The End of Faith

Humanist, May-June, 2005 by David A. Niose

Surely, just a little restraint on Harris' part would have been prudent. Although he's a young scholar, we can almost see him years from now reflecting on this early work and regretting such shoot-from-the-hip remarks.

Thus, The End of Faith presents a dilemma for ambitious Humanist activists. Should it be embraced for its central thesis--advocating the toppling of the established religious faiths of the West--or should Harris be scorned for his quasi-totalitarian views? It would seem that, despite his vision of a reason-based society, Harris' means of getting there--utilizing torture and persecuting people for their beliefs alone--will make him about as welcome in the broad freethought family as Michael Skakel at the Kennedy Compound.

And the above examples aren't the only points where Harris can be accused of overselling his thesis. In his relentless attack on religion, he lashes out at two nonreligionists--Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy--both of whom Harris criticizes for their well-documented criticism of American policy. Laughably, Harris spends almost a full page listing some of the United States' worst humanitarian atrocities--from slavery to the massacre of Native Americans to military crimes in Southeast Asia--all for the purpose of agreeing with Chomsky. (Harris writes: "In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky's thesis whole.... We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky's acute sense of outrage") Then he proceeds to lambaste Chomsky for somehow being unfair in criticizing U.S. foreign policy. Harris' point seems to be that U.S. atrocities aren't exactly analogous to the atrocities of religious fanatics, but he fails to explain in any convincing way how this should negate Chomsky's valid criticisms.

Similarly, Harris digresses briefly into a defense of Israel that is unnecessary and irrelevant to his central thesis, impeaching his own credibility by suggesting simply that religious fanaticism is just about the only cause of the ongoing problems in the Middle East. Historical details that might show that this religious fanaticism was itself caused by other factors--such as the resentments that arose when globally dominant Western powers, all non-Muslim, arbitrarily decided to create the state of Israel in the middle of the Islamic world--never come up on Harris' radar screen.

Indeed, never does Harris seem to consider the complex causes of various instances of religious fanaticism. He doesn't even seem to acknowledge that, while Islam is a religion that has embraced violence in the past, fundamentalist Islam, at least in the form we see it today, is a relatively recent phenomenon that has root causes other than just the core Islamic doctrines that make violence justifiable.

Even the testosterone factor--humankind's seemingly innate predisposition toward violence--is a nonfactor in Harris' thinking. Harris has apparently never read that famous philosopher, Genghis Khan, who said: "Man's highest joy is in victory: to conquer one's enemies, to pursue them, to deprive them of their possessions, to make their beloved weep, to ride on their horses, and to embrace their wives and daughters."