Sam Harris & the War on Burqas

moral superiority justifies immoral acts

This is a repost of one of my earliest videos from Sept 2021 responding to a 2018 interview of Sam Harris by Russell Brand. Russell asked Sam, "What's the biggest threat to freedom, Islam or consumerism?" I rephrase consumerism as capitalism and deconstruct Sam's examples of burqas and suicide bombers, which he uses to show that religious ideology, particularly of Islam, is the source of all evil.

I look at how this reasoning gave a faux-moral rationale for the occupation of Afghanistan and the killing of 1M people since 9-11, letting motivators like paychecks and profits off the hook. Russell has another video called, “Did Liberals Use Feminism to Justify the Afghan Clusterf*ck?" and I show how Sam does the same. I urge him to question his dogma of moral superiority and its cover of "humanitarian intervention."

At that time, the War on Terror was losing steam and the US public wanted out of Afghanistan, so a new justification was needed. Feminism was used to spur righteous indignation over women being forced to wear the hijab or burqa.

Today the same ploy is being resurfaced to turn public opinion against Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran for another unpopular war.

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what is the greatest threat to freedom: Islam or consumerism?

I'm rephrasing consumerism as capitalism because consumerism is an individual choice of what to buy whereas capitalism is the constriction of choices in how we can live, how we can enable ourselves and our families to have the necessities of life.

Sam was an early apologist for the war on burqas that Russell talks about in his YT “Did liberals use feminism as a way to justify the Afghan clusterf*ck?”

I want to deconstruct his logic and figure out where it went wrong, enabling his moral rationale to justify the violence. As revealed by Wikileaks, we now know it was intentional propaganda, a strategy to get people on board because enthusiasm for the war on terror was waning after such a long time. So burqas and feminism were the new rallying cry for humanitarian intervention to once again distract us from looking at corporate profits.

I’d also rephrase the title of Russell’s YT: liberals is too broad of a term, elites is too broad, even one percent is too broad. Really we're talking about a handful of people who are pulling the strings. These are the ones who, in feudal times, would have said “Your labor belongs to me because the land belongs to me.”

Now it’s the bankers and the way they control our labor is by issuing the mortgages. If you want more details on that, I’ve linked my episode on Edward Snowden and The Three Greatest Conspiracies in Plain Sight.

We need a word for those people. I'm going to use oligarchs but I welcome Russell to come up with something better that doesn’t include all the rest of us who are essentially being manipulated and fooled.

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psychopaths are atheist devils

Sam talks about dogma. We always need to define our terms. I define dogma as a belief that someone is not willing to raise to question. I don't think dogma is a bad thing—I think we should all have beliefs we're not willing to raise to question but I think we should own them.

Liberation theology says everyone has a bias—the important thing is to be able to own your bias. Their bias was, as they called it, a preferential option for the poor. I have only one dogma: that all people are born morally equal, which I’m not willing to raise to question.

Sam disagrees; he says one percent or less are born as psychopaths. For everyone else, how they are is because of some system of incentives. In that I agree with him completely.

If we're all born morally equal, then how someone behaves is a result of their circumstances after birth. When I look at someone I consider to be behaving badly, I have to ask, “What would cause me to do the same in their circumstances?” I can't say, “I could never have done that.”

Sam states that a dogma can be dangerous even though on the surface, it seems harmless. The example he gives is the belief that all life is equally valuable and life begins at conception. He says this is a dangerous dogma because it impedes things like embryonic stem cell research.

I think it's interesting that he doesn't consider the example of women having control over their own bodies, since that seemed to be the rationale he's using for the invasion of Middle Eastern countries but whatever …

It’s an obfuscation to conflate the belief that all life is equally valuable with the belief that life begins at conception. But both of those together wouldn't be dangerous without a third and fourth: that we are morally superior in our belief and we have the right to impose our belief on others.

Sam holds those last two beliefs that make a dogma dangerous: he believes his ideology is moral superior and it should be imposed on others. In that sense, he's the same as the right-to-lifers, it's just that his dogma is not motivated by religion but a secular concept, which could be called capitalism.

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against moral relativism

Sam also talks about moral relativism, which he rejects. I share his rejection. So what's the opposite? There are absolutes to what is good and bad.

How do we determine that spectrum? I think that to do good is to alleviate suffering and to do better is to enable people to alleviate their own suffering. To do bad is to cause suffering but to do evil is to force others to cause suffering.

The system of capitalism puts us in a position where causing suffering may be the only way to make a living. Let's look at Sam's example of the ‘religiously motivated evil’ of suicide bombers.

We had recently passed the 20th anniversary of 9-11 [in 2021] and I was having dinner with some friends that night. I asked whether they thought it was possible our government was complicit in that act.

One gentleman was adamant there was no way our government or anyone in it could be so evil. I asked, “How is it possible for people from other countries to be so evil?” and he said “Religion. They are motivated by religion and that's what allows them to do something that is so evil.”

He happened to be a project manager for a defense contractor who made bombs. Since 9-11, there have been nearly a million people killed in the global war on terror. By my calculations, that's 33,000 for every one person killed on 9-11. If we're not going to accept moral relativism, we need to look at all life being equally valuable. So killing 33,000 people is 33,000 times more evil than killing one.

We don’t question whether his job is evil. We see it as a perfectly rational means of caring about your own family, your neighbors and your country because it's motivated by a paycheck. Something motivated by a paycheck or profits isn't raised to scrutiny, only something that's motivated by religion.

If it were my kids who had been killed by a bomb, I don't think I would care whether the motivation was money or religion. When we look at the money, a recent book by William Hartung is Prophets of War, that looks at how much money has been made by defense contractors in these last 20 years.

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‘good’ palestians

Another example Sam gives of how different religions have different levels of morality is when he says Christian Palestinians are not suicide bombers. Therefore the morality of their religion is better than the Muslim, even though they are both equally oppressed.

Let's examine that. One religion enables people to be themselves oppressed, have all of their neighbors and family and country be oppressed, but not do anything about it—not respond, not put their own lives in danger but go along with it and be submissive.

Is that a higher morality than someone who fights back? I think all empires would like their colonies to have an ideology of being passive. It also completely ignores Israeli violence that doesn't even exist in his example. Why don't we raise to scrutiny violence that's motivated by profit, paychecks and money as we do religious or ideological violence?

Sam believes it’s self-evident all lives have gotten better over the course of history. Russell says, “I think we need a truthful metric by which we measure that.” The metric Russell talked about it in the title was freedom, the ability to make your own life better.

Russell mentions the brilliant article by John Pilger on Afghani women and how much better off they were before the US introduced the Mujahideen that then created the Taliban. Afghani women were doing a fine job of enabling their own freedom and their own happiness and taking control over their own lives.

We did not help that. Words matter.

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the most dangerous dogma

Sam’s rationalization provided a way to disguise the level of violence inflicted on the Middle East. It gave those in the US a willingness to go along with it and not scrutinize it. It goes back to his dogma of moral superiority and that an act motivated by money is not the same as an act motivated by ideology.

This thinking has allowed us to participate in atrocities. No matter what job we do in the US, we're still paying taxes, we're still participating in these atrocities. We do not have the right to do no wrong.

Being okay with that is the most dangerous dogma of all.

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Responding to Russell's interview of Edward Snowden, called The Greatest Conspiracies Are In Plain Sight, I give my list of the three biggest conspiracies: tax havens, financial derivatives and money itself. I explain what Mafia techniques are used with tax havens, how one building in Delaware houses 280,000 companies, why the interest rate makes me hot, and who stole the right to make money out of nothing and own your home for free. But to start, I find a common 'rub' between pole dancing, online dating, and capitalism.

A conversation with Everything Voluntary Jack on whether A Course in Miracles is an authoritarian belief system. I counter with why atheism is a dogmatic belief in the separate self. I outline rhetorical devisives I call the Toxic Tilt, You've Been Framed, and Throwing the Book.