On Fundamentalism

Bill Maher is one of the comedians slash commentators that I view regularly – on Youtube because I don't have HBO; I enjoy Maher's show very much because it is funny, informative and refreshingly direct, 'non-PC' in the sense that he spares no-one's feelings and doesn't care if he offends the over-sensitive... but this does not mean I agree with Maher on every single issue. Earlier today I saw Maher's interview with Sam Harris in which they discussed the war on terror. Maher and Harris seem to agree that one of the biggest issues facing the U.S. (and maybe the world) today is 'Islamic extremism'. Neither endorses Trump's 'Muslim ban', nor would either like their shared position to be described as a hostility to all Muslims, but both regard Islam itself as a kind of evil idealogy that needs to be fought somehow, through rational argument or through supporting 'moderate Muslims' or 'ex-Muslims'. I don't know whether any readers care at all about my views on the issue of 'Islamic extremism'. But, this being my blog, I can say what I like and feel I want to offer an opinion.

Maher and Harris both dislike Islam, yes, but their dislike of Islam is part of a deeper antagonism towards all religions generally. On The Daily Show once, Maher said his show was founded on two premises: "Drugs are good and religion is bad". (Jon replied equivocally "I agree with one of those statements".) Harris has written books attacking Christianity as well as Islam and was considered one of the 'four horsemen of the New Atheism' along with Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The New Atheists believe not only that there is no God or Gods but that religion is the cause of all worldly problems and that atheists should go forth and proselytise, persuading religious people through rational argument to put their trust in science rather than the false idols of superstition. The New Atheism is aggressive, Fundamentalist, almost evangelical. It is also absurd. Imagine a New Atheist in Utah, like some reverse Jehova's Witness, knocking on Mormons' doors and telling each new potential convert, "There is no God, life is meaningless, you're stupid, everyone you know is stupid and everything you've always believed is wrong. Here's a pamphlet about Darwin and a copy of Being and Nothingness by John-Paul Sartre. Have a nice day." It seems pretty evident that telling a person that he or she is stupid not the way to win friends and influence people but this seems arguably to be the strategy of Harris and the other horsemen.

For most of my life, I should say, I was a kind of New Atheist myself. I had absolute faith in science. I must give off a kind of lost-sheep vibe though, because people would often approach me on the street to try to convert me to their religion, sometimes Christians but more often Hare Krishnas waving copies of the Bhagavad Gita. I would never engage these people for long, not because I thought I might be assimilated, but rather because I worried that I might accidentally convert someone to atheism and I didn't want to deprive anyone of any comforting illusions he or she might have. I was that sure of my atheism. I now think that it is fairly ridiculous to think that one can persuade a committed Christian to stop being 'stupid' and 'ignorant' – and a story about a friend of mine, Stevie, illustrates this. Stevie, a poet and rock musician very influenced by Radiohead among others, who, thanks to Tinder, had a different sexual partner every week when I knew him, is also a committed Christian who said to me once, "Give me one reason why you think the Resurrection didn't happen and I'll prove you wrong." It seems unlikely that I could accidentally convince Stevie to give up his faith.

The idea that we can persuade religious people through rational argument to abandon their beliefs and embrace atheism is plainly silly. Yet it is what the New Atheists believe. This is not the only mistake Fundamentalist Atheists make though. The other reason why Maher and Harris are misguided is because they misunderstand the role religion plays in people's lives. For most people, religion is not an alternative to science but rather a supplement. As President Obama pointed out to Maher in an interview Maher conducted a couple of months ago, there are many scientists who are religious. (In the same interview, Maher claimed that atheists were a persecuted minority and Obama replied, "In my experience, I don't see that.") Yes, there are a few oddball Christians out there who believe the world was created in 4004BC and that Noah brought dinosaurs aboard the ark, but most Christians, and I suspect most Muslims, are not anti-science. Religion, for most people, is a marker of identity, of moral values, and of group allegiance. If someone says "I'm a Mormon" or "I'm a Scientologist" or "I'm a Buddhist", he or she is not usually making a metaphysical assertion about the world and its history, rather the person is making a statement about who he or she is. When Islam is attacked by people like Maher and Harris, it can only be construed by Muslims as an attack on their shared sense of self, as a kind of hate-speech. And this can only encourages borderline individuals to consider or endorse violence, to go over the edge.

The New Atheists see something wicked in religion itself. Maher and Harris condemn Islam for many reasons, but one reason in particular is that they believe Islam is inherently misogynistic. What they don't take into account is the genuine possibility that a person can be both a Muslim and a feminist – an example being Nadiya Hussain, the British Muslim woman who won the Great British Bake Off in 2015. Nadiya, who has a high public profile, openly wears a hijab (not a burkha), not because she is forced to, but because it is an expression of her Islamic identity and her membership of that community. Nadiya wears a hijab in the same way cute Christian goth girls wear silver crucifixes around their necks, as a token of who she is. A hijab is not a burka. I am no expert on the Quran but I believe Muhammad only instructed his female followers to cover their hair – and so countries which force women to wear full burkhas are taking the Prophet's injunction, I believe, much further than the religion actually requires. This practice says more about these societies than their official religion. And yet Maher presented a picture of women in burkhas as though it were irrefutable evidence that Islam is irredeemably anti-progressive.

Apparently, liberals often argue that organisations such as ISIL and Al Qaeda represent an extremist fringe and should be compared to the Ku Klux Klan, an argument that Maher calls a "false equivalence". The problem with this comparison, the reason it is false, Maher suggested in his talk with Harris, is that the Muslims have "armies of terrorists" whereas the Ku Klux Klan don't. Now, if liberals sometimes commit the logical error of drawing "false equivalences", Maher sometimes commits the error of regarding the extreme as representative of the whole and of over-simplifying. Islam is not to blame for ISIL. ISIL was born in the hell of the Syrian civil war, a war which began in peaceful protests against autocratic dictator and which quickly devolved into a monstrous and unwinnable bloodbath. In a civil war, there is no middle ground; the moderate democratic opposition was squeezed out of existence. Suppose a civil war erupted in the United States between white crackers in the centre and South of the country and the multi-cultural liberal communities of the East and West coasts? It is indeed possible to imagine an alt-right 'army of terrorists' emerging, made up of white supremacists and former survivalists, blowing up black churches and attacking mosque and synogogues. The equivalence is not so far-fetched as Maher makes out.

I like Maher but I am not a big fan of Sam Harris. Harris is articulate and interested in dialogue, but he is not a particularly subtle thinker. I read with interest the debate he had with Noam Chomsky about American foreign policy and I thought Chomsky won. (I feel sure, incidentally, that Chomsky is an atheist but, unlike Harris and the other horsemen, Chomsky feels no need to force his atheism down other people's throats.) I also heard a pod-cast Harris made a little while ago in which he suggested that the reason Trump won was because the Obama admininstration had failed to identify and tackle the real enemy – Islam. The problem with his argument is simply this. New York and Los Angeles, multi-cultural cities which actually have large Muslim communities, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton; the hinterland where no Muslims live at all voted Trump. In the South, people's only exposure to Muslims and 'the war on Terror' is through Fox News. It seems that when you actually know Muslims it becomes harder to hate them.

Obama, as I have said before, has steadfastly refused to use the term 'Islamic extremism' and rightly so. Using the term 'Islamic extremists' would be about as helpful as the British government during the Troubles characterising the IRA as 'Catholic extremists'. I know how much Maher likes and admires Obama and so perhaps he should entertain the idea that Obama might have been right about this issue. The root cause of terrorism is social and political, not religious. Of course, it is as hard to change the opinion of a committed Atheist as it is to change the mind of a committed Christian or Muslim... but I hope Maher might consider it.