Following on from Cris’ recent posts about ISIS and its coverage in the media, a new interview of Graeme Wood addressing how his recent article at The Atlantic has been received has just been posted on blog of the (in)famous New Atheist Sam Harris. I often have a polarised response to Sam Harris’ writing on religion because on the one hand, I agree with him that people are often reluctant to criticize any aspect of religion under the guise of tolerance/relativism, however, he also frequently makes grand reductionist pronouncements about religion or religious traditions and seems to have little use for the extensive existing research literature on religion and extremism. True to form this interview, which is conducted by Harris, provides much to agree with and yet also presents some real head-slapping moments. Graeme Wood however comes across very well, he provides interesting details about how he constructed the story and further nuances his position. I also agree with his assessment that many of his critics are simply misreading his piece based on their rather inflexible agendas:
Wood: … Much of the initial wave of reaction has come from people who desperately wanted it to say one thing or another, and who reacted by assuming that it fell into their predetermined classifications of pieces about politics, Islam, or terrorism. It is gratifying to write a story so resistant to classification that people have to pretend it says things it doesn’t just so that it fits in their mental categories.
Many enemies of Islam … have wanted to read the story as claiming that Islam is responsible for terror, or that ISIS is Islam. In fact it denies these claims explicitly and has a long section about literalist Muslim objections to ISIS. Many Muslims have, ironically, read the piece in exactly the same way, assuming it blames Islam for ISIS. That misreading, I think, is because it’s easier to argue against the anti-Islam point of view than to reckon with the possibility that Islam contains multitudes, like other religions, and that some of them are very, very nasty indeed, even though they share the same texts as the not-nasty ones. People are also frustrated by the fact that the piece discusses religion but has no time for talk of a “clash of civilizations,” and in fact argues that one of our main policy goals should be to avoid this. Finally, some readers are desperate to see my article as a portrayal of Muslims as savages, and cannot process that I am actually arguing something like the opposite, and specifically about ISIS. Its members aren’t brainless brutes who cannot think—that’s the Orientalist view, and ironically it’s the view that a lot of people who would call themselves anti-Orientalists take when reading the piece. ISIS members are often highly sophisticated people, just as capable of intelligent critical thought as anyone else. They are simply evil.
Then, finally, there’s the very interesting reaction of people who condemn the article for being “Islamophobic” in effect if not in intent, because people who hate Muslims will use it and ignore the parts about Muslims’ overwhelming rejection of ISIS. I’ll just say that Muslims, of all people, should be wary of assigning guilt to texts because of how they’re invoked by hate-filled people.
The only comment that gave me pause from the above was the ‘they are simply evil’ comment, which while an understandable reaction is also an unproductive sweeping assessment. Sam Harris calls him on this point later however and argues for a more nuanced position:
Harris: Yes, but nor are these people “simply evil,” you stated at the beginning of this conversation. Calling them “evil” can be as misleading calling them “crazy.” I’m sure jihadism is selecting for thrill seekers and psychopaths to some degree. But I doubt that it’s a large variable. If 1% of the general population is suffering from psychopathy, let’s nudge that up to 10% for the Islamic State—an increase that would still do nothing to explain the larger phenomenon.
I see no reason to think that most jihadis are psychologically abnormal. The truth is far more depressing: These are mostly normal people—fully capable of love, empathy, altruism, and so forth—who simply believe what they say they believe. (emphasis added)
I fully agree with Harris’ point here and it made me think about the recent fascination, evident even with liberal news sites like the BBC site and the Guardian, with various mundane details of the previous life of ISIS’ British executioner ‘Jihadi John’. While, his unmasking generated understandable interest, I was taken aback with the fact that the BBC and Guardian’s top stories for the past few days have been recounting his previous jobs in IT and comments from previous teachers, as if they represent some shocking revelation. The fact that he was a normal person, who had lived a fairly unremarkable life, seems to be baffling the media but that actually seems entirely predictable. Extremists can be life long fanatical devotees, raised in families of extremists or recruited after suffering some great injustice, but often they are not- especially when they come from the West, in such cases they are usually just ordinary teenagers or young 20 somethings that fall into extremism for fairly mundane reasons, be it political dissatisfaction or even just existential ennui. Harris’ makes this point clearly and I think it is noteworthy that this suggests a more realistic appreciation of Islamic extremists than many of his critics claim.
Wood defends his point by noting that ISIS fighters commit acts of barbaric savagery and openly promote things like the return of slavery and the execution of homosexuals as ‘good’ and thus calling them ‘crazy’ or ‘evil’ is not entirely unwarranted. Most people would agree with this, but I still think Harris’ point stands that to do so can be counterproductive.
Harris’ hawkishness does come out several times during the interview however and at one point he seems unable to understand how meeting ISIS in some glorious clash of civilizations battle could be a bad strategy:
Harris: It seems that they wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to engage us there, especially if we told them that we intended to build a gay-porn palace on the site, or some other sacrilege. It seems that these guys are telling us with every breath how to wage psychological warfare against them.
… Our intelligence services have estimated that they have 30,000 fighters. The Kurds put the number at 200,000. Whatever the true figure, we have the most dangerous and incorrigible religious maniacs alive telling us that if we only make the right noises, they’ll show up in the middle of an open field at daybreak and just turn their credulous faces skyward, expecting to see Jesus swoop down from the clouds and declare that he’s been a secret Muslim all this time.
…
So why not act on this information? It seems to me that the psychological and propaganda value of our resulting victory is not something to wave away lightly. Imagine the effect this would have on true believers everywhere: They’ve created a new caliphate, and the new caliph is just swell. All the prophecies are coming to fruition, so an army of the purest jihadis to exist in a thousand years rides into this final battle and gets smashed by infidels. And God just sits on his hands. Just as important, this would be a situation in which we could avoid creating a lot of collateral damage. This battle could actually take place in an unpopulated area.
Graeme Wood is eventually able to counter Harris’ enthusiasm by highlighting that such actions would lend ISIS and other Islamic extremists a propaganda victory that would ultimately prove harmful:
Wood: The decision not to attack them that way is a natural outgrowth of acknowledging that they mean what they say. If they really think there is a war brewing between Muslims and the West, then you don’t convince them otherwise by telling them to bring it on.
But even then, Harris seems to fail to appreciate how utterly self defeating it would be to hand ISIS a clear demonstration of one of its central propaganda premises, namely “that Crusaders are out to kill Muslims and will come to crush them whenever they become strong”.
Harris: It strikes me as such a strange fear to be obliged to consider. And to have it be the primary concern that closes down specific military options just seems uncanny. Again, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you. This may, in fact, be the very reason why we shouldn’t attack the Islamic State in a way that might actually defeat it. But to admit that is to admit that we are already hostages of a sort. It’s very depressing.
I also enjoyed when Wood counters Harris’ simplistic dismissal of academic research into extremism, although he does go on to criticize the peculiar ‘dogma’ of certain researchers who dismiss the relevance of ideology or beliefs out of hand:
Harris: I just want to point out that this effort to get at root causes only ever runs in one direction. No one doubts the political and economic justifications that people give for their behavior. When someone says, “Listen, I murdered my rich neighbor because I knew he kept a pile of money in a safe. I wanted that money, and I didn’t want to leave a witness,” nobody looks for an ulterior explanation for that behavior. But when someone says, “I think infidels and apostates deserve to burn in hell, and I know for a fact that I’ll go to paradise if I die while waging jihad against them,” many academics refuse to accept this rationale at face value and begin looking for the political or economic reasons that they imagine lie beneath it. So the game is rigged.
Wood: Yes. However, the countervailing current in social science is the tradition in ethnography and anthropology of taking seriously what people say. And this can lead to the exact opposite of the materialist, “root causes” approach. When Evans-Pritchard, for example, talks about witchcraft among the Azande, he’s describing exactly what they say and showing that it’s an internally consistent view of the world. This is something that anthropology has done quite well in the past, and it gives us a model for how we can listen to jihadis and understand them without immediately assuming that they are incapable of self-knowledge.
What I’m arguing for in the piece is not to discard either type of explanation but to remember the latter one and take the words of these ISIS people seriously (emphasis added). Even though at various points in the past we’ve ignored political or material causes, this doesn’t mean that ideology plays no role, or that we should ignore the plain meaning of words.
In short, this is a great follow up to The Atlantic piece and is both enlightening and at times very frustrating to read. Graeme Wood comes across as a very reasonable and responsible researcher, whose main argument is that we need to pay attention to what extremists say and not dismiss the influence of their beliefs because of the role of religion/belief that most people in Western democracies are familiar with. He does not posit ideology as being the single factor responsible for extremism but rather a factor that is all too frequently overlooked. Harris on the other hand comes across sincerely, and at times well informed, but also occasionally as reactionary and dismissive of opinions that differ from his own. I’m glad a voice like his is out there though as the liberal side does not people like Harris to give voice to some of the positions of those who do not buy into the US-centric narratives of Chomsky and Greenwald.
— Chris K.
