Writer, journalist, democrat, republican, realist, optimist, itinerant.

Apr 4, 2016

Part VIII: Christianity, Ben Carson, Noam Chomsky

In the final part of our debate, we discuss Christianity and Noam Chomsky among other issues. For me, this is the most revealing part of our discussion because it confirms just how much of an ideologue Harris is. In arguing, as he does below, that “It is hard to justify holy war with recourse to the New Testament,” he is making my point for me, namely, that texts are not the end of the story. They are a small part of it. The New Testament is relatively peaceful, as Harris notes, and yet Christians built massive authoritarian empires, launched the Crusades, conducted the Inquisitions, expelled the Jews, burned heretics, massacred millions of bodies, conquered and subjugated Asia and Africa, and so goes the story. All these things happened despite the fact that “it is hard to justify holy war with recourse to the New Testament.” Precisely. It’s because politics and history and the competitions of power are far more important to understand the logic of violence and conquest.

Second, Harris repeats the canard about “How many Christian suicide-bombers can you name?”

Here’s his exchange with the anthropologist Scott Atran from 2006, ten years ago:

SH: Where are the Palestinian-Christian suicide bombers? Most of the Palestinians are Muslims, obviously, but there are Palestinian Christians who have to go through the same checkpoints, they suffer the same humiliations by Israelis, it seems to me this is practically a science experiment…

Scott Atran: As far as the the Palestinians are concerned, you get about 70% support in terms of Christians, for support of suicide terrorism…There have been [Palestinian Christian suicide bombers], PFLP, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine…Mostly Christian, Marxist organization.

No one is defending suicide bombing, of course. It is an abhorrent, terroristic practice. But to suggest that Muslims are uniquely predisposed to become suicide terrorists, because of their faith, is a grotesque and factually inaccurate statement. But what is remarkable from the above exchange is that Sam Harris repeats the exact same words to me, ten years later, in 2016:

SH: Look at the Palestinians. How many Palestinian Christian suicide-bombers can you name?

OA: They do some. The PFLP [The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], a Marxist organization. In fact, the founders of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], many of them were Christians.

SH: …There are Christians in many of these countries who have suffered some of the same intolerable political conditions, in many cases worse because they have been victimized by their Muslim neighbors, I mean you look at the Copts in Egypt or Pakistani Christians, they are not resorting to suicide-bombing. This is practically a science experiment.

Apparently, when it comes to Islam, Harris thinks almost exactly what he thought ten years ago, in exactly the same words: Muslims are bad, they are a unique menace, they are predisposed because of their awful faith to become terrorists. This is an ideologue who cannot deal with evidence and logic, even with ten years to learn and grow.

SH: Again, the specific ideas matter. The specific doctrines matter. The problem we’re dealing with, yes you can talk about politics and you can talk about history, and there are valid and useful conversations to have on both of those topics, but the problem we’re dealing with now, not a thousand years ago — but this was also true a thousand years ago — there are differences among religions and among theologies and among holy books that are inconvenient. It is hard to justify holy war by recourse to the New Testament. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard. You have to give a fairly tortured reading.

OA: Didn’t Jesus say he did not come to bring peace but the sword?

SH: There are a few lines there and you can get a militant Jesus, but in terms of his example, the hippie who got crucified, and in terms of the rest of what he said, the prevailing message is not one of how to be a warlord to spread the one, true faith to the ends of the earth. And it is easy, given the text, to divorce Christianity from politics by recourse to the New Testament. It’s not necessary but it is easy. And that is a good thing.

OA: Ask a Jehova’s Witness, I think they would probably disagree with you.

SH: Of course there are extremists in the Christian tradition who emphasize the other side of things. That’s why I’m saying it’s not necessary but it’s easy.

OA: What do you think prevents a Jehova’s Witness — by the way, if you overlap their views with ISIS, there would be a lot overlap.

SH: They don’t have a doctrine of jihad.

OA: They believe that god’s kingdom on earth was established in 1914 and they need to lead a religious war of good against evil.

SH: They don’t have a doctrine of jihad, of holy war. The crazy Christians, and I’ve written more about crazy Christians than most people you’re ever going to talk to, as crazy as they are, there are circumstances where their beliefs are even scarier than the beliefs of ISIS. You have turn all the dials a fair amount to get that situation —

OA: — If you put the Jehova’s Witnesses in the middle of Iraq, I can almost guarantee you that their conception of violence will be very different than it is today.

SH: Look at the Palestinians. How many Palestinian Christian suicide-bombers can you name?

SH: I’m not saying that the only way to be a suicide bomber is to be a jihadist, but I’m just saying that there are differences in how these religious communities behave even in the same context. There are Christians in many of these countries who have suffered some of the same intolerable political conditions, in many cases worse because they have been victimized by their Muslim neighbors, I mean you look at the Copts in Egypt or Pakistani Christians, they are not resorting to suicide-bombing. This is practically a science experiment. You have Christians in the same context, arguably worse, and they are not becoming suicide bombers. And again, I’m telling you that there are theological differences that explain this. The situation is reversed in Islam. The problem we have to deal with is that it is easy to justify holy war by recourse to the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad. It’s trivially easy. It’s easy to justify the actions of ISIS, down to the sex slaves. And it’s hard, genuinely hard, to argue that they are doing everything wrong.

OA: That’s not right. You think it’s hard to interpret that?

SH: It is hard to say that ISIS is getting everything wrong.

OA: So the 120 Islamic scholars who know more about Islam than you or I — the ones who condemn ISIS, the ones who condemn terrorism, are they wrong? Are they just doing this for politically correct reasons?

SH: Again, this is Maajid’s point. We have to find rival interpretations of the text that delegitimize and contextualize and repudiate ISIS and terrorism.

OA: Majority interpretation. Historically and today.

SH: We can’t lie to ourselves that it is a straightforwardly easy thing to do. Because the sex slaves are right there in the book. When they say, “Listen we have a theological justification for taking sex slaves and we treat them how we do because we’re reading it as a recipe book — ”

OA: And how you respond to someone who says that is there is a principle in Islamic jurisprudence and Islam as lived for 1,400 years of consensus, and slavery was banned hundreds of years ago. It’s not practiced anymore. There have been fatwas given about this. I’m sorry, but you cannot just cherry-pick a verse and interpret it however you want today and say that we have a holy war, the Qur’an says so, let’s go take as many sex slaves as we want. There are all these principles that they completely negate — they’re puritans — principles of consensus, of jurisprudential interpretation, that the majority of scholars and majority of Muslims adhere to. So look, this is an extremist organization. Their political extremism, their political fascism is as important as their interpretation. This is the mindset that they approach the text with. If there were no violent verses in the Qur’an, do you think that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would not exist? No, they would have another reasoning for their views.

SH: That is the fallacy we have to exorcise.

OA: Suppose there was one violent verse.

SH: The argument you’re going for here which is belied by an endless number of examples is that bad people will always do bad things and they’ll find some justification for doing bad things — many people think that bad people will do bad things anyways. All the people in ISIS now taking sex slaves and crucifying people — they are psychopaths who would have acted out anyway. ISIS is acting as a bug light for the world’s psychopaths. There is absolutely no evidence of that and an abundance of evidence for the falsity of that claim. There are people who wouldn’t have harmed anyone, who based on specific religious ideas which they believe to be true because they read the scripture as a non-fiction book and not as a novel —

OA: That’s difficult though. Because the Qur’an refers to Allah as “We.” So if you read it literally as a non-fiction book, is god a polytheist? Is Islam a polytheistic religion? Of course not. It’s inherently contradictory. You have one verse saying if you kill one person it’s as though you’ve killed all of humanity, another verse extolling the virtues of jihad.

SH: Yes, there are specific verses that you can cherry pick which you can use to say there is something far more tolerant here than what ISIS is up to and we have to hold to that tenaciously until the end of the world. That’s great, and I’m glad that Muslims have those resources they need — that I wish they had. They don’t have nearly the resources that Christians have, because the Bible is an enormous book that is massively self-contradictory and does not have any kind of unified message that’s analogous to what you get with a Salafi reading of the text. But the issue here and now I think we have to get to the end-zone here, but the issue is all of the background assumptions, having this talked about in a certain way, pushing back against specific points, and deliberately or virtually deliberately misunderstanding others, that has conspired to make our conversation the way it is, and has conspired to make you think Maajid and I are up to something sinister and selfish and totally unproductive, and when we get into the details, you seem to be checking all of the boxes Maajid is checking in terms of the way forward. This is part of the problem.

OA: My solutions are different. But keep going then I’ll respond.

SH: But the reason why I wanted to have the conversation is because the problem isn’t just ISIS. The problem is that it’s so difficult — I mean, you’re getting your JD at Yale and you’re not even a religious or very religious Muslims — and you and I get so bogged down on this conversation. And you’re colleague, you’re one step away, someone you have to argue with the ethical validity of stoning people to death, and you’re

OA: Not colleague, someone I had a conversation with. Please don’t demean me or denigrate me in such a way.

SH: I’m not demeaning you, I’m talking about the reality of the world.

OA: And I also explained to you how that conversation would have flowed and how precisely he would have neutralized that conversation and that’s exactly it happens in cafes around the Muslim world.

SH: Great. Until it doesn’t get neutralized. But the point I’m making is that you have in your immediate circle — so this conversation was as hard as it was with you, and you have in your immediate circle someone like Murtaza Hussain who you defending to whatever degree you did in this conversation—

OA: Journalist for The Intercept your listeners should know.

SH: Yes.

OA: Founded by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

SH: And he’s as starkly unethical as I’ve met in my collisions with so-called journalists. He is someone who I could not possibly contemplate attempting this conversation with. Now, I don’t know how much worse it would’ve gone with him, but given what he’s done on the page and given the kinds of noises he’s made on social media around this, the possibility of dialogue me and him — a profitable dialogue — or between Maajid and him in terms of a dialogue that’s actually going to go somewhere worth going, it just seems absolutely impossible. This is the problem I’m trying to deal with, because this is not the problem of ISIS. I’m talking about the problem of people like you and Murtaza and your other friend —

OA: Sam — excuse me, my other friend, who are you referring to? Are you referring to my Muslim friend who returned from four duties in Afghanistan? Is that who you’re referring to? Take this conversation up with him. He would tell you to go screw yourself because you’re condemning all of his co-religionists.

SH: I’m not condemning his co-religionists —

OA: The rhetoric you have consistently used has been blanketed. I don’t want to quote you your words again because honestly it’s boring.

SH: Right now, you’re taking offense where no offense is intended or even given.

OA: I’m not taking offense to you. I’m correcting you.

SH: I’m talking to you about the milieu in which you are saying someone like Maajid has no standing and how his efforts are at reform are meaningless and that he’s not even an honest interlocutor. And you’re treating him that way. You’re treating me that way. And yet when you look at specifics, basically, you’re both talking about the necessity of energizing liberal voices, finding ways to contextualize and marginalize Salafi-style readings of the text, you want to emphasize secularism, pluralism, and you want to find a way to energize all of the kinds of 21st century cosmopolitan values we agree on and which make a life like your possible and a life like mine possible, that we have a common project, and yet this very conversation was pure poison.

OA: I don’t agree with that. Look, we’ve had a debate about important issues that we need to flesh out our differences on. You have your critics, and I’m sure after this conversation I’m going to have plenty of critics and I’m going to hear from them, and that’s entirely fine. But look, this is a grand project. We’re talking about reforming or changing a religion and how to do that. And my fundamental contention is that the solutions you proposed, 1) would be counter-productive and just aren’t going to happen, you are not going to be able to excise the verses, you’re wasting your breath.

SH: You talk about how much agreement there was [in your piece] in the end as a major failing. There’s not going to be more debate here, this is a totally wasted effort. The reason why there was so much agreement is because Maajid convinced me on many points. It was a virtue of the conversation. That is when a conversation is working. Maajid and I started out so far apart when we first met, I had no idea how the conversation would have gone, it could very well have gone how the conversation you and I just had has gone, where there would have been no book and there would have been no friendship and no basis for future collaboration, it just would’ve been bad vibes and misunderstanding —

OA: It would have been a great debate to read, actually, a much better book from that perspective. My beef with Maajid is that he didn’t challenge you on your right-wing views.

SH: I don’t have right-wing views.

OA: Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, you want to go there as well?

SH: There you have another example of me being maliciously quoted out of context.

OA: I quoted you entirely. You called them religious imbeciles and religious maniacs and you supported the preferencing of Christian refugees over Muslims.

SH: Let me ask you, do you think I support Ben Carson for the presidency of the United States?

OA: I think you support one of his views and maybe some of your listeners will now vote for him. Beliefs have consequences, right?

SH: What view of Carson’s do I support?

OA: You support — that you would vote for him over Noam Chomsky.

SH: What point was I making?

OA: When it comes to question of dealing with ISIS and Islamism, violent extremism, that’s the point you would, that you support Ben Carson. Ben Carson could not name a single ally of the United States in the Middle East. Here’s the exact quote: Given a choice between Noam Chomsky and Ben Carson, in terms of the totality of their understanding of what’s happening in the world, I’d vote for Ben Carson every time. He’s a dangerously deluded religious imbecile and it’s a scandal that he’s a candidate for president. So you’d vote, on this issue, at least, for a dangerously deluded religious imbecile. Now why is that?

SH: The only point I was making there and it’s absolutely obvious in context is that Noam Chomsky and the far left are so clueless about the problem of jihadism, globally, and the erosion of free speech as a result of the larger problem of Islamism, that yes, and I worry more and more — this comes back to the problem of fascism. I worry more and more that if the left doesn’t start making credible, sensible noises about the problem of jihadism, more and more people, if given a choice, and we’re not at that point now, but in Europe they may very soon be — if given a choice between a genuinely scary right-wing person and a delusional liberal, someone like Jeremy Corbyn, they would feel no choice but to choose the right-wing when they don’t agree at all.

OA: Noam Chomsky, for all of the disagreement that you have, is not a delusional liberal. He is n fact not only the most quoted scholar but he’s someone understands —

SH: — Please.

OA: Fine, you have your disagreements politically but please don’t give me this garbage that he would just let ISIS have free rein. He’s a skeptic and an atheist, and he said himself that the local forces need to defeat ISIS. He’s not a pacifist.

SH: He blames the United States for basically every problem we could name on the world stage.

OA: He states that it creates a disproportionate amount of violence and that’s factually true.

SH: This is a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down with you. The point I want to make in closing is that the difficulty of this conversation is the real topic of conversation for me here. Because there’s so much we agree about and yet you insist upon just what you trotted out here at the end about Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.

OA: I’m responding to the words you’ve said.

SH: No, you’re responding to obvious smears based on lifting these quotes out of context.

OA: Sam, I can’t quote you a two-hour podcast so it’s out of context by definition. By I gave you the operative quote in the paragraph.

SH: The operative quote — the only point I’m making is that the people who think we created ISIS and all these people, all the problem of a global jihadist insurgency, would go away if we just stopped mistreating people, if we stopped flying drones.

OA: That’s nonsense. People who think that can’t tell their ass from their foot.

SH: That is the Chomskyian criticism.

OA: Why does Chomsky focus on the US? Let’s be charitable to his views, even if we disagree with him.

SH: I’m not going to do it here. I’d be totally charitable to Chomsky’s views in a conversation with Chomsky but I have heard Chomsky say and I have seen him write — I mean he wrote a book about 9/11 immediately after 9/11 which was the hardest time to make these points about 9/11 and he basically blamed us for 9/11.

OA: There is some blame in terms of supporting the mujahideen in the 80s in Afghanistan.

SH: No.

OA: Do you think that the US has clean hands in terms of the rise of al Qaeda in the Middle East?

SH: This is not a conversation I want to have.

OA: It’s a simple question.

SH: It’s not a simple question because you are guaranteed to misinterpret the answer. Yes, the phenomenon of blowback is real. Yes, we supported the mujahideen against the Soviets.

OA: — And withdrew from Afghanistan and didn’t care much about it.

SH: All of this is understandable through the lens of the Cold War and our not recognizing the problem of jihadism that we were helping to foster. Yes, we were stupid, but that does not exonerate the theology of Salafi Islam.

OA: I don’t think Chomsky would exonerate them.

SH: Chomsky’s analysis renders it completely inexplicable that you could have a middle class, well-educated, psychologically-normal person, living in the West, the victim of nothing, who could then wake up tomorrow morning after watching an ISIS video and think “I have to go to Syria to fight with these guys.”

OA: There’s a lot of glory and a utopian project involved in addition to the text. If I were to reduce ISIS I would say it’s a selective interpretation of the readings plus gangsterism plus opportunity — those are the three things. If you have those three in the right context, you’re going to have people who want to join ISIS, whether it’s people who bring Islam for Dummies with them or people who have PhDs in Islamic theology. And again, the broader point I was just making, social-political circumstances are very important, we should not underemphasize them or de-emphasize them, and to understand this battle and to continue supporting the leftist, progressive opposition and eliminating or at least opposing vociferously, the far-Muslim-right, these are the things that we need to be understanding, in the various countries they operate.

SH: Stated that way, nobody disagrees with you. Certainly Maajid doesn’t disagree with you. If you ask Maajid whether he wants to support liberals, or ask me, of course we’re on to that project, and to those liberals include apostates and ex-Muslims and minorities-within-minorities. Everything I or Maajid has ever said about the problem of Islamism or jihadism acknowledges that the first and primary victims of these theocratic trends has been Muslims. Liberal Muslims. Yes, jihadist terrorism is more a problem for Muslims than it is for non-Muslims. And I hear from Muslims and ex-Muslims all the time who support the kinds of efforts Maajid and I have made in this book. If we’re not at the end of our energy, we’re at the end of our listeners’ patience here. I mean, frankly, I assume I’m going to release this. I’m going to have to edit this, not for content but for sound quality because you know, every recording comes replete with mouth noises and is just a total mess. If after going through this, I decide the most deadly, boring conversation ever held, and I can’t inflict it on my listeners, I won’t release it, or I’ll come back to you and I’ll say, I have 3 1/2 hours which I can’t release but I want to cut it down to 2 hours and I’m not going to cut it down in a way that’s to your disadvantage. I’ll ask your permission to do that.

OA: Please do.

SH: But I won’t know until I hear this.

OA: That’s fine. Personally, I appreciated this conversation and I think that it’s good we generated a lot of heat, I have nothing against you personally, and I’m glad that there’s a lot of people — some of whom would agree with me and some who would agree with you, and that at least we can have this ideological and ideational back and forth in terms of arguments. All I ask is we proceed with integrity and that if you’re going to cut it then at least we have a discussion or ask me if it’s ok, so it’s not to one party’s advantage.

SH: Yeah. Obviously I appreciate your willingness to do this.

OA: Who else would read a criticism of someone else word for word on an article like this.

SH: Others certainly would. I just think it seemed like a promising experiment to run, but having participated in it, I think it is a cautionary tale. The lesson I draw from this is just how hard it is to converge on even the simplest and least deniable truth claims given the kind of background assumptions people are talking to these kinds of conversations. It is no wonder that the world is as it is when this conversation was as hard as it is.

OA: Most people with opposing views don’t want to have a conversation, they want to be stuck in their silos. I have a more optimistic view on this than you do, to have our disagreements fleshed out publicly.

SH: Honestly, this is some of the feedback I think you’ll get. This was less a debate about important issues than a continuous effort to unravel the most charitable way to say it is misunderstanding, but I think in many cases, not-good-faith misunderstanding, assumptions and tendentious moves that really don’t belong.

OA: Look these are complicated things. We’re talking about history, politics, religion, and theology.

SH: It’s not that complicated. Maybe I will learn something from this conversation, but when you listen to it, I hope you will see the places where you could have this conversation differently. It’s certainly possible that I will see that for myself.

OA: I’m open to that.

SH: There’s a lot here that isn’t just a matter of these being complicated issues, it’s a matter of a style of conversation and an unwillingness to back off claims even after they become obviously implausible or shown to be unfounded that just makes this kind of conversation impossible.

OA: Listen, Sam, I really appreciate it, I really have to run to the bathroom.

SH: There’s the primal reason to end any conversation. In any case, best of luck to you. We will meet down the road.

OA: I hope we do. Take care, Sam.

SH: Take care.