Report Says Education Officials Violated Rules

Department of Education officials violated conflict of interest rules when awarding grants to states under President Bush’s billion-dollar reading initiative, and steered contracts to favored textbook publishers, the department’s inspector general said yesterday.

I am in a dialog with a friend who sent me an article from the LA Times, September 18, 2006 entitled “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.” By Sam Harris.  She is the same person that sent the list of Jewish and Muslim Nobel Prize winners. (See my post of Sep 17th).  The article makes some serious claims, you can get the gist of it from my specific responses at the bottom.  Here is my reply:

The article covers a lot of ground, and I won’t try to address it all specifically.  The author says he has written books on the various subjects and it is clear that almost every sentence is the conclusion at the end of a chapter.  I don’t want to write a book and you don’t want to read one. 

But the short answer is that I do not agree that liberals (as represented by me) are “soft on terrorism.”  Instead I believe that generally, terrorism can be defeated only by addressing three factors:  (1) the sense of overwhelming outrage and injustice against the west, especially the US.  This has a lot of sources, only one of which is uncritical support for Israel.  (This is a long discussion)  (2) The sense of powerlessness and repression that make asymmetric warfare the only feasible tool, and (3) the hopelessness and despair that make suicide bombers willing to strap it on.  (By the way, it is interesting to contrast suicide bombers with the motivations of  Japanese kamikaze pilots, who were generally educated young men with a lot to live for.  The similarities are a lot greater between them and the London and 9/11 bombers than the ones in Israel and Iraq.)  My characterization of the opposing (conservative) view is that we can defeat them by killing them, often along with whoever is standing nearby.  I don’t think so.  That just feeds the cycle.

But the article is about a lot more than that – it is about the role of religion.  That is a complicated issue, and instead of dealing with the article directly, I will try to describe something else – I’m not sure what to call it, but it is a result from the combination of my studies, experiences and personal and family history that forms the way I look at the world.

1. What we are pleased to call “western civilization” is one which emerged in Europe as a result of the Norse invasions of the 8th and 9th centuries, and is based on the notion of the individual as the fundamental unit.  Oriental societies before and since are based on the tribe as the fundamental unit.  This view emerged from the quasi-religious based system of paternalistic families evolving into tribes, where the divine or divinely-sanctioned ruler is the father and the family members-subjects exist to preserve the family-tribe.  The individual is unimportant.  You can see the difference in the way “I” is formed in various languages.  In European languages it is an explicit and separate word, but as one goes east, it runs into an ending on a verb and becomes indistinct, finally disappearing.  The Norse and other barbarian languages which have a word for “I”, gradually replaced Latin after the overthrow of the Roman Empire. (Read Borkenau on this subject.)
2. The fundamental psychological problem of humans – the price of the self-awareness that animals mostly seem to lack – is the knowledge of eventual death.  The fear of death generates a psychological insistence on the existence of an afterlife, despite the total lack of any evidence for it – it is founded not on reason but on faith.  And it is religion that provides the framework for that faith.
3. Reasoned judgment requires hard work – it requires thought, investigation and information.  It requires constant questioning, because we are always acquiring new information as a result of experience, both personal and historic.  And that means that one has to be open to changing ones mind and admitting being wrong. It’s like a system of cogs and wheels that works to turn a system in one direction –if you add one more cog, the direction reverses.  A statistician calls it the “missing variables” problem.  It is much easier to check one’s brain at the door of the church, allowing the priests to make the rules.  Surrendering reason to faith is the easy path, because it does not require judgment.
4.  In the West, individualism after the end of the Viking wars over time generated a huge number of sects and churches in the various Protestant traditions.  But in the Orient, that fragmentation is much less pronounced, with just a few large separations into Shia and Sunni.  And that was based not on individual interpretation of dogma but on historical arguments about legitimacy of succession.  It is Orientalism that guided the historical development of Islam, not the other way around.  And that means at the extreme, that there is a willingness to sacrifice others and oneself for the benefit of the tribe and its ruler, and a view that it is the duty of the faithful to do so.  A good example is the Assassin cult that arose during the Crusades.  It is not Islam as a religion but Orientalism that has been cloaked in Islam that generates this.
5. Religion provides a story of divinity and a variety of myths that enable faith, but because faith is the easy way, it can overcome reason.  And religion, by emphasizing the mysterious and unknowable and by introducing rituals and rites and secret knowledge, creates a gap between “us” and “them.” This creates the opening used by politicians throughout history to use religion as a means of manipulation to achieve worldly ends that are cloaked with justification by religion. This is what Marx meant when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses.  Much of the human – generated evil that has existed in the world has been justified in these ways.
6. It is interesting that the Romans never undertook religious wars.  They were polytheists, and that necessarily generated tolerance of multiple gods.  It was not until Akhenaten’s, Abraham’s, Moses’, and later Mohammed’s widespread monotheism that large scale religious persecution and wars justified by divine revelation began.  The Albigensian Crusade in France, the Crusades to the “Holy Land”, the various religious persecutions and religious wars throughout European history, all had “god on our side” and were positioned as a battle between good and the other – the  evil – religion.  My father and grandfather lived through the Armenian (Christian) massacres by Turkey (Muslim), and told me vivid stories of that time.  My mother’s family lived through the rise of the Nazis (state religion)  in Germany and told me vivid stories of that time.  Bush Senior fought in that war and lived through that history, and understood this, but his son, who is poorly educated and seems ignorant of almost everything except faith, has no clue.
7. The Enlightenment was at its core a separation of religion from the affairs of state.  The Constitution is a product of the Enlightenment.  The First Amendment was not put there just to protect religion from the state but also to protect the state from religion.  For the divine right of kings, it substituted elections and a human-based system of checks and balances.  It looks like religious “conservatives” want to return to the pre-Enlightenment structure.  I don’t. 
8. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, in physics and in human society (where Hegel calls it dialectics).  We tend to become our enemy. That is what is so infuriating to me about Bush.  He is turning the US into a version of the enemy that he opposes, breaking down the separation of government from religion, with international aggression, police state tactics, and a belief that it’s OK if we do it but not if others do.  He seems prepared to thoughtlessly destroy the Constitution, which is what makes the United States exceptional, and that gives us a moral stature in the world that has almost totally evaporated.  And we have nothing to show for it, even in Bush’s own terms of reference. 

So to come back to the article:
– I agree that religion should be kept out of public life.
– I share the view that there are many legitimate unanswered questions about 9/11, although my general rule is not to explain by malice what can be attributed to sheer incompetence.
– Neither the US nor the Israelis are innocent of killing civilians, and the view in the region is that neither we nor they try very hard to not do so.  It is not so much that opponents are inhumanely using human shields, but that they are part of the fabric of their societies. Mao Tse Tung said that a guerilla must swim in the population like a fish swims in the ocean and Hamas and Hezbollah do.  Anyway, Muslims live their religion at a level that a fundamentalist Christian would understand perfectly.  But in the Middle East, everybody is that way, not just a minority as in the West.
– Israel does not hold the moral high ground against Hamas and Hezbollah as far as people in the region are concerned.  The article is totally wrong on that.  Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has put it into the same moral category as South Africa under apartheid.  And if the US generally accepts and supports his view, which it does, then this puts the US also on the wrong moral side.
–  Liberal tolerance is not the problem; it is part of the solution.  The rest of the solution involves education, economic development, decent jobs, and an opportunity for the hope that the future will be better than the past. The problem is not whether there is life after death, but whether life after birth can be made tolerable, rewarding and hopeful.  That’s how you defeat terrorism.

Which of the following is acceptable:

a) Calling an entire country “evil”
b) Calling three whole countries “evil”
c) Calling one misguided president the Devil?

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