Monday, January 7, 2008
In the New York Times Book Review, Ayaan Hirsi Ali reviews Lee Harris' "The Suicide of Reason"
...The second fanaticism that Harris identifies is one he views as infecting Western societies; he calls it a "fanaticism of reason." Reason, he says, contains within itself a potential fatality because it blinds Western leaders to the true nature of Islamic-influenced cultures. Westerners see these cultures merely as different versions of the world they know, with dominant values similar to those espoused in their own culture. But this, Harris argues, is a fatal mistake. It implies that the West fails to appreciate both its history and the true nature of its opposition.
Nor, he points out, is the failure linked to a particular political outlook. Liberals and conservatives alike share this misperception. Noam Chomsky and Paul Wolfowitz agreed, Harris writes, "that you couldn’t really blame the terrorists, since they were merely the victims of an evil system — for Chomsky, American imperialism, for Wolfowitz, the corrupt and despotic regimes of the Middle East." That is to say, while left and right may disagree on the causes and the remedies, they both overlook the fanaticism inherent in Islam itself. Driven by their blind faith in reason, they interpret the problem in a way that is familiar to them, in order to find a solution that fits within their doctrine of reason. The same is true for such prominent intellectuals as Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama.
Harris does not regard Islamic fanaticism as a deviancy or a madness that affects a few Muslims and terrifies many. Instead he argues that fanaticism is the basic principle in Islam...the West has cultivated an ethos of individualism, reason and tolerance, and an elaborate system in which every actor, from the individual to the nation-state, seeks to resolve conflict through words. The entire system is built on the idea of self-interest. This ethos rejects fanaticism. The alpha male is pacified and groomed to study hard, find a good job and plan prudently for retirement: "While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin," Harris writes, "the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive and ruthless."...our worship of reason is making us easy prey for a ruthless, unscrupulous and extremely aggressive predator and may be contributing to a slow cultural "suicide."
Harris’s book is so engaging that it is difficult to put down, and its haunting assessments make it difficult for a reader to sleep at night. He deserves praise for raising serious questions. But his arguments are not entirely sound...
...Enlightenment thinkers, preoccupied with both individual freedom and secular and limited government, argued that human reason is fallible. They understood that reason is more than just rational thought; it is also a process of trial and error, the ability to learn from past mistakes.
Harris is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement...Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands...
...To argue, as Harris seems to do, that children born and bred in superstitious cultures that value fanaticism and create phalanxes of alpha males are doomed — and will doom others — to an existence governed by the law of the jungle is to ignore the lessons of the West’s own past. There have been periods when the West was less than noble, when it engaged in crusades, inquisitions, witch-burnings and genocides. Many of the Westerners who were born into the law of the jungle, with its alpha males and submissive females, have since become acquainted with the culture of reason and have adopted it. They are even — and this should surely relieve Harris of some of his pessimism — willing to die for it, perhaps with the same fanaticism as the jihadists willing to die for their tribe. In short, while this conflict is undeniably a deadly struggle between cultures, it is individuals who will determine the outcome.
Hirsi Ali believes that reason is our strength, not our weakness. Reason gives us the the ability to learn from past mistakes. This is a skill that political Islam and multicultural Romaticism lack.
Like Hirsi Ali, we should have the courage of our convictions.
What a wonderful thing to see someone with such keen mind (Ali) review the work of another bold thinker (Harris). Like many Lee Harris fans (everyone who enjoys this site should read both his books, and all of his columns in Policy Review and www.tcsdaily.com), I looked forward to his new book with the same anticipation the rest of the world waited for the last Harry Potter.
What did I think? While I agree with Ali that reason needs to be looked at in all its aspects before determining that it is a flexible enough concept with which to meet fanaticism head on, I beleive she missed an important point that it is the unquestioning devotion to reason (or at least a belief in reason as a natural endpoint for all advancing civilizations) that can leave a society naked before unreasoning enemies. To be fair to Ali, Harris did not do as good a job in laying out his argument in book length format as he did with this remarkable essay on the same subject that appeared in the Weekly Standard last year:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/736fyrpi.asp
Also, Harris' first book "Civilization and its Enemies" (a superior work to "Suicide of Reason," in my humble opinion) lays out just how unlikely it is that any society can ever come into existence based on the principles of reason which we take for granted today. His main message is that we must not believe that the societies many of us are fortunate enough to inhabit are the natural evolution of man, but see them as highly artificial creations that - because of their unlikely nature - can just as easily be undone as created.
If only the New York Times spent more column inches allowing intelligent people to debate the issues of the day on a regular basis - as they did in last Sunday's book review section - we might have entered this year's election cycle talking about issues of real substance, rather than the usual nonsense.
This was the first time I've read the book review in ages. Usually I skip it, but when I saw the subject and the reviewers...
Hirsi Ali is one of the great defenders of enlightenment thinking. Very few western intellectuals are willing to defend concepts like reason and liberty with the kind of enthusiasm she shows.
She also objects to the idea that we must return to our religious values in order to fight this war. Although the Jihadis claim to be influenced by religion, their actions indicate that they're more motivated by the usual things - the desire for more money, more power, to impose their will on others. Their will is strong but their military strength is weak. When we choose to use it, our military strength (based on years and years of scientific reason and research) could easily crush them.
We're not held back by reason, we're held back by an irrational fear of our own ability to inflict violence. We know we can destroy the enemy, and the world, many times over. We know that the history of the west is extremely violent. Many of us fear that the horrors of the Third Reich were inspired by reason. In fact, these horrors, like the Jihadi horrors, were inspired more by romanticism and an irrational faith in cultural supremacy. But we don't see that.
I went to hear her talk at PEN's 'World Voices' tour in the NY Public Library. She discussed the same issue she covered here, and she declared how proud she was to be an American. People were shocked to hear someone saying things like that. I was surprised to see that the audience, composed mostly of NY Times-reader types gave her a five minute standing ovation.
In his remarkable piece in the Weekly Standard (linked above), Lee Harris provides an intriguing analysis of the Pope's comments last year that led to Muslim rioting. Far from being a challenge to Islam, his comments were a challenge to Westerners to see how their tradition is really a fusion of the culture of reason and the culture of belief. This builds on themes Harris talks about in articles like this one:
http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/cosmopolitan_illusion.htm
His first book "Civilization and its Enemies" also puts into perspective the fact that what we today call "reason" (mostly scientific reason) is not something the first reasoning society (the Greeks) would have recognized. For example, a modern thinker might look at a question such as "which religion is superior" and answer simply that all religions are based on superstitition and thus reason cannot allow us to answer such a question.
Classical thinkers might approach the question differently by noting that a religion (no matter how preposterous its superstitions) that allows reasoning men to live next door to its members is superior to a religion that determines all people who believe in reason (vs. believing in the relion's creed) must be killed. If you cannot bring yourself to admit that a religion that lets you live is superior to a religion that will happily murder you, then you are confronted by "The Suicide of Reason".
So, despite my enormous respect for Ali, I think she got it wrong by putting reason in one bucket and romanticism and religious faith in another. Rather, we as men and women of reason must get back to the origins of what it means to be a reasoning person. For too long, men of science of monopolized the term. If reason is to rescue us, it must be relearned in all of its original breadth as a tool appropriate for men of science, men of philosophy and even *gasp* men of faith.
If you cannot bring yourself to admit that a religion that lets you live is superior to a religion that will happily murder you, then you are confronted by "The Suicide of Reason".
If you believe that no religion should have the power to decide who lives and who dies, then you are confronted by the American ideal of the separation of church and state.
I have no problems with the idea or practice of faith, but I don't believe that we need faith or patriotism to fight the threat of Islamism. Faith is a wonderful thing, and it can inspire people to join together, but it can also exclude people who would otherwise like to join the fight.
The Muslims who join radical terrorist groups are no more 'pious' than apolitical Muslims. According to reports from Iraq, al Sadr's men leave their hideouts littered with beer cans. Al Qaeda uses drugs as often as they use religion to recruit members. According to some studies, the people who decide to become suicide bombers do so for relatively rational reasons. They use this strategy because the strategy works.
We shouldn't allow ourselves to be bamboozled by the Islamists' 'we're not afraid to die' propaganda. They're motivated by the same supremacist philosophy that motivated the Nazis - they just use different recruitment tools and different tactics. We need to understand those tactics and outsmart them. That requires research, pragmatism and reason.