The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
Berman also takes issue with Huntington's thesis, however, in that the concept of a "civilization," to his mind, fails to pick out the real variable at issue. Rather than a clash of civilizations, we have a "clash of ideologies," between "liberalism and the apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against liberal civilization ever since the calamities of the First World War."36 The distinction appears valid, but unimportant. The problem is that certain of our beliefs cannot survive the proximity of certain others. War and conversation are our options, and nothing guarantees that we will always have a choice between them.
Berman sums up our situation beautifully:
What have we needed for these terrorists to prosper? We have needed immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world. We have needed an almost willful lack of curiosity about those failures by people in other parts of the world-the lack of curiosity that allowed us to suppose that totalitarianism had been defeated, even as totalitarianism was reaching a new zenith. We have needed handsome doses of wishful thinking-the kind of simpleminded faith in a rational world that, in its inability to comprehend reality, sparked the totalitarian movements in the first place.... We have needed a provincial ignorance about intellectual currents in other parts of the world. We have needed foolish resentments in Europe, and a foolish arrogance in America. We have needed so many things! But there has been no lack-every needed thing has been here in abundance.37
But we have needed one more thing to bring us precisely to this moment. We have needed a religious doctrine, spread over much of the developing world, that makes sacraments of illiberalism, ignorance, and suicidal violence. Contrary to Berman's analysis, Islamism is not merely the latest flavor of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their worldview has been transfigured by the light of paradise. Given what Islamists believe, it is perfectly rational for them to strangle modernity wherever they can lay hold of it. It is rational, even, for Muslim women to encourage the suicides of their children, as long as they are fighting for the cause of God. Devout Muslims simply know that they are going to a better place. God is both infinitely powerful and infinitely just. Why not, then, delight in the death throes of a sinful world? There are other ideologies with which to expunge the last vapors of reasonableness from a society's discourse, but Islam is undoubtedly one of the best we've got.
Secularists tend to argue that the role of Islam, or religion in general, is secondary to that of politics in determining the character of a society. On this account, people are motivated by their political interests first and find a religious rationale to suit the occasion. No doubt there are numerous examples of political leaders' invoking religion for purely pragmatic, and even cynical, reasons (the tenure of Pakistan's Zia ul-Haq seems a good example). But we should not draw the wrong lesson here. A lever works only if it is attached to something. Someone, after all, must believe in God, for talk of God to be politically efficacious. And I take it to be more or less self-evident that whenever large numbers of people begin turning themselves into bombs, or volunteer their children for use in the clearing of minefields (as was widespread in the Iran-Iraq war),38 the rationale behind their actions has ceased to be merely political. This is not to say that the aspiring martyr does not relish what he imagines will be the thunderous political significance of his final act, but unless a person believes some rather incredible things about this universe-in particular, about what happens after death-he is very unlikely to engage in behavior of this sort. Nothing explains the actions of Muslim extremists, and the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the Muslim world, better than the tenets of Islam.
Given what many Muslims believe, is genuine peace in this world possible? Is the relative weakness of Muslim states the only thing that prevents outright war between Islam and the West? I'm afraid that encouraging answers to such questions are hard to come by. The basis for liberalism in the doctrine of Islam seems meager to the point of being entirely illusory. Although we have seen that the Bible is itself a great reservoir of intolerance, for Christians and Jews alike-as everything from the writings of Augustine to the present actions of Israeli settlers demonstrates-it is not difficult to find great swaths of the Good Book, as well as Christian and Jewish exegesis, that offer counterarguments. The Christian who wants to live in the full presence of rationality and modernity can keep the Jesus of Matthew sermonizing upon the mount and simply ignore the world-consuming rigmarole of Revelation. Islam appears to offer no such refuge for one who would live peacefully in a pluralistic world. Of course, glimmers of hope can be found in even the shadiest of places: as Berman points out, the diatribes of Muslim orthodoxy are predicated upon the fear that Western liberalism is in the process of invading the Muslim mind and "stealing his loyalty"-indicating that Muslims, like other people, are susceptible to the siren's song of liberalism.39 We must surely hope so. The character of their religious beliefs, however, suggests that they will be less susceptible than the rest of us.
For reasons we have already begun to explore, there is a deep bias in our discourse against conclusions of this sort. With respect to Islam, the liberal tendency is to blame the West for raising the ire of the Muslim world, through centuries of self-serving conquest and meddling, while conservatives tend to blame other contingent features of Middle East, Arab, or Muslim history. The problem seems to have been located everywhere except at the core of the Muslim faith-but faith is precisely what differentiates every Muslim from every infidel. Without faith, most Muslim grievances against the West would be impossible even to formulate, much less avenge.
Leftist Unreason and the Strange Case of Noam Chomsky
Nevertheless, many people are now convinced that the attacks of September 11 say little about Islam and much about the sordid career of the West-in particular, about the failures of U.S. foreign policy. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard gives these themes an especially luxuriant expression, declaring that terrorism is a necessary consequence of American "hegemony." He goes so far as to suggest that we were secretly hoping that such devastation would be visited upon us:
At a pinch we can say that they did it, but we wished for it.... When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer. It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this brutal retaliation.... This is terror against terror-there is no longer any ideology behind it. We are far beyond ideology and politics now.... As if the power bearing these towers suddenly lost all energy, all resilience; as though that arrogant power suddenly gave way under the pressure of too intense an effort: the effort always to be the unique world model.40
If one were feeling charitable, one might assume that something essential to these profundities got lost in translation. I think it far more likely, however, that it did not survive translation into French. If Baudrillard had been obliged to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban, would he have thought that the horrible abridgments of his freedom were a matter of the United States's "effort always to be the unique world model" ? Would the peculiar half time entertainment at every soccer match-where suspected fornicators, adulterers, and thieves were regularly butchered in the dirt at centerfield-have struck him as the first rumblings of a "terroristic situational transfer" ? We may be beyond politics, but we are not in the least "beyond ideology" now. Ideology is all that our enemies have.41
And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard view the events of September 11 as a consequence of American foreign policy. Perhaps the foremost among them is Noam Chomsky. In addition to making foundational contributions to linguistics and the psychology of language, Chomsky has been a persistent critic of U.S. foreign policy for over thr
In his book 9-21, with rubble of the World Trade Center still piled high and smoldering, Chomsky urged us not to forget that "the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state." In support of this claim he catalogs a number of American misdeeds, including the sanctions that the United States imposed upon Iraq, which led to the death of "maybe half a million children," and the 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan, which may have set the stage for tens of thousands of innocent Sudanese to die of tuberculosis, malaria, and other treatable diseases. Chomsky does not hesitate to draw moral equivalences here: "For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere."42
Before pointing out just how wayward Chomsky's thinking is on this subject, I would like to concede many of his points, since they have the virtue of being both generally important and irrelevant to the matter at hand. There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky's thesis whole. To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share
Chomsky's acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.
Take the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant: according to Chomsky, the atrocity of September 11 pales in comparison with that perpetrated by the Clinton administration in August 1998. But let us now ask some very basic questions that Chomsky seems to have neglected to ask himself: What did the U.S. government think it was doing when it sent cruise missiles into Sudan? Destroying a chemical weapons site used by Al Qaeda. Did the Clinton administration intend to bring about the deaths of thousands of Sudanese children? No. Was our goal to kill as many Sudanese as we could? No. Were we trying to kill anyone at all? Not unless we thought members of Al Qaeda would be at the Al-Shifa facility in the middle of the night. Asking these questions about Osama bin Laden and the nineteen hijackers puts us in a different moral universe entirely.
If we are inclined to follow Chomsky down the path of moral equivalence and ignore the role of human intentions, we can forget about the bombing of the Al-Shifa plant, because many of the things we did not do in Sudan had even greater consequences. What about all the money and food we simply never thought to give the Sudanese prior to 1998? How many children did we kill (that is, not save) just by living in blissful ignorance of the conditions in Sudan? Surely if we had all made it a priority to keep death out of Sudan for as long as possible, untold millions could have been saved from whatever it was that wound up killing them. We could have sent teams of well-intentioned men and women into Khartoum to ensure that the Sudanese wore their seatbelts. Are we culpable for all the preventable injury and death that we did nothing to prevent? We may be, up to a point. The philosopher Peter Unger has made a persuasive case that a single dollar spent on anything but the absolute essentials of our survival is a dollar that has some starving child's blood on it.43 Perhaps we do have far more moral responsibility for the state of the world than most of us seem ready to contemplate. This is not Chomsky's argument, however.
Anudhati Roy, a great admirer of Chomsky, has summed up his position very well:
[T]he U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it judges others.... Its technique is to position itself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives, whose markets it's trying to free, whose societies it's trying to modernize, whose women it's trying to liberate, whose souls it's trying to save.... [T]he U.S. government has conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people "for their own good."44
But we are, in many respects, just such a "well-intentioned giant." And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it "the perfect weapon."
Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of "Collateral Damage"
What we euphemistically describe as "collateral damage" in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons-weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property. What would we do with such technology? Pacifists would refuse to use it, despite the variety of monsters currently loose in the world: the killers and torturers of children, the genocidal sadists, the men who, for want of the right genes, the right upbringing, or the right ideas, cannot possibly be expected to live peacefully with the rest of us. I will say a few things about pacifism in a later chapter-for it seems to me to be a deeply immoral position that comes to us swaddled in the dogma of highest moralism-but most of us are not pacifists. Most of us would elect to use weapons of this sort. A moment's thought reveals that a person's use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics.
Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.)-in the pages of writers like Roy and Chomsky, in the Arab press, and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs ? Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers ? Whether or not you admire the man's politics-or the man-there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done ? They would have used them rather differently.
It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment. Political and economic stability, literacy, a modicum of social equality-where such things are lacking, people tend to find many compelling reasons to treat one another rather badly. Our recent history offers much evidence of our own development on these fronts, and a corresponding change
New Yorkers of the nineteenth century were barbarians by our present standards? To say of another culture that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social development is a terrible criticism indeed, given how far we've come in that time. Now imagine the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the developing world.
Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as 1968, at My Lai:
Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals. There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired at Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down every house. They raped women and girls and then killed them. They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps. Pregnant women had their stomachs slashed open and were left to die. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machine-gunned in a ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.45