Dear World:
On January 16, I am going to talk with Sam Harris, on his podcast, Waking Up with Sam Harris. Dr. Harris is one of the so-called New Atheists, of which there are four. Like the other three Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins - who, by the way, I have always particularly wanted to debate — Dr. Harris is a smart guy, and I'm certainly not complaining that I will encounter him, instead of Dawkins. So I am preparing my arguments, carefully (although I have been doing so for years). The specific ideas I am going to share with you today were obsessing me the moment I woke up, somewhat fitfully, this morning, so I dictated them to my son, and then edited them.
The central problem of human beings isn't religion, as the New Atheists insist. It's tribalism. We know this in part because chimps, our closest biological kin, go to war, and they are not religious, although they are tribal.
Tribalism also has a central problem — and it's not competition, despite the tendency of competition to produce, at least temporarily, winners and losers.
It's cooperation, because cooperation is what allows us to exist as bounded groups. A group, by definition is a collective cooperatively aiming at something. It can't be aimed at nothing, because nothing cannot unite. It only divides. Thus, attacks on collective purpose, because of its tendency to produce tribalism, merely divides. The politics of identity, which emerge when the central purpose is criticized too destructively, inevitably produce the situation described in the story of the Tower of Babel:
Everyone fragments into primitive tribes and speaks their own language.
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