What Unitarians Know and Sam Harris Doesn't

I meant to post this earlier as I thoroughly enjoyed reading it in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. Marilynne Robinson, whose novel Gilead was one of my favorite books last year, thoughtfully and gently punctures Sam Harris's pretensions in her review of his new book, The Moral Landscape. Here is a bit to entice you and then do go read it all.

Sam Harris begins his new book with a celebration of the ideal of cooperation, a value that has been in eclipse among us, and whose absence we feel in every failed attempt to dislodge the country from all the tight places in which we find ourselves these days. The cult of competition has elbowed its way into the place in our national life once reserved for promoting the general welfare, and the general welfare has suffered in consequence. Mr. Harris's assertion of this value without so much as a nod to the claims of our brutish Pleistocene ancestry is tonic. He says: "As with mathematics, science, art, and almost everything else that interests us, our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution."

What specific forms is cooperation to take? Mr. Harris is a little vague on this point. He strongly favors "maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures." He imagines potential human circumstances as landscapes of peaks and valleys, with different models of moral success on each of the peaks and of moral failure in each of the valleys. Probably because he deplores moral relativism, he offers no particulars about what these variants might look like. Many of his aspirations are highly respectable but they are neither bold nor new, at least from the point of view of certain religious traditions. If he were to articulate a positive morality of his own, he might well arrive at its heights to find them occupied by the whole tribe of Unitarians, busily cooperating on schemes to enhance the world's well being, as they have been doing for generations.