Sam Harris: “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals”

See also my original post plus responses on Freethought Forum.

Written 5 January 2007:

Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith was awful, but this article clinches the danger of his political ignorance. The full text is no longer available free to the general public. The original title I had is:

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
Sam Harris

Quote:

... But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

This is what I find now:

It’s real, it’s scary, it’s a cult of death
Liberals are soft on terrorism —and dangerously out of touch with the reality of global Muslim extremism.
Los Angeles Times [HOME EDITION], Sept. 18, 2006, p. B.11.

While you need to consult Harris’s article for reference, here is my criticism, written 18 September 2006.

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(1) What is the social composition and ideological affiliation of the people polled who believe that the Bush administration itself blew up the Towers? Are more than a third of Americans on the liberal fringe?

(2) Where is the boundary between “liberals” and the “Left”?

(3) Since when do liberals hold this position?—:

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.

(4) What is the basis of this fantasy:

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause.
Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

(5) The article abounds with vague generalizations of craven liberals and crazed Muslims, but the harsh reality which the mealy-mouthed weak-kneed liberals can’t face up to doesn’t get much treatment from Harris—instead only disconnected sound bites about the Muslim menace.

(6) The upshot is that the liberals make excuses for the Muslims, exculpating them as putative victims of the West. But even if this were uniformly true, where is the basis for analyzing what’s really going on in the Muslim world? None except that they are irrational fanatics possessed by a crazed religion out to destroy civilization.

Harris has succumbed to the hysterical, shallow, sound-bite culture in which appeals to fear and generalized ideological phenomena substitute for substantive social analysis.

And in this, Harris is only a typical liberal, nothing more.

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Addendum: Sam Harris the liberal [written 19 September 2006]

. . . When I think of liberals, I think of them napalming Vietnamese peasants.

I asked what is the borderline between liberals and the left, because (1) this tendency to exculpate Islamic extremists is more likely to be found on the left, though there too there is a wide difference of opinion and analysis, (2) Harris’ hysterical propaganda piece reminded me how Christopher Hitchens lost his mind after 9–11 and turned on the left, making similar blanket accusations. Harris is much less sophisticated than Hitchens. Harris refers to his “fellow liberals”, and indeed, he is very much like them, always looking for an ass to kiss.

If you re-read Harris’ piece, you’ll see it’s pure propaganda, he’s saying nothing specific at all, there’s no real social analysis, just an accusation that liberals are spineless and that only the right wing knows how to get tough with Muslim fanatics, whose entire basis of political existence is a death wish. Stupid and dangerous.

Let’s look at his social/political “analysis”:

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.

The third paragraph is the only one with real information, albeit a generalization, but let’s accept it as true, and in any case, it reveals the ideological position of the 9–11 conspirators and others like them. But is this who you think you’re seeing every time you see an angry mob on the TV screen or read about a suicide bomber in the Middle East? This lack of differentiation is as true of Harris as it is of people on the left who ignore it. But even making this discrimination, we are ill-disposed to diagnose the source of this ideological motivation other than the superstitious belief in virgins and paradise. This hardly gives an adequate personality profile of Muslim fascists—I have no problem with calling them fascists. And it fails to give a social profile of the other retrograde manifestations of Islam throughout the world.

Let’s discuss the incident of the cartoon of Muhammed that aroused such a violent reaction. Is it true that this is just a free speech issue as portrayed throughout the western media, and that those who were incensed by the cartoon were just unreasonable fanatics? If this were a replay of the Salman Rushdie affair, I could see it. But the cartoon was a deliberate right-wing act of provocation, and whatever negative things can be said about Muhammed, portraying him as a contemporary bomb-throwing terrorist is a slander directed at the entire Muslim population. Suppose this newspaper had published a caricature of Moses with a huge hook nose and a bag of gold behind his back? What conclusion would you draw from that?

Now the violence of the reaction is another matter. Even so, we see little of the mechanisms by which these angry demonstrations and violent reactions are orchestrated, in other words, how the news is filtered to the various angry mobs who react to it.

The current flap over the pronouncement of the Nazi Pope is much more disturbing, actually. My reaction to Cardinal Ratsass would be: look who’s calling the kettle black. But what the news media is reporting is much more serious than the reaction to the cartoon: churches were burned and Christians were murdered—not officials of the Catholic Church, not priests or bishops, but, as far as we know, innocent scapegoats of a different religious persuasion. This is much much more ominous, and it shows that people are stupid everywhere; they’d rather turn on the nearest scapegoat than formulate a calculated response to what they perceive as an insult. But again, when I saw the reports on TV, I asked myself, how did the angry mobs who retaliated violently against the Pope’s statement get the news, in what context, framed and spinned in what fashion, and why were they primed to attack the targets they did? It’s not a question of making excuses for them, it’s a matter of understanding their social perspective and how they’ve been conditioned to interpret and react to current events. I don’t think attributing their behavior to their superstitious belief in virgins in paradise explains a damn thing, any more than I think our rednecks here are fundamentally motivated by faith in the Rapture.

As for his distinctions between Muslims vs. Israelis and Americans, Harris is living in a fantasy world. I doubt there are tens of millions of Muslims who are scarier than Dick Cheney, though I don’t doubt that there are a substantial number of such people, let’s say about the same proportion of them as we have here. Harris reveals himself in the end to be a typical liberal, as divorced from reality and spineless as the rest, primed to cave in to the first strongman who promises to protect him from the Muslim hordes.