Sam Harris - The End of Faith

In 2007, Americans have good reason to be concerned about the state of reason and religion. Many would have us believe that we face a tyrannical enemy - islamic fundamentalism - that seeks to destroy, us, our way of life (summed up as “freedom”), and really, everything. Our secular institutions are under attack here as well, with religious conservatives still seeking to ban evolution and stem cell research, “protect” marriage, and for reasons that probably have more to do with money than religion, ignore climate change.

In comes Sam Harris with The End of Faith, a polemic in favor of Enlightenment values and against religiosity of any kind. His basic premise is that the tenets of any religion are illogical, and include beliefs which have historically fostered and continue to demand savage violence and bigoted intolerance. Spending most of his time with Christianity, Judaism, and especially Islam, he exhaustively cites religious texts to point out that a fundamentalist view in any religion would necessitate intolerance and violence towards nonbelievers. His primary thesis is that old religious conflicts now have the potential to wipe out humanity via nuclear weapons.

Harris almost seems to suggest that irrationality, chiefly in the form of religion, is solely responsible for all violence and conflict among human beings. He implies that, if we all started to behave reasonably and rationally - and that means dropping the dead weight of religion - we would live in a peaceful, harmonious world. Furthermore, he claims that religion has never given humanity anything good, that ethics need not be attached to faith.

It goes almost without saying that this approach is extremely reductive. He states that people group together according to religion than any other factor, including “basis of language, skin color, location or birth,” or anything else. This becomes a motif of the book: he routinely dismisses political or economic reasons for a given dispute in order to emphasize the religious dimension. Thus, violence in Israel and Palestine is not related at all to the creation of Israel as a political entity, human rights, or disputes over land and water. It is only religion that compels people to act with such violence towards each other. He maintains this point of view, even while unwittingly supplying evidence to the contrary: in a diatribe about the inquisition, Harris notes how church officials would seize the property of a supposed heretic, and share it with both “local officials and the victim’s accusers.” Thus there was a solid economic reason to accuse others of heresy, rather than just a religious motive. The broader historical currents at play here - the Church as a political institution, for example - don’t even fall within the purview of Harris’ narrow, one-sided argumentation. In addition to being reductive, his arguments tend to take on a patronizing tone: the Tamil Tigers are not an example of a secular terrorist group, because, quite simply, “they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death...Hindus, even those whose pre occupations appear to be basically secular, often harbor potent religious beliefs.” Harris seems to be saying: any mention of self determination and civil liberties in the conflict in Sri Lanka is a red herring. It’s all about religion. Apparently, when one speaks with the authoritative voice of reason, it is just so easy to dismiss counterexamples to one’s argument.

In a similar fashion, he either dismisses or completely ignores any major conflict that did not stem from religion. It is easy at least for Harris, to forget all the ways reason has led us astray. Harris talks at some length about the potential for nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan (dismissing, once again, any other motive besides religion for this conflict). He fails to mention, however, that the nuclear bomb is an epochal achievement of science, a work of collected genius. Harris core argument - that irrational and violent fundamentalism now has genocidal weapons at its disposal - completely ignores that fact that these weapons came from the very culture of reason he is promoting. Similarly, he disagrees with most historians when he simplifies nationalist socialism into a mere continuation of a long-standing persecution of Jews. Eugenics may have been irrational, but it was an rationally derived, ultimately, from the Enlightenment, not from religion. Harris goes on to place the social engineering projects of Stalin and Mao to the side by calling those projects “political religion.” These were genocidal regimes that specifically tried to replace religion in the social sphere, and began as experiments in how to reasonably make a better society; to call them “religious” is indeed convenient for Harris. It should, in fact, come as no consolation to him that Lenin probably was probably as hostile toward religion as Harris, even if he was more violent in his response.

Employing such a reductive and contrived line of reasoning may not be a problem for Harris, however, because in many ways he is not really interested in proving that religion is the source of all conflict generally; really, he seems to want to only especially prove one specific case: the current conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and western modernity. Harris is in a group (mostly consisting of white, western men) that has responded to September 11th with alarmist rhetoric. According to Harris, we must all see life from the “perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the hundredth floor of the World Trade Center” on 9/11. This perspective, somehow, is the one that will lead us to reason and away from religion. Harris chooses to consistently take the stance of a neoconservative western imperialist concerned with a “clash of civilizations.” Maybe I’ve been reading The Nation too much, but some of his statements regarding our interventions in the Middle East are quite stunning. Quoting Paul Berman, he states that “ ‘in all of recent history no country on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United States on behalf of Muslim populations.’ This is true...[yet this] is generally counted as a further grievance against us...another source of Muslim ‘humiliation.’ ” One can almost see Harris throwing his arms up in frustration: we liberate them, and this is the thanks we get. He gets particularly riled up by Iraqi Shiites who after the fall of Baghdad choose to celebrate religiously (after having been oppressed for decades) rather than help us make the invasion successful by our standards: “their society was in tatters. Fresh water and electricity were scarce...and occupying army was trying to find reasonable people with whom to collaborate...self-mortification and chanting should have been rather low on their list of priorities.” Quite right. I mean, shouldn’t they have been busy throwing flowers at the feet of US soldiers?

Harris mentions, briefly, the ways in which the United States supported tyrannical regimes or is otherwise responsible for the current situation, but then confusingly states that he can place such concerns “on the shelf,” because the root of the conflict stems from Islam, which is irredeemably violent. In fact, he says, “without faith, most Muslim grievances against the West would be impossible even to formulate.” So were the Muslim Brotherhood not Muslim, they would appreciate US support for Hosni Mubarak’s rather vicious dictatorship? I suppose these claims shouldn’t be shocking, considering they come from a writer that puts the words imperialism and hegemony in quotation marks (attributing the latter formulation to Jean Baudrillard, of all people). For Harris, the danger of Islam is lurking everywhere, even just around the corner. Muslims living in America, for example, appear tolerant of others, but this is only because they are in the minority. Like the terrorists, they are just biding their time until they can strike.

If such fear-mongering weren’t bad enough by itself, it takes Harris, like others in his 9/11 alarmist cohort, to some dark places. He claims that “our common humanity” is all we need to ensure that no human beings suffer needlessly, and that “whenever you hear that people have begun killing noncombatants intentionally and indiscriminately...you will always - always - find [their beliefs] preposterous." The word intentionally is key, because he reasons from such a standpoint that collateral damage, no matter how many people, is ethical as along as the intentions are just. George Bush and Tony Blair have intended to minimize civilian casualties, whereas Osama Bin Laden couldn't care less. This is a familiar line of reasoning, but a shallow one. Bombing is an easy and effective military strategy, so it has been used often, causing an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq (Washington Post). But if we know for certain that thousands of innocent people will die due to a given action, it is truly ethical to continue with that action? And how confident should we be that our intentions are always so noble? For Harris, if you see a child drowning, you shouldn’t feel an especial obligation to save her, as long as you didn’t throw her in to begin with.

Wait, it gets worse. After giving the ok on collateral damage, he describes it in these vivid terms: “what, after all, is ‘collateral damage’ but the inadvertent torture of innocent men, women, and children? Whenever we consent to drop bombs, we do so with the knowledge that...children will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed.” My point, exactly, but Harris takes it in a different direction. Harris, and we as a society, generally accept collateral damage as part of modern warfare, and we do so because we cannot see collateral damage; the dead Iraqi civilians are merely statistics (one would argue that major news networks are what makes this so). Therefore, the reasoning goes, if we accept collateral damage, as Harris has, we must also accept torture, for collateral damage is much worse ethically than torture: “if we are willing to drop bombs...we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects...if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.” Put me in the latter camp, and Harris, distressingly, in the former. According to Harris, if we think someone is Al Qaeda, we should torture them even if there is only “one chance in a million” that he will say something worthwhile, and if this is the case we should “use every means at our disposal.” What's truly tortuous here is Harris’ logic. After spending a hundred pages decrying torture and violence and awkwardly trying to work out an ethics based on minimizing human suffering through reason, Harris “rationally” justifies mass-killing and torture. Truly, it is rare to read a book that so concisely and thoroughly refutes its own thesis.

I am not and never have been a religious person. In fact I’ve always been pretty suspect of religion. Nor am I a fan, however, of didactic, simplistic, and bigoted polemics. Harris takes the point of view that reason, humanism, and science will always lead us to a better place (don’t tell me...he went to Stanford), and yet the world he takes us to sounds more Orwellian than anything else. This argument, incidentally, was the same one that was posed to me on the GRE - you know, the part where they give people facile, generic thesis statements and ask test takers to respond. There are people - yes, even conservatives - making far more lucid and interesting arguments about the state of the world. You don’t have the time to waste it reading this book.

Svetlana Boym - The Future of Nostalgia

The back cover of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia claims that Boym has “achieved nothing less than [identifying] a new area of inquiry, a new typology, the identification of a new aesthetic: the study of nostalgia.” We have all been trained to ignore the back cover’s of paperbacks, of course, but at times it does seem that Boym has such grand ambitions, and they do much to mar what otherwise might have been a compelling work.

Boym spends much time trying to reinterpret history, particularly 20th century European history, through the lens of nostalgia, the longing for one’s home. Her style is aggravating. She jumps from topic to topic, failing to pursue her interesting thoughts and introducing many irrelevant details along the way. She is certainly an erudite author, but this is erudition as tedium, as she name drops with abandon but fails to connect the dots between her many references. Sections end abruptly, as if they were more vignettes that parts of a well-reasoned argument. For all her grand ambitions, she never truly provides the reader with a thesis, something to grab onto. Rather, this book reads more like creative non-fiction with footnotes.

With those criticisms in mind, I will say that some of her thoughts do coalesce at specific points, especially near the end when she starts discussing the ethics of nostalgia, in particular with regard to the writing of Vladimir Nabokov. We associate nostalgia with immigrants and exiles, but in the past century so many exiles were in their condition because of particularly nostalgic regimes – Nazism and Stalinism in particular. Thus, for Nabokov, the sentimentality of nostalgia was not just aesthetically distasteful (as it was for exile Milan Kundera), but unethical. Kitsch, or poshlost, reeks of totalitarianism. Boym goes on to contrast this sentiment with the lived realities of so many Russian immigrants who populate their homes with souvenirs, both from the old world and the new. Boym notes that “yard sales and trash play an important role in the émigré topography of America.” For these immigrants, kitsch and nostalgia are ways of dealing with present circumstances, rather than reactionary attempts to reclaim the past.

In the end, Boym never really delves into these debates enough to resolve them. She is most surefooted when focusing on the authors she knows best – Nabokov, for example – and limiting herself to one cogent argument. Unfortunately, for most of The Future of Nostalgia, she prefers to range through the entire history of western culture, art, literature, architecture. The result can only be momentarily interesting, and scattered.

Yukio Mishima - The Sound of Waves

Translation can have a leveling effect on writing, especially prose. The nuance, intensity, and inventiveness of the writer go out the window in favor the plodding efficiency of the translator, who conveys the meaning and sense of the words but not the aesthetic impact. Translators could do far worse (and often do), but this tendency always leaves a translated text in suspicion, as if it were wearing a mask.

Though I don’t know any Japanese, I don’t suspect the firm, even-handed tone of Yukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves is not the result of a business-like translation. Mishima approaches his story as if it were a fable, and he the distant, sure-handed, and slightly paternalistic narrator drawing the reader gently in to the parochial world of Uta-Jima island. The novel begins at such a distance, with a descriptive introduction to this pastoral setting that rather quickly alights upon the young hero of the story, Shinji-san, who just as quickly meets the object of his affection, Hatsue. Those looking for the slightest amount of narrative intrigue, tension, or plot twisting, let alone literary inventiveness, can stop reading at this point. Within ten pages, we can look to whatever boy-meets-girl narrative prototype we have in our heads and guess pretty quickly how this story ends. There will be a jealous, wealthy rival, an unsupportive father, a worried mother, gossiping women, an illicit and yet innocent love scene, and, finally, a heroic act that seals the deal. And this novel is actually less dramatic than all that.

That Mishima maintains our interest, then, is not so much by his use of plot trickery but rather the through the rhythmic precision of his language (I suspect for this he actually shares the credit with the translator, Meredith Weatherby). For Uta-Jima, we find out early on, has remained unmarked by the intrusions of modernity, and Mishima’s clean, almost simplistic diction is in step with his object’s provincialism. Shinji-san and the other young men on the island are wide-eyed innocents who

conceive, by sheer force of imagination, such things as streetcars, tall buildings, movies, subways. But then, once they had seen reality, once the novelty of astonishment was gone, they perceived clearly how useless it had been for them to try to imagine such things.

The modern world doesn’t enter here as a force of disruption or ruination; at no point is there a danger of things falling apart. Rather, like Uta-Jima’s peaceful waterfalls, pathways, lighthouses, springs, and boats, it glides in and out of the narrative, as in a daydream. At times, this is a world that seems to exist entirely apart from the narrative simply because it is so unaware of itself: “city youths learn the ways of love early from novels, movies, and the like, but on Uta-jima there were practically no models to follow.” As previously mentioned, every corner of this novel follows well-worn models, but we are the only ones who know this, not the characters that we affectionately look upon.

Many an author would very easily make such a stance come off as cloyingly trite; we all were subjected to a fair share of such stories in middle school. But again, Mishima relentlessly approaches his characters from a calming distance. Even a passage that references an allied bombing of a civilian boat does not resort to cheap and out-of-place moralizing of the sort that typically make such stories one-dimensional and obnoxiously didactic. At no point does the story interfere with the beautiful tranquility of the setting; rather, it is laid gently on top, so that the novel as a whole feels like a peaceful nap. Nothing awe-inspiring, for me at least, but satisfying nonetheless.