%) of those nests is not known because vegetation was too dense to see into the nests. Of the remaining nests 97 produced no chicks (17%), 107 produced one chick (19%), 263 produced two chicks (47%), and 76 produced three chicks (14%).

*Dr. Byrd (an appropriate name for an ornithologist) was one of my professors at William & Mary.

A confab with the faithful

January 30, 2011 • 7:29 am

People like Elaine Ecklund are always urging scientists to “dialogue” with the faithful, expecting that it will benefit both of them.  (What people like her really want, of course, is not benefits to science but more tolerance of religion.)  I haven’t been averse to such dialogue. Although I certainly don’t think it’s going to improve my science, and have no illusions that I’ll convert religious people in a short conversation, it is a learning experience.  And I just had one yesterday, participating in a discussion group at the First United Methodist Church of Chicago.  A while back, senior pastor Phil Blackwell emailed me that the church’s reading group would be discussing Why Evolution is True, and invited me to join in.  I did so gladly.

The church itself, located in the Loop of downtown Chicago, is pretty amazing. It’s actually a skyscraper about twenty stories high, with a steeple on top!

I’ve never seen a building like this.  The church itself, the oldest Methodist congregation in Chicago (founded in 1821), now occupies a couple of floors in the building, renting out the rest of it for office space.  Scopes lawyer Clarence Darrow—a vociferous atheist—once had his office on the sixth floor!  And Phil and his family live in the steeple—what a great job perk!  There’s also a “sky chapel” at the top, said to be the highest place of worship in the world.

As I said, the discussion was supposed to be about my book, so I expected to talk a lot about evolution. It didn’t turn out that way.

The discussion group actually has a topic: the interface between science and religion.  And that’s what we talked about.  (It always turns out that discussions of my book, when not rigorously guided away from the topic of religion, always wind up dealing with science and faith.  That’s been my experience talking not just to laypeople, but also to college and high school classes.  That’s fine by me, for thanks to the Gnu Atheists religion is on many people’s minds, and I welcome the chance to speak my mind.  Besides, I’ve given elebenty gazillion talks on my book and it’s boring.)

Before I showed up I had resolved to keep pretty mum about my views on religion—after all, I was addressing twenty religious people who were kind enough to buy and discuss my book. But that resolve lasted only about thirty seconds!  How could I sit by when people made the familiar arguments that science and faith are separate magisteria, that atheism and science were responsible for Nazi Germany, that parts of the Bible were metaphorical fictions while others weren’t, and so on?  To not say my piece would have been intellectual dishonesty.  But, to be sure, I tried to be calm and respectful.

The discussion lasted two hours, and while a rapprochement obviously wasn’t reached, I did learn a lot.  Here are some of my outtakes:

  • Because the church members were liberal, urban Methodists, apparently well off, they were obviously not raving fundamentalists.  Their approach to faith was far more “nuanced” (I hate that word!) and circumspect.  Several of them struck me as being a hairsbreadth from atheism, seeing God as some kind of distant entity who neither concerns himself with the world nor was even involved in creating it.  In fact, they spent a fair amount of time denigrating  fundamentalists like Southern Baptists, reassuring me that they disliked those folks more than I did!
  • It was obvious that for these folks, one of the most important aspects of church membership was a sense of community—and the opportunity to do something to help other people. The church has various intellectual activities (like the reading group), outreach programs like an ecology group, and it feeds the homeless.  All of this is obviously good: this is one of those churches for which it’s hard to say that, on balance, they create more harm than good.  But the question, as always, is this:  is the doctrine that brings these people together really true? I think for some of them it doesn’t matter, but I wonder how many of these people would even belong to the Church if they knew absolutely that Jesus was not the son of God and that the Resurrection never happened.

All atheists recognize that one of the vital functions performed by churches is social—to bring people together and make them feel part of a movement greater than themselves, or simply to be part of a community whose members care about each other.  It also enables them to work together to help others. I appreciate this function, and realize that—as Phil Kitcher always emphasizes—any viable atheist community must somehow satisfy the need for this kind of social interaction.  In the discussion, several people implied that religion was the only way to provide that. I responded that Europe is doing pretty well without religion, and that Europeans have somehow met the need for community without a need for God.  (Greg Paul’s work suggests that simply having a secure society, one with medical care, social security, low crime, and the like, serves to dissolve the need for faith.)

  • With respect to the inevitability of religion, a couple of people claimed that “religion will always be with us,” since it’s been part of humanity ever since the Neandertals buried their dead with ornaments and ochre pigments.  I think the idea was simply that religious belief is inherent in the human brain (having either been directly instilled by evolution or as a byproduct of our complex brains and intelligence).  My response was that, of course, much of the world is not religious.  The work of Phil Zuckerman, surveying belief around the world, shows that in many countries the incidence of atheism is between 40% and 85%.  Countries like France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Japan can be taken as largely secular, and they’re not appreciably more immoral or insecure than America.  I pointed out that religion appears highly correlated with both poverty and insecurity, and perhaps reducing those will help “get rid of religion”.
  • One of the discussants asked me how I’d deal with a fundamentalist who simply rejected evolution outright because it contravened the Bible. I said that in such a case that there was nothing to do.  My own strategy for promoting evolution, I said, had evolved into trying to “get rid of religion,” which is the source of creationism, and far worse things besides.  I believe that statement shocked some folks, but I hastened to add that the types of religion I was most concerned with eliminating were those that promoted Biblical literalism or had invidious effects on society, like promoting suicide bombing, repression of women, and prohibition of birth control.  I doubt that these Methodists fit into those categories!
  • The discussion was generally pleasant.  The only distressing part was one woman who insisted that Hitler and the Nazis could be directly traced to prewar Germany’s emphasis on science and math, and its pervasive atheism. I made the standard counterarguments: that Hitler really wasn’t an atheist, that math and science are big in Japan and Denmark but there aren’t any Holocausts there, that the persecution of the Jews can be traced directly to religion, and so on.  The woman was apparently one of those folks who see religion as a bulwark against immorality and persecution.  My response was simply to point again to modern Europe.  When I got home last night, I found an email from one of the other discussants, thanking me for my presence and adding, “I beg of you, please do not write that Methodists believe math and science led to Nazi Germany!”  So let me add that only one person espoused that view!
  • The “different ways of knowing” trope arose several times.  One person compared religion to poetry (i.e., an emotional response to the world) and science to prose (a rational and empirical approach to the world).  I mentioned—and this was difficult to say before such a group—that I didn’t think that religion was a way of knowing anything: that different religions had different dogmas and different answers to questions like “What is the proper place of a woman in society?” What, then, is the “knowledge” to be gained? If any of the church members read this post, and I suspect some of them will, I’d ask them to consider what religion really helps us “know”, and how can Methodists be confident that what they “know” is true while the different things “known” by Muslims, Hindus, and Southern Baptists are wrong.
  • The same lady who blamed science and math on Hitler raised the point that there was a commonality to the “truths” of faiths—they were monotheistic.  I pointed out that many faiths, like Hinduism, were not monotheistic, so even that is not a “truth”.  Moreover, when you get beyond the “one god” idea, faiths rapidly diverge in their other “truths”. Yes, they all pay lip service to the Golden Rule, but clearly Muslims don’t treat all other Muslims as they want to be treated themselves! And religions diverge on many important issues like sex, birth control, and treatment of gays and women.
  • To me, one of the most interesting parts of the discussion involved interpreting the Bible.  One gentleman claimed that, of course, stories like Genesis were metaphorical fiction, an attempt of preliterate people to make sense of the world without empirical tools for studying it.  I agreed with him (adding that he  probably also believed that Adam and Eve and the story of Noah were metaphors), but pointed out that he may have been treating the Bible unequally.  Why are stories like Genesis and Noah so obviously fictional, and yet stories like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus are seen as true: the bedrock foundations of Christian belief?  To me, this is the most difficult question for liberal religious folks. In fact, one woman asked Pastor Blackwell to respond to this point.  Phil basically confessed, I think, that he didn’t have good reasons to think that Jesus’s divinity and resurrection were true in a literal sense, but that even if they were fictional they did not (and I quote him here) “affect the timeless and boundless truths around the life of Jesus.” Of course I’m not sure what those truths are, but so be it.
  • Finally, one thing that impressed me very strongly about the group was its sense of doubt.  Just as we scientists can’t be absolutely confident that what we discover are timeless and unalterable truths, so several of these Methodists said they weren’t so sure about the “truths” of the Bible, or, importantly, about the nature of God.  (The difference between scientific and religious doubt is, of course, that scientists have good ways to resolve doubt.)  While this doubt was not ubiquitous, I’m sure I wouldn’t have sensed it in, say, a confab with Southern Baptists.

In the end, it struck me that the harmful and destructive nature of faiths may be correlated with how much doubt resides in their adherents.  These Methodists, unsure about the nature—or perhaps even the existence—of God, are certainly not wreaking much harm on the world. Indeed, with their outreach programs, help for the poor, and so on, their net effect on the world may be positive.  (Also, they seemed like nice people—people trying to live their lives according to the morality they derive from faith). This is not the kind of faith that I spend a lot of time attacking, even though I consider their religious beliefs—insofar as they even have religious beliefs—largely irrational.  And I’m not sure how much their own belief enables beliefs of more harmful faiths, like Islam or fundamentalist Christianity.  My impression is that most of these people are not enablers in that sense.

The destructive nature of faith stems from certainty: certainty that you know God’s will and God’s mind.  It’s that certainty that leads to suicide bombing, repression of women and gays, religious wars, the Holocaust, burning of witches, banning of birth control, repression of sex, and so on.  The more doubt in a faith, the less likely its adherents are to do harm to others.  These Methodists seem riddled with doubt, and that defuses potential harm. But though they may doubt the nature of God and the truth of scripture, they do not doubt the value of helping others, and that prompts their many charitable acts.

At the end, I was asked by Pastor Blackwell to provide a “topic sentence,” a short precis of my view on the discussion.  I said something like this:  Everyone claims that a dialogue between scientists and the faithful will be useful to both of them.  I’m not sure I agree.  Certainly my own scientific research is not helped at all by talking to religious people.  How could it be?  And while scientists do have something of value to say to the faithful, that is only our empirical research that disproves religious dogma.  Nevertheless, these discussions are of value, if only to inform each other where we stand.  I, for one, learned some useful things about liberal Christianity and was glad I went.

Thanks to Pastor Blackwell and his group for inviting me! If any church members read this, do feel free to comment below; you can do so anonymously if you wish.

Annals of airline security III: TSA approved toy soldier

January 30, 2011 • 6:39 am

by Greg Mayer

Unlike the Canadian woman Jerry posted about (Annals of airline security: Part  II), I was able to bring a toy soldier into the passenger cabin on a plane, last spring at Washington National airport.

Britains toy soldier, purchased at Fredericksburg National Military Park

I’m not sure why he made it through, but here are some suggestions:

  • His weapons (a sword and probably a Colt Army 1860 revolver) are less deadly than an SA 80 rifle.
  • He’s smaller than the British toy soldier.
  • The security officials didn’t notice it.
  • The security officials were rational.

(Note: Britains is a well known British toy soldier maker. It’s undergone corporate vicissitudes, may now be owned by Americans, and the soldiers are now made in China.)

New interview with Christopher Hitchens

January 29, 2011 • 6:50 am

On January 23, C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb recorded his twentieth interview with Christopher Hitchens. It’s nearly an hour long, but if you have the time it’s worth watching a brave, thoughtful, and articulate man facing death.  The interview is largely about Hitchens’s cancer, his treatment, and his attitude toward mortality. There is very little about politics.  I’ll let some of our cancer experts comment on the treatment that Hitchens describes.

Hitch’s hair has partially grown back, but he’s a bit hoarse here.

If you don’t have time to watch, you can read the written transcript of the interview here.  I’ll highlight just one quote:

And there’s a certain ghoulish element, even about the nice people who’ve been praying for me. Because they are not just praying for my recovery, they’re praying for my reconciliation with religion. And I—I proposed a tradeoff the other day, I said, I tell you what, what if we secularists stop going to hospitals and walking around the wards and asking if people are religious when they are in extremis and in their last days and saying look, you’ve still got a little time, why don’t you live the last few days of it as a free person. You’ll feel much better. All that nonsense they taught you. You know you could still have every chance to give it up. Experience the life of a free thinking autonomous person. Don’t live in fear, don’t believe in mythology.

They – I don’t think they’d welcome it. And of course, we don’t do that. But it seems to be considered the right of almost everybody to do it the other way around. I don’t resent it at all, because I like every opportunity for the argument, but it—a lot of it has been to do with that.

h/t: Joe and Sigmund