"If I can bring some light to bear on problems like that, I feel that people will be enlightened not only on the question but also on a way of approaching such questions"
About this Quote
Harris is pitching enlightenment as method, not mere conclusion. The phrasing is almost modest - "some light" - but the ambition is large: he wants to change how people think, not just what they think. That’s the telltale posture of a scientist who believes the real victory is reproducible reasoning. The payoff isn’t agreement on “the question,” it’s adoption of “a way of approaching” questions, a subtle bid for authority in the realm where values, identity, and politics usually claim the microphone.
The subtext carries Harris’s signature cultural materialism: social puzzles can be made legible if you treat them as problems with constraints, incentives, and observable causes, rather than mysteries best handled by tradition or moral panic. “Problems like that” suggests he’s talking about the hot-button cultural phenomena anthropologists get dragged into explaining - religion, taboo, violence, inequality - topics where people often want vindication more than understanding. Harris implies that clarity is possible, but only if you’re willing to be disenchanted: to trade comforting stories for testable explanations.
Context matters here. Writing in a postwar era when anthropology was wrestling with relativism, colonial legacies, and the culture wars of the 1960s and ’70s, Harris positions science as a democratizing tool: light that “people” can use, not just experts. There’s also a quiet evangelism. He’s not merely analyzing cultures; he’s recruiting readers into a discipline of skepticism, where the real lesson is how to interrogate any claim that arrives pre-wrapped as common sense.
The subtext carries Harris’s signature cultural materialism: social puzzles can be made legible if you treat them as problems with constraints, incentives, and observable causes, rather than mysteries best handled by tradition or moral panic. “Problems like that” suggests he’s talking about the hot-button cultural phenomena anthropologists get dragged into explaining - religion, taboo, violence, inequality - topics where people often want vindication more than understanding. Harris implies that clarity is possible, but only if you’re willing to be disenchanted: to trade comforting stories for testable explanations.
Context matters here. Writing in a postwar era when anthropology was wrestling with relativism, colonial legacies, and the culture wars of the 1960s and ’70s, Harris positions science as a democratizing tool: light that “people” can use, not just experts. There’s also a quiet evangelism. He’s not merely analyzing cultures; he’s recruiting readers into a discipline of skepticism, where the real lesson is how to interrogate any claim that arrives pre-wrapped as common sense.
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| Topic | Teaching |
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