Imagining a Future of Tolerance
Balancing the need for intellectual exploration with a healthy regard for its societal impact
I have discovered something about myself. I have a penchant for the philosophical mindset.
This is a mindset whose primary concern is discovering what is true about any given question. It doesn’t matter if the question seems absurd, impossible, or completely detached from the tasks of daily functioning. Is there an afterlife? Why is the sky blue? Are mosquitoes conscious? I want to know what the truth is. Note, however, that this is not an inherently moral mindset. It can be detached and aloof. It can paralyze itself with esoteric complications while the world burns around it. Those of us operating from this framework can have a hard time prioritizing anything else. As Robert Nozick once put it:
Does life have meaning? Are there objective ethical truths? Do we have free will? What is the nature of our identity as selves? Must our knowledge and understanding stay within fixed limits? These questions moved me, and others, to enter the study of philosophy. I care what their answers are. While such other philosophical intricacies as whether sets or numbers exist can be fun for a time, they do not make us tremble.
Like Nozick, this mindset feels natural to me, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But I also know it’s not the only way minds approach problems.
There is a political mindset which often operates in parallel and sometimes in opposition to the philosophical. This mindset is primarily concerned with discovering what is helpful to express or think about in response to any given question. If speaking the truth isn’t helpful, the political mind does not speak it. The goal of this mindset is to discover what motivates humans to move in a certain direction and subsequently say or do precisely the thing that must be done to move as many minds as effectively and swiftly as possible. This is not an inherently moral mindset either. It can be, and often has been, directed toward terrible ends.
There is also the psychological mindset which aims to discover how minds work. There are, of course, philosophical and political dimensions to the operations of human minds. If either of these are to be successful in their defined goals, it will be on the basis of taking seriously the psychological mindset and its deliverances.
One of my core beliefs is that an intellectual sweet spot exists at the intersection of these three mindsets. I am convinced that just about every contentious and consequential topic of our time can be best served by a genuine effort to find the overlapping middle in a Venn diagram of the three mindsets. The challenge is to locate that elusive sliver offering truthfulness and helpfulness. On topics as delicate as Islam, immigration, violence, universal human rights, and others, this twin commitment to truth and helpfulness is of paramount importance.
I was a sophomore at a very left-leaning university in Massachusetts on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Thanks to the single pre-9:00 a.m. course that I had on my schedule that term — it was a course on medical ethics — I was up early that day.
I caught the news as I was still getting ready. They were reporting a terrible accident in lower Manhattan. I shuddered at the image of a smoking tower on the television and hopped into the shower. By the time I got to class, suspicion was growing that the event was more sinister than mere pilot error. My professor had a radio on his desk tuned to the news as he began his hopelessly distracted lecture. Within the first few minutes of class the second plane hit. He dismissed us immediately. By the time I got back to my dorm, all of my roommates were gathered in the common area staring at the screen. The rest of my story from that day is predictable and common — pain, fear, confusion, anger, sadness.
Before the cultural dust had fully settled, a singular question materialized in what seemed like every cable news report, every newspaper headline, and every political conversation. The question was obvious and innocent enough: “Why do they hate us?”
I remember knowing that how we ultimately answered that question would have profound implications. It could derail the global experiment or redefine it.
I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia in the ’80s and early ’90s. As many in my generation have recently come to realize, we had an easy go of things in those days. Things seemed secure. Things seemed uncomplicated. It was a kind of lovely dream. There was plenty of space and an absence of urgency to engage in any national tug-of-war over who we were. I have a vague memory of yellow ribbons on trees outside of my elementary school to show support for the troops in the first gulf war but for the most part my “American-ness” was not deeply pondered. (At least, this was the case for me, from my admittedly privileged perch in the ‘burbs.)
After 9/11, I felt “American” for the first time. I watched the first Phillies game that was played after the attacks. They were playing the Braves. The Phillies were terrible (as they often were in my youth) so they had no chance of making the playoffs but the stadium was packed that night. No one paid much attention to the game. The crowd just wanted to be together and to participate in a unifying ritual. Spontaneous “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chants rained down on scenes as mundane as middle-inning pitching changes. I saw a shirtless man running along the concourse with an oversized American flag trailing triumphantly behind him. The crowd indulged every repetitive pass the flag made with genuine cheers and tears. I think the Phillies won and Scott Rolen hit a long home run to left field. It didn’t matter.
My parents put up a small American flag above our garage. This was something that none of us would have even thought to do pre-9/11. It felt easy, like hope, or like a prayer that read:
The nation as a collective myth will find its way through these thorns intact and stronger. Amen.
We didn’t have much evidence for that hope but perhaps we knew that’s exactly the moment when a flag can do its most important work.
“Does ideology have anything to do with it?”
By late September 2001, my college friends and I were grappling with the national why-do-they-hate-us debate on the campus green. I remember asking that question naively enough. I don’t think the tone of my voice indicated what I thought the answer must be. It may have. The philosophical mind tends not to dwell so much on the tonal dimensions of utterances — the way I said it certainly might have telegraphed something. If so, it was purely by accident — consciously, I merely attempted to arrive at the truth.
“What exactly do you mean?” There was no ignoring tone in this case. My friend’s response was unmistakably accusatory.
“You know, like… Islam?”
It didn’t take long for me to be called a “racist,” an “Islamophobe,” and an “imperialist.” I backed down quickly and laughed off any potential conflict. I also didn’t want to complicate my friendships. But my philosophical mind was far from satisfied. This may have been the moment I first started to appreciate and recognize it. Was my question crazy? I understand that I can be wrong about an answer, but, in this case, can I be wrong by asking a question?
Within a month of the American flag adorning my parents garage door, they quietly took it down. To them, the symbol had become a divisive message which implied support for a particular political stance and the beating of war drums that, fueled by the stark “with us or against us” rhetoric of George W. Bush, advocated for violent regime change in the Middle East. The warning signs that we would collectively fail to ensure an ongoing rational conversation were everywhere. My parents never put the flag back up. The symbol — the flag — has not quite recovered. (Doubt that statement? Ask yourself: Upon seeing a lone American flag bumper sticker on the car in front you on the highway, could you guess with a high degree of confidence which political party the driver last voted for?)
I refrained from bringing up my nagging questions for the remainder of my college career. It was obvious that I didn’t know how to do it and I was pretty sure that being branded a bigot at a small liberal school was not something that would serve me well. But I did find Sam Harris’s writing.
Here was someone actually giving voice to the questions I had wrestled with in my mind. It was refreshing. His thinking was that it falls on us to think through these thorny questions, and if we fail to have this conversation honestly, the far right is going to have it for us. So Harris and a handful of others held public debates on the subject. They usually didn’t go well. Harris recognized, though, that he was engaged in a philosophical exploration and often entangled with politically minded opponents. In a 2007 C-SPAN debate with a frequent combatant, Reza Aslan, Harris explained what his role is, and what it isn’t, as it relates to the broader social implications:
It’s perfectly clear to me that my style of conversation is not what can be broadcast to the Muslim world to change people’s minds. That is your job. You are much better suited for that job. And I would agree with you that in order to empower the moderates of the Muslim world, drawing cartoons of the prophet and writing paragraphs of the sort that I have written is not a strategy. I am not a diplomat.
When a national figure like Barack Obama or George W. Bush stands in front of the nation after a terrible event and repeats the refrain, “This has nothing to do with Islam,” it occasions at least two highly significant reactions. The first is a product of the political mindset, which appreciates that even if this line is not true it is nevertheless helpful. But the other thought comes from the philosophical mindset, a mindset that, in Aristotle’s words, “desires to understand,” a mindset intellectually compelled to evaluate whether that thesis is actually true.
This is where the psychological mindset can help. This is a mindset far less eager to take people at their professed word. We humans are, in fact, tremendously stubborn post-hoc rationalization machines. The psychologist not only understands this well, but applies it in ways that enable fuller explanatory accounts than either of the other two mindsets operating on their own.
In 2016, the global conversation descended further into divergent and dangerous noise. Harris’s initial hypothesis — that if the masses abdicated their responsibility to have important discussions the far-right would fill this void — proved prophetic. As Donald Trump signaled a kind of hourglass-running-out moment, as malignant forces increasingly became emboldened to take the reins on these conversations online, there was an urgency to say something profoundly true and helpful that might rescue the conversation.
It was around this time I read Sam Harris’s collaborative book with Maajid Nawaz.
Nawaz has a political mindset. He has a gift for words and is highly effective at mobilizing others. This gift was unfortunately deployed for the work of the Hizb ut-Tahrir’s cause for much of his early life. This lead to his eventual imprisonment in Egypt and a complicated de-radicalization process. By the time he re-engaged with Harris, after an initial failed intellectual clash four years prior, he was actively advocating for reform within Islam.
Their conversation struck me as genuine and helpful. It was sloppy and contentious. It was flawed and imperfect. It was challenging and daunting. It was inspiring and useful. It tiptoed towards what felt like a center of that diagram.
Every conversation I had on this topic improved after reading their dialogue. I could only dream of how much better things may have gone if I had the tools displayed in that conversation on my college campus in 2001. I reached out to a group in Australia which was producing a live tour and suggested there was a documentary film which ought to be made about this collaboration. It soon became a reality.
Right as Donald Trump seemed to be a legitimate threat to win the presidency, or perhaps more accurately, when Hillary Clinton looked to fumble it away, Harris wrote a post on his blog. He saw Clinton repeating many of the same messages as her predecessors. Harris’s post was called “What Hillary Clinton Should Say about Islam and the ‘War on Terror.’”
The entire speech is worth reading, but here is an important bit of setup. It’s tantalizingly easy to hear this in Hillary’s voice:
In the past, I’ve said that groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda have nothing to do with Islam. And President Obama has said the same. This way of speaking has been guided by the belief that if we said anything that could be spun as confirming the narrative of groups like ISIS — suggesting that the West is hostile to the religion of Islam, if only to its most radical strands — we would drive more Muslims into the arms of the jihadists and the theocrats, preventing the very cooperation we need to win a war of ideas against radical Islam. I now see this situation differently. I now believe that we have been selling most Muslims short. And I think we are all paying an unacceptable price for not speaking clearly about the link between specific religious ideas and the sectarian hatred that is dividing the Muslim world.
Needless to say, this speech was never read. Donald Trump won the election. And two years later my documentary about Sam and Maajid trying to find the true and helpful way to speak about this issue is being released into an even more fraught climate than when I began filming.
A loud and lingering question in my mind is where do we go from here. How do we find the space to have a rational conversation without letting it be redirected toward very regrettable aims? There is no instruction manual for this.
The two men deploy an analogy of walking a tightrope in this conversation. We liked the analogy so much that we filmed with actual tightrope walkers during the production. On one side is a pit whose deafening shouts for unimaginative closed societies leave no room for public intellectual struggle or moral innovation; on the other is the civilizationally suicidal delusion that may inadvertently abandon the most vulnerable victims in the world. The fear is that the tightrope has already narrowed significantly. The hope is that it has not snapped entirely.
I don’t know the exact formula but it strikes me that a central part of the effort to regain the conversation will be to merge the philosophical, political, and psychological minds in the quest to find true and helpful conversations. I hope the film can help pave the way towards the overlap. We’re all desperately searching for it and when people feel like they’ve found it, it’s worth hearing them out.
