How to Dig a Hole, or, I Am Not an Islamophobe

[rug]

Version 2.3 (April 7, 2013)

A few of the subjects I explore in my work have inspired an unusual amount of controversy. Some of this results from real differences of opinion or honest confusion, but much of it is due to the fact that certain of my detractors deliberately misrepresent my views. The purpose of this article is to address the most consequential of these distortions.

A general point about the mechanics of defamation: It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things. In fact, the very act of defending himself against such accusations quickly becomes debasing. Whether or not the original charges can be made to stick, the victim immediately seems thin-skinned and overly concerned about his reputation. And, rebutted or not, the original charges will be repeated in blogs and comment threads, and many readers will assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire.

Such defamation is made all the easier if one writes and speaks on extremely controversial topics and with a philosopher’s penchant for describing the corner cases—the ticking time bomb, the perfect weapon, the magic wand, the mind-reading machine, etc.—in search of conceptual clarity. It literally becomes child’s play to find quotations that make the author look morally suspect, even depraved.

Whenever I respond to unscrupulous attacks on my work, I inevitably hear from hundreds of smart, supportive readers who say that I needn’t have bothered. In fact, many write to say that any response is counterproductive, because it only draws more attention to the original attack and sullies me by association. These readers think that I should be above caring about, or even noticing, treatment of this kind. Perhaps. I actually do take this line, sometimes for months or years, if for no other reason than that it allows me to get on with more interesting work. But there are now whole websites—Salon, The Guardian, Alternet, etc.—that seem to have made it a policy to maliciously distort my views. I have commented before on the general futility of responding to attacks of this kind. Nevertheless, the purpose of this article is to address the most important misunderstandings of my work. (Parts of these responses have been previously published.) I encourage readers to direct people to this page whenever these issues surface in blog posts and comment threads. And if you come across any charge that you think I really must answer, feel free to let me know through the contact form on this website.

My views on Islam (link)

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/

[okasha]

1. And pull it in after you.

Sounds like what LGBT used to hear a lot. "I'm not a homophobe. I'm not afraid of homos," and/or "Some of my best friends are f****ts."

[backscatter712]

2. Speaking as an atheist, I'm not a big fan of Sam Harris.

He does cross the line into ethnic animus.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. Harris makes some good points, but also goes much too far in some places.

In no particular order:

He's right that "Islamophobia" is nothing like sexism or antisemitism, because Islam is a belief.

He's quite right that Islam, as interpreted by the majority of its adherents, is far, far worse than most other religions.

He's wrong to say that the use of violence is at the heart of Islam - yes, in many circumstances Islam actively encourages the use of violence against innocent people, but that's a far cry from that being at the heart of it.

He's certainly wrong to say that the people making the most sense about Islam are fascists - most fascists say not merely "Islam is a bad thing" - which it certainly is - but also "and therefore we should discriminate against Muslims and deny them basic rights" - which we certainly shouldn't, any more than we should discriminate against republicans.

His views on religious profiling strike me as deeply misguided, to say the least. Yes, if you introduce religious profiling *and no-one knows you've done so*, you will catch more terrorists with less effort. This does not justify it, however.

While I don't agree with every word of his views on torture, the Iraq war etc, they don't strike me as obviously absurd or evil.







(The Greenwald article this is a response to, by the way, strikes me as rank idiocy).

[Act_of_Reparation]

4. PZ Meyers posted a fairly detailed rebuttal yesterday

Much of it has to do with previous exchanges between the two (Harris has posted this kind of crap before, and there is a measure of animosity between them), but the rest deals with the narrowness of Harris' thinking.

Pharyngula: Heat and heart, atheists

There’s a place for playing philosophical games when thinking about trolleys and vats and logic puzzles, but when it comes down to real world thinking, reducing hugely complex problems to simplified abstractions does not provide clarity at all, only confusion and false conclusions. Right now, this country is facing the consequences (well, a good portion of the country is trying to ignore the consequences) of this kind of robotic pseudophilosophical argument. We had people making rationalizations for all-out warfare against a country that we claimed to be a clear and present danger on the basis of having weapons of mass destruction, that we argued was ruled by a brutal dictator who should be prevented from doing more harm, and on the basis of those widely promoted “corner cases”, we murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, shattered a country’s infrastructure and opened it up to corporate exploitation, and drained our finances dry pouring more and more cash and blood into a brutal war.

You do not get to make these cold calculations while leaving out the human element — the fact that we atheists, as a people supposedly dedicated to reality and truth and respect for the potential of the human mind, can so callously dismiss personal experience and the lives of the people at the heart of these hypothetic scenarios and thought experiments is precisely the reason their author is so easily made to look “morally suspect, even depraved.”

Harris does a good job of bringing up the fuller context of some of the quotes that he feels have been excerpted to misinterpret him, but he seems incapable of recognizing that what he considers a justification merely compounds the problem. Somehow, the moral calculus only goes one way. We are allowed to contemplate (in a rarefied philosophical way, of course) bombing or torturing or isolating people who have a slim chance of contributing to harm to us, but somehow we never consider that perhaps the people on the other side are making the very same calculation, considering that they are amply justified in bombing or torturing or isolating those privileged Westerners, because we might harm them.

And sadly, they have better empirical evidence of real threat.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

5. Who said anything about contemplating?

I'm afraid I think that Myers' argument is at best extraordinarily poorly thought-through and at worst dishonest.

"We are allowed to contemplate (in a rarefied philosophical way, of course) bombing or torturing or isolating people who have a slim chance of contributing to harm to us, but somehow we never consider that perhaps the people on the other side are making the very same calculation, considering that they are amply justified in bombing or torturing or isolating those privileged Westerners, because we might harm them. "

In one sentence, he makes a jump from "contemplating (in a rarefied philosophical way, of course)" doing unpleasant thins to people to actually doing those things, and presents them as equivalent.

If Muslims want to write essays discussing under what circumstances it's OK to bad things to me, I'm absolutely fine with that, provided that, as Harris does, the answers that they come to are that it's not OK to do so in practically any circumstance. What's not fine is to e.g. (long, long list of appalling things Muslims do because of Islam, that I can't be bothered to list).



Myer's claim that there is more threat from Westerners than from Muslims is also misguided - far, far more Muslims are murdered by other Muslims in the name of religion than are killed by Westerners. It's important to note that what America has done wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq has *not*, primarily, been killing innocent people, it's been failing to prevent evil Muslim fanatics from killing people.