An atheist denunciation of Sam Harris.PART TWOHarris bends over backwards to justify torture & is an apologist for neoconservative militarism.

Sam Harris. Aw, shucks. What a nice, friendly, moderate, liberal, young man.

Into justifying the use of torture against enemies in the American War On Terror? Then, allow me to introduce you to the Reader's Digest-league philosophical musings of one Sam Harris. The following quotations are taken from an article that first appeared in the Huffington Post back in the halcyon days of 2005. The title of this pièce de résistance is 'In Defense of Torture'.

Golly gee, Sam! responds the unsuspecting HuffPo junkie, as she wraps her Reader's Digest-quality mind around Harris's provocative titular gambit. But isn't torture a bad thing?

Turns out, it's not! Well, not always, anyways. You might not, says Harris, have considered a strange bit of highly technical, jargony whatsit known as the 'ticking-bomb' scenario. If this term of art -- familiar to experts in highly specialized fields of philosophy -- has you confused, don't worry. Uncle Sam's gonna lay it out plain, in old-fashioned, workin'-man's English:

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a bomb in the heart of a nearby city. He now sits in your custody. Rather than conceal his guilt, he gloats about the forthcoming explosion and the magnitude of human suffering it will cause. Given this state of affairs—in particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocity—it seems that subjecting this unpleasant fellow to torture may be justifiable. For those who make it their business to debate the ethics of torture this is known as the “ticking-bomb” case.

Ya see? So, now that we're equipped with the specialty knowledge required for rational discussion of the ethics of torture, we can begin to, as it were, unwrap some of the underlying presuppositions that we tolerant, middle-class, bleeding-heart liberal Americans bring to bear in approaching highly complex ethics of torture. What are these presuppositions....these variables, and in what manner might they becloud our usually adaptable, dynamic and context-sensitive sense of justice? Of right and -- as it were -- wrong?

Well, glad you asked. Turns out that

many variables influence our feelings about an act of physical violence. The philosopher Jonathan Glover points out that “in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful.” To learn that one’s grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed many more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. There is much to be said about the disparity here, but the relevance to the ethics of torture should be obvious.

Yes, yes, Sam. Much to be said about the disparity, but no: let's waste no time pondering these disparities! I mean, we're talking about a 'ticking-bomb' here, right? No time to sit and chat! [To be read in the voice of T.V.'s Batman, as portrayed by Adam West:] Mustn't....waste time discussing....things to be said.....about....disparity........Only....time....to.....torture!

.....If you think that the equivalence between torture and collateral damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal while stray bombs aren’t, you stand convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment’s reflection on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. If our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.

Whew. I haven't learned so much since I took Torture 101, sophomore year of high school. Here is an objection: Harris is getting it backwards. The failure of imagination is his own: He confuses the aversion of we middle class Westerners to torture with our aversion to particular sets of aural and visual associations that the concept of torture brings to mind. After all, for 99 percent of inhabitants of the lazy, fat, TV-watching West, the 'conventional' military aerial bombing raid is every bit as unfamiliar to our lived experience as is torture. Therefore: if there is a basis upon which we shall formulate our ethical point of view as regards torture, it is not going to be our (non-existent) lived experience of how the monstrous, barbaric act is carried out. It is even less advisable that we formulate our view by way of comparison to another monstrous, barbaric act with which we also have no firsthand experience.

And anyone who is actually going to formulate his view of the ethics of torture v. the ethics of the aerial bombing raid without reflecting seriously upon his personal estrangement from the actual physical, lived circumstances of both is someone who lacks the imagination and empathy to defer to the firsthand testimony of others who have actually experienced these horrors. He is someone who is so myopic and solipsistic as to base his impressions of the outside world entirely on television shows crafted especially for fat uneducated rednecks: easy targets for indoctrination into ethical dispositions that would have seemed unthinkable and certainly un-American just a few years ago.

Shows like Fox's 24, which dramatizes during each episode at least one, if not two or three instances of Harris's 'ticking-bomb' scenario.

By the way, in real life, do you want to know how many times the 'ticking bomb' scenario has occurred? NEVER. Not once.

The creator of 24 -- a ultra-neoconservative whack-job called Joel Surnow -- knows that his award-winning show's portrayal of torture as useful, ethically sound, and consistent with American values in fact bears no relation to reality. And yet, he feels that his show is "patriotic."

Joel Surnow, creator of TV's 24: Doesn't he look like a guy who has chronic erectile dysfunction?

Patriotic, huh? Well, I think that Surnow is poisoning the well of civil discourse, imbuing people's commonsense notions of what it means to be a patriotic American citizen with an ideologically calibrated and exceedingly reckless fabrication that taps into the bloodlust, cultural resentment and aimlessness of wide swaths of an especially vulnerable (and, for a host of reasons, ticked-off [so to speak]) American population. Whatever vision Surnow wishes to advance of what it means to be an American is glaringly at odds with the vision shared by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

One thing that I find galling about this is: where the hell is the sex and violence on T.V. crowd? I mean, is it, like, the new thing among Conservative White Evangelical Christian parents to say: "Well, sex is still bad, but violence may now be okay in particular circumstances; as long as it takes the form of lots and lots of explicit, gruesome, agonizing dehumanizing torture"?

I mean, I'm a First-Amendment Fundamentalist and feel that censorship in any form functions to undermine the capacity of human beings to live in the real world. But, I feel tempted to drive a pickup truck out to some megachurch tomorrow and ask the hoards of Bible-thumping parents: do you really want to bring your kids up in an American society in which torture is seen as not only acceptable but patriotic?

My answer's no.

Look: anyone that knows me will tell you that despite my habit of chatting about politics ad nauseum, I'm not much of a going-out-into-the-streets-and-chanting-things-through-megaphones type. But if there's any issue I'm passionate about, it's this one. As far as I'm concerned, to so much as attempt to justify legalizing torture on the basis of its putative utility is itself INSANE. Like, for instance, this washed-up mockery of a law professor

Alan Dershowitz: One of O.J. Simpson's defense attorneys. The first time around.

-- you know, Alan Dershowitz, the guy who was among the lawyers that represented O. J. Simpson? -- has written articles and even appeared on television proposing a law that would make torture legal under certain circumstances. Which circumstances? Why, of course, the ticking-time bomb scenario. You know, the one that's never ONCE happened in real life? His proposed law would, however, require getting a warrant from a judge. Now, honestly, would you want to become a judge if you knew that it meant periodically signing off on waterboarding people? It's a good thing no sentient human could possibly give a shit what Dershowitz says.

Should the neoconservative tendency ever -- God forbid -- show signs of reemergence on the scale of the pre-Iraq War National Brainwashing Project, I think it will likely be entirely necessary for the quote-unquote 'secular Left', Left-leaning Catholics and the non-evangelical Protestant Left to join forces with anti-torture portions of the evangelical Christian community in order to block the truly chilling specter of legally sanctioned torture from coming into existence.

Anyway, back to Sam Harris. Our friendly atheist continues his tortured explanation of why torture should be okay with us (albeit only in the specific circumstances that, as we have discussed, have never once occurred):

To demonstrate just how abstract the torments of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal “torture pill”—a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end? No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.

All right. Instead of responding myself, why don't I just go ahead and quote George Orwell? The following is from 1984, in particular from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, a copy of which the novel's protagonist Winston Smith is given to read by O'Brien, an Inner Party member who initiates Smith to the "Brotherhood," a secret organization that plots to overthrow the Party. Read this excerpt -- which lays out candidly the function of torture in the totalitarian state -- and compare it with Harris's assertions:

In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage -- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

The banality of evil, indeed. Of course, as we know, O'Brien turns out not to have in fact been a member of "The Brotherhood," but is in fact himself a scientist -- a psychologist -- working for the totalitarian regime. For Big Brother. He applies his expertise in precisely the manner elaborated in the above excerpt.

Harris is said to be pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Hmmm.

I shall conclude with a voice of sanity, that of the legal scholar David Luban (Virginia Law Review, 9/15/05):

The only reasonable inference to draw from these recent efforts by the government to defend its actions is that the torture culture is still firmly in place, notwithstanding official condemnation of torture. Indeed, given that lawyers at the highest levels of government continue to loophole the laws against torture as energetically as ever, more than half a year after the Abu Ghraib revelations, the only reasonable inference to draw is that the United States government is currently engaging in brutal and humiliating interrogations. At most, torture has given way to CID. The persistence of interrogational brutality should surprise no one, because the liberal ideology of torture fully legitimizes it. The memos illustrate the ease with which arguments that pretend that torture can exist in liberal society, but only as an exception, quickly lead to erecting a torture culture, a network of institutions and practices that regularize the exception and make it standard operating procedure.

For this reason, the liberal ideology of torture, which assumes that torture can be neatly confined to exceptional ticking-bomb cases and surgically severed from cruelty and tyranny, represents a dangerous delusion. It becomes more dangerous still coupled with an endless war on terror, a permanent emergency in which the White House eagerly insists that its emergency powers rise above the limiting power of statutes and treaties. Claims to long-term emergency powers that entail the power to torture should send chills through liberals of the right as well as the left, and no one should still think that liberal torture has nothing to do with tyranny.

An atheist denunciation of the polemical atheists.PART ONE: The rise of Oprah-atheism.

Sam Harris. Aw, shucks. What a nice, friendly, mellow, moderate, liberal, young man.

Re the proliferation of books for popular audiences that have entered the market over the past few years or so purporting to be (or marketed as being) 'arguments for atheism'. Call it atheism-for-beginners. Common to all of these popular-market writers -- among them Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins -- is a combination of self-seriousness and one-dimensionality. Each author (with the possible partial exception of Hitchens) peddles his atheism in a voice approximate to that of 'experts' or even 'scientists' who appear on infomercials in order to endorse a that allows bald men to regrow their hair. Each acts as though his atheism is novel or unique. Think Oprah; think The Secret. As though atheism is this cool thing that the authors have just discovered, or there's this brand new formula that scientists have been developing in the lab. Or as though the state of world affairs is such that there are special, atheism-ready conditions on the ground, ripe for exploitation.

Your humble blogger's got nothing against atheism. In fact, he himself is an atheist.

There have been atheists of varying stripes since forever. In identifying one's particular species of atheism, it's often helpful to identify the religion into which one had been born and raised. This hazard -- that of having the dogma and practices of a particular religion foisted upon you during your upbringing -- befalls many a person. There's no insurance policy against it. Some such persons emerge into adulthood seemingly unscathed.

Although I have always had my doubts about the veracity of the claims of those in this apparently lucky few, I can report with total confidence that none in this lucky few -- not a single person -- was raised in the Catholic Church.

I can say this with authority, because I am -- and shall ever be -- a Catholic atheist.

Like many Catholic atheists, I endured twelve years of Catholic education. The final four years saw the gradual dissolution of both my need and inclination to pledge my obedience to a Celetial Dictator.* Perhaps it was mere coincidence that I during those four final years, I attended a Jesuit high school. In contradistinction to the meally-mouthed, self-contradictory, spineless pseudo-spiritual cant that was foisted upon me through eight years of Catholic grammar-school, my subsequent indoctrination in Jesuitism was a breath of fresh air.

Now, don't get me wrong: looking back, there's some seriously Christo-Fascist shit they serve you in the Jesuit Koolaid. But the good thing is that the Jesuits are and long have been in the business of education and scholarship. Which means there were interested in teaching their students about -- to the extent possible in any high school -- ideas. Not so much what you should or must think, but how. Again, sometimes how and what can be difficult to disentagle, and my brain's got the stretch-marks to prove it. But still.

Now, this part was very fortunate and helped open the door to the nonbelief that I so assiduously espouse. Because: where there are ideas -- and where there's the question of how to navigate ones way around and through them -- there is also atheism. Don't get me wrong, the latter by no means entails the former.

The fact is that all of the same arguments on both sides of this supposed 'pro-' vs. 'anti-' religious divide have been and continue to be recycled over and over again since.....I don' know.....Plato or something? Consider the following quotation from Thomas Jefferson:

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there.

...letter to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith, 1816

Jefferson, of course, was a theist, which was about as many people got in his day to atheism. There are, of course, exceptions, like Rousseau and Diderot, et. al. And Jefferson was aware of these men. But, then as now, the distinction between the former -- belief in a benevolent God who does not interfere with earthly things -- and the latter is somewhat academic.

After Jefferson's time, there emerged, of course, still more forceful and often compelling forms of atheism. None of the thinkers who espoused some or another form of it harbored illusions about his having invented anything new. Theirs was a presentism that was -- in contradistinction to Harris, et. al -- not wanting for historicity. The discourses in which they were engaged were simply too gentlemanly -- in both the best (polite) and the worst (chauvinistic) senses -- to allow for much sloppiness and grandstanding.

Perhaps the most prominent exceptions to this gentlemanliness rule prove the rule. In the case of Marx, I shall simply state that he was not really an atheist author, in the sense that atheism didn't interest him in and of itself. It was his very reduction of religion to mere a mere instrumentality of bourgeois ideology -- brilliant and spot-on as it was -- that proves this fact. He made this explicit in his famous comment about religion as the 'opiate of the masses', and had previously explained this line of thinking in still greater detail in his "On 'The Jewish Question'." So, let's dismiss him, genius though he was, from the present discussion.

That leaves Nietszche. He might just be the Father of Shrill Atheism, no? There's logic in that idea. There's also logic in the proposition that he was preoccupied chiefly with the establishment of a new kind of religiosity. Yes, he was sometimes sloppy, but that was really just toward the end, when he was literally going mad. After all, those who declare Nietszche to be 'self-contradictory' are charlatans who don't understand (or aren't interested in understanding) what he was doing. The basis upon which I claim that his atheism conforms to the ethic of gentlemanliness that prevailed among his peers -- even when his peers may not have seen things that way -- is the unique performativity of Nietszche's writing. A sentence ago, I talked about his texts in terms of "what he was doing," and this is exactly how his texts are by and large to be understood: as doing, rather than saying.

Our modern-day publishing phenoms peddling their atheist wares cannot be given credit for this kind of genius or inventiveness. These recent pop-cultural atheism screeds are much more fun than either Marx or Nietzsche. Their glossy monographs aren't just the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus's of their time -- which is to say, they're not just sugar-coated pills. They're candy-coated CANDY! In fact, what they represent is a brand new, groovy kind of lifestyle atheism. Remember those old I-Mac advertisements? Right around the time that Apple's television spots started to get really annoying? The I-Macs were sold in an array of colors -- of flavors -- from which the consumer could choose:

Likewise, each 'brand' of lifestyle atheism -- Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, et al. -- caters to its own sassy, au courant, metropolitan sensibility. Into science? Dennett's your man. Or maybe Dawkins....I can't keep 'em straight (they're both incredibly boring and frankly mediocre). Into literature and droll, rapier wit, with just the teeniest-spritz of Islamo-fascism-baiting? Then Hitchens is your man.

Into justifying the use of torture against enemies in the American War On Terror? Then, allow me to introduce you to the Reader's Digest-league philosophical musings of America's friendliest FASCIST NEOCON: Sam Harris.

I shall return shortly with Part Two of this series, in which I shall share with you some musings on the scary, militaristic, neoconservative, pseudo-scientific, new-agey, historically illiterate, racist ideology that one Sam Harris espouses.

* Certainly the only coinage for which I shall remain forever grateful for the existence of Christopher Hitchens.