Harris’ work, like all excellent theses, left me with quite a few questions. The one I’m most interested in right now is what the content of the reactions from Muslims who agreed with him were. Their reactions, and the possible dialogues he had with them (as he mentioned in the epilogue) could be a guide as to a larger reaction from the faith community that he attacks.
When approaching The End of Faith it is important to understand the author’s purpose. Harris is an atheist philosopher who studies the phenomenon of faith. It’s right there on the jacket. Thus he is going to criticize not just “faith,” but irrationality that protects itself with religion. He’s going to see that as a problem; comparatively he’s going to ignore other causes of individual action (such as suicide bombings, etc) in order to criticize the element he feels hasn’t been criticized enough. Then he will assert that morality and ethics can be had outside of religion, and he’ll do a few exercizes to show that, using his very academic philosophy language that is outside the experience or interest of many readers. Finally, he’ll reconcile the “good” parts of faith-that is, the extraordinary experiences-with his training as a logical philosopher.
It was the last two sections where my interest went down (and judging from the other All Consuming comments below, where a few other folks lost interest as well). As an atheist, I certainly have an interest in justifying and exploring my non-religiously inspired ethics, but I am not interested studying philosophy to do so. I feel like I missed some of his arguments there because I’m not familiar with the history of philosophical thought. And while ethics is always going to be abstract, it was also more difficult to connect to the hypothetical ethics arguments of this section as compared to the concrete ethical arguments of the first part of the book. Whether that’s laziness on my part or an unrealistic expectation about the discussion of ethics, the result is something that non-academics and/or non-philosophers will find difficult to peruse.
I kept thinking through the whole book what the reaction of my high-school dropout super-Catholic uncle would think. He wouldn’t even get past the first chapter; the intellectual language is prohibitive in this way. Of course that’s part of the problem of academia, but I feel that Harris’ purpose is not to limit the book to a relatively small number of intellectuals. Somehow I have hope that the language barrier between the highly educated and everyone else can be breached and a thesis can still have integrety with the Academy. (Although considering the language of philosophy, perhaps Harris WAS dumbing it down already. In any case it was certainly logically vigorous.) A final point on the structure of the book before I get to the content: the language was VERY male-centered. He mentioned women, but still used the archaic “man” when he meant “humanity” and used males in all his examples of hypothetical people in hypothetical situations. And when he used examples of women (in real life or hypothetically), they were ALWAYS victims. For example, on page 27 the examples of 2002 conflict between Muslims and Hindus were all examples of women being raped, killed, and mutilated. It’s a minor point that doesn’t really affect his overall argument, but it annoyed me. And it did raise some questions in my mind about the totality of his statements; at one point he argues that if Muslims are given the vote, they will rip away all of their civil liberties. I question this. Would Muslim women really, actually vote to make it impossible for them to leave the house without a male escourt, or to be stoned for showing an ankle in public? I doubt it. He assumes here that all Muslims, including women, would support this. Maybe this is true. However, in countries like this (say, Saudi Arabia) women don’t have equitable legal power in the first place. However, it is very nice to have an ally who thinks that rape as a weapon of war and honor killings are some of the most heinous actions a society can sanction and who treats these problems as something worth discussing. Although most people would say these are bad (if they didn’t dispute the truth of them), they (especially men) would not necessarily think them worth discussing. He blames the people who need blaming, as opposed to Muslims who argue that honor killings, for example, is an AFRICAN phenomenon, not a Muslim one. Sounds far more racist to me than Harris’ argument that religious-based ideas about female sexuality and honor cause honor killings. (To be fair, he doesn’t discuss non-African/Middle Eastern Muslims’ practice in honor killings, like those that live in Indonesia or China. If they also kill women for sexual “honor,” more so than people who don’t believe as they do, then it is safe to say that it is definitely a part of Islam, as opposed to a part of Islam that fits with existing regional tendencies.)
I like and agree with Harris on most points. Religion is bad for the world. People complicate their lives by creating unnecessary conflict over things that no one can prove; it’s a battle over who’s indoctrinated better than whom. His arguments are generally airtight and bring up a lot of interesting material. His discussion about torture shows, too, how sometimes just logic won’t deliver the correct ethical answer. By including it he acknowledges the limits or “blind spots” of his ideas but, as stated in the beginning, that doesn’t mean that striving for rational truths aren’t worth pursuing.
His bias focuses on the role of belief; that is the point of the book. To that extent he tries to rule out others who argue that economic factors or whatever other reason are the causes of (especially Muslim) violence. I’m not sure that he really is pursuasive in this matter. But really it is a chicken-and-egg argument. Whether someone adopts violent religious beliefs in order to counter Western influence or not, the end result is that violence happened, and that it couldn’t have happened in the way it did without the corresponding religious beliefs. In this Harris is absolutely correct. This is a debate worth having, however, for if fixing U.S. behavior regarding the Middle East would lead to a recession in religious violence, then maybe that would be a good course to take. However, I find it suspicious, as Harris does and as he points out, that there are no Tibetan suicide bombers, and that Jain fundamentalism sweeping across the world would not be a problem, since Jains don’t kill anything.
On to the subject that Harris opens himself to attack for by including it at all: racism. He asserts that his critique cannot be racist, since there is no biological basis for certain kinds of religious belief. True. However, that’s a limited definition of racism, and its forms these days can get pretty subtle. Beyond that, there’s the problem of new kinds of discrimination that have no name. What Harris IS guilty of is religious-ism. There’s no word for that, because as he discusses, that hasn’t been seen as a problem in the past. It is perfectly acceptable to discriminate against someone because of religion, even now, though legally in the U.S. it isn’t. But that’s the basis for conversion, right? Intolerance of religious differences. And conversion is perfectly acceptable to most.
So Harris certainly discriminates, and against some more than others (Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism more than Buddhism). He also focuses on some areas more than others (Middle Eastern Muslims more than Western or Chinese or Indonesian Muslims). But these areas also tend to be the most violent. You could also say that he attacks Republicans (though he never explicitly does so) because most of his examples of religious Christian policy makers are Republican. It seems to me that he attacks these groups because these groups tend to display the most abhorrent behavior, not because he’s racist. He’s very consistent with this. It would be inconsistent to accuse him of racism (given what he shows, using Islamic religious texts, what Muslims believe) because he attacks Christianity in the same way, both when it was as violent as Muslims currently are and now. It is not racist to say that Muslims are more violent than modern-day Christians. It is a fact. Remember the cartoon riots? People profane images of Christianity all the time (they even burn crosses right before they lynch people) and there’s no worldwide riots and murders across Christian nations. The West even tolerates Holocaust denial by Muslims without killing them. Arresting them, maybe, in some places. In Nigeria a particular cartoon riot led directly to the murder of Christians. This just doesn’t happen in Christian nations anymore.
Overall the book is worth reading. It is a somewhat cynical atheist viewpoint; it doesn’t acknowledge the people of faith who do not regard Scripture as the word of God but rather imperfect interpretations by men (but then, these people are not the problem in Harris’ eyes). The last few sections are unnecessary if you aren’t interested in pursuing metaphysical experiences and ethics Harris’ way, but they are good introductions to philosophy and Buddhism if you are. The book may offend you, and you may find his conclusions hard to endorse (given that Muslims kill people who convert away from Islam, I don’t think that his proposed solution of converting Muslims is viable). But if nothing else his book is an excellent examination of what is true in the world.
A review of this — 38 weeks ago
