Book Review: The End of Faith, by Sam Harris

I'm very glad Sam Harris wrote The End of Faith, and it took great courage for him to write it. He travels with bodyguards now, due to multiple death threats. What did he say to earn such hatred? Paraphrased, he said, to the believers in the God of Abraham, "Your faith is dangerous nonsense." This is very much against the mainstream current of our culture, to dare to directly criticize someone's religious beliefs. Just recently, the President of the U.S. apologized publicly because some Korans accidentally got burned by the military. Apparently, showing even unintended disrespect for this book is much worse than killing and maiming innocent children, something President Obama does every time he authorizes a drone strike, but for which he has never apologized. In daring to criticize Islam most severely and directly, Sam Harris is taking exactly the opposite approach. It remains to be seen which approach will bear the fruit of peaceful coexistence in the long run, but I applaud Harris for having the guts to state the unpopular position and bringing up some very troubling and important questions about the prevailing moral beliefs of our age.

As you may know, I am a devout atheist myself. I think believing that the Bible is literally true, or that a God like the one described there exists is at best extremely unlikely, and in my judgement, preposterous and absurd. I don't feel the need to offer an alternative explanation for the origin of the universe in order to say that Rick Santorum's God is as silly as all the other creation myths created by all the other cultures which do not share his Christian traditions.

While Harris is clearly a nonbeliever, he is not really pushing an atheist agenda. His main premise is that the existence of fundamentalism, in particular Muslim fundamentalism, is a threat to our existence as a species in this age of Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Given the number of well-documented suicide attacks carried out by radical Muslims, it's hard to deny that significant danger exists unless we learn to quell the anger of these people or control access to WMDs.  As Harris describes, neither outcome seems likely, certainly not as long as "freedom of religious expression" is allowed to enjoy its privileged place in our world of ideas.  Harris gives religious moderates a thorough drubbing as well, given the enabling role they play for allowing literalist interpretations of our sacred texts which inspire extremists.  He does, however, leave a door open to religion, particularly Islam, "fixing" itself by downgrading its sacred texts to the status of myth, and accepting modernity.  In order for us to survive, Harris contends, we must remove faith, i.e., certainty without evidence, from its privileged place of being off-limits to criticism.

There is much I dislike about The End of Faith, particularly with regard to Harris' prescriptions for what we should do about the danger posed by faith.  The book is decidedly alarmist, trying to rouse us to action to face this danger.  Harris spends considerable time tearing down ideas that I still hold dear, even after reading his book: that preemptive war is evil, and that American foreign policy, such as military intervention in the Middle East and our support of secular Arab tyrants is partly responsible for Muslim terrorism against the West.  Harris argues that said tyrants, while undeniably evil, are holding back the greater evil of the theocratic states which would inevitably arise if the Muslims of the Middle East were given self-determination.  And while he admits that a nuclear first strike against a nuclear-armed Islamist state would be a horrible crime, he defends this possibility as the lesser evil compared to allowing Islam to conquer the Western world.  I personally would rather live under sharia law than be responsible for the nuclear annihilation of all Muslims.

Harris also spends time defending the excesses of Israeli occupation and oppression of minorities by saying that nobody else would be more restrained and reasonable in a similar situation.  Maybe so, but the situation could be changed.  I believe Harris fails to see the bigger picture in his support for Israeli oppression and apartheid, and his promotion of the idea that the West is, in fact, at war with Islam.  Since questions of religious identity form the basis of the Israeli-Arab conflict, it's a little frustrating for atheists like myself, who see the whole conflict as people fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.

Harris argues that Western meddling in the Muslim world is not the main reason for Islamic terrorism, and that the central tenets of Islam would invent reasons to war with the West if we had not provided them with reasons such as our support for Israel and secular Arab tyrants.  I disagree.  I think if contemporary politics did not provoke the anger of Muslims, there would be room for moderation and modernization in Islam.  The greatest evidence for this comes from Harris' own data, which shows that sentiment regarding the West and the justification for terrorism varies by nation, with the most extreme views being held in those parts of the world most torn by recent violent conflict.

Harris' imagination also fails when he holds up militarism as the best response to the threat of militant Islamism.  Granted, Harris would prefer that we would all give up our faith and turn to reason in conducting human relations.  That is why he wrote The End of Faith, and why he founded Project Reason.  In this respect, our ideals may be the same, and our missions overlap (Project Reason's tagline is "Spreading Science and Secular Values").  However, I believe these values can only be spread by persuasion, not by bombs and guns.  Harris charts a confusing zig-zag path of moral calculus by trying to simultaneously acknowledge and condemn the atrocities the U.S. has carried out in the world while also elevating them above the atrocities of Muslim terrorists by claiming intent is what matters.  First, I am sure Harris does not know everything our leaders know when they plan their bombing raids, and to claim that they do not intend civilian casualties seems very naive at best.  But more importantly, I don't think the victim of violence really cares whether his injury or death resulted from intentional harm or the sloppy violence of collateral damage.  Harris' own text seems to indicate his confusion and self-contradiction.  The footnote to his sentence "Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything." concludes "Intentions matter, but they are not all that matter."

Harris' defense of American collateral damage as morally superior to the intentional civilian carnage of the suicide bomber relies on thought experiments about how different people would use "perfect weapons" (those which can be employed risk-free without collateral damage).  Such weapons do not exist, so debating how George Bush might use them vs. how Osama bin Laden might use them is an exercise in mental masturbation.  We must judge people's actions in the real world in which we live.  Harris also criticizes pacifism as a deeply immoral philosophy, on the grounds that failure to defend ourselves and our neighbors against antisocial, destructive people is permitting suffering to occur needlessly.  I basically agree with Harris that a dogmatic, absolute pacifism does give too much leeway to immoral, violent people, but this is a straw man argument.  Harris himself acknowledges that hardly any of us are pacifist to this degree.  People like myself believe not in complete non-violence, but in non-aggression, that is, against taking the first swing.

Harris argues that a transition to civil society cannot be made without forcing people to be civil at the point of a gun.  Fundamental to this belief is Harris' criticism of pacifism and subsequent justification of preemptive war.  Following this logic to its extreme shows its absurdity: we should just kill everyone, since the potential for violence exists everywhere.  Back in the real world, preemptive war is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Hate and violence breeds hate and violence.  Contrary to Harris' obsessive need to control all risk, no matter what the cost, we could, in fact, wait and see if any Islamic terrorists obtain and use WMDs.  If they do, it would be a tragedy for sure, but then we could respond, militarily or otherwise, to a proportional degree, and with real moral superiority, since we would not be violating the non-aggression principle.  If we reject preemptive war, maybe the feared massive terrorist attacks will never come.  In fact, if the President of the U.S. said publicly that we would no longer invade other nations, this would do much to quell the fear which drives the terrorism in the first place.  If the United States condemned nuclear weapons and unilaterally destroyed much of its current arsenal, that might be a sign to the world that maybe they are not a good idea.  Instead, we invade non-nuclear states and leave alone the nuclear ones, all but guaranteeing that any rational head of state will want his own nuclear weapons.

Harris thoroughly rejects moral relativism, the belief that we should not judge other cultures based on the standards which developed in our culture.  I believe Harris has again gotten his head too much in the clouds on this one, and is arguing an abstract debate which has little relevance in the real world.  I agree with him that absolute moral judgement can and should be made, but I think these judgments should be few and far between.  I also feel that cultural relativism is is very important and relevant in determining what solutions should be applied to injustice.  The simple fact of the matter is that the Christian-dominated West has a long history of making problems worse by the particular means we choose to solve them.  We simply don't know enough and are not perfect enough ourselves to suggest or enforce solutions to moral injustice.  Again, intentions do not matter as much as results.  People and nations of the world must be left to self-determination if evolution to peaceful coexistence is to be achieved.  We can lead by example, but we cannot force people to be moral by our standards by bombing them.

Ultimately, acceptance of Harris' ideas on the moral appropriateness of preemptive war relies on how much one agrees with his conclusion that the survival of civilization depends on eliminating Islam and other faith-based judgments from public discourse.  He sees the situation as very dire, life and death.  I do not.  While one or two nuclear or biological terrorist attacks would be horrible tragedies, civilization as we know if would not end with such an occurrence.  In fact, the only real existential threat humanity faces now is nuclear winter, which can only be caused by the massive nuclear arsenals held by those "well-intentioned giants" such as the United States.  If only Harris would put his attention to reducing this danger, then I would accept he is actually concerned with the fate of humanity, rather than the survival of Western culture above Muslim culture.

Despite its flaws, I very much appreciate the contribution Harris has made in writing The End of Faith.  We would all like a more rational world, and the book makes crystal clear that in order to get there, we must completely rethink what we mean by freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.  Only when religion can be criticized, like all other beliefs may be, can we throw off the final, lingering drag of the Dark Ages on human progress.