Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith, a sharply argued, and worded, polemic against religion — all religion, has a new book out, heralded by full page ads in major newspapers: Letter To A Christian Nation, as he himself describes it, is a short broadside against fundamentalist christianity. [Early praise here.]
He also has a recent opinion piece in the LA Times blasting liberals for having their heads in the sand over the threat of demagogic Islam.
I have my doubts about his drawing such sweeping conclusions from e-mail responses to his book, though anyone would be impelled to some response, having received them in their thousands. Nevertheless, it is a very particular, and self-selected group.
… my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.
On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.
This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.
I also have doubts about his resources in, and study of the Koran and other Islamic texts. There is bad business within the texts, no doubt, as there is — and as Harris repeatedly, and angrily, points out — in the Christian Bible. What matters, it seems to me, is not whether the texts speak of the necessity and godliness of murder but whether in these times there is more muderous behavior, by whom, justified by what, inspired by what.
Harris says that Islamic violence is on the rise, and that in these years of increasingly easy-to-get nuclear devices, this matters.
We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.
Where Harris is very odd is in his claim that intention is the essence of morality.
liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause …
It doesn’t make any difference at all to most of us whether the murdering of our friends is intentional or not. Cluster bombs from Israeli and US aircraft murder and terrify innocents in the hundreds — far more than are murdered by murdering Muslims. There is something odd, and self-serving, in the western view that a murder up close and personal, a beheading, is worse than a beheading by a brickwall hurled horizontally by a bomb.
For a man of reason, (Harris is a neuroscientist) he is very quick to use apocolyptic (if secular) language himself. I don’t know that there “tens of millions of people in the Muslim world … far scarier than Dick Cheney,” or that “terrifying numbers” of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. Nor do I know that “This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior.” Unless Harris has information I don’t have, his fear is over wrought, and makes him a bad analyst and a bad prognosticator.
Where he is right, in my view, is that too many comfortable westerners don’t want to think about what has changed in the world. They don’t want to come to grips with the idea that even if the obtuse murderousness of western leadership is significantly repsonsible for what is: it is not soley responsible for what is coming to be. The US invasion of Iraq set in motion a civil war; no one in the invading armies gave instruction in drilling into the brains and eyes of the enemy. This is a ghastliness of local origin and it is a ghastliness that progressives don’t want to talk about, preferring to blame the invasion itself. The invasion should be condemned, again and again and again. So should murderous sectarian violence — whatever the reasons advanced, whatever the sacred texts.
Westerners should not avert their eyes and pretend that savagry is all right and is not to be spoken of unless it is close to home. They should not believe that the only response to the intolerance of fundamentalist Muslims is more tolerance. They should not however, as Harris does, feel that a threat is so close, so great and so unstoppable that the fascists of Europe are speaking better sense than the liberals.
Speak up, speak out, demand the same of religion, and human beings, everywhere. Learn to fight the good fight, not with more and more lethal weapons but with the weapons of understanding — of the self and the other, of self sacrifice, of calling people to the best of their texts, not the worst. Some will be called upon to sacrifice their lives in such struggles, but the sacrifice should be such –as Gandhi taught– to bring others closer to shared truth and shared life, not with the aim of extermination of the Other.
Give aid and comfort to our friends where ever they may be in the necessary struggles against great evil and acceptance of great evil.
