You’ve probably seen or heard about the discussion between Sam Harris and Graeme Wood over at Sam’s website, a discussion called “The true believers.” Wood, of course, has become famous—and notorious—for his analysis of ISIS’s theological background in a piece that appeared in The Atlantic (see my post for the link). Wood’s thesis, which he supported by interviewing ISIS supporters outside the Middle East (the man is no fool and didn’t want to be beheaded), was that ISIS represents an apocalyptic strain of Islam, justified by the Qur’an, that aims to establish an ever-expanding Caliphate and longs for a final battle with the West, during which Jesus will appear and save Islam.
Wood was taken to task for the usual things: neglecting “other motivations” for ISIS’s behavior, failure to interview members of ISIS in the Middle East, and for his “un-nuanced” interpretations of theology. By and large, he took as truth what his subjects told him, and when that largely revealed religious motivations, the “Islamophobia-decriers” had to find reasons to discredit him.
In his long discussion with Sam, they go over these motivations again, and I recommend that you read the piece. I’ll highlight just three things:
1. Motivations: religious or otherwise? There is a slight disparity between Harris and Wood here, with Harris taking the religious motivations espoused by ISIS sympathizers at face value, while Wood says that some people might not be expressing other motivations, like resentment of Western colonialism. By and large, though, both men are on the same page; but Wood is a tad more cautious:
Wood: Yes. However, the countervailing current in social science is the tradition in ethnography and anthropology of taking seriously what people say. And this can lead to the exact opposite of the materialist, “root causes” approach. When Evans-Pritchard, for example, talks about witchcraft among the Azande, he’s describing exactly what they say and showing that it’s an internally consistent view of the world. This is something that anthropology has done quite well in the past, and it gives us a model for how we can listen to jihadis and understand them without immediately assuming that they are incapable of self-knowledge.
What I’m arguing for in the piece is not to discard either type of explanation but to remember the latter one and take the words of these ISIS people seriously. Even though at various points in the past we’ve ignored political or material causes, this doesn’t mean that ideology plays no role, or that we should ignore the plain meaning of words.
Of course, we don’t know what people actually think. Maybe they’re self-deluded; maybe they don’t really believe in the literal rewards of martyrdom. We can’t know; we’re not in their heads. But this lack of knowledge cuts both ways. Why do so many people instantly resort, with great confidence, to a material explanation—even or especially when the person himself rejects it? It’s a very peculiar impulse to have, and I consider it a matter of dogma for many people who study jihadists.
Harris: Yes, especially in cases where a person meets none of the material conditions that are alleged to be the root causes of his behavior. We see jihadis coming from free societies all over the world. There are many examples of educated, affluent young men joining organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State who lack any discernible material or political grievances. They simply feel a tribal connection to Muslims everywhere, merely because they share the same religious identity. We are seeing jihadis travel halfway around the world for the privilege of dying in battle who have nothing in common with the beleaguered people of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Somalia whose ranks they are joining, apart from a shared belief in the core doctrines of Islam.
. . . Again, the fact that most jihadis are generally rational, even psychologically normal, and merely in the grip of a dangerous belief system is, in my view, the most important point to get across. And it is amazing how resolutely people will ignore the evidence of this. Justin Bieber could convert to Islam tomorrow, spend a full hour on 60 Minutes confessing his hopes for martyrdom and his certainty of paradise, and then join the Islamic State—and Glenn Greenwald would still say his actions had nothing to do with the doctrine of Islam and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy.
I’m perfectly prepared to accept that some of these militants have motivations other than religion. Many may simply long for excitement, or to feel part of something larger than themselves. But what I’m not prepared to accept is that every one of them has nonreligious motivations. It’s curious to me—and this the one thing I think I’ve contributed to Sam’s thinking—that Western apologists like Greenwald and Karen Armstrong will question people’s motivations when they explicitly say their motivations are religious, but will not question them when they say their motivations are based on economics or resentment of Western imperialism. This is the double standard of Western liberals that so infuriates me.
2. So why the double standard? I think both men agree, and I agree too, that holding ISIS to standards different from those to which we hold, say, the Israelis, reflects a kind of paternalism: a tendency to give a break to people considered oppressed.
Harris: Do you have other ideas about why it’s so tempting for liberals to ignore the link between jihadism and religious belief?
Wood: There’s also a deep urge to deny agency to the Islamic State, and I think it’s fundamentally connected to a reluctance to see non-Western people as fully developed and capable of having intelligent beliefs and enough self-knowledge to express them. These people articulate well-thought-out reasons for what they do. And yet ignoring what they say somehow gets camouflaged in the minds of liberals as speaking up for them. It’s delusional.
I think this is on the mark, though liberals are notably reluctant to admit it, for it’s expressing a kind of reverse racism that they deplore. I consider myself a liberal, and am deeply distressed by the view that different groups should be held to different standards of behavior, with some groups excused or overlooked for performing barbaric acts.
3. The false notion of objective morality. Wood’s interview with ISIS sympathizers convinces me even more that there are no universal moral truths. Listen to what he says about some of his subjects:
Wood: Anjem Choudary is a fixture on Fox News. He talks to Sean Hannity, and many people would say that those two deserve each other. He’s known for screaming about the greatness and supremacy of shari’ah. But I had no interest in the screaming. Instead, I wanted details. We had a lucid, friendly exchange about what he believed a fully shari’ah-compliant caliphate would look like. I found him articulate, informed, and pleasant company in this regard. When I say “informed,” I mean he had answers to all my questions. They might not have been the right answers, but he was able to answer pretty much everything I could come up with about the Islamic State, about how it looks and why it’s so wonderful.
And he did this unflinchingly, even when he was endorsing what I would call rape or slavery—what even he would call slavery, in fact. This was not a tough call for him. If he has any compunction about these practices, it was completely undetectable. That was not true of some others I’ve interviewed who have literalist views of Islam. To be in the presence of someone who can say, in this modern day, that slavery is a good thing and that to deny its goodness is an act of apostasy was a very unsettling experience.
Most moral objectivists would say that slavery is objectively wrong. I say it’s “wrong” because a society that condones it is a dysfunctional society that promotes the subjugation and unnecessary suffering of individuals. But Choudary would say it’s fine, justifying it on Quranic grounds, or even on consequential grounds. How do you convince someone like him that he’s objectively wrong? Such people appeal to divine sanction, and although you can say that there is no god, and he should be appealing to something else, the fact is that many people hold religious dogma as the arbiter of morality.
I have seen attacks on the internet of my views that there are no objective moral truths, but I don’t find them convincing. Slavery is an example that most reasonable people would agree on, but there are other and harder issues, like abortion, that defy any objective “moral solution.” One must, at bottom, express some kind of preference, like for “overall well being,” that can be neither quantified not objectively justified.
