On Being Blog

Sam Harris speaks at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention. Photo by G Crouch / Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0

Last month a contentious exchange broke out between Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and one of the torchbearers of the so-called New Atheist movement — Sam Harris. The quarrel began when Mr. Greenwald tweeted a link to an Al Jazeera article by Murtaza Hussain. The article argued that some of the New Atheists (Mr. Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens) endorse, under the guise of rational scientific discourse, forms (often venomous) of anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Particularly problematic for Mr. Greenwald was Mr. Harris’ assertion — cited by Mr. Hussain — that “[the] people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”

Mr. Harris then wrote to Mr. Greenwald, protesting Mr. Hussain’s “quote-mining,” criticizing the Al Jazeera article as “defamatory garbage,” and expressing frustration with Mr. Greenwald for promoting the piece.

However, reading Mr. Harris’ quote in context does little to call into question the conclusion reached by Mr. Hussain. Indeed, Mr. Harris confirmed Mr. Hussain’s conclusion when he explained to Mr. Greenwald that it was his (Mr. Harris) intention to “bemoan the loss of liberal moral clarity in the war on terror.”

It is a curious line of reasoning that allows Mr. Harris to espouse positive views about fascist speech and about the “moral clarity” of the Christian Right (a group included in the context provided by Mr. Harris) without assuming any of the liabilities of these positions. He endorses the “sensibleness” of their speech, neither as fascist speech nor as the speech of the Christian Right, but rather as the displaced speech of an authentic liberalism. Mr. Harris thus identifies his position with fascists and religious fundamentalists through his presumed ability to sanction their views without himself being identified with their practices.

This is the reason Mr. Harris takes such offense at the accusation that he is a racist or an Islamophobe. He is, as he states, “not making common cause with fascists,” but rather recovering the reasoned liberal position of defending “civil society” — a task, he claims, that in recent years has “been outsourced to extremists.”

Thus for Mr. Harris, the inability or unwillingness of secular, multicultural liberalism to press a vigorous critique of Islam is a symptom of its failure. With respect to Islam, liberals, according to Mr. Harris, ought to be ones “pointing the way beyond this iron-age madness,” but they have failed by virtue of their multicultural tolerance.

One of the critiques, advanced by Mr. Hussain against New Atheists like Mr. Harris, concerns the way in which their rational thinking is not as free from history as it presumes; on the contrary, it often exhibits the tendency to rehearse oppressive (at times racialized) features of colonial thought. Mr. Harris’ phrase “this iron age madness” functions as a clear example of the way in which he codes ‘non-Western’ as traditional, backward, and repressive, allowing the West to represent itself as modern, forward thinking, and free.

This form of reasoning confuses its descriptions with its presuppositions, using the former to covertly ground the latter.

In a notable example of such confused reasoning, Mr. Harris asserted, in a Huffington Post piece quoted by Mr. Hussain, that “the outrage that Muslims feel over US and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns.”

Here we see Mr. Harris’ assumptions: 1) theological concerns cannot provide a basis for reasonable claims; 2) theological concerns are symptoms of a mistaken (traditional, backward, culturally determined) understandings of oneself and the world; and 3) non-theological (atheistic) concerns as the only kinds of concerns capable of grounding an accurate view of oneself and the world.

Mr. Harris’ assumptions mask the vast differences internal to modes of religious thought (an oxymoron for Mr. Harris) and religious life. It also obscures the fact that there might, in fact, be non-theological reasons for Muslims to feel outraged over U.S. and British foreign policy.

Mr. Harris’ new form of atheism sounds very much like an old form of colonialism.

This is seen most clearly at those moments when Mr. Harris shows us the ethical character of his thinking. He writes, in the email response to Mr. Greenwald, “one of my main concerns is for all the suffering women, homosexuals, freethinkers, and intellectuals in indigenous Muslim societies.”

Appealing to the discourse of Western moral superiority, Mr. Harris invokes their plight as a way to justify belligerent attitudes against Islam. His reasoning predicates the West as the source of salvation and precludes the possibility of thinking meaningful social transformation outside the framework of an atheistic liberalism.

Daniel J. Schultz is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is currently writing a dissertation on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power in relation to the visual transmission of theological discourse in Franciscan iconography.

This essay is reprinted with permission of Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Photo by Stephen Collector

You might call Tami Simon a spiritual entrepreneur. As a college dropout and a seeker in her early 20s, she started Sounds True with a tape recorder and $50,000 she inherited after the death of her father. Sounds True is now one of the fastest growing privately held companies "disseminating spiritual wisdom" from Ram Dass to Eckhart Tolle to Brené Brown. Our interview with Ms. Simon is in production and will be available on Thursday. In the meantime, I've compiled my live-tweets of Krista's conversation with her in studio. Enjoy and share your favorites.

Photo by Matthew Foster / Flickr, cc by-nc-nd 2.0

Just south of Liverpool, England is the town of Wrexham. And from that moist location came the most edifying words from Benji (@benjiw):

Comforting myself at the end of a long day and having damp feet from rain listening to @Beingtweets podcast with @kristatippett.

It's Mother's Day weekend here in the States. One of those all-too-rare occasions when families come together to celebrate the women in their lives. It's also a moment to acknowledge the beautiful messiness of life, of raising children and grandchildren, of being a spouse and a child. As Krista (@KristaTippett) noted on Twitter this week:

So important that we are real about parenting. It's amazing. But it's not "all good," all bliss.

The quoted language comes from Tracy Hahn-Burkett's blog post, The Fantasy That 'It's All Good' in Parenting":

"By telling the truth, you just might make some other parents weep with relief when they realize they're not alone."

You're not alone, Tracy. You are so not alone! Which reminds me...

Poet Marie Howe pointed us to the street art of the Mazeking. With a simple idea and chalk, she (he?) welcomes people to stand inside a circle with "Happiness Here" inscribed:

"I wanted to create something interactive, free for all to see and use which provoked thought about what happiness is."

Take a look at the artist's video profiling people's reactions to being "in happiness." How would you react?

Last week's show with neuroscientist Rex Jung on creativity sparked plenty of discussion, especially his observations on a cherished method of idea generation:

"Brainstorming is the worst thing you can do. The main reason why is because of this process of trying out strange new ideas versus when you put people together in a room, almost invariably they will try to conform socially. So you will get creative ideas, but you won't get as creative when people are trying to please each other than when they're trying to push the envelope. And so the studies invariably show that the quality of the creative ideas that people put out individually are invariably higher in quality than those done in a group format. So another myth bites the dust."

As you can imagine, Dr. Jung's words drew a strong response. It was reblogged on Tumblr and shared hundreds of times on Facebook. It also generated dozens of comments. Many let out a big sigh of relief, like Sultan Elam ("I agree!"), and others, like John Ginty, objected to they slaying of a sacred cow:

"I was surprised to hear Jung discount the habit of brainstorming - one of, IMHO, the most beneficial techniques."

What's been your experience with brainstorming? Does it combat or encourage creativity?

But one of my favorite responses came from Sujata Krishna. After hearing Rex Jung's description of how we can actually change the shape of our brains and beef them up with training, he offered this passage from Jiddu Krishnamurti:

"Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought. Insight is the total absence of the whole movement of thought as time and remembrance. So there is direct perception."

Read an extended passage on our Tumblr. It's good.

"How do you know you're Pagan? How do you know when you're in love?" ~Raymond Sweeney

Over the past couple of years I've been working with Diane Winston's graduate journalism students at USC. And, this week, I posted an intriguing story from Dublin. Shweta Saraswat (@shwetaspins) and Tricia Tongco (@triciatongco) report on former Catholics who are rediscovering their religious beliefs and Irish heritage in pre-Christian spirituality. Check out "The Snakes are Still in Ireland: Pagans, Shamans, and Modern Druids in a Catholic World." So interesting.

"The truth about culture lies in the middle; values are transposable, which is why identity is most enthralling when they are tethered the least."

Much has happened in so-called Muslim-Western relations in the last decade, not the least of which is the Arab Spring. Has the paradigm changed or does it remain same? Guest contributor Michael Young offers this provocative op-ed on the ever-changing nature of culture.

And, finally, from the Twitter desk of Krista Tippett:

"Pondering the relationship between remembering and invention."

Any thoughts or reflections on this pairing? Weigh in here. I'll share some of our favorites on Twitter (@beingtweets) and next week's newsletter.

Median % of Muslims across seven Muslim countries who say each of these traits describes people in Western countries and median % of non-Muslims across the U.S., Russia and four Western European countries who say each of these traits describes Muslims. (Source: Pew Research Center)

It is a fact that the notion of a clash of civilizations, first popularized by the American academic Samuel Huntington, is more relevant than ever in the minds of many people. Especially when it concerns Muslim-Western relations, there is a view that Muslim and Western values are incompatible.

And yet Mr. Huntington’s argument that after the Cold War conflict would be defined not by ideology or economics, but by cultural differences, was indeed prophetic since culture has become the principle basis for differentiation, even if culture itself is often viewed in far too static a way.

The reaction to Mr. Huntington’s conclusion was generally one of unease. If what he said was true, then the future of the world could be very bleak indeed. Cultural differences would be regarded as sinister rather than as foundations of invigorating diversity. For many, Mr. Huntington seemed to be looking at the glass half empty, when the very concept of global interaction, and globalization in general, imposed a far more heartening reading of the situation.

Both sides had a point. Mr. Huntington was prescient for realizing that the causes of conflict would shift away from ideological antagonism (though the argument with respect to economics was less persuasive), even if they remained firmly in the realm of ideas. However it is also true that, in his rendering, global relations seemed to reflect an apocalyptic vision — that of perennial discord and enmity.

There is nothing wrong with discussing the disparities between Western and Muslim values, but to lend to the discussion unchangeable qualities on both sides is to miss the adaptable nature of culture and the ability of humans to modify cultural reactions in changing environments.

If one wants to question Mr. Huntington’s paradigm, it is in the sphere of perceptions where that has to be done. For many people in the West, the Arab uprisings since 2011 have been a case in point. These people have come to believe that what began as a yearning for democracy and freedom has ended up favoring Islamist groups (groups that believe there is a role for Islam in politics) that are neither particularly democratic nor tolerant of freedom, and who have usually sought restrictive legislation against women, a substantial portion of their populations.

But the reality lies in the nuances. For example, in Egypt and Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennadha parties have taken over major state institutions. While they have allowed behavior unheard of under the old regimes, they have also become increasingly contested as they have retained powers allowing them to restrict certain freedoms, such as freedom of expression, while riding roughshod over representative bodies.

Acknowledging the complex undercurrents of the Arab revolts is necessary in order to grasp what is going on. The notion that there is something irreconcilable between the aspirations of Arab societies and those of Western societies is simplistic, and often wrong, just as it is equally naïve to expect that Arab societies in ebullition will wholeheartedly embrace Western values, such as secularism, the primacy of the individual at the expense of the group, and so on.

To demand such an embrace, no less than declaring it impossible, is to believe that culture talks in absolutes.

In the last 12 years since the 9/11 attacks, familiarity has led to a better Western understanding of the complexities in the Muslim world, while far-reaching changes in the Muslim world have undermined a black and white view of the region in the West. When Syrians revolted two years ago, they had no hesitation in asking for Western help, just as the overthrow of pro-Western autocrats was regarded favorably in the United States and Europe.

A Syrian or Egyptian still regards freedom much as a Frenchman or an American does, even if the preferred social contract each will favor to protect those freedoms differs. Perhaps some will want more secularism, others more religion. But if the preferred social contract ends up undermining those same freedoms, then the chances are that new rebellions will occur at some stage.

Mr. Huntington was correct in looking toward culture as the boundary between Western and Eastern societies. But boundaries are ever-changing and values cross over between cultures by osmosis. To assume cultures are autarkic and unchanging is as erroneous as to assume that cultural distinctions are invariably resolvable. The truth about culture lies in the middle; values are transposable, which is why identity is most enthralling when they are tethered the least.

Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

A version of this article was published by the Common Ground News Service on April 30, 2013. Copyright permission is granted for publication.