Sam Harris Redux

by tristero

I must admit to being a bit surprised at the amount of disagreement with my earlier post on Sam Harris. Several posters asserted that I had taken Harris’ rhetorical question out of context. I read the original article again and I do not believe I have. Here, for reference, is that question:

But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam?

Some main points of the article are obviously true: there surely are egregious abuses of universal human rights in many Islamic and islamist societies. I did not need to read Harris’ article to know that and indeed, found nothing I didn’t already know.

It is also obviously true that Islamists and very strict Islamic cultures are worse abusers of human rights than all but the most marginal of American christianists and fundamentalists. Again, Harris is saying nothing that anyone serious has ever disputed.

I believe, however, that Harris seriously underestimates how dangerous and powerful America’s theocrats are. That people like Robertson, Hagee, and Dobson feel, at present, restrained from calling for the killing of heretics, abortion providers, blasphemers and other “undesirables” is not due to their inherent tolerant impulses: they have none. If America’s Taliban is not advocating the execution of infidels or oppressing women at the same horrific level as the Taliban itself, it is due to the strenuous effort of those other Americans who have been fighting tooth and nail to maintain church/state separation and strenuously object to any erosion of it, no matter how seemingly trivial. Under Bush, the theocrats have become ominously more powerful and therefore more virulent. While Harris, a well-known atheist, surely deplores christianism and fundamentalist Christianity, he is all too quick – at least in the article under question – to dismiss the seriousness of their threat when comparing them to the islamists and strict followers of Islam.

But that is just a question of emphasis. Far worse is that Harris can’t help confusing two entirely separate issues. It is not enough for him to condemn specific abuses within Islamic communities. He feels compelled to condemn the religion itself:

The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It’s not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology.

His argument is specious. No one denies a “connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence.” Of course, radical islamists will quote the Qu’ran and other texts as justification. What Harris fails to appreciate is that this is a highly specific exploitation of certain Islamic tropes and symbols to gain political power. However, while it is certainly possible to read the texts of Islam (at least, the translated texts) as supporting a political program and the use of violence to gain power, it is not a necessary reading any more than a reading of the Hebrew Bible necessarily supports the violent suppression of objections to Israeli settlements.

No doubt, islamism in many different forms is widespread, and violent versions of islamism are a major problem. But Harris’ failure here goes far beyond merely repeating what everyone knows. Convinced that what he calls “Islam” itself is the problem, he fails to acknowledge that a major factor feeding the growth of violent islamisms has nothing to do with the Qu’ran and everything to do with the catastrophe known as the Bush/Iraq war.

In other words, Harris’ mistake here, in the very definition of the problem, is all of a piece with the one he makes in the question I quoted in the earlier post. He oversimplifies and “leaves aside” pieces of a complicated problem that are crucial to understanding the problem. For indeed, there is no such thing as “Islam” but Islams – plural. To lump all Islams together and condemn the aggregate as inherently violent is not merely silly, but bizarre. It’s like saying because there has been a pedophilia scandal in the American Catholic church, we need to oppose all Christianities, even the most upright, and barely-observed Lutheranism in Iceland,*

If Harris’ purpose is to minimize human rights abuses in Islamic and islamist societies (it is crazy to assume they can be eliminated), then it is neither necessary, relevant, nor helpful to concoct a demon called “Islam” that is more inherently evil than others. But eliminating abuse within a religion is only part of Harris’ goal: he also seeks the elimination of Islam altogether, if not all religions. And, since in Harris view, all the Islams are corrupt, imaginary and dangerous, they can be grouped under the rubric of “Islam,” then conflated with islamism, and the aggregate loudly condemned.**

The refusal to address the practical conflict between the two goals leads to an irresolvable intellectual incoherence. Again, this is the problem inherent within the question I quoted. If your goal is to confront specific human rights abuses within a specific Islamic society, then it is counterproductive – to put it mildly – to condemn Muslim socieities in general. Even if the abuse is widespread? Of course! The abuse may be the same and utterly horrific, but the reasons very different.

You cannot speak about an aggregate “Islam” and create an effective confrontation with it. Why? Because it does not exist. You cannot leave aside the practical and political in discussing a problem as complex as abuse. Yet, by conflating Islams and then conflating them again with islamisms, Harris creates just such a meaningless abstraction which he urges us to see as obviously deplorable and therefore something we must condemn.

Not me.

But by refusing to accept Harris’ over-generalizations and join him in deploring an imaginary demon, I incurred the wrath of many commenters. Here’s a typical example In comments, I wrote a hasty precis of the above:

[Harris has two goals:] One is to eliminate evil acts by a religion he loathes. The other is to eliminate all religions. Both are crazy ideas.

Tensor commented:

It’s crazy to eliminate human sacrifice? We’ve already done that, and we all can see it was “evil acts” by a religion. As for eliminating all religions, the most prosperous areas of the world seem to have the least religious fervor. If that trend continues for long enough, it may indeed end religion. I never though a thinker as good as tristero would dismiss a far-thinking idea with such airy language.

For the record, I have no interest in far-thinking ideas when they refer to changing societies or cultures. In fact, far-thinking ideas, in the hands of the powerful, may very well lead to enormous human sacrifice. That is, they can lead to war. But let’s not be glib.

Somehow, by refusing to accept Harris specious’ premise that all Islams are essentially one evil Islam, and by my refusing to “engage” the issue of human rights abuses in Islamic societies within this nutty paradigm, many commenters truly felt I was “excusing” such practices as female genital mutilation and the like. And at least one imagined I think it is crazy to eliminate human sacrifice.

I can think of few attitudes more likely to perpetuate atrocities like female genital mutilation than Harris’. What he is proposing is that the West – whatever that is – treat Islamic cultures as one big inherently immoral black box, that we denounce the immorality of this non-existent entity. Furthermore, he wishes us to to entertain the thought, leaving aside all practical and political vicissitudes, of “liberating” – whatever the hell that means in such a generalized context as Harris’ – the women and children of ” traditional Islam.” The ignorance, moral laziness, and intellectual arrogance of such an attitude is simply breathtaking. And it’s simply asking for resistance and antagonism. Not to mention an utterly intractable attitude towards all traditional practices, and possibly the creation of more traditions for the sole purpose of defining a culture in opposition to :”the West.”

And then he has the gall to claim that multiculturalists – ie, those of us who don’t think of the world’s complex cultures as a big bad black box – can be “credibly accused of racism,” not he.

Folks, I stand by my earlier post. Harris’ argument differs in no significant way from the nonsense that was spoon-fed to the liberal hawks to get them to sign on to Bush/Iraq. The issues of illiberalism, oppression and abuse in Islamic cultures deserves a far more serious and articulate treatment than Harris’ “lump ’em all together and condemn ’em all” approach. It smells too much like Kurtz and it’s high time liberals learned to recognize that smell before it turns once again into the foul stench of rotting corpses courtesy of US tax dollars.

Harris is no idealist. He is just plain wrong. Intellectually wrong. And morally wrong.

{UPDATE: Ali Eteraz had a similar reaction to Harris’ article.}

***

* If someone happens to turn up a pandemic of horrific scandals in Icelandic churches, simply substitute the mildest and most scandal-free congregation of reform Jews, or Episcopalians; the point is these are very different situations and it makes no sense to generalize in this fashion.

** I’d like to make it clear that many of the most outspoken atheists don’t think like this. But Harris does.