A new book on the IDW takes a dimmer view of these above-the-fray intellectuals who claim to be motivated by hostility to ideological orthodoxy. Indeed, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right is the most substantial critique of the IDW and its brand of ‘classical liberalism’ to date.

The book’s author is Michael Brooks, an American political YouTuber and a socialist. For Brooks, the IDW use a veneer of ‘reason’ and ‘science’ to justify prevailing inequalities. In a context where Donald Trump is the occupant of the White House and neo-liberal capitalism remains dominant (Jeff Bezos is forecast to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2026), the IDW’s cringeworthy posturing as a “persecuted minority” is glib and largely vacuous, in Brooks’s telling. As Brooks writes, the IDW “brand themselves as unclassifiable renegades even as they all share elements of an unmistakable anti-left agenda”.

The IDW’s lodestar is Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist and self-help guru who likes to talk about hierarchies and gender differences while dissecting Left-wing totalitarianism for the YouTube generation. Peterson has been preaching the same material for years. Yet he only truly gained prominence in 2016 following a campus row over pronouns for transgender students. The campus Left went berserk and Peterson started getting invited onto popular talk shows to rail earnestly against “post-modern Neo-Marxists”.

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Yet as time went on, what the ‘renegades’ of the Intellectual Dark Web were really reneging on was their previous commitment to the Left. As Brooks writes, “[the IDW] generate their audience by publishing a neverending stream of ‘oh my God, look at these leftists being crazy’ articles”.

Aside from Ben Shapiro, a religious conservative who refers to abortion as “killing babies”, the IDW is largely made up of former liberals who have been “mugged by reality”, in Irving Kristol’s famous phrase, even if they nowadays often sound indistinguishable from what Brooks describes as “old school reactionaries”. Dave Rubin was once a member of the progressive Young Turks network who today decries “oppression Olympics”. Sam Harris is a fellow New Atheist ‘Horseman’ and one-time supporter of Hillary Clinton who conducts thought experiments on torture and a nuclear first strike against Iran. Meanwhile Jordan Peterson implores readers of his bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life, to “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”.

Underlying much of this, Brooks argues, is an acceptance of prevailing inequalities — economic, gender, and racial — as natural. The IDW’s leading lights uncritically defend capitalism while drawing on biology and the dreary science of ‘IQ’ to bolster the status quo. They aim to “naturalize or mythologize historically contingent power relations”, as Brooks puts it. Behind every one of Peterson’s self-help homilies is an unbending fealty to the status quo. Hierarchies are hard-wired because lobsters follow them. Gender differences are real because women gravitate towards people and men towards things. Envy and resentment at the success of others will rot your soul. Oh, and stand up straight and make your damn bed.

The Left takes a dim view of the self-help movement — related, I suspect, to its own paternalistic preference for people who are on their way down rather than on their way up. Sinecured academics and privately educated scribblers make a handsome living telling poor people that they should “rise with their class, not out of it”. The sort of self-betterment promoted by the likes of Dr Peterson — so the argument goes — would be better channelled into a focus on structural change. Ironically, much like the Petersonian self-help mantras they disparage, large sections of the Left also want the poor to defer gratification — albeit until after the Revolution.

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But self-actualisation has its obvious limitations. As Brooks notes, “sometimes people’s houses aren’t in order precisely because of the condition of the world”. In contrast to many of his comrades on the Left, however, Brooks argues that, rather than dismissing Jordan Peterson’s fanbase — largely white, male and self-taught — as ‘deplorables’, the Left should try to win them over to a more substantive programme. “One of the most dangerous things the Left can do is to write off the demographic to which Peterson appeals because of its relative racial and gender privilege,” Brooks writes.

Brooks’ critique of the IDW is at its best when he pulls apart the latter’s penchant for “naturalising instead of historicising”. Much IDW thought seeks in effect to depolitisise politics. We cannot fundamentally change the world therefore we should only try to describe it. Particularly absurd, as Brooks points out, is the way in which ideology is portrayed among members of the IDW as something other people subscribe to, whereas they are merely disinterested, above-the-fray intellectuals. Thus Peterson launches tirades against the principle of absolute equality, which few people believe in anyway, while earnestly drinking the meritocratic Kool-Aid, which is as much an ideological mirage as anything Peterson opposes. Meritocracy, as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once put it, is an imaginary world in which “every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything”.

The belief in actually existing equality of opportunity is particularly credulous when it comes to accounting for racial injustices in the contemporary United States. Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, whose work is frequently cited by members of the IDW, made the astonishing claim during a 2007 debate that “most of the juice” had gone out of environmental explanations for racial inequality “by the 1970s”. This too is an ideological point of view. As Brooks notes with incredulity, this was “a single decade after the ‘Whites Only’ signs came out of the restaurant windows and black people started to be allowed to vote”.

Of course, one needn’t be affiliated with the IDW to understand that the movement’s popularity — Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson can easily pack-out auditoriums — is partly a backlash against the excesses of the Left. It was once said that the Bolsheviks sought to politicise sleep. Their successors on today’s social justice scene deploy the truism that everything is political as a licence to shut down opposing opinions as ‘phobias’ and ‘microaggressions’. Peterson is not entirely wrong when he compares the campus activist who vibrates with rage at some minor rhetorical transgression to the Cheka officer whose gloved-hand raps on the door in the middle of the night. The difference is one has political power while the other does not.

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This remains an important distinction, however, especially in Donald Trump’s America. The cloying self-regard of much IDW debate is bad enough, but it seems especially self-serving to pose as a purveyor of ‘unorthodox thought’ when taking on the comic turbulence of campus politics — all the while saying very little about the moral abominations of the Trump Presidency. Flattering the likes of Charles Murray may constitute subversive opinion in some quarters, but it’s hardly Charter 77.

Despite his opposition to Peterson and company, Brooks is of the Marxist-influenced Left, which has little time for the hair-splitting narcissism of identity politics and what he refers to contemptuously as the “shallow analysis” of the “ultra-woke”. Brooks calls instead for a return to universalism because “good and liberating ideas, like bad and reactionary ones, have thrived in a variety of cultural settings”.

This is a welcome blast against the dominant fetish for what Brooks describes as “drawing artificial lines between cultures”. Campus-driven heresy hunts are a distraction and a turn-off for ordinary people, as Brooks notes. Damning someone for being male or having a white skin may provide some cheap and ephemeral thrill, but it is not a serious approach to winning political power. As Brooks writes, “comradeship and solidarity across racial and national lines… is going to have to be central to any kind of viable movement to achieve a better world”.

Moreover, by the time Peterson and co appeared on the scene, many liberals had apparently forgotten how to argue for the things they believe in — thinking that moral indignation alone was enough. The brass standard here is Cathy Newman’s flailing attempt to interrogate Peterson in a 2018 interview for Channel 4 News. The interview went viral on the back of his running rings around her. Newman’s subsequent attempt to blame the humiliation on “men with an agenda” was as fatuous and complacent as her interview style.

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But the Intellectual Dark Web — Peterson in particular — have thrived off the back of an overblown fear, particularly prevalent in the United States, of a resurgent Socialism. This would probably find a less substantial audience if people like Michael Brooks stopped trying to resuscitate Marxism-Leninism. Brooks contrasts the reactionary Left-baiting of the IDW with his own fruitless search – encapsulated in the pages of the socialist magazine Jacobin — for a “rejuvenated, humane, internationalist, and appealing version of the politics of the Finland station”[1].

In setting out what he believes in (as opposed to the IDW), Brooks evokes St Petersburg’s Finland Station to convey his sympathy for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Brooks concedes that one should not be an “uncritical apologist for everything that happened in the years after Lenin arrived at the Finland Station” — which is big of him — but he contrasts the reactionary politics of the IDW with his own dream of Communism with a human face. This reader wasn’t persuaded. Indeed, this sort of Socialist wish-thinking was once likened by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski to trying to cook a “dish of fried snowballs”. Leninism leads to famine, terror and forced labour camps — even if Jordan Peterson and the IDW say so.

Anti-Communism comes in a variety of hues though, some of which are more interesting than others. One irony of the ongoing culture war is the sense — to those of us standing on the sidelines at least — that one extreme sustains its opposite, and vice-versa. Christopher Hitchens briefly appears in Brooks’s book — only to be showered with abuse about his “failing liver”. Once upon a time Hitchens cautioned his friend the novelist Martin Amis to be careful about the type of anti-Communist he turned into. Brooks similarly reprimands the IDW for “obsessing about ‘freedom’ while getting chummy with authoritarians like Viktor Orban”. The IDW might here be reminded of Peterson’s Rule #6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the World.

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One should also look at the material reasons why, historically, socialism has gained traction, but this doesn’t seem to interest the IDW. This might after all indicate that something was rotten with the status quo. Indeed, one can imagine Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin reading Dickens’s classic revolutionary drama, A Tale of Two Cities, and coming away looking for Jacobins under the bed — while entirely missing the line which warns: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.”

The Whiggish liberalism of the Intellectual Dark Web sometimes feels like an ideology for affluent and comfortable times — in common with the narcissistic culture of identity politics it defines itself against. In this sense the IDW bring to mind an older generation of 19th-century liberals and conservatives who, in the words of Czesław Miłosz — a far more interesting anti-Stalinist than anyone the Intellectual Dark Web has produced — continued to “mouth 19th-century phrases about respect for man” — while all around them the world burned.

But the culture wars haven’t gone away. As we’ve seen with the recent Black Lives Matter protests: Covid-19, stagnant economies and mass unemployment are lighting a fire beneath ongoing ideological battles over history and social justice. One therefore imagines that the IDW will go on having the “important conversations that the mainstream won’t”, as Dave Rubin portentously phrased it. For Brooks, however, those seeking answers to the big questions of our time be better off looking elsewhere.

[1] Jordan Peterson may call Lenin “an ideologue & mass murderer”, yet the hero in Lenin’s favourite novel — Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? — is a man called Rakhmetev who eschews sex and alcohol and eats only raw steak while following a rigorous exercise programme. Which sounds an awful lot like Jordan Peterson.

Richard Dawkins does not have the same rule, I think it’s fair to say. “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds,” he tweeted recently. “It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice.”

Lots of people got very cross about that, and I was naively surprised; surprised enough to break my own rule. I thought he was saying something fairly obvious, which is that if you bred humans for some trait then it would probably make that trait more common, and that he was explicit in saying he wasn’t talking about whether it was morally acceptable. But other people thought — they told me so — that he was literally in favour of eugenics. (Dawkins later clarified that no, he was not: “I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy [but just] as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. Heaven forbid that we do it.”)

The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

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Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

As a high-decoupler, Harris thought that it was OK to talk about what-ifs; if there are genetic components to racial differences, then we still need to treat everyone with equal dignity, etc: “I’m not saying there are, but if there are…” He thought he’d performed the ritual.

But for Klein, the editor of Vox, the ritual was not strong enough. Murray’s ideas are reminiscent of a grim history, in which pseudoscientific ideas about a hierarchy of humans were used to justify slavery or Jim Crow laws. For Klein (a low-decoupler, in Nerst’s taxonomy), you can’t simply take an idea out of its context like that. The context comes with it.

These two paradigms are very hard to square. Harris thought he was having a coolly rational debate in the philosophy-seminar style, so was baffled to find he was being accused of racism; Klein thought Harris was trying to sneak racist ideas in under an academic smokescreen, and couldn’t believe Harris claiming otherwise. Their models of the world were so different they just couldn’t understand each other. So obviously it descended into a massive online row with accusations of bad faith and racism.

That’s what I think was going on with the Dawkins tweet. Dawkins thought he’d performed the magic ritual – “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice” =  “By X, I don’t mean Y.” He is a nerdy, high-decoupling person, a scientist, used to taking concepts apart.

But many people reading it are not high-decouplers; they hear “eugenics” and “work” and immediately all of the history, from Francis Galton to Josef Mengele, is brought into the discussion: you can’t separate the one from the other. 

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I think a lot of arguments in society come down to this high-decoupler/low-decoupler difference. And while I hope I’ve done a good job of putting the case for low-decoupling, I am very obviously a high-decoupler, so often I find myself thinking “but they performed the magic ritual! They said they didn’t mean Y!” and being really confused that everyone is very angry that they believe Y.

Dawkins, to my knowledge, never explained why he suddenly brought up eugenics out of a clear blue sky, but the word is in the news at the moment because Dominic Cummings hired the weirdo he wanted to hire, a man called Andrew Sabisky. Inevitably enough, the media has gone through his old social media posts and found various things he’s said, and he has since quit.

For the record: some of it is genuinely unsettling, for instance that “there are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly — even mostly — genetic in origin”. This is, I think, not true — I don’t know how you square it with the simple fact that poor black boys in the UK get better educational outcomes than poor white boys, for instance. And none of this should be seen as a defence of Sabisky’s hiring. (Watch me perform the decoupling ritual: will it work?)

But I thought a few of them were interesting from this high/low decoupling point of view. For instance, he described female genital mutilation (FGM) as a “moral panic”, because the actual numbers were low, so the risk to girls in the UK was pretty tiny. The full quote was “It is still unclear to what extent FGM represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic.”

It seems fairly obvious to me that Sabisky is saying that FGM is rare in the UK – a view, incidentally, shared by at least one consultant obstetrician in the BMJ, who said “there is no evidence that large numbers of girls living in UK are having FGM”. He’s not belittling the impact itself.

Similarly, I’ve said before that claims about a wave of teen suicides are “absolute bollocks” and that the “epidemic of loneliness” is not real; that doesn’t mean I don’t think that suicide and loneliness are terrible things. You can decouple the frequency of the event from the seriousness of the event when it does happen. But for low-decoupling people, you can’t; by downplaying one, you are downplaying the whole package.

Similarly, Sabisky said that “women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s”. But the context was that of Caster Semenya, a female runner who has an unusually high level of blood testosterone, and whether she should be allowed to compete in women’s sport. Sabisky is suggesting, as I understand it, that there is a need to draw boundaries around women’s sport in a way that you don’t around men’s, but you do around the Paralympics; if anyone could compete in women’s sports or the Paralympics, then lots of mediocre able-bodied men would win them and there would be no women’s sports or Paralympics left. The concept of “boundaries around the sport” has been separated from the idea of the sports themselves. But to a low-decoupler, it sounds, I think, as though he is saying they are inferior. 

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Even his “eugenics” argument, in an interview with Laura McInerny in SchoolsWeek in 2016, strikes me as quite a separating-the-feelings-from-the-facts, decoupling-style situation. In fact he even says so, explicitly: “You have to separate yourself from what you feel and from what are the facts of the matter.” He asks whether parents should be able to screen IVF embryos, whether for disability or schizophrenia, or for intelligence. The former is not a million miles away from our current situation, where pregnancies at high risk of chromosomal disorders can be terminated if the mother wishes; the latter will probably be happening in China in a few years. The fact is that it’s possible; that doesn’t say whether it’s right. 

Sabisky himself, according to that interview, seems to be against it: “He is personally uneasy about the ethics of many of the things he talks about and as a Christian — he married in church last year — he has moral views on the topics that may not be what people expect.” It seems to me that he is explicitly decoupling what he thinks is true, or what he thinks is effective, from what he thinks is right.

I don’t think, as some people do, that these remarks have been “taken out of context”, as such. I think that even with the context, lots of people would still assume that when he says “FGM isn’t a major risk” he means “we don’t need to care about FGM”. Similarly, Dawkins’s tweet wasn’t taken out of context: the context was all there, but the magic ritual didn’t work. It’s a translation problem: some people think they’re having a cold, rational discussion; other people are alive to the implications; there will be frequent occasions when the two groups will hear the same words and yet understand totally different things by them.

Again, to perform the decoupling-ritual one more time, none of this is to defend the hiring of Sabisky — who, full disclosure, I met in 2017 and interviewed for my book. It wouldn’t surprise me, to decouple again, if he was a useful person to have around government: he is a “superforecaster”, which means that of the 20,000 people making predictions about the future for the Good Judgment Project, he was one of the 150 who scored best for accuracy. (Read a bit more about that here, if you like.) I suspect having people who are really good at predicting the future is useful, but that is decoupling his abilities from his views, and maybe that’s not a good thing to do.

But I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. Sometimes the ritual fails, and the spirits break through the warding circle.

Prompted, at least in part, by 9/11, New Atheism rumbled through the ‘noughties’. It was noisiest towards the end of that decade, thanks the self-described ‘Four Horseman of the Apocalypse’: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins’ The God Delusion,  Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, God is not Great by Hitchens and Breaking the Spell by Dennett were all published in a cluster around 2007.

In 2009, British citizens were treated to the spectacle of the ‘Atheist Bus’ — a double decker advert declaring ‘There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life’ — created by the comedian Ariane Sherine with the support of, again, Dawkins.

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The themes of the Four Horsemen’s treatises are now widely known: religion is dangerous and deeply irrational; only science, and the light of reason, can save humanity from the plague of superstition and violence it whips up.

Most religious responses took the bait. Some were shrill and ill-informed. The best, like The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath, did a good job of exploding the facile underpinnings of most of the arguments, but didn’t succeed in changing the terms of the debate. Unapologetic did. The first chapter was serialised run in full by the Guardian, for one thing.

For another, Spufford is a real writer, a writer’s writer. Picked as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1997, he is unusual in publishing both critically acclaimed, commercially successful novels and books of non-fiction, as well as collections of essays. He is also a professor, teaching creative and life writing at Goldsmiths College. The book directly prior to Unapologetic was Red Plenty, about life in the USSR. This segue into religion came as a bit of a surprise, not least, apparently, to his agent.

So Spufford’s prose is hilarious and precise (but excruciating) as he acknowledges the worst caricatures of Christian belief: “Believers are the people touting a solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution. In an anorak”. It helps that he has spent some time as an atheist. Spufford knows all the flaws and failings of religion. Yet he still wants to offer, not “a defence of Christian ideas [but] a defence of Christian emotions — of their intelligibility, of their grown up dignity”.

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He moves the debate out of the zero-sum dingdong about the Big Bang and biblical archaeology and philosophical proofs — and into the realm of feelings. And not because feelings are just easier (the clue is in “intelligibility and grown-up dignity”) but because for almost all of us, that’s what drives not just our metaphysics, but most of our deepest decisions.

Spufford was not alone in pushing in this direction. Although he had been writing about it in academic circles since the late nineties, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also broke into the mainstream in 2012 with The Righteous Mind. Building on his earlier work “The emotional dog and its rational tail”, he updated the metaphor as an elephant and rider. Our emotional, intuitive judgements are the elephant, actually in charge, and our reasoning minds construct post-hoc rationalisations for why we wanted to go that way in the first place. Daniel Kahneman — a Nobel laureate psychologist and economist had made similar arguments in Thinking, Fast and Slow the previous year — and the work of Ian McGilchrist, among many others over the decade, all contributed to this growing sense that we are not as rational as we thought.

In seeking to shift the debate about religion into the realm of emotions, then, Spufford was not dodging the “real question”:

“If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether this crap I talk is true”.

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For the record, he does care, describing himself as a fairly orthodox believer who can recite the creeds. It’s not that he doesn’t think truth is important, but that arguments about whether God exists are self-defeating: “No, I can’t prove it. I don’t know if there’s a God (and neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins…it isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item).”

Instead of getting stuck there, he agrees with the major move in social psychology and neuroscience this decade: “it is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I assent to the ideas”.

Crucially, he argues that this is true of everyone. It’s not only that religious people have faith because of their feelings — the opposite can be true:

“There are arguments to be made [against the existence of God]…but for a lot of people they function as a rationalisation after the event for a deep and emotional conviction that the universe is just not the kind of place in which such things can happen.”

The move is a good and persuasive one, but it’s the manner in which he writes about emotions that make the book so successful. There is no schmaltz; no earnest, dusty, churchy tone. Atheist philosopher John Gray called it, “a rare gem, a book that carries conviction by being honest all the way through”.

Whether describing sin — the crack in everything — as HPtFtU (the Human Propensity to Fuck things Up) or exploring the sense of divine mercy in Mozart’s Clarinet concerto, Spufford writes about the lived experience of faith more accurately and beautifully than anyone except Marilynne Robinson, Graham Greene and Dostoevsky (significantly all novelists).

People will still be reading this book once the new atheist polemics (and their religious responses) have been consigned to the recycling bin of history, because it is more powerful, more human, than any of them.

For the next 90 minutes Harris led the conversation on politics, science, ethics and God.  When the time came for audience questions the queues for the audience microphones stretched to the back of the hall.  The few questioners who did get a chance to ask something showed themselves to be part of a bunch of unusually cerebral people who were not only cool and diverse but clearly deeply engaged with their times.  It was the sort of crowd any politician would dream of being able to attract, while very few mainstream media figures would even be able to fill the bar of such a venue (people might come for the celebrity but they would not be detained by the thoughts).  Afterwards people mulled around, talking ideas, taking photos and finally getting those drinks in.  In some ways it was like a rock concert, but a rock concert of ideas.  For his followers, Harris is indeed a type of rock-star.

He first came to prominence in the post-9/11 years, firstly through his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. The book was an instant bestseller and was bracketed with a set of other ‘anti-God’ books that came out around the same time (not least Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great).  He became identified along with them as one of the ‘new atheists’ and along with the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett they all became known as the ‘four horsemen’ of the anti-theist movement of the 2000s.

For those who were paying attention it was obvious even from The End of Faith that Harris’s contributions did not simply consist of arguing around an absence.  The most controversial and brave parts of that book were not those aspects which reiterated in a newer and more sparkling form arguments against God which had existed before, but crucial arguments about what this meant for the moral universe the world now found itself in.  What should the attitude of non-believers be in an era of mass-terror being committed in the name of faith?  What accommodations could we (or should we) all come to agree upon?  In his writings throughout the rest of that decade – not least in his crystalline Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) Harris remained focussed on this question.  Not least because world events kept calling him back to the subject he had broken through in.  Throughout events like the Mohammed cartoon crisis (2005 – ?) Harris proved to be one of the few people who had a certain enough moral framework, a developed enough understanding of what was being attempted and enough residual outrage to make a stand against such violent incursions of the most extreme forms of faith back into the public square.

It led him to be pigeon-holed, certainly.  But by the turn of the decade it became clear that his strong anti-theism was not all there was to him (enough though that could have been).  In The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values (2010) and Waking Up: A guide to Spirituality without Religion (2014) he did what very few among the ‘new atheists’ had ever bothered to do.  He attempted to build a positive case in the terrain which the new atheists had scorched.  Unlike many in his own schools of thought he recognised that opposition was not enough, but that it was necessary to build and to address questions, rather than merely to savage them and shoot them down.  What he engaged in was not what was elsewhere described as ‘Atheism 2.0’ but atheism as a starting point for all the important subjects which still followed.

Of course individual readers will have individual reactions to the level of success or persuasiveness of these ventures.  But the sincerity of them, as well as the depth – and, perhaps most crucially – width of his learning is something which any honest critic as well as fan will note.  His works draw not just on philosophy and history but on the very latest developments on science, in particular neuroscience.

Perhaps it is this cutting-edge that allows the ‘Waking Up’ podcast which Harris began in 2013 to reach tens of millions of listeners around the world.  In these podcasts – a medium in which Harris was a relative pioneer – he mulls at length (sometimes for several hours) on the most serious themes.

He occasionally veers wholly into politics.  But more commonly he delves into issues deep beneath the events of any day’s news.  Recent podcasts have addressed ‘Consciousness and the self’ (a conversation with the professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Anil K. Seth) and a conversation on ‘The science of meditation’.

These podcasts are an extraordinary phenomenon.  With more than a million followers on Twitter, Harris is obviously able to point people to the irregularly posted discussions.  But what is most extraordinary – as audiences like that in London in October evidenced – is their reach.  Not just because they are listened to by millions of people at a time.  But because in their reach they demonstrate the failure of a popular broadcast media intent on ‘gotcha’ moments and ‘X annihilates Y’ screen-grabs.

Harris shows an entirely different model of how to engage with your time and its challenges.  Even with people who he has invited on with whom he disagrees he shows himself to be unfailingly, outstandingly courteous.  Without any grandstanding he demonstrates continuously that thoughtful dialogue remains possible even between people who fundamentally disagree.  When he crossed swords with the actor Ben Affleck on the Bill Maher show in the USA four years ago Affleck came across as a grand-standing ignoramus with a misplaced, Hollywood-induced, sense of his own significance.  Even as he rolled his finger and ordered his fellow guest to hurry things along (as though Affleck were the director of all situations he graces with his presence) Harris dealt with him courteously, carefully and – as audience reaction showed – devastatingly.

It is the same in the conversations which he hosts.  It is impossible to come away feeling that Harris has done anything other than give his guest their best shot.  A recent appearance by Harris on Russell Brand’s podcast exemplified the idea.  Brand showed off his wares in his familiar fashion (duck, weave, play the joker, turn into a pseudo-philosopher, then whoopsey-daisey there I go again, I’m a comic really etc, ad nauseum).  All the time Harris takes even what Brand says as a serious proposition, countering him and correcting him, but always with a courtesy and an attention to facts so fastidious that it makes you wonder whether it mightn’t at some point even make some impact of Brand. In an age of intellectual dishonesty Harris’s way of communicating face-to-face as well as with his readers betrays a commitment to honesty as well as honest dialogue which is unusual.  Of course it might yet prove essential.

Harris is still only 50.  Many television bookers will not have read his works. Quite a number of opinion-page editors will only vaguely have registered him.  But he is one of the free minds who is changing our world.  And he’ll keep doing that whether the old media notice what he’s doing or not.