Just one final quick thought on torture, I hope to be my last. Sam Harris refuses to denounce torture because, in some hypotheticals in his head, it comes in handy. That logic of course means you can’t ‘categorically’ denounce anything as immoral, because any bad act could, in theory, lead to overall good consequences. Harris sees this as a deep insight.

In other words, this grown man just recently came to understand teleological ethics, the idea that, sometimes, the ends justify the means. Most people get that sometime in elementary school I’d imagine.

The issue isn’t far-fetched hypotheticals. The issue is the overwhelming likelihood of bad consequences, and the innate odiousness of the act itself. Rape might lead to the conception of a child who grows up to be the next Gandhi; we don’t condone rape. Murder might prevent future crime; we don’t condone murder. An innately awful act that has overwhelmingly negative results is immoral. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it’s probabilistic. It’s called being an adult.

We issue universal proscriptions against certain acts, aka, crimes, because we know that leaving the choice to commit these actions, as well as those far less dangerous, up to the vagaries of individual choice places us all at risk. Risk of bigots, of the crazed, of the selfish and virulent… people like Sam Harris, in other words, who think themselves fit to judge your innermost beliefs and find you guilty.

Public ethics, to my mind, are utilitarian. You can’t condone evil in pursuit of incredibly unlikely, implausible, and largely hypothetical goods, while the evil act itself causes very real, very large, and almost certain negative consequences. It’s bad math, bad policy, and bad ethics.

Let us also note the short memory of people like Harris who cannot comprehend the risk in giving a government the kind of power to do these things, in secret, and without accountability. All Harris cares about is reducing his risk of being killed by scary Muslims; he can’t grasp the risk of being killed by much more powerful, and numerous, people closer to home.

That’s it. Speech over. This blog now returns to lighter topics for a good long while.

One can look at a wingnut (and I include Harris in this category) as a comical figure, full of contradictions and hypocrisy. But what is it that drives a person to the kinds of frenzied, thoughtless activity we see these people engaged in?

Sometimes it’s simple greed, cashing a paycheck to sell out their fellow culture warriors; sometimes it’s intense self-loathing, like you see in your typical, deeply closeted gay Republicans.

In the case of torture enthusiasts like Sam Harris, however, it’s fairly obvious: fear. Pure, unadulterated, childish fear.

People like Harris live in constant, irrational terror. They’re terrified that the swarthy fellow down the street is in an Al Queda sleeper cell; they’re terrified that they’re going to wake up, ala Rip van Winkle, and find themselves living under Sharia law. They’re terrified that someday, however unlikely, however far removed from actual threat, however protected, isolated, coddled they may in fact be, that the next time the big, scary Islamist threat strikes, it will come for them.

Ooooooh. Spooky.

The reason so much attention is paid to Islamic extremism isn’t what most people think, to my mind. The obvious assumption is bigotry (which people like Harris intentionally misconstrue as ‘racism’, then defend themselves against by acknowledging that Islam isn’t a race. Strawmen are a specialty of the terror loving set).

The real reason Americans of many races, creeds, and ideologies (including neo-pagan Power of the Mind hippies like Harris) have fallen so completely off the deep end is simple: September 11th, 2001 was the first time any of them felt real Fear.

They couldn’t handle the strain.

See, unlike the people whom we subject to carpet bombing, or whose countries we invade for resources, or whose corrupt, violent governments we prop up to keep labor cheap and profits high, your average American in the intellectual class has never known real Fear. They might have been momentarily afraid, as they got into a minor car accident, or even somewhat stressed over a tough midterm or having to take out a larger student loan. They might even have struggled to make the rent once or twice in their lives. That’s fear with a lowercase f, and it’s very real.

But it’s not Fear. Fear is knowing that, at every second of every day, you face the real threat of lingering, agonizing, violent death from people and causes over which you have no control. Fear is knowing that your life is worth less than nothing, that you are an impediment to the amoral goals of a violent, godlike (relatively speaking) figure forever beyond your reach. Fear with a capital-F is the destruction of personal security, of the feeling that ‘everything will be all right’, however delusional that feeling is.

Americans by and large don’t know that fear. Many living here in this country do, of course; the homeless, the Appalachian families that have lived in crushing poverty since the Civil War, our immigrant underclass hiding from Immigration’s cruel raids designed to devastate their families.

But not people like Harris. Never them.

So on that September day when they turned on the news and saw the heart of American power (economic power, after all, our real strength) set ablaze by people who, being dead, were obviously beyond repercussion, directed by shadowy figures half a world away who were also apparently forever beyond reach, the future Torture enthusiasts were reduced to gibbering, bed-wetting hysteria.

They had to find an answer. They had to find something, anything, some tiger rock, some deity, some way to reassure themselves: I’m an American, and I’m safe.

Torture was the answer many of them settled upon. They’ve seen it in action movies, they loved it on 24, and it appeals to them for precisely the same reason they crave reasssurance that the big, bad, (incredibly statistically unlikely) Muslim threat won’t get them: fear

Terror of physical harm drives them to seek radical solutions, and their own deranged, completely uncontrollable fear ensures their belief in torture’s efficacy. Torture, they reason, is TERRIFYING. Therefore, no one could ever resist it. It must work; fear, to a wingnut, always works… because it always works *ON THEM*

This is the nexus, this is the key. Wingnuts believe that the world works the same way as their own befuddled brains. If fear can make them do anything, it can make anyone do anything.

These mouth-breathing halfwits usually resort to the most extreme of hypothetical, theoretical, fear-generating mental exercises to make their ‘point’: the so-called ‘ticking bomb’ scenario, where you have a torture suspect who conveniently knows just how to stop, say, a nuclear weapon from going off, you have the weapon, and oh, if ONLY you knew how to disarm it — and only they can tell you. This is the scenario that makes Harris types all gooey.

There’s only one problem (actually there are several but roll with me here): empirically, in the real world.. torture doesn’t work.

Let me repeat that for the simple-minded, whether Harris or Neoconservative or just Kiefer Sutherland fans: TORTURE. DOESN’T. WORK.

Experts and interrogators from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences agree that torture is counterproductive. Here, have a sample:

By contrast, it is easy to find experienced U.S. officers who argue precisely the opposite. Meet, for example, retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam. More than once he was faced with a ticking time-bomb scenario: a captured Vietcong guerrilla who knew of plans to kill Americans. What was done in such cases was “not nice,” he says. “But we did not physically abuse them.” Rothrock used psychology, the shock of capture and of the unexpected. Once, he let a prisoner see a wounded comrade die. Yet — as he remembers saying to the “desperate and honorable officers” who wanted him to move faster — “if I take a Bunsen burner to the guy’s genitals, he’s going to tell you just about anything,” which would be pointless.

Source: Washington Post

Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 — long before Abu Ghraib — to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply “not a good way to get information.” In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no “stress methods” at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the “batting average” might be lower: “perhaps six out of ten.” And if you beat up the remaining four? “They’ll just tell you anything to get you to stop.”

Source: Ibid

So, even in your ticking time bomb scenario, torture not only doesn’t work — it’s too dangerous. The terrorist will tell you anything to get you to stop. That might be the truth, or it might be a lie. Would you really trust that disarm code your terrorist just gave you to put into the nuke?

What if it’s wrong? What if it makes the bomb go off instantly? Then the torture will stop (especially if the bomb is near, say, the terrorist).

(While we’re on the theoretical, if I was a terrorist, and they had the bomb next to me, tortuing me, I’d tell them the wrong code on PURPOSE. At least then I’d take them with me.. and who’s to say they’ll ever stop, otherwise?)

Ultimately though, hypotheticals aren’t worth as much as demonstrated facts. Let’s have some more.

In the first congressional hearing on torture since the release of Bush administration memos that provided the legal justification for torture, Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the CIA’s abusive techniques were “ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida.” According to Soufan, his own nonviolent interrogation of an al-Qaida suspect was quickly yielding valuable, actionable intelligence — until the CIA intervened.

…

Soufan, who testified at the hearing from behind a partition to hide his identity, worked on a small team of interrogators utilizing tried-and-true techniques that emphasize knowing the detainee’s language, understanding his culture, leveraging known information about a detainee, and sometimes using a bit of trickery. The method is based on rapport and is believed by experienced interrogators to result in the most reliable actionable intelligence. “It is about outwitting the detainee by using a combination of interpersonal, cognitive and emotional strategies to get the information needed,” Soufan said in written testimony, which he paraphrased on Wednesday.

…

“Within the first hour of interrogation,” Soufan said, “we gained actionable intelligence.” Soufan could not say what that information was because it remains classified. Zubaydah had been injured during his capture, and Soufan’s team arranged for medical care and continued talking to the prisoner. Within the next few days, Soufan made one of the most significant intelligence breakthroughs of the so-called war on terror. He learned from Zubaydah that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind behind the attacks on 9/11.

Then, however, a CIA interrogation team from Washington led by a contractor arrived at the secret location. Zubaydah was stripped naked and the contractor began a series of coercive, abusive interrogations, based on Cold War-era communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. During the Korean War, for example, Chinese interrogators employed the measures to get captured American pilots to make false confessions. “The new techniques did not produce results, as Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking,” Soufan explained. “After a few days of getting no information, and after repeated inquiries from D.C. asking why all of a sudden no information was being transmitted … we again were given control of the interrogation.”

As Soufan and his team resumed their interrogation, Zubaydah revealed information about Jose Padilla, the alleged “dirty bomber.”

But after that, the CIA and the contractor again took over, using what Soufan called an “untested theory” that the Cold War techniques might work for getting good information. “Again, however, the technique wasn’t working,” Soufan recalled.

Soufan’s team was brought back yet again. “We found it harder to reengage him this time, because of how the techniques had affected him,” Soufan noted. “But eventually, we succeeded.”

A third time the CIA and the contractor team took over, using increasingly brutal methods. Soufan reported what he called “borderline torture” to his superiors in Washington. In protest of the abuse, former FBI Director Robert Mueller pulled Soufan out of the location.

There you have it. Torture doesn’t work; not only that, it makes real interrogation HARDER. Torture makes you LESS safe, Harris, you bedwetter.

Source: Salon.com

So what do Torture supporters do, when confronted with this evidence? They lie.

Sigh.

Aside from not working to get the information you want, torture is the ultimate recruiting tool for NEW terrorists. Torture discourages people in custody from cooperating, it alienates much of the world, it weakens our alliances and makes our soldiers the target of retribution. All that for something that DOESN’T work.

Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse. But that’s only the past.

Somewhere in the world there are other young Muslims who have joined Al Qaida because we tortured and abused prisoners. These men will certainly carry out future attacks against Americans, either in Iraq, Afghanistan, or possibly even here. And that’s not to mention numerous other Muslims who support Al Qaida, either financially or in other ways, because they are outraged that the United States tortured and abused Muslim prisoners.

Source: The Daily Beast http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-20/torture-doesnt-work/

That’s from yet another successful interrogator, by the way; his team caught the head of Al Queda-in-Iraq.

What’s the take-away from all this?

Sam Harris hems and haws, he goes on and on about how you can’t rule out torture in ALL imaginary, fantasy-land constructions he makes in his head, therefore, torture isn’t so bad. He insists that the ticking bomb scenario is real, that nuclear terrorism is an imminent threat, and that therefore, you can’t rule it out. Harris doesn’t think it should be legal to torture people; he just thinks we should do it anyway, and that this would be ok.

Here, read this filth.

It is widely claimed that torture “does not work”—that it produces unreliable information, implicates innocent people, etc. As I argue in The End of Faith, this line of argument does not resolve the underlying ethical dilemma. Clearly, the claim that torture never works, or that it always produces bad information, is false. There are cases in which the mere threat of torture has worked. As I argue in The End of Faith, one can easily imagine situations in which even a very low probability of getting useful information through torture would seem to justify it—the looming threat of nuclear terrorism being the most obvious case. It is decidedly unhelpful that those who claim to know that torture is “always wrong” never seem to envision the circumstances in which good people would be tempted to use it.

Funny, I think I’ve just spent this entire column discussing the circumstances in which ‘good people’ would be tempted to do it. The Daily Beast article up there talks extensively about those situations, and why it’s still wrong to torture.

Harris has a constantly shifting series of goalposts. You can’t just demonstrate that torture overwhelmingly provides bad information, that it recruits far more terrorists than it could ever stop, that experienced interrogators disagree with Harris on every point. You have to prove, to satisfy Harris’ delusional fantasies, that torture is always wrong, in all areas, in all times, forever, throughout history, throughout the universe.

When he loses the argument on practicality, on ticking time bombs, on reliability of intelligence, on the fact that torture is overwhelmingly impractical, Harris has to resort to this ridiculous thought experiment. When even that seems implausible, he gets snarky and passive-aggressive.

The best case against “ticking-bomb” arguments appears in David Luban’s article, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” published in the Virginia Law Review. (I have posted a PDF here.) Luban relies on a few questionable assumptions, however. And he does not actually provide an ethical argument against torture in the ticking bomb case; he offers a pragmatic argument against our instituting a policy allowing torture in such cases. There is absolutely nothing in Luban’s argument that rules out the following law:

The Harris Law of Torture: We will never torture anyone under any circumstances unless we are certain, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the person in our custody is Osama bin Laden.

It seems to me that unless one can produce an ethical argument against torturing Osama bin Laden, one does not have an argument against the use of torture in principle. Of course, my discussion of torture in The End of Faith (and on this page) only addresses the ethics of torture, not the practical difficulties of implementing a policy based on the ethics.

From Harris’ website

I’ll take that challenge, you self-righteous prick. Ready, asshole? Here you go:

1: In order to torture someone, you must have them under your power, by definition.
2: It is always wrong to abuse someone under your power.

Given that we have the word of numerous experienced interrogators that, on the whole, torture always costs more lives than it saves and produces negative outcomes, and that you never know the outcome before you torture someone, every single decision to torture is a decision to abuse the helpless (unethical) in order to, with overwhelming likelihood, produce further unethical acts.

Committing one evil to most likely commit another? That is not ethical.

By Harris’ logic, you can’t make a ‘categorical argument’ against anything. Rape isn’t ‘always wrong’, because you might conceive a child that grows up to be the next Ghandi. Murder isn’t ‘always wrong’, because that person might someday go crazy and kill a child. Nothing is ‘always’ wrong, says Harris, if you can justify it, before or after the fact, with or without evidence, entirely in the province of your mind.

Harris has singlehanded dismissed the entire field of ethics. Bravo.

What Harris misses is that, in fact, murder, rape and torture ARE always wrong. The Greater Good still involves a Lesser Evil, and you can never wash that stain away.

Yes, in a thought experiment, you can make torture ‘right’. You can also make 1+1 = 3. Real world consequences matter. My ethical argument deals with established reality.. I’ll never try to answer all the lunatic ravings of a Harris, or a Jonah Goldberg, or a Bill O’Reilly. Their minds are cesspools of hate and fear, and there’s always another bogeyman. Adults learn to deal with fear and live in the real world.

Harris never has.

I will digress here to discuss the final point of disagreement I have with Harris. Having demonstrated that he has no core beliefs that can’t be waved away with a scary dream, having shown that he has no standard for public consistency or honesty, advocating that we torture people and lie about and see how long we can get away with it, Harris then goes for the coup de grace. He thinks you should be able to KILL PEOPLE if you think that the beliefs in their heads are *dangerous*

The following passage seems to have been selectively quoted, and misconstrued, more than any I have written:

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

This paragraph appears after a long discussion of the role that belief plays in governing human behavior, and it should be read in that context. Some critics have interpreted the second sentence of this passage to mean that I advocate simply killing religious people for their beliefs. Granted, I made the job of misinterpreting me easier than it might have been, but such a reading remains a frank distortion of my views. Read in context, it should be clear that I am not at all ignoring the link between belief and behavior. The fact that belief determines behavior is what makes certain beliefs so dangerous.

When one asks why it would be ethical to drop a bomb on Osama bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri, the answer cannot be, “because they have killed so many people in the past.” These men haven’t, to my knowledge, killed anyone personally. However, they are likely to get a lot of innocent people killed because of what they and their followers believe about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, etc. As I argued in The End of Faith, a willingness to take preventative action against a dangerous enemy is compatible with being against the death penalty (which I am). Whenever we can capture and imprison jihadists, we should. But in most cases this is impossible.

Ibid

First of all, marvel at a grown man who doesn’t understand the concept of ‘conspiracy’. A mob boss who orders a hit is completely without blame for that crime, because it’s in the past, and he didn’t do it personally!

This is marvelous reasoning, akin to that used by certainly highly observant Jews who build appliances that turn themselves on, sort of, because you can’t do ‘work’ on the Sabbath. If I don’t directly turn the dial, if it turns itself on sometime later, why, the STOVE did it.

What a maroon.

A person doesn’t have to have done anything to justify their death; Harris just said that past events are irrelevant. What’s relevant is, once again, your possible future crimes. (Though I’m unclear, if Osama didn’t directly kill anyone in the past, and therefore he’s not a threat, why is he a threat in the future? If he only continues to give orders, he’s not dangerous, right Sam?)

Here’s the key bit again:

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people.

Ideas are so dangerous that it ‘may’ (how weaselly) be ethical to kill people, solely for believing them. Even if they haven’t done anything. Because those beliefs might, some day, somehow, motivate someone to violence… and unlike violence in torture, violence against people like Harris is wrong.

Who determines which beliefs are dangerous? Who determines whether those beliefs will lead to action?

I think we know the answer to that one… at least, in Sam Harris’ twisted little mind.

Orwell and Phillip K Dick had absolutely nothing on Sam Harris. Nothing.

So, in Pt I, we saw that Sam Harris dismisses some types of the supernatural as fanciful and obvious inventions of man, while others (coincidentally, ones he personally enjoys) are both logical and morally desirable.

Unfortunately for Harris, the amount of evidence for both propositions is roughly equal (namely: none).

Hypocrisy and personal blinders are hardly unusual, though Harris takes it to something of an extreme. Whereas he detests religion in general, and loves some aspects of Eastern religion, he has a profound, frothing hatred of one religion in particular: Islam.

Yes, that’s right. Harris jumped on the Muslim-bashing bandwagon, post 9/11, like so many other Americans. His reasons are… rather poorly thought out.

See, Harris has a particular revulsion for suicide bombing, which is carried out almost exclusively in the contemporary world by bombers who happen to be Muslim. (A vanishingly small percentage of all Muslims of course)

Forgive me in advance for quoting some of his hate speech here but it’s necessary, I think, to make the point.

In fact, suicide bombing is now so commonplace in our world that most of us have lost sight of just how unimaginable it should be. It is, perhaps, the least likely thing human beings could ever be inclined to do. What, after all, is less likely than large numbers of middle class, educated, psychologically healthy people intentionally blowing themselves up—in crowds of children, in front of the offices of the Red Cross, at weddings—and having their mothers sing their praises for it? Can we even conceive of a more profligate misuse of human life? As a cultural phenomenon, suicide bombing should be impossible. But here it is.

Why is suicide bombing so bad compared to, say… dropping bombs from 30,000 feet? Or doing it with remote controls like the IRA? Harris, oddly enough, doesn’t say.

Harris also must lack much in the way of imagination, if a suicide bomber killing him or herself at a cafe is the most profligate misuse of human life he can think of. Suicide bombing is, at heart, murder in pursuit of a cause, usually political. We studied the effects of small scale terror operations like these in a class I had on political revolution in my undergrad days actually; it can be quite effective, if well tailored and targeted, at swaying public opinion. In that respect, suicide bombing isn’t wasteful, it’s exceedingly efficient and cost-effective.

Compare that to dropping atomic weapons on Japan, even as it attempted a diplomatic surrender through Soviet back-channels. Hundreds of thousands dead, to serve no legitimate military purpose. Sure, some people allege that Truman wanted to scare the Russians… which worked out great, since they were already well on the way to stealing our atomic technology, and we had just happened to use up our last two prototypes killing civilians in a broken country. If anything, dropping the bombs on Japan made us far LESS safe. (Certainly, dropping ALL of our remaining nuclear arsenal was moronic. What if we had actually NEEDED that third bomb?)

If you want a less flashy example, how about the thousands of people who die in the United States, every single year, from food-borne illness? Five THOUSAND people die each year that way, and every single one of those deaths is both, by definition, preventable and pointless. Here are the CDC figures on the subject: 76 million Americans get sick each year, 300k are hospitalized, and 5k die.

Source: The Centers for Disease Control

Isn’t that pretty profligate, Sam?  How many of those deaths are the result of poor conditions in slaughterhouses, of untreated sewage used as fertilizer, or unsanitary conditions in factories and processing plants?  Remember the salmonella outbreak last year with jalepenos?  How about the peanut scare?  How about the recall of chili dog sauce, or the Jack in the Box scandal?  On and on and on.

RJ Eskrow, also writing for the Huffington Post at the time, skewered Harris nicely on these issues, and played the same word substitution games with Harris that I did.

As for Harris, his words could be used against any religion (or lack thereof). Take this sentence:

How many more architects and electrical engineers must fly planes into buildings before we realize that the problem of Muslim extremism is not merely a matter of education?

Now imagine we’re in World War II. Replace “buildings” with [sic] and replace “Muslim” with “Shinto” – or just “Japanese.” Or imagine these are the 1970’s, when U.S. saw wealthy young college students blow themselves up making bombs in a Greenwich Village apartment. SLA fighters, having assassinated a popular school superintendent in Oakland, have just ended their own lives rather than surrender to police. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction are committing acts of terrorism in Europe. Then rewrite Sam’s next sentence accordingly:

How many more middle-class American and European citizens must blow themselves up and kidnap or kill noncombatants before we acknowledge that atheist terrorism is not matter of poverty or political oppression?

Source: The Huffington Post

No kidding. This argument, in fact, often gets extended by the likes of scumbaggy Ben Stein to blame atheism for the Holocaust, because Hitler may have held some atheistic tendencies. Of course, he also expressed admiration for religion’s ability to motivate people to obey, and stated that he wanted to elevate Germany to a position of worship (as a God), so I think people like Stein are aiming for the wrong target. How about Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot though? They seem like pretty committed atheists, and they certainly got a lot of murder and oppression done. Stalin in particular brutally oppressed the Orthodox church in Russia, until it became politically useful to stop.

Somehow I don’t think Harris would agree that this justifies cracking down on atheist thought.

Ok, so we’ve seen that Harris flipped out, probably over 9/11, and over the relatively small number of deaths caused by suicide bombing. Surely if a few thousand deaths offends him this greatly, the estimated million or more people we’ve killed in Iraq sends him to the fainting couch, or has him denouncing US foreign policy from the rooftops?

I have never written or spoken in support of the war in Iraq. The truth is, I have never known what to think about this war, apart from the obvious: 1) prospectively, it seemed like a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; 2) retrospectively, it has been a disaster. While much of the responsibility for this disaster falls on the Bush administration, one of the administration’s great failings was to underestimate the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people. Whatever one thinks about the rationale for invading Iraq and the subsequent prosecution of the war, there is nothing about the resulting conflict that makes Islam look benign—not the reflexive solidarity expressed throughout the Muslim world for Saddam Hussein (merely because an army of “infidels” attacked him), not the endless supply of suicide bombers willing to kill Iraqi noncombatants, not the insurgency’s use of women and children as human shields, not the ritual slaughter of journalists and aid-workers, not the steady influx of jihadis from neighboring countries, and not the current state of public opinion among European and American Muslims. It seems to me that no reasonable person can conclude that these phenomena are purely the result of U.S. foreign policy, however inept.

Source: Sam Harris.org

Hmm, not so much.

I’m not even sure where to begin with that one. However, perhaps we’ll take that first claim, that Harris never wrote in support of the War in Iraq. Lesse… ah, here we go:

The war in Iraq, while it may be exacerbating the conflict between Islam and the West, is a red herring. However mixed or misguided American intentions were in launching this war, civilized human beings are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people.

Source: The Huffington Post (Sam Harris Column entitled ‘Bombing Our Illusions’, from 2005)

Ah yes, the ‘civilized’ people were trying to improve the life of the Iraqi people. That must be why we killed so many of them, and appointed a series of puppet dictators like Maliki to serve our interests.

This is not to impugn the work of many people who did go to Iraq with that goal, from some soldiers to NGOs to reporters. But Harris glosses over the larger goals and motivations of our occupation to frame it as the good, civilized West helping out those silly, savage Muslims. What a tool.

The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on earth, we could still expect tomorrow’s paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself up for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women, and children. The outrage that Muslims feel over U.S. and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns. Devout Muslims consider it a sacrilege for infidels to depose a Muslim tyrant and occupy Muslim lands—no matter how well intentioned the infidels or malevolent the tyrant. Because of what they believe about God and the afterlife and the divine provenance of the Koran, devout Muslims tend to reflexively side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This is solidarity born of religious delusion, and it must end—or a genuine clash of civilizations will be unavoidable.

Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere have been traumatized by war and by decades of repression. But this does not explain the type of violence they wage against us on a daily basis. War and repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the U.N., foreign workers, and Iraqi innocents. War and repression do not account for the influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is not George Washington with a hood. Sawing the heads off of civilian contractors, humanitarian workers, and journalists is not “resistance” to oppression. It is the work of men who left their hearts in the 7th century. Civilization really does have its enemies, and we have met — and, perhaps, made – many of them in Iraq.

Source: Ibid

Don’t you just love unsourced claims? Does Harris have polling data on why Iraqis, at that time, felt the way they did? Sociological studies? Interviews?

No, of course not. He knows why they did what they did, and how they felt, because he is Sam Harris the all-knowing, and they’re just… silly, ignorant Muslims.

*rolls eyes*

Leave the social science to actual social scientists, Sam. You’re clearly unqualified.

For a bonus, look at that comparison of Washington and his tactics to the violence and mutilation going on in Iraq. Just how ignorant IS Sam Harris, anyway?

George Washington more or less started the French and Indian war with his campaign against the French immediately preceding the surrender at Fort Necessity; amongst other horrors were the murder of a captive Frenchman by one of Washington’s allies, and the scalping of dead French soldiers.

Source: Wikipedia

So when an Iraqi mutilates the dead or murders captives, it’s because he’s a Muslim, and when people under Washington’s command do it… it’s because… they’re good British citizens (and/or allied Native Americans)?

What?

Plus there’s this classic passage: “Sawing the heads off of civilian contractors, humanitarian workers, and journalists is not “resistance” to oppression. It is the work of men who left their hearts in the 7th century. Civilization really does have its enemies, and we have met — and, perhaps, made – many of them in Iraq.”

Harris presents these decapitations as despicable acts (which they most certainly are), but tries to lay the blame for mutilating the dead on early Islam (hence the 7th century crack).

One of many issues with that: the aforementioned scalping.

Scalping, aka the mutilation of a living or dead person by cutting their scalp off with a knife, has been widely practiced throughout history. In the ancient world, the Scythians did it; the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman French also scalped in the 9th century, and white settlers and Native Americans did the same in America.

Sources: Wikipedia
The Encyclopedia Britannica

So what is it that Harris objects to? It obviously isn’t the mutilation of the dead and captured in general.

For that matter, the US goverment is in the business of mutilating captives in the War on Terror for which Harris shows such enthusiasm:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.

Another source familiar with the case said: “British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn’t do anything about it.”

Source: Think Progress

We’re also, much like Al Queda, in the habit of routinely and gruesomely murdering our prisoners in this war.

The record could not be clearer regarding the fact that we caused numerous detainee deaths, many of which have gone completely uninvestigated and thus unpunished. Instead, the media and political class have misleadingly caused the debate to consist of the myth that these tactics were limited and confined. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey recently put it:

We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.

Journalist and Human Rights Watch researcher John Sifton similarly documented that “approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.”

Source: Glenn Greenwald

I intend to cover Harris’ reprehensible advocacy of torture more in a later post, but include it here to illustrate his continuing hypocrisy on Islam. Harris flippantly asserts that mutilating the dead is a ’7th century’ mindset, ignoring the enormous volume of evidence that a wide variety of people, of differing faiths and nationalities, have done it down the centuries since. He complains of cruelty perpetrated by our enemies in the ‘War on Terror’, but ignores our own savagery (though admittedly, the Binyan Mohammad stuff wasn’t available when he wrote the 2005 column. He still endorses torture on his current website though, so he’s not off the hook).

There is one obvious unifying theme here. If you commit a horrible crime, an act of violence or terror, and you’re a Muslim, Harris assumes that your religion is the cause. Harris then uses that ‘evidence’ as proof that the entire religion is inherently violent and disreputable. Yet, when anyone else does it, Harris is silent on their larger motivations. He doesn’t assume that the United States tortures people out of religious sadism, or that we invaded Iraq out of a religious motivation, despite evidence for that position*.

It is the very definition of a double standard.

*See this article on the infamous Lt. General Boykin, who likes to give speeches on how the US is a Christian nation fighting Satan, or how he knew he would win in a conflict because his god is real and his enemies isn’t. Etc.

Sources: CBS News, Wikipedia

Or see the scandal of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan trying to convert the local inhabitants.

Source: Democracy Now

Remember boys and girls, before he started writing angry screeds, Harris was a grad student working in neuroscience.

Yeah.. that career wasn’t going far, I’d wager.

The more I read about Harris, the less serious he looks. Remember how he recommended (and still does, on his site) a book about Reincarnation? Wikipedia has a bit more on the ‘research’ of the man who wrote it, and how his work holds up when re-examined. Answer: not so well!

Sharada: Uttara Huddar was a woman in India who normally spoke Marathi. While in hospital undergoing psychiatric treatment, she began manifesting a personality called Sharada, who spoke in Bengali. Stevenson had recordings analysed by Bengali speakers, who disagreed among themselves about the subject’s fluency.[3] It cannot be ruled out that the subject may have learned Bengali earlier in life: both she and her father had a long-standing interest in Bengal, her home city had 1% native Bengali speakers, she had read Bengali novels in translation, and she herself had taken lessons in reading Bengali.[4]

…

Gretchen[6][8], an American woman named Dolores Jay who presented the life of a teenage girl in Germany while hypnotized by her Methodist minister husband. Stevenson reported that the subject was able to converse in German. Mrs. Jay did study a German dictionary at one point during the sessions, but Stevenson pointed out that she had already spontaneously produced 206 words before this event. Again Thomason’s reanalysis, while acknowledging that the evidence against fraud was convincing, concluded that Gretchen could not converse in German. Her speech was largely the repetition of German questions with different intonation, or utterances of one or two words. Her “German vocabulary is minute, and her pronunciation is spotty”.[9] When asked what she had for breakfast, she answers ‘Bettzimmer’, which is a non-existent word made up of the two words for ‘bed’ and ‘room’. Moreover she had some previous exposure to German in TV programmes and a “look at a German book”.

Wikipedia has other examples, those are just two of my favorites. Keep in mind, Stevenson only came up with 20 total, so that right there? 10% of the book Harris recommends. In the first case, the person had extensive exposure to the language before this ‘xenoglossy’, and the second? She couldn’t speak German, in any meaningful way whatsoever. Also, she watched German language tv. According to Wikipedia, those are some of the BEST, as well; in most of the alleged xenoglossy cases, they couldn’t ‘converse’ at all, just recite foreign language words like a bad dictionary, or a student in a tough spelling bee.

To compare, I bet I could pull off that much Japanese if you gave me a week with my anime collection, and I suck at language memorization (just ask any of my Latin professors).

Give me a break. Con artists of the world, might I suggest you pay a visit to Mr. Harris? It’s bound to be very lucrative.

Update: Uggh, looks like Carl Sagan might have bought into this stuff too, a bit.

In The Demon-Haunted World (1996), Sagan wrote that claims about reincarnation have some, though dubious, experimental support, arguing that one of three claims in parapsychology deserving serious study is that, “young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”

Source, Wikipedia article on Stevensen, author of the Reincarnation book Harris likes

What precisely is so hard to understand, people? You die, you rot in the ground*. There’s just no plausible alternative. If you think you have one, GET SOME PROOF.

*(Or get reduced to ash, or eaten by birds in the desert, shot into space, what have you.)

Continues in Part II

Man did that open a can of worms. Sam Harris is, in fact, a total whacko (hence the title). He is, in fact (in my humble opinion), a borderline sociopathic lunatic, an extremist, and, bizarrely enough, considering his large following in the secular-humanist/atheist communities, he is also a hokey, carnival-sideshow grade spiritualist.

Wow.

Ok, so let’s hit a couple of high points. First, Harris claims to hate all religion, and want to rid the world of it.

All religion, except for the ones he likes, and, arguably, believes in. Seriously.

Harris, however, argues that not just Western gods but philosophers are “dwarfs” next to the Buddhas. And a Harris passage on psychics recommends that curious readers spend time with the study “20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.”

Asked which cases are most suggestive of reincarnation, Harris admits to being won over by accounts of “xenoglossy,” in which people abruptly begin speaking languages they don’t know. Remember the girl in “The Exorcist”? “When a kid starts speaking Bengali, we have no idea scientifically what’s going on,” Harris tells me. It’s hard to believe what I’m hearing from the man the New York Times hails as atheism’s “standard-bearer.”

Source: Alternet

Seriously. Harris believes that xenoglossy, aka SPEAKING IN TONGUES, is scientifically plausible.

Better still, he thinks the jury is still out.. on psychic powers:

Harris writes: “There seems to be a body of data attesting to the reality of psychic phenomena, much of which have been ignored by mainstream science.” On the phone he backpedals away from the claim.

“I’ve received a little bit of grief for that,” he says. “I certainly don’t say that I’m confident that psychic phenomena exist. I’m open-minded. I would just like to see the data.”

By that logic, Mr. Harris, I could make the following statement:

“I certainly don’t say that I’m confident that religious miracles exist. I’m open-minded. I would just like to see the data.”

For the record, I’m not terribly open minded on that subject. Human civilization has existed now for something on the order of four thousand years. In all that time there has been not one, single, solitary piece of credible scientific evidence for the supernatural. Not one. No one has ever captured an angel, or raised the dead, or smote their enemies with divine power. Nor has anyone, in that same length of time, demonstrated actual psychic powers with any scientific reliability. Again, not one time.

Show me proof of a single miracle, Sam Harris would say. To Mr. Harris, I would respond: show me a single telekinetic. Anywhere, anytime, in human history. Or an actual psychic. Go on, I’ll wait, I’m quite patient.

Now, you might want to be sitting down for this one. Harris defends the plausibility… of reincarnation.

To see the “data” yourself, “The End of Faith” points readers to a slew of paranormal studies.

One is Dr. Ian Stevenson’s “Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy.” The same author’s reincarnation book presents for your consideration the past life of Ravi Shankar, the sitar player who introduced the Beatles to the Maharishi. He was born with a birthmark, it says, right where his past self was knifed to death, aged two.

Making the case for the “20 Cases” researcher, Harris sounds almost like “Chronicles of Narnia” author C.S. Lewis, who said Jesus could only be a liar or the Son of God.

“Either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on,” Harris says. “Most scientists would say this doesn’t happen. Most would say that if it does happen, it’s a case of fraud. … It’s hard to see why anyone would be perpetrating a fraud — everyone was made miserable by this [xenoglossy] phenomenon.” Pressed, he admits that some of the details might after all be “fishy.”

Some of the details of a reincarnation ‘story’ might be fishy?

MIGHT?

He believes it because people claiming to be reincarnated wouldn’t lie… because… it would make themselves miserable.

But he throws out all of the Abrahamic religions because he thinks that it’s obvious the various holy books were written by men. Again, to Harris, I would ask: Why would they lie? Those lies make them miserable! Why would anyone write a book that says they can’t eat pork? Pigs are DELICIOUS. Why would anyone found a church stating that they need to die rather than get a simple blood transfusion? Blood is DELICIOUS.

Ok, wait. It’s useful, not delicious. Really, blood is coppery tasting and sort of foul.

Here, let me put up part of Harris’ response to this controversy, from his site:

(Here, I am making a point about gradations of certainty: can I say for certain that a century of experimentation proves that telepathy doesn’t exist? No. It seems to me that reasonable people can disagree about the data. Can I say for certain that the Bible and the Koran show every sign of having been written by ignorant mortals? Yes. And this is the only certainty one needs to dismiss the God of Abraham as a creature of fiction.)

Source: Sam Harris.org

Again, I would respond: Can I say for certain that psychic phenomena, whether card-reading, fortune-telling, telepathy or telekinesis, all show every sign of having been devised by (often quite clever) frauds? Yes. Yes I can.

According to Harris, that should be enough to dismiss the whole field. He dismisses both Christianity and Islam on the basis of their foundational texts; I think I’m on rather more solid ground by dismissing the supernatural he thinks plausible, or at least far more plausible, on evidentiary grounds (though I can, and do, apply those same grounds to religion).

Not to worry, though; Harris has found the evidence!

Another book he lists is “The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena.” “These are people who have spent a fair amount of time looking at the data,” Harris explains. The author, professor Dean Radin of North California’s Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is not accredited for scientific peer review, proclaims: “Psi [mind power] has been shown to exist in thousands of experiments.”

So Harris, esteemed religious skeptic, takes as evidence of magic mental powers the ravings of the, ahem, Professor of a fake, unaccredited pseudo-university.

The Amazing Randi would have a field day with Mr. Harris.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary had issues as well with citing the work of Radin.

So Harris finds Christianity and Islam to be obvious frauds, but he believes reincarnation and psychic powers to be plausible. He finds speaking in tongues compelling. (I wonder how he feels about Christians who speak in tongues?)

Another sign of the double standard Harris applies? He places great faith in eastern religious practices.

We all need our illusions. But doesn’t his, a mishmash of Buddhism and “Time-Life Mysteries of The Unknown,” weaken his case against Christians? His answer is that Buddhism is a superior product for including the doctrine of “non-dualism,” or unity. “The teachings about self-transcending love in Buddhism go on for miles,” he says. “There’s just a few lines in the Bible.” And hundreds in Dostoyevsky and the Confessions of St. Augustine, but never mind: Harris’s argument that “belief is action” rests on treating works like the Old Testament not as complex cultural fables but something akin to your TiVo instruction manual.

Again, from Alternet

The stench of hypocrisy here is overwhelming, and painfully obvious. Harris ascribes to a watered-down form of hippy-dippy, fast-food Eastern religiosity. He finds some kinds of magic personally appealing (psychic powers) and so ignores their screamingly obvious implausibility; he finds others less appealing (monotheism), and so he tears into them like a junkyard dog. He sums up all of Christianity by the core text; he backs up his chosen religion with psuedo-scientific pablum.

Nothing can illustrate that hypocrisy better than the man’s own words.

My views on “mystical” or “spiritual” experience are extensively described in The End of Faith (and in several articles available on this website) and do not entail the acceptance of anything on faith. There is simply no question that people have transformative experiences as a result of engaging contemplative disciplines like meditation, and there is no question that these experiences shed some light on the nature of the human mind (any experience does, for that matter). What is highly questionable are the metaphysical claims that people tend to make on the basis of such experiences. I do not make any such claims. Nor do I support the metaphysical claims of others.

Let’s play the word substitution game again: “There is simply no question that people have transformative experiences as a result of <prayer/a tasty meal*/gargling Drano>, and there is no question that these experiences shed some light on the nature of the human mind.”Your transformative mental activity? Superstition you’d be better off without. His transformative mental activity? SCIENCE.

Give me a break. If the basis for determining a human activity’s validity is whether it ‘transforms’ a person, then religion categorically has value. As does… everything else.

What a wanker.

To Be Continued In Part Ia
Update:

Ooh, ooh, I forgot this one:

And like a Scientologist cleric promising you the state of Clear, evicting alien ghosts ruining your life, Harris expresses a faith that his own style of pleasurable mental exploration ushers in good deeds. Meditation, he says, will drive out whatever it is “that leads you to lie to people or be intrinsically selfish.”

Alternet again. I rest my case.

Update Two: I lied. Another gem, from an article in New Humanist:

But this bilious attack on faith – the aspect of the book which has received all the attention – only sets the stage for what seems to be his real goal: a defense, nay, a celebration of Harris’ own Dzogchen Buddhist and Advaita Vedantic Hindu spirituality. Spirituality is the answer to Islam’s and Christianity’s superstitions and wars, he tells us. Spiritualism is not just good for your soul, it is good for your mind as well: it can make you “happy, peaceful and even wise”. Results of spiritual practices are “genuinely desirable [for they are] not just emotional but cognitive and conceptual”.

Once again: your spiritualism, entirely subjective, only exists in your head, and superstition. Harris’? Good, desirable, scientific.

This man is a tool.

Final Update:
Something came up in conversation with the roomie: Sam Harris claims he rejects metaphysical claims and doesn’t support the metaphysical claims of others. What possible non-metaphysical explanation could there be for psychic powers? Or reincarnation? Is there one? Has anyone ever proposed a workable, testable scientific hypothesis for any of that stuff?

It seems like, much as Harris segregates parts of Buddhism from other religious practice, he segregates stuff he likes from the rest of metaphysics. At last, some consistency.
*I’m actually being serious with this one. From the Wikipedia page on Julia Child:

Child repeatedly recalled her first meal in Rouen of oysters, sole meunière and fine wine as a culinary revelation. She described the experience once in The New York Times as “an opening up of the soul and spirit for me”