Among the Non-Believers

The tedium of dogmatic atheism.

Chris Lehmann from the January 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

How can it be that the 9/11 suicide bomber, whose spiritual principles and hateful political practices are denounced in the highest reaches of mainstream Islamic observance, is "a man of perfect faith," and that the innocent victims of those attacks, Muslim, Jew, Christian, Jain, or Hindu, are automatically symbols of defiled secularism? Harris' protracted 9/11 set piece isn't even a credible account of how the religious world was affected by the terror attacks (let alone responded to them); so much the less is it the hard and fast measure of "all pretensions to theological knowledge."

It's obvious, of course, that a certain derangement of Muslim dogma prompted these men into terrible action, but there are also, again, more complicated forces in play, involving (just for starters) the ruinous course of Israeli-Palestinian relations, the deeply antidemocratic and dissent-resistant political traditions of the Middle East, and a Saudi monarchy and gerontocracy propelling many middle-class young men to the religious fringe. None of these by itself is an explanation of any of the hijackers' behavior, but neither is something that is--in the actually existing real world, if not in Harris' imagination--as broad and variegated as "faith."

It's necessary to insist upon this point in some detail because Harris, as it happens, is only getting warmed up with the 9/11 scaremongering. He's ready to roll up his sleeves and endorse pre-emptive assaults on both individual bad believers and dangerous Islamist regimes by any means necessary. In a world-class show of "this hurts me more than it hurts you" disingenuousness, Harris makes it clear that the fault for this state of affairs resides entirely with the believers he thinks we may have to kill. "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

"This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people."

If we must, more in sorrow than in anger, expunge Islamist thought by offing its adherents one by one, so we must also gird ourselves for the big coming conflict with a nuclear-armed Islamic power, which prompts Harris to flights of hypothetical fancy worthy of Herman Kahn (if not Dr. Strangelove's Gen. Buck Turgidson). After all, Harris reasons, "There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons....Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon."

Cautioning further that we would never know the actual whereabouts of such lethal weaponry in the hands of a Paradise-addled Islamist power, Harris presses blithely on to the unthinkable: "In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own." He of course allows that this opening feint of pre-emptive war could trigger a "genocidal crusade" among the Islamic world's nuke-wielding imams, but to paraphrase our Vietnam strategists, sometimes you have to destroy a planet in order to save it.

In any event, it was the believers who started it. Calling this course of events "perfectly insane," Harris once again didactically marvels at how our own pie-eyed tolerance of faith has brought us to this grimmest of all passes: "I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns."

Here again, Harris glides right by historical precedent--a well-advised move for his argument, since the only power that has used nuclear weapons on civilian populations (up to and including the zealots in Pakistan and India who now belong to the nuclear club) is our own secular, Enlightenment-bred American republic, steeped in pragmatic self-regard far afield from faith-induced deliriums of jihad and martyrdom. And its war-ending rationale in 1945 was very much of a piece with the shoot-first reasoning of Harris' current doomsday scenario. Presumably, it meant a great deal to the dignity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's incinerated citizens to reflect that they were being sacrificed not to mad faith, but to the prerogatives of a properly calculated nuclear assault, on the part of a Western power that was only rationally pursuing a marginal military advantage.

It is a notorious hazard of the village atheist's vocation to mimic many of the worst features of the dogma he obsessively denounces. That certainly is the case with The End of Faith. Harris wishes to convict religious belief of mulish literalism, while attacking its tenets in the most bluntly prosaic and anachronistic terms he can muster. Harris attacks the believing world's maudlin wish fulfillments and faulty logic--and winds up exploiting lurid imagined scenarios of the final moments of 9/11 victims as an argument-stilling tactic. Harris excoriates the religious worldview's foreshortened use of fact and evidence, and produces ahistorical, misleading summaries of the most basic features of Muslim belief, geopolitical conflict, and religious thinking generally.

Most tellingly, The End of Faith derides the callow apocalyptic temper of the monotheistic traditions, while effectively seeking to bully readers into accepting nuclear Armageddon as a justified response to rampant fundamentalism. Lord knows there's plenty to criticize, and be alarmed by, in today's religious scene. But even if we posit with Harris that faith is itself "the enemy," then it behooves any tough-minded strategist to know the enemy. And while I'm far from a believer myself, I'd also suggest that it behooves any village-atheist counselor of high-stakes nuclear conflict to ponder the Psalms of Pogo, in which it is written that we have met the enemy, and he is us.�