The End of Faith?
Jean-Michel Moreau. Family.
My nephew Jean-Michel was reading a book by Sam Harris called Waking Up, which he found stimulating, and he recommended another of Harris’s books, End of Faith for me to read. I responded by saying that I have not read any books by Harris, but am familiar with him through some of his articles, including his idea of the end of faith. His name comes up in the atheism v. religion shouting matches, reverently on the atheism side, dismissively on the religious side. I tend to respond in a moderating way to both sides of the screaming.
I think that lock-step religious behavior is too often unintelligent and unresponsive to societal needs, too often intolerant. Note the “lock-step.” But not all religious thinking and behavior is inflexible, and some of it produces the best kind of compassionate behavior. Many religious adherents, including many Muslims, a religion of particular concern to Sam Harris, do not believe in using destructive means to accomplish their earthly goals. Harris sees the worst of religious behavior, and there is plenty to be found, and from this suggests that it has to go (even moderate religion, and most crucially, individual religion) due to its inherent irrationality, that is: How can you make a good decision based on blind adherence to rigid postulates, even in the face of contradicting evidence? When put that way, of course one must get rid of faith-based religion and embrace pure rationality! Besides, look at all of the violence performed in the name of God! (Now, if I could just get the proper rhythm to my speech, I could be up on the dais, preachin’ my heart away.)
I believe that Harris is not mistaken about the worst aspects of religious behavior, and I wholeheartedly (whoops! that human irrationality seems irrepressible) agree with him regarding the separation of church and state. I also agree with him that organized religion is not needed to formulate acceptable societal norms or ethics. But I do not think that he is right in extending the worst possibilities to all of religious behavior, and think he places insufficient emphasis on the primary source of poor human behavior: human nature. Violent societal conflicts (wars, genocides) have been primarily about human fears, greed, hatred, survival, quest for control, and so on, with ideology providing justification. (For me, organized religion is just another ideology.) Bertrand Russell says this rather well: "I think that the evils that men inflict on each other, and by reflection upon themselves, have their main source in evil passions rather than in ideas or beliefs. But ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions."(Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, Ideas that have harmed mankind, p. 143)
For example, historians often describe the 16th-17th century European wars as Christian wars of religion, and the two 20th century world wars as wars driven by the secular totalitarian ideologies of Nazism and Soviet Communism. They are not wrong, but to stop at the ideological level is not even close to right. One way to illustrate this is that during the Thirty Years War, fought between Catholics and Lutheran Protestants, in a given battle it was not unusual for Catholics to be fighting Catholics or Protestants to be fighting Protestants! Under Nazism, German Protestant churches by and large supported the government, including the anti-Semitic laws, and Wehrmacht soldiers wore belt buckles inscribed Gott mitt Uns. These facts are the tip of the historical iceberg: for each piece of historical evidence supporting an ideological motivation for war, you will find one or more pieces of evidence which suggests a non-ideological motivation, like tribal enmity, fear of other. Like Russell, I am more inclined to believe that ideology is too often used as a justificatory mask for the most basic human nature, evil or otherwise.
As for pure rationality – well, good luck with that! It doesn’t exist in human nature. Even Sam Harris gets overly emotional about his point of view sometimes. I agree with him that we should make societal decisions based not on blind faith, but the best available thinking and evidence. But good luck again in sorting out what precisely is the best available thinking and evidence. Science is our best means to analyze many, if not all, problems, but it does not always provide as clear an answer as its most passionate proponents maintain. Ironically, Sam Harris’s own discipline of neurobiology is young, sparse and murky at best. Science is a way of modeling our world, and does not represent what it models precisely. And even if it did, it does not provide any simple way to prioritize where societal resources should be spent. Emotions will always be involved in societal decision making, including emotions expressed via ideological thinking.
Faith will always play a role in human life, if only because it takes some small dash of daily hope to believe that life is worth living, and what is hope if not the minimum threshold of faith?
We are all in need of some kind of faith. Faith will always play a role in human life, if only because it takes some small dash of daily hope to believe that life is worth living, and what is hope if not the minimum threshold of faith? I think that Harris goes too far in seeing or desiring the end of faith (or more specifically, the end of religion) as the best for the human future.
Sam Harris points out real issues with closed ideological thinking, but his solution is to a degree itself closed ideologically and culturally. Ideologies are bound up in culture, that most persistent and coercive of sociological influences. Addressing Harris’s valid concerns about the irrational influences of rigid ideology on society requires an effort to better understand the rules of cultural construction: for example, why are we so easily dismissive of interpretations that deviate from our own culture? But while we are waiting for the scientific method to improve our sociological understanding, we must continue making efforts to change society for the better of society as a whole, not just that selfish part of society that represent our own narrow cultural, national, or ideological tribes. Sam Harris clearly desires this, yet his lack of a wider audience is due in part to some of his own narrowness.
Good ideologues sell over-simplistic ideas (just add a letter, and you get ideaLs), good ideologues assume more importance for their own AND opposing ideologies than any ideology can bear, and Sam is a good ideologue. He is a useful voice, perhaps in the way that the concept of an ideal gas is heuristically useful in physics. Were human behavior only as simple as physics.
Yet I do not dismiss Sam Harris, just as I don’t dismiss religious adherents who contribute something for all of us, like Pope Francis, a somewhat lonely beacon of compassion in the Catholic Church’s overly-controlling hierarchy. And through any sincere ideological discussions, shouldn’t compassion be the focus? Aren’t we collectively better off if we incline away from our innate selfishness and toward our instincts for compassion? We improve our ability to do so through progress in science and less coercive interpretations of religious texts. But we don’t need to wait for more understanding to tell us to act more compassionately and less selfishly right now. Reason and emotion are both required: Reason by itself is insufficient for a more wide-scale adoption of compassion.