A response for Mr. Hitchens
Ah, Science Vs Religion, the Ultimate Sunday Special Transcendental Fight, Winner Takes All! There is quite a bit of prejudiced thinking that both sides bring to the table in these never-ending discussions, and just like republicans and democrats, the existence of Martians, and the merits of some professional sports team or other, folks just won’t listen to the other party, but will rather grab the microphone, crank the amplifier up to 11 and go into the echo chamber. You know, as we’ve been doing for ever.
Why don’t we dial it back just a notch? You will surely agree, no one is completely rational nor completely irrational all the time. We have our moments. In our good days, we can be rather reasonable.
Much has been said about the vices of extreme religious thinking, and I’m right there with you on that one. But are we really talking about religious thinking per se, that is, in itself? Or are we talking about a more general human vice? I would posit that it may be the latter, that the vice of becoming a fanatic is the culprit here, and which of course looks much uglier and leads to much more catastrophic consequences when you apply it to religion than, say, your favorite fountain drink. Still, a Mountain Dew fanatic is also awful.
But we’re on the 21st century, what with our neurosciences and sophisticated behaviorism and other wonderful tools for peeking inside what makes us tick (and explode, at times). Surely we can make a better assessment of our stupidities than in other periods of history. Surely! Yes?
No?
It is rather sad to say, no. And it is even sadder, that much fallacy is coming from what should be the more rational camp, that is, the one fighting –and why should this be an out-and-out fight, in the first place?– in Science’s corner. We certainly expect the religious discourse –fraught as it’s always been with our hopes and wishes and all kind of emotion, waxing poetic as it is wont to do– to be the one that slips and stumbles and otherwise walks perilously when confronted with hard facts, logic and reasoning, but we all fall prey to our ego, don’t we. And we just go about becoming a fanatic again, for what we take to be a better cause. Our cause is always better.
So. The so-called “Modern-day Four Horsemen”: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, bringing you the newest battle against organized religion which, truth be told, is fascinating. But it is as old as religion itself, we just want something to get excited about every time, so don’t buy the hype that we’re the first ones that ever shake the chains of ignorance. Socrates was way ahead of y’all. But even these high-profile, seasoned thinkers cannot avoid using tricky, fallacious arguments in their discussions. Because of course, we want to win the discussion more than we want to see the naked truth.
Hitchens was a master of debate and an excellent journalist to boot, but he –more than others– also showed the perils of being thoroughly sure of yourself and thus of listening less and less. Before going into his bag of tricks though, let’s look at two ways of considering fanaticism, that most awful of human follies which makes people blind and spoils the most decent of ideas:
The more radical attitude towards religion thinks that it is, by definition, fanatical. And not only this, but it also has the general idea that fanaticism is a religious phenomenon, as if it had a copyright on it or some such exclusivity right. That is a most ungenerous, as well as a very ignorant, proposal. This view also wants to separate science from religion as if human activity could be so easily classified as an apothecary’s inventory.
Now, any fairly reasonable man may be persuaded that what goes on in our minds can be quite a fearsomely murky matter, and that our motivations and our acts may be impossible to explain in the ideal of detail required by a logician. It is most true that when fanaticism contaminates the religious sphere, it becomes a double tragedy, since religion purports to elevate man’s spirit. But it is equally true that fanaticism is an extreme condition of man’s behavior and it may manifest itself in all of man’s activities, taking the name of tribalism, nationalism and a sadly long list of attitudes that imply the idea of “us versus them”, with varying degrees of passion and violence.
The argument that usually goes with these attacks is that “religion craves power” which is, I think, equally false. Fanaticism at its most basic is defensive, more like a sentiment of belonging to a group or an ideal –which is but an abstract group– but taken to a pathological extreme. Man, of course, is always craving for power, whether fanatically or not, and is usually bent on getting it because power –contrary to other pleasures like lust or gluttony, which quickly exhaust the body– is the only pleasure which can be enjoyed permanently: it is a pleasure of the mind and thus it is supremely difficult to renounce (Nietzsche dixit).
In the same way we talk about Religion, we should thus talk about Science, which does not exist as a separate, definite entity, but which like the former is a method to arrive to certain goals, however different. Both methods are incarnated in our forms and our minds, and both are excellent inventions of our spirit, unlike fanaticism which is an affliction rather than an invention. Hence, like in religion, we have scientists who are backward or progressive, fanatical or liberal, because all of them are human before they are scientists.
Now, if we can agree on the former proposal, let’s not go into Truths –of which there are too many– but rather into dares, of which Mr. Hitchens was quite the enthusiast and of whose favorite repertoire we will choose the most famous two. The first one goes like this:
“You do not need religion to do very good things, but you do need religion to do very bad ones.”
As so many similar phrases, this one is constructed to please, and above all, to be easily remembered; it is a prêt-a-porter meme. Unfortunately it is not constructed to be thought about at any reasonable length, mainly because it starts out by implicitly assuming an intolerant vision of religious thought. It is in fact a fine little summary of another very widespread argument which is equally erroneous, which states that “religion is the main cause of wars in history”. So before giving a response to Mr. Hitchens, I will make a parenthesis to answer this barbaric thesis first:
It may very well be that the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the burning of witches at Salem did leave an indelible mark in the West’s collective consciousness, and have been endlessly reinforced by starring in literature and cinema. But going from this to the sentence above is, quite simply, not knowing history. I most definitely do not want to go ahead and say that these are minor trifles when compared to bigger evils, but I merely want to point out that the assertion of “religion as a major source of wars” is false. It is true of course that religion, together with nationalism, have frequently been used as motivating tools to mobilize the people –because if you are going to ask someone to go who knows where and probably get killed in a gruesome way in order to defend your own property, you damn well have to give him a mighty good reason to do so– but religion as a primary motive for getting out of bed, leaving your farm and family and go slaughter some strangers is somewhat rare: as a paradigmatic example, let me present to my reader the expansion of Islam starting from the 7th century; but even this event was not completely removed from considerations of geographic and political power, after the prophet passed away.
Other conflicts in which religious motivation has played a major role –but, and this must be stressed, almost always mixed with more mundane aspirations– are the famed Crusades, the Irish conflict, the Hindu-Islamic conflict which resulted in the separation of Pakistan and Bangladesh from India, and more recently, the armed conflicts in south Thailand.
By contrast –and I am not even going to Google this– I can think of the following events from all regions and historic periods, which have caused catastrophic loss of human life: the Viking invasions of Europe, the Mongol invasions, the conquest of the Americas, the conquest of India by the mogols, An Lushan’s rebellion and the Taiping Rebellion in China, the Soviet purges, the Dutch invasion of Indonesia, the Armenian genocide, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, every war of independence of African and Latin American countries, the Rwandan genocide, the Kosovo War, the Gulf Wars and the invasion of Afghanistan.
Any one will probably agree that that is a sadly impressive list which, even more sadly, could be greatly expanded with hardly any trouble. But not one single conflict in there had religion as a motive, though a couple of them did use it as a motivator, like the Taiping Rebellion. The point is: religion is not the primary cause for war and loss of human life, and it is not even remotely so.
It is certainly abused during times of chaos and it becomes one more tool in the arsenal of human greed and folly, but it is not the trigger. As a simile, we can say that you can probably kill a fellow human being using nothing but a glass cup. But it is clear that the cup was not constructed with such a nefarious objective, but quite more simply, to make one able to drink in a comfortable or even elegant manner. We would hardly confuse a glass cup with a pistol, which was specifically created to destroy whatever thing is put in its sights. And going a little further to draw a conclusion that should be evident, man is man, with or without religion. Let’s try not to pretend that if we could eliminate one of his favorite expressions, we would by some magical transaction eliminate his motives for expressing himself.
If we wish to know the main reason for armed conflict throughout human history, it is a simple matter: we need only take a look at a world map and notice all of those lines that demarcate areas everywhere. Our borders.
Anyway, Mr. Hitchens’s proposal does not need any rebuttal at all, but it may very well do with a minor rephrasing, that may better take into account our general nature and does not unnecessarily hang itself from a specific trait. Here it is, hoping that its potential for becoming a meme may be at least as good as the original:
“You need ideals to do very good things, and you need fanaticism to do very bad ones.”
Ideals and fanaticism: those are two poles of human behavior, whose acknowledgement does not call for any major controversy and that, more importantly, are not circumscribed to any particular expression.
Now for the second phrase, one which has come to be known as “Hitchens’s Challenge” and which goes like this:
“Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.”
This one certainly looks quite more difficult than the first one and if one is to believe the literature so far, it has not been answered to general satisfaction. But whether someone has advanced a definitive answer or not, we must recognize that this dare is much more subtle than the other. Still, if subtlety alone would be enough in these disputes, we should defer to the divines who argued about the finest points of the celestial hierarchies with incomparable fastidiousness. The problem here is that the challenge is posed in a mischievous way. It wants to show only one side of the matter while artfully concealing the other. Artful it certainly is, but it is basically a variation of those trick questions such as “Have you quit beating your wife?”, where no matter whether you answer Yes or No, you are still in the wrong. It may not appear as such at first glance, but the principle is the same: it can be answered, but not with what it requires, which is an example.
If you please, it is closer to those classic movies that revolve around a trial, particularly in the scene where the cunning prosecutor asks the witness to answer a loaded question but only in the form that he wants –usually with a Yes or a No– and not giving him any chance of adding any other explanation, thus creating exactly the impression he wants in the jury.
But the challenge can be answered. If not with the example it demands, with a different scenario that may complete the picture of what is actually being discussed:
Let us imagine a government or other institution, that approaches two scientists: one is a believer and the other is not. Both are asked to work on the development of a nasty biological bomb, that kills in an atrocious manner and for which there is no defense. It is peacetime and the only compensation are money, status and the usual benefits of a secure job. Neither are in dire straits. Do any of the two men necessarily refuse?
I will be bold enough to posit that no, none of the two men will necessarily refuse. Both can refuse, and may do so based on ethical considerations that may or may not be religious; and moreover we can add that this scenario is not hypothetical in the least, for the simple reason that we have indeed created such weapons.
This, as the reader may see, is not an answer, but it is rather adding necessary depth to the question. We should not take a complex human problem and limit its possible explanations to one specific expression of the human spirit. Are we not smarter than that?
