A secular liberal discusses liberal denial
Sam Harris is the author of The End of Faith. He is a harsh critic of the Bush administration, and favors higher taxes, gay marriage and similar ideas of the left. In his LA Times piece today, however, he is most concerned about the denial of reality coming from those who share many of his goals and values when it comes to Islamic violence.
A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror.” We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.
This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.
Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.
Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.
At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government “assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;” 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.
Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.
I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.
Mr. Harris’ logic and analysis led him to write this sentence: “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.” He is about to find that many of his friends on the left have become his former friends.
September 18th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Harris is correct to identify the threat posed by religious extremism. He did so with his book and he does so again in this article. The outstanding question is how to address these threats. Racial prejudice may not be perfectly analogous, but I think it offers some insight into the perils of unbridled extremist ideologies on both sides of a conflict. Our own Civil War points out the potential for ideology to lead to violent conflict. How we address religious extremism may well demonstrate what we did or didn’t learn from our own experience.
However, identifying the threat and crafting the solution are two distinct endeavors. Harris clearly identifies the threat but seems more inclined to then pivot and blame liberalism for our inability to confront the issue rather that offer any reasoned solutions. By acknowledging that liberalism is “generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity” and at the same time blaming it for not combating religious literalism is incongruent logic. In reality, liberalism clearly understands the dangers of religious literalism which is exactly why it promotes reasonability and tolerance. Further, that understanding is why liberals believe that the war in Iraq and the war on terror will ultimately require political solutions rather than an ever expanding military strategy.
As world population and a world economy continue to expand, our abilities to prevent the inherent racial, cultural, and religious clashes that come with proximity will become more challenging. Succumbing to the absolutism that accompanies any us/them equation is certain to trigger accelerated conflict. It is essential we refrain from adopting a broad brush strokes mentality. A reactionary strategy is nothing more than the fuel for escalation. In the end, it is individuals who define the differences upon which conflict is predicated…whether they be Islamist, Liberal, or otherwise. It will be the politics of leadership that will eventually bridge the divide.
Read more here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com
September 19th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Daniel, with all due respect I think that you are not acknowledging the principle pivot upon which Harris balances his piece. You say “Succumbing to absolutism that accompanies any us/them equation is certain to trigger accelerated conflict.”
In this you simply fail to see that we are not being presented with any option EXCEPT an “us/them” mentality. That is, the conflict is being driven forward relentlessly by the Islamists regardless of your hope to avoid an “us/them” mentality. In their eyes, you *are* corrupt, decadent, weak and pitiful to them (all the more so by your very insistence on being “generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity.”) You *are* “us” already, regardless of how you feel about it. And they are dead set on killing you for it. We’re just trying to get you to stop all the meandering, detached musings and wake the hell up about the choice they’re offering you and its implications for all of us.
This is what Harris sees clearly, Hitchens sees clearly, and our host sees clearly. You can *explain* all you want - but the Islamists *simply don’t care.* They’ve said it clearly: shut up and convert…or die. Yes, they are relatively weak now. Yes, we must maintain a distinction between Islamist fanatics and the Muslim masses. But it is a suicidally misguided idea to think that, therefore, we should avoid facing the contest to which we are being called. All such a wait would do is to help them become strong enough to make it a far more challenging match - with all of the worldwide bloodshed and misery that that would entail.