Fri, 20 Jul 2007

Combined Comments re: Harris at Truthdig

I need easier access to these:

At Royce Hall Harris outlined three ways to support religion. In typical sophist manner he listed the three to which he has prepared answers and implied his list was exhaustive. But he missed at least one important support of religion: it is an unavoidable fact of human life, be the form a simple animism like Shinto or a complex and contradictory mysticism like Zen or a politically powerful force like the Roman Catholic church. Like it or not, humans are religious, arguably from the same drive as that which moves science, to wit, the desire to understand, to orient within the larger universe, to predict and control and achieve favorable outcomes. Cavil as much as he may like (there's a two-syllable word for your detractors ) Harris can do nothing to stem the tide of religiosity. And you rightly point out that Harris's ideological kettle cannot contain itself. I don't know that Harris's views on religion are really worth the bother to discuss. His conclusion that his views justify religious persecution, by way of contrast, should be very much at the forefront. Harris considers "us" to be at war with Islam. Not with a nation. Not with perpetrators of some crime. With a religion. I suspect this is what comes of asking questions with great socio-political impact of a neuro-scientist-in-training, about on a par with asking Durkheim about an aneurysm. But the truly dominant religions in our culture are scientism, from which comes such oxymorons as "Christian Science", and cebebritism, in which a manufactured "religion" like Scientology actively recruits the Tom Cruises and John Travoltas of the world. Harris currently benefits from the blind worship of both science and celebrity, despite the vacuity of what I've seen of his writing and presentation.

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it's possible Harris just lacks the maturity to recognize what really motivates him. But to be clear, he's not a racist. Nor a sexist. When Chris Hedges made the mistake of calling Harris's position racist Sam acted like a chess junkie confronted with the one opening he knows well enough to play credibly. "How dare you call me a racist, when I'm the one pointing out how it's Muslim women who suffer most under Islam!" He was quite breathless about it, and managed to imply, deftly, that in opposing Harris it is Hedges who is complicit in the plight of the oppressed. (Nahida's comments about the accuracy of Sam's views, obviously, notwithstanding.) So, be clear, Sam Harris is not a racist, per se. He is, however, by the words he has written, an unrepentant religious bigot, and an arrogant one at that, hiding behind efforts to earn credentials completely unrelated to the subject matter at hand and a gift for, like all sophists, emotional argument, reductionism, and the raising of straw men. But I was equally disappointed with Hedges and Scheer. Scheer at one point flatly said, "I"m not going to put you on the spot' with regards to Harris's whine that Hedges misrepresented Harris. When later Hedges pulled chapter and verse from Harris's own book Harris tried to deflect. And then Hedges blew the whole thing by feeding Harris one of Harris's preferred gambits, the accusation of racism, after which Sam deftly moved to his intellectually illegitimate Nazi allusions. Hedges should have known better. And even after gifting Sam with such a slow-pitched softball, Hedges should have simply said, "My mistake, the word is 'bigot'."

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