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Black + White Magazine (Australia) - May, 2005
May, 2005
The Gods Must Be Crazy
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, American academic Sam Harris watched repeatedly as a pair of hijacked jet airliners slammed one after the other into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. As the plane’s payload of high-octane fuel weakened the very foundations of the two buildings, Harris realised that on a metaphorical level the forces of religious extremism were having much the same effect on the defining power of reason and rational thought in our society.
Here, as once-imposing structures gave way to the debris of Ground Zero, was WB Yeats writ large: “The centre cannot hold…”
On September 12, 2001, as spontaneous crowds of Muslim demonstrators took to the streets in the Gaza Strip to celebrate what they considered a great victory in the name of their God, and American leaders vowed an unyielding revenge in the name of their God, Harris started writing.
Published two and half years later in America, but still brimming with a logician’s fierce response to dogma that guided his initial salvo that first morning, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (Norton), is a startling, persuasively made frontal assault on the inherent dangers of institutional religion. It brings a clarifying vision to an uncertain era that is positively Orwellian.
Harris, a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University, posits that religious faith is the single greatest danger to humanity’s future. Across 250 pages of carefully ordered discourse, he describes how the illogical and untoward nature of religious fanaticism – from the Muslim suicide bomber who claims he’s a martyr destined for eternal paradise to the American president and numerous others in positions of power who believe that a war in what they consider the Holy Lands will presage the Second Coming – will combine with technology, a damning combination of the ancient and the modern, to threaten our way of life. We face a world populated, as Harris writes, by 14th century hordes with 21st century weapons.
It is, in a roundabout way, a marketing executive’s dream: there’s something to upset nearly everyone in The End of Faith. Opening with a clear-headed refutation of the existence of God – “we cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence,” the author notes – that occasionally makes a point with an almost sarcastic thrust of logic. Substitute Zeus for God in various pronouncements by world leaders (after all they are both deities borne of legend, one is simply no longer widely worshipped) and you start to sense how the lunatics have taken over the asylum, he suggests.
“Once you put on these goggles – the ones that ask what goals do religions have – you see that the path to violence is tied to personal belief and faith,” notes Harris, speaking from New York, where he’s completing a doctorate in neuroscience. “Fully half the articles I read in the newspaper every day have to do with some way with how religion can have a stupid and dangerous impact.”
The man pictured on the dust jacket of The End of Faith has a winning smile and bright, inquisitive eyes. He looks like someone’s favourite high school teacher, the guy who runs a poker night none of his friends want to miss. When Sam Harris speaks, however, he brings a calm strength to proceedings. He talks like someone long used to making an argument, to presenting a case. He runs through linked points, slips in a briefly worded adjunct that serves as illustration, moves to a conclusion. His voice is level, calm even. So how does he manage to survive the modern day inquisition that is known as hitting the promotional trail?
“I accept it because I’m in a position to communicate in a broader way than through my book. More people will be exposed to my publicity for the book than to the actual book itself,” he explains. In America, where the book was first published, he appeared on media scattered to either end of the political spectrum. Both wings welcomed him, initially…
“My book cuts across liberal and conservative lines,” he adds. “When I’m talking to conservatives, who tend to be highly respectful of Christian dogma, they love what I have to say about Islam, but they recoil the moment the conversation turns to Christian dogma. The liberals want me to wail away on fundamentalist Christianity and George W Bush, but the moment I start saying politically incorrect things about Islam they put on the brakes.”
The End of Faith even takes aim on those who would be considered moderates, or even nominal fellow travelers. Noam Chomsky, he writes, is shortsighted in his analysis. “For him, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.” Religious moderates, of any faith, are simply failed extremists, written off by the pious and yet unable to criticise their faith from the inside. Their only influence is to maintain the status quo, an iconography of ignorance.
As Harris sees it, to be involved in a war on terrorism is like pursuing a war on murder – it is an effect, not a cause. The ongoing crisis between Israel and Palestine, for example, is generally considered on political terms, even when it extends to the actions of groups with a satellite interest, such as Al-Qaeda. To Harris, it’s best divined purely on the grounds of religious extremism.
“September 11 caught me in a moment when I had done a lot of research on religion itself and eastern philosophy being integrated with western cognitive science. All of that gelled around this crisis in our civilisation where we were faced with an unambiguous threat coming out of religious dogmatism, but we had no acceptable tools by which to talk about it. I just watched our culture get driven more deeply into the arms of religious extremism – they were delivering us into the arms of the very thing they abhorred through religious faith.”
While The End of Faith touches on the crimes perpetrated by Hindu extremists in India, it is Christianity and Islam that dominate the pages, which is not surprising given that to Harris they are involved in a war that suggests only escalation and appears unlikely to cease until one side eradicates or converts the other. While he does his best to quantify his opinions – “while I do not want to single out the doctrine of Islam for special abuse, there is no question that, at this point in history, it represents a unique danger to all of us,” he writes – there’s little doubt he may have taken himself out of the academic shadows and into the spotlight of public controversy.
“I’m really not aware of any document that takes on Islam to this degree,” admits Harris. At one point he lists, for six pages, quotes from the Koran that “prepare the ground for religious conflict”. While he’s not a Muslim, for whom the act of saying that the Koran is not the literal word of God is punishable by death, as Salman Rushdie was when he penned The Satanic Verses, Harris is not entirely without fear that the ease with which religious extremists resort to violence to furnish their self-belief could extend to his own well-being.
Harris, who speaks about this very calmly, nonetheless points out that, “I’m not a Muslim, so I can’t be considered a blasphemer, but then neither was Theo Van Gogh.”
A Dutch filmmaker descended from the famous artist, the 47-year-old director was stabbed and shot dead while riding his bike to his office in east Amsterdam on November 2 last year. His assailant was a 26-year-old man of joint Dutch and Moroccan citizenship, a Muslim fundamentalist named Mohammed Bouyeri. After he shot Van Gogh – whose final words were “We can still talk about it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” – Bouyeri slit his throat and pinned a note to his chest with his knife.
Van Gogh’s crime was to make a short film, entitled Submission, that screened on Dutch public television and depicted a Muslim woman being forced into an arranged marriage, where she was abused by her husband, raped by her uncle and then brutally punished for her adultery. Soon after Van Gogh’s murder Sam Harris began to think that it was probably not worth the risk of going to Europe to promote the publication of The End of Faith.
“I would be reluctant to at this point. I will certainly wait to see what the reaction is,” he concedes. “I have a healthy respect for people’s ability to completely flip over the contents of the book. In the States I waited some months until I made any public appearances and then it was only media engagements.”
Harris had his first inkling that his book may be upsetting to various groups just prior to publication. Having worked on it in private, marshalling arguments and looking to intellectually engage readers, he realised the full breadth of possible feedback when various people he had gratefully named in the book’s acknowledgments, including his agent and editor, approached him individually and asked for their names to be removed.
There are no individual names attached to The End of Faith. Nor does he supply virtually any personal details to journalists. “I’ve seen what kind of information is out there on me and others and how it’s easily available through the power of Google,” he says. “At a certain point conservative broadcasters can give out facts that make it all too easy for the lunatics of the world to find you. But you have to have the courage to represent the ideas that matter to you.”
IN TERMS of the background that helped foster those ideas, Harris comes from a secular family. “I didn’t have a particular view of the world’s religions at an early age,” he adds. At the age of 13 he became interested in esoterica and started reading about it and by college his curiosity had become serious. He spent time in India and Nepal studying meditation and developed “an interest in spiritual experience in a rational context”.
This surprises some who assume that Harris is an atheist. “Atheism is a dead end: as a word, a school of thought, an entity,” he insists. “There’s no reason to confine ourselves to a negative reaction to something that’s been disproven. No one wastes their time being an opponent of astrology. You don’t get anything that anyone wants through atheism. I prefer to talk about rationality and reason.”
One of the distinctions the book makes is between faith and spirituality, although the writing of the book has reduced his personal interest in the latter. “To some degree it has winnowed out the last remaining metaphysical indulgences I had,” offers Harris. “I spent a lot of time studying the Buddhist tradition, but inevitably, no matter how remarkable the teachers or their teaching were, they were saddled with various dogmas and had a level of religiosity that was very baroque.”
His current work is moving in the opposite direction, using MRI technology to research the neural basis for belief. In moving through the complex latticework of the brain, Harris is seeking to understand literally what belief is and how the brain allows you to be skeptical about some propositions until there is a standard of truth, while others, such as religious faith, never require one.
“You can entertain the proposition that Australia is an island and acknowledge that as a genuine reflection of the state of the world,” he explains. “If you suggest that Australia is a planet you would reject that as not mapping onto the state of the world. I want to know if that process is or can be the same if we’re talking about geography or religion. Do religious people who believe that Jesus was born in a virgin birth believe that in exactly the same way they believe that Australia is an island?”
As for The End of Faith, he’s pleased with the book and hopeful that it can foster healthy debate. While the book has a pessimistic voice bred from the worrying conclusions, Harris won’t be drawn on his outlook. “I rarely evaluate that. I really don’t think there’s anything else I can do apart from what I’m doing,” he notes. “I open my mouth and it’s really not predicated on being an agent of change. It seems unlikely that people by the billions will start thinking the way I’m thinking.”
Still, it’s not a good time to be a rational voice given the world we live in. “Or is it a good time to be a rational voice?” he replies, a wry edge seeping into his voice. Sam Harris laughs softly. “Let’s just say it’s not a promising time.”
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason is distributed in Australia by Simon & Schuster. www.samharris.org
