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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Sam Harris: Yet another liberal mugged by reality |
| 2007-05-28 |
| Sam Harris is - or at least was - becoming a liberal icon. After all, he has done virtually everything right, in the eyes of the left. His best-selling book on religion, "The End of Faith," was heavy on Christian-bashing, no doubt to the delight of his American audience. He wants the rich taxed more, gays free to marry and drugs decriminalized. It's a wonder he's not on tour with George Soros. So when a friend sent me a piece Harris penned for the Los Angeles Times last fall, I was ready to chuckle and dismiss it. Then I read it. Here was the liberals' liberal explaining that his Times' piece "may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that `liberals are soft on terrorism.' It is, and they are." It seems Harris has come to a shocking, for him, conclusion about liberalism, after actually being in contact with said individuals when his book made the best-seller lists. "(My) correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of the world - specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith," Harris wrote. In other words, Harris woke up one day and realized that today's version of liberalism thrives on illogic and a "debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities." In the very next paragraph, Harris notes the absurdity of that dogma: "I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off journalists before this fantasy will dissipate." Harris attempts - as he did in his book - to equate all religious dogma, saying that none affords any opportunity for rational discourse or leeway for disagreement. That's a tough sell in these modern times, as one religion more than any other seems to have a lock on savagery in the name of its prophet. But Harris has made a career out of being an atheist, and so he's almost professionally required to lump all people of faith into the same pot. Setting that incongruity aside, let's just note that Harris isn't a conservative atheist, so maybe his words concerning what he repeatedly calls the "failure of liberalism" won't fall on deaf, progressive ears. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #6 Harris has been writing about the horror of Islam since at least 2004 (his book, "the end of faith" has a lot in it about jihad, honor killings and the like. I don't know how much before that he was so inclined. For all I know his 'awakening' may precede the awakening of many of us Rantburgians. |
| Posted by: mhw 2007-05-28 14:36 |
| #5 At least Harris has to be given credit for awakening from his coma. This is much like the turn around that happens to every sputtering, fuming gun control/confiscation moron when they or one of their personal family has been mugged or murdered, often times in their own home. Then they realize, but for a functioning gun, their relative would be alive today, not in a cemetary. |
| Posted by: Woozle Elmeter2970 2007-05-28 11:40 |
| #4 If you start to examine dogmatic leftism from the perspective of it might being a psychopathology, suddenly some things start to make sense. To start with, in the clearest comparison, fanatics of any stripe have been noted in past to have several distinct and irrational similarities: 1) The world is clearly divided between good and evil. There are no shades of gray or ambiguities. From that, the fanatic develops an intense "Us and Them" attitude, with absolute intolerance for "Them". 2) The belief in "Us", also ignites in them a powerful herd instinct, and a belief that mass behavior, like group exercise, creates the strongest mood of affiliation. Independence and individuality are to be scorned. Uniqueness shows an attraction to evil. Mediocrity is preferred over success or failure, as it is easier to attain by all. 3) The philosophy and doctrines of "Us" must be absolute. If there is no knee-jerk response that needs no qualification, then the subject is to be ignored. (It was noted that you can identify such a person by their inability to spontaneously laugh; because such laughter is often a defensive response to a non-sequitur, which does not exist for a fanatic. This was used in past to identify fanatical communists, and was quite accurate.) 4) Such a limited world-view, in which everything can be explained, is also a common trait in people with pre-schizophrenia. In their case, at some point, their world-view is fractured by some data or stress that cannot be explained, ignored, or rationalized. It is the psychological breakthrough that reflects the physical damage to their brain caused by the disease. 5) However, in those who aren't schizophrenic, but are especially polar in their philosophy, there is tremendous awareness of the "forces of evil", however they define it, and of its ability to permanently corrupt the "good". HL Mencken wrote of a preacher with such a mind, who when he had an affair with a choir leader, was so convinced he was damned that the two went on a crime spree, heaven being closed to them. Joseph Stalin also was aware of this, at one point drawing a line on a map of Europe and decreeing that any Soviet soldier who crossed that invisible line was to be later killed, as they might have been exposed to "corruption", which they might bring home. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-05-28 11:37 |
| #3 "(My) correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of the world - specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith," Harris wrote. In other words, Harris woke up one day and realized that today's version of liberalism thrives on illogic and a "debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities." I don't know what brought about this epiphany in Harris but we should try to find out, bottle it, and then "liberally" apply it. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-05-28 09:48 |
| #2 Robert Fisk quite literally "blamed himself" for being stoned by children. Of course, by this he meant to blame Christianity, "colonialism", "imperialism", the Jews, the West, in fact pretty much anyone except himself except in the most tangential sense. Critically, the only people who were utterly exempt from blame were the ones throwing the rocks. Reason will not change viewpoints such as this. People can watch airplanes flown into office towers and construct ludicrous fantasies to explain how anything except the airplanes brought the towers down. We are not dealing with an ideology but a psychopathology. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-05-28 09:36 |
| #1 What's the phrase: "there is more rejoicing in heaven at one sinner repenting..."? Reality: it's not just a good idea, it's the law! |
| Posted by: Tony (UK) 2007-05-28 08:24 |