Today the excellent radio show Skeptical Sunday, which airs on my radio home here in Ithaca, WRFI, broadcast a thought-provoking interview by philosopher Peter Boghossian with Richard Dawkins, Oxford prof and author of the best-selling and equally provocative book The God Delusion. Dawkins is a British wit and intellectual, cut from the same cloth as the journalist Christopher Hitchens, with a manner that does not gladly suffer fools and an imperiousness that is thankfully tempered by wry humor.
These three men share a commitment to atheism and, somewhat paradoxically, are rather evangelical about it, each authoring widely read tomes denouncing all things religious.
Boghossian's conversation with Dawkins inevitably turned to Islam (on which Dawkins' comments have frequently proven controversial) and that's what I'm writing about today. Dawkin's discourse on the subject struck me at times as willful bordering on obtuse, and endangered him with metamorphosing from rapier wit to oblivious twit... And here's why.
Of course atheists, and for that matter Muslims, and anyone else, should be free to criticize Islam. But when you do so, understand that your words form part of a larger set of dialogues that have concrete implications -- and exercise caution to ensure that your words are not misunderstood. Do so not because you should be legally refrained from doing otherwise, but because you should value preventing this kind of misunderstanding for both analytical and ethical reasons.
In the same way that people should be able to criticize the practices of the government of Israel without being perceived as anti-Semitic, criticism of Islamist practices should be allowed without being taken to be anti-Arab (which would be another form of anti-Semitism). In both cases, though, it is worthwhile to take care that your intentions are not misunderstood, because anti-Semitic and anti-Arab thinking continues to cause harm in the world.
Dawkins' defense of his criticism of Islam dripped with self-righteousness as a truth-teller waging war against the plague of political correctness that blighted even his fellow non-believers. Liberal scholars so greatly feared accusations of racism, Dawkins declared, that they chose a weak-willed and deceitful political correctness over speaking truth to religion.
The tone of this colloquy recalled very similar kinds of salvos during the "culture wars" in the U.S., circa the 1980s and 1990s, when the term "political correctness" was coined. At the time, a coalition of the politically conservative and the academically conservative felt that intellectual space in the U.S., whether in universities or in public discourse, was being overtaken by representatives of all manner of minority groups who profited by playing up their historical oppression and parlayed victimhood into various kinds of advantages -- the "race card" was said to have been played to win everything from university admissions to criminal trials.
Again somewhat paradoxically, the decriers of politically-correct, race-card-wielding professional victims themselves claimed an oddly parallel kind of mental victimization, averring that to be called racist is horribly wounding. According to Dawkins in his interview with Boghossian, this fear is enough to cow his colleagues out of fighting injustice caused by Islam.
Here's my problem with this kind of disquisition -- it seems to assume that those who are combating racism or Islamophobia are attempting to act as some kind of thought police, and are concerned with the subjective states of mind of those they deem to be racist.
For me such claims entirely miss the point. Of course, it is hurtful to believe that people in your community, your society, your country, see you as less than human, as not deserving the understanding, compassion, or respect that they would accord themselves. But the greater harm lies not in words but in the actions that have been justified, both historically and today, by the sentiments contained in those words. The real harm lies in the structures of extreme inequity that were built, and that continue to survive, because of those sentiments. Think or say whatever you want about me -- but when you support institutional practices that unfairly exclude and harm me, then we have a problem and rightfully so.
Here's an example of what I mean: Back in the early 2000s, Dawkin's comrade Christopher Hitchens felt himself to be brave in exposing the oppressiveness of Muslim-majority societies in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as a consequence he blindly advocated ill-conceived warfare that has now bankrupted the U.S. economy, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in those war-torn countries, and created enormous numbers of casualties for U.S. troops, including quite often their emotional trauma of having been called upon to execute an unjust war.
Subsequently Hitchens eventually admitted that the Iraq war was disastrous, though he defended his initial support of it. But the point is that, in insisting on his right to decry Islam, he himself committed the ultimate scholarly sin -- a lack of analytical rigor in scrutinizing the circumstances surrounding the actual declaration and prosecution of war.
See my point yet? Those who fan the flames of Islamophobia support, even if unintentionally, a politics of oppression - one that dehumanizes others and makes the justification of the unjustifiable much easier than it would be otherwise.
Similar controversies swirl around the use of the (tiresomely euphemized) "n" word. For me personally, the reason that, say, the "n" word is harmful isn't because of the state of mind of either the person who says it or the person who hears it. It's because of the historical and current injustices created by the mentality that also created that word. The "n" word signifies a person who is worthless, despicable and against whom any action can and should be taken with impunity. The lynchings that scarred this country happened because people were seen in this way. Anyone who has read or heard of, for example the extremely disturbing jokes about Trayvon Martin during and after George Zimmerman's acquittal for his killing must worry whether that strain of virulent, potentially violent racism persists. (By the way, I disagree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that black folks who urge each other not to use the word must be indulging in hypocritical "respectability politics"; in my opinion the reason not to use the word is that it reinforces internalized racism and self-hatred - it's less about seeming respectable to others and more about respecting yourself.)
To move from linguistic battles to tragically real ones is not always a stretch. Extrajudicial killing can be an expression of these extreme beliefs. And a tool of the current U.S. war on Muslim-majority countries, the armed drones, have posed a major subject of concern as a means of precisely that, according to a recent statement of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings.
No one should claim that the actual decision-makers on drones, in the White House or JSOC or wherever, harbor Islamophobic beliefs - there's hardly any way of proving that.
But we should wonder whether totalizing depictions of Islam contribute to dehumanizing the populations that are so affected. I use the term "dehumanizing" because such generalizations don't permit the same nuances that we would intuitively understand for our own case - even critics of Christianity would hardly contest that a world of difference exists between various denominations, not to mention between theology and everyday life.
For atheists, the underlying belief in a higher power is going to be misguided whatever its intensity, but the analytical slippage arises when the argument moves from criticizing the inherent logic of any religious faith, and towards characterizing a specific religious faith as necessarily entailing socially harmful practices.
So, yes, I do think it behooves critics of Islam to choose their words carefully in order to make sure they are not misunderstood as claiming, for example, that all Muslims are religious extremists or that Islam must be interpreted in a certain way. For these scholars who pride themselves on clarity of thought, the imperative to speak precisely should hardly be a bother. And it is not too much of a stretch to caution that, when wars are fought and civilians are subsequently killed on the implicit basis of such misperceptions, communicating with precision is not only a matter of scholastic pride but possibly of life or death.
These three men share a commitment to atheism and, somewhat paradoxically, are rather evangelical about it, each authoring widely read tomes denouncing all things religious.
Boghossian's conversation with Dawkins inevitably turned to Islam (on which Dawkins' comments have frequently proven controversial) and that's what I'm writing about today. Dawkin's discourse on the subject struck me at times as willful bordering on obtuse, and endangered him with metamorphosing from rapier wit to oblivious twit... And here's why.
Of course atheists, and for that matter Muslims, and anyone else, should be free to criticize Islam. But when you do so, understand that your words form part of a larger set of dialogues that have concrete implications -- and exercise caution to ensure that your words are not misunderstood. Do so not because you should be legally refrained from doing otherwise, but because you should value preventing this kind of misunderstanding for both analytical and ethical reasons.
In the same way that people should be able to criticize the practices of the government of Israel without being perceived as anti-Semitic, criticism of Islamist practices should be allowed without being taken to be anti-Arab (which would be another form of anti-Semitism). In both cases, though, it is worthwhile to take care that your intentions are not misunderstood, because anti-Semitic and anti-Arab thinking continues to cause harm in the world.
Dawkins' defense of his criticism of Islam dripped with self-righteousness as a truth-teller waging war against the plague of political correctness that blighted even his fellow non-believers. Liberal scholars so greatly feared accusations of racism, Dawkins declared, that they chose a weak-willed and deceitful political correctness over speaking truth to religion.
The tone of this colloquy recalled very similar kinds of salvos during the "culture wars" in the U.S., circa the 1980s and 1990s, when the term "political correctness" was coined. At the time, a coalition of the politically conservative and the academically conservative felt that intellectual space in the U.S., whether in universities or in public discourse, was being overtaken by representatives of all manner of minority groups who profited by playing up their historical oppression and parlayed victimhood into various kinds of advantages -- the "race card" was said to have been played to win everything from university admissions to criminal trials.
Again somewhat paradoxically, the decriers of politically-correct, race-card-wielding professional victims themselves claimed an oddly parallel kind of mental victimization, averring that to be called racist is horribly wounding. According to Dawkins in his interview with Boghossian, this fear is enough to cow his colleagues out of fighting injustice caused by Islam.
Here's my problem with this kind of disquisition -- it seems to assume that those who are combating racism or Islamophobia are attempting to act as some kind of thought police, and are concerned with the subjective states of mind of those they deem to be racist.
For me such claims entirely miss the point. Of course, it is hurtful to believe that people in your community, your society, your country, see you as less than human, as not deserving the understanding, compassion, or respect that they would accord themselves. But the greater harm lies not in words but in the actions that have been justified, both historically and today, by the sentiments contained in those words. The real harm lies in the structures of extreme inequity that were built, and that continue to survive, because of those sentiments. Think or say whatever you want about me -- but when you support institutional practices that unfairly exclude and harm me, then we have a problem and rightfully so.
Here's an example of what I mean: Back in the early 2000s, Dawkin's comrade Christopher Hitchens felt himself to be brave in exposing the oppressiveness of Muslim-majority societies in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as a consequence he blindly advocated ill-conceived warfare that has now bankrupted the U.S. economy, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in those war-torn countries, and created enormous numbers of casualties for U.S. troops, including quite often their emotional trauma of having been called upon to execute an unjust war.
Subsequently Hitchens eventually admitted that the Iraq war was disastrous, though he defended his initial support of it. But the point is that, in insisting on his right to decry Islam, he himself committed the ultimate scholarly sin -- a lack of analytical rigor in scrutinizing the circumstances surrounding the actual declaration and prosecution of war.
See my point yet? Those who fan the flames of Islamophobia support, even if unintentionally, a politics of oppression - one that dehumanizes others and makes the justification of the unjustifiable much easier than it would be otherwise.
Similar controversies swirl around the use of the (tiresomely euphemized) "n" word. For me personally, the reason that, say, the "n" word is harmful isn't because of the state of mind of either the person who says it or the person who hears it. It's because of the historical and current injustices created by the mentality that also created that word. The "n" word signifies a person who is worthless, despicable and against whom any action can and should be taken with impunity. The lynchings that scarred this country happened because people were seen in this way. Anyone who has read or heard of, for example the extremely disturbing jokes about Trayvon Martin during and after George Zimmerman's acquittal for his killing must worry whether that strain of virulent, potentially violent racism persists. (By the way, I disagree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that black folks who urge each other not to use the word must be indulging in hypocritical "respectability politics"; in my opinion the reason not to use the word is that it reinforces internalized racism and self-hatred - it's less about seeming respectable to others and more about respecting yourself.)
To move from linguistic battles to tragically real ones is not always a stretch. Extrajudicial killing can be an expression of these extreme beliefs. And a tool of the current U.S. war on Muslim-majority countries, the armed drones, have posed a major subject of concern as a means of precisely that, according to a recent statement of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings.
No one should claim that the actual decision-makers on drones, in the White House or JSOC or wherever, harbor Islamophobic beliefs - there's hardly any way of proving that.
But we should wonder whether totalizing depictions of Islam contribute to dehumanizing the populations that are so affected. I use the term "dehumanizing" because such generalizations don't permit the same nuances that we would intuitively understand for our own case - even critics of Christianity would hardly contest that a world of difference exists between various denominations, not to mention between theology and everyday life.
For atheists, the underlying belief in a higher power is going to be misguided whatever its intensity, but the analytical slippage arises when the argument moves from criticizing the inherent logic of any religious faith, and towards characterizing a specific religious faith as necessarily entailing socially harmful practices.
So, yes, I do think it behooves critics of Islam to choose their words carefully in order to make sure they are not misunderstood as claiming, for example, that all Muslims are religious extremists or that Islam must be interpreted in a certain way. For these scholars who pride themselves on clarity of thought, the imperative to speak precisely should hardly be a bother. And it is not too much of a stretch to caution that, when wars are fought and civilians are subsequently killed on the implicit basis of such misperceptions, communicating with precision is not only a matter of scholastic pride but possibly of life or death.
