ANTI-ISLAMOPHOBIA

In a previous post and discussion about Islam on the Integral Global Facebook group a video by Bill Warner was recommended as an excellent source for the history of Islam. After reading about Warner he seemed like a typical politically motivated and narrowly informed Islamophobe like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. I criticized him as an Islamophobic ideologue, without having watched the video. I was taken to task for not watching Warner’s video on the history of Islam and promised I would watch it and give an evaluation of Warner’s work. Bill Warner has many books and videos on Islam and is a political activist who says he’s educating the public about the history of “Political Islam” because of the threat it poses to the US and Europe.

So I’ve seen Bill Warner’s video and I have looked at the scholarly sources to check what he says. Lo and behold, it’s exactly as I said it would be. Warner has a skewed view of Islam that selects and arranges favored facts to promote his fears of an Islamic takeover. Now it could be the case that I just did what Warner does, select and arrange facts to agree with my preconceived ideas. Because that is possible, we need a test of what we assert. That is the point of having a community of scholars who devote their lives to studying specific topics AND who discuss assertions critically with other well-schooled scholars. Their assertions, unlike Warner’s, must past peer-review. 

 SUMMARY OF WARNER’S VIDEO

Warner’s history of “Islam” is shockingly tendentious. We see a map of the Middle East and Mediterranean that will visually chart the course of Islam’s spread from its beginnings. His biased title of this chart is “The Destruction of Classical Civilization”. He calls it a “battle map” and shows the 548 battles that Islam, represented as an everenlarging green blob, caused as it unrelentingly spread over more and more lands.  He absurdly personifies a thing called “Islam” and says “it” is taking over. His basic story is that Islam, because of the warlike parts of the founding documents, inevitably attacks and dominates other lands in order to impose Sharia law on the dominated. He says he’s only stating facts, and he does know some facts, yet chooses the facts he tells for maximal Western revulsion. So we learn about Islam enslaving but little about its culture. We learn nothing of the economic, social and political aspects of this history, nor is mentioned that this imperial struggle is only one dimension of the story of many world powers throughout history. Towards the end of the video his political agenda is exposed as he accuses universities and corporations of wanting Sharia law because they practice political correctness. But a rightest political ideologue like Warner could be right, so we need to check the scholarly debate. What we find is that some elements of Warner’s skewed view are accurate, but he has chosen to tell a narrow story focusing on the war-making aspects of Islam to scare and sow revulsion in Westerners ignorant of how history-writing is done. 

THE ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP 

Note: I will be noting the credentials of the scholars I cite, not to use their status as a substitute for determining whether what they say is true, but to emphasize that their work has been critically reviewed by similarly knowledgeable scholars. In academic scholarship there is a rigorous checking mechanism Bill Warner’s work doesn’t withstand.

First, it’s important to understand that it’s difficult to know what happened in undeveloped Arabia 1,400 years ago. One of the most esteemed scholars of Islam, Montgomery Watt, in “What is Islam?”, warns that “The greatest challenge to a coherent conceptualization of Islam has been posed by the sheer diversity of—that is, range of differences between—those societies, persons, ideas and practices that identify themselves with “Islam.”” 

So unlike Warner’s unhistorical green growing blob called “Islam”, one of the greatest scholars of Islam emphasizes its diversity, even using scare quotes around the term Warner tosses around so cavalierly: “Islam”. 

Prof. Chase Robinson in “The Rise of Islam 600-705”, part of “The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries” from Cambridge U. Press, elaborates on Watt’s comment, “As we shall see all too frequently throughout this chapter, the historiographic ground cannot bear interpretations that carry the freight of much real detail. For reasons made clear in chapter 15, the study of early Islam is plagued by a wide range of historiographic problems: the sources internal to the tradition purport to preserve a great deal of detailed history, but with very few exceptions they are late and polemically inclined; meanwhile, the sources external to the tradition are in many instances much earlier, but they know so little of what was happening in Arabia and Iraq that they are inadequate for detailed reconstruction. What is abundant is in general unreliable; what is relatively reliable is invariably too little;” Robinson concludes “Given the state of the evidence, the most one can do is to set out some historical answers very schematically.”

 Agreeing with Watt, Prof. Khaleel Mohammed states that “Islam contains so many juristic and interpretational differences that scholars generally acknowledge that there are several Islams. I choose not to detail such differences in this Element [book] and embark on a sort of essentialism.”

 I also found that Warner’s brand of polemical history is itself a subject of study by real scholars. In the chapter, “Modern approaches to early Islamic history,” Fred M. Donner, recounts the struggle against Warner-like polemics and in the process eerily nails Warner’s methods:

 “In another vein, there has emerged in recent years a secularized contemporary avatar of the medieval religious polemics against Islam that essentializes ‘Islamic civilization’ as antagonist to the ‘West’ and which sometimes reaches back to the founding events of early Islamic history in an effort to find ammunition for its arguments. In considering how scholars in the modern West have studied early Islamic history, then, it is important to be mindful of the many forms of the polemical tradition against Islam, even though that tradition cannot be considered scholarship in the proper sense of that word.”

 While Warner blithely recites his skewed conquest narrative of early Islam, Donner describes the differences among the scholars he names and the difficulty posed by the meager reliable sources: 

 “Regarding the conquest narratives, Noth emphasized their salvation-historical character and questioned whether the conquests had any centralized impetus or direction, Sharon and others suggested they never occurred at all, and Conrad has shown that some conquest accounts appear to have no secure factual basis; on the other hand, Donner stressed the cogency of understanding the conquests as a unitary phenomenon and Robinson demonstrated that some early, independent non-Muslim sources confirm certain Muslim conquest reports.”

 Donner concludes, “Beyond the thorny problems posed by the heritage of the polemical tradition and by the deficiencies of the sources for early Islamic history, there exist other problems of perception and conceptualization, as well as practical obstacles, that have affected Western approaches to early Islamic history.”

 And from  Chase F. Robinson, editor of “Volume 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries”:

 “This – the realization that what we know about early Islam is less certain than what we thought we knew, and that writing history in this period and region requires altogether more sophisticated and resourceful approaches – is one of a handful of notable advances made in Islamic studies since the original Cambridge history of Islam was published in 1970.”

 Robinson’s summation: “What, in broad strokes, is the quality of our evidence for the period covered by this volume? It is mixed.”

 This appreciation of the diversity of views about historical Islam is also reflected in serious study of the contemporary Islamic world. In contrast, Warner presents Islam as a scary monolith that is driven by adherence to central ancient texts.

We learn from Prof. Emeritus Mohammed Ayoob in his “Political Islam: image and reality” that:

“In practice, no two Islamisms are alike because they are determined by the contexts within which they operate. What works in Egypt will not work in Indonesia. What works in Saudi Arabia will not work in Turkey. Anyone familiar with the diversity of the Muslim world--its socioeconomic characteristics, cultures, political systems, and trajectories of intellectual development--is bound to realize that the political manifestations of Islam, like the practice of Islam itself, are to a great extent context specific, the result of the interpenetration of religious precepts and local culture, including political culture.”

“It becomes clear that the Islamist political imagination is largely determined by context when one looks at the political discourse and, more importantly, the activities of the various Islamist movements.”

 And contrary to Warner’s ahistorical concoction “Political Islam”, we learn that “Political Islam is a modern phenomenon, with roots in the sociopolitical conditions of Muslim countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a product of the Muslim peoples' interaction--military, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual--with the West during the past two hundred years, a period when Western power has been in the ascendant and Muslims have become the objects, rather than the subjects, of history.”

“As these examples make clear, it is the local context that has largely determined the development and transformation of Islamist movements within particular national milieus. Moreover, it is not true that Islamist political formations have been primarily violent in nature. The most long-standing and credible Islamist parties have normally worked within the legal frameworks in which they have found themselves.”

And Ayoob, a political scientist, concludes “This Western perception does not, however, negate the fact that political Islam is a multifaceted phenomenon and is in almost all instances context specific, circumscribed by the borders of individual states. The overwhelming majority of Islamist political activity is conducted through peaceful means within constitutional limits, even where governments are unsympathetic to the Islamists' cause. Transnational extremist activities, including acts of terrorism, are the exception, not the rule, when it comes to political action undertaken in the name of Islam.”

Amazing how different is the conclusion of Prof Ayoob, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Michigan State University, writing in the peer-review World Policy Journal and subject to the criticism of his colleagues, from Bill Warner, the former physicist, who has no peer-reviewed Islamic publications or scholarship to his name. 

 ISLAM AND NON-MUSLIMS

An understandably popular topic in the West is how the dominant Islamic authorities, in the lands they conquered, treated their subordinate populations of Christians and Jews. As we might expect from such a diverse array of societies and locations the conditions for the underclass varied greatly.

Chase Robinson, in his chapter “Rise of Islam 600-705” confirms the warlike aspect of Islamic history that is Warner’s narrow focus. We learn of:

 “Muhammad putting his nascent community into shape for war-making against his polytheist opponents. In this, the Constitution conforms to the great stress laid in the

Quran upon fighting on behalf of God in general, and upon the connection between emigration or ‘going out’ (khuruj, as opposed to ‘sitting’, ququd) and this fighting, as Q 2:218 (‘those who emigrate and fight on the path of God’), and other verses put it. The Muslim is ‘one who believes in God and the last Day and fights on the path of God’ (Q 9:19)” (Robinson, the Rise of Islam 600-705).

While describing war making in the name of Islam, Robinson also provides the facts Warner excludes. In contrast to Warner’s hard linkage of Islamic violence to Islamic teaching we learn that:

 “Only gradually – and incompletely, as subsequent Islamic history would show – was taking up arms disengaged from belief, as armies were professionalized and the state claimed the exclusive right to carry out legitimate violence.” (Robinson, the Rise of Islam 600-705).

 And in the following quotes it sounds as if Robinson is criticizing Warner’s approach when he writes that “Modern descriptions of systematic conquest-era violence targeted at non-Muslims, in addition to those of post-conquest persecution before the Marwanids, are usually nothing more than poorly disguised polemics.” (Robinson, the Rise of Islam 600-705). He notes that “Unlike the barbarian invasions of the fourth- and fifth-century western Mediterranean, the effects of the Islamic conquests were in many respects modest.” (Robinson, the Rise of Islam 600-705). 

 And he concludes that:

 “For the most part, conquest destruction was restrained and, at least in some respects, discretionary: low- and mid-level bureaucratic functionaries were preserved so as to ensure fiscal continuity, and the material evidence shows continuities at other levels too.” Robinson, (“Conclusion” of “From formative Islam to classical Islam”)

 Regarding non-Muslims “the umma of the Constitution appears to accommodate the Jews of Medina, although they occupy a subordinate status. This inclusive sense of community reflects the relatively catholic nature of early Islamic belief: we have already seen that Muhammad had followed in the footsteps of earlier prophets (Moses and Abraham are especially prominent in the Quran), and his call for monotheism was initially compatible with those made by his predecessors.”  (Robinson, The Rise of Islam 600-705).

 Other sources confirm Robinson’s account:

Regarding Islam’s relation to Christians and Jews we learn in Courbage and Fargues, “Christians and Jews Under Islam”, that “the political, sociological and demographic factors that have shaped the position of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islam in the past and today. Focusing on the Arab world and on Turkey, the authors show how Christianity and Judaism survived and, at times, even prospered in the region, thus modifying the view of Islam as an inevitably unbending and radical religion.”

Najib Saliba, professor of Middle East history at Worcester State College, MA, writes: “This article will show that, for centuries, perhaps a millennium, during which Islam dominated the area, conflict between Jews, Christians and Muslims was the exception, not the norm. The norm was peace, harmony, coexistence and cooperation among those of the three religions. ”http://www.alhewar.com/Saliba_Christians_and_Jews_Under_Islam.htm

While Gordon Newby, chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University, emphasizes the stronger effect of historical factors, rather than the sacred texts Warner focuses on so exclusively. In “Muslim, Jews and Christians - Relations and Interactions” he writes:

“Relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians have been shaped not only by the theologies and beliefs of the three religions, but also, and often more strongly, by the historical circumstances in which they are found.” “During the first Islamic century, the period of the most rapid ex­pansion of Islam, social and religious structures were so fluid that it is hard to make generalisations” https://www.iis.ac.uk/academic-article/muslim-jews-and-christians-relations-and-interactions

SHARIA LAW

Warner is prone to hyperbole especially about Islamic Sharia law: “Each and every demand that Muslims make is based on the idea of implementing Sharia law in America.”  (Warner, “Sharia Law for Non-Muslims”) Part of his mission is to provide Americans with the information needed to combat the imposition of Sharia law in the US.

In Khaleed Mohammed’s monograph “Islam and Violence” for the Cambridge “Elements” series on “Religion and Violence” we get an informed and more varied picture of the current situation:

“The battle for Islam, as Khalid Abou El-Fadl notes, is between moderates and those he deems “puritans,” based on their vision of a pure Islam if certain laws and practices are enforced (Abou El-Fadl 2007: 162). Entities like ISIS and Boko Haram, in their effort to fight the Western forces, are imposing their own brand of Islamic law that has little to do with methodology or consideration of the goals of the Sharia, as understood by the classical jurists. Such “puritans” view most modern Muslims as having strayed from the path of righteousness and in need of coercion to return to what is proper. Many of the proponents for “Islamization of law” are not scholars in the field, and as such, bring about what Scott Appleby (2002: 85–92) and Khalid Abou El-Fadl (2014: 119) term the “vulgarization” of Islamic law. This means a return to an imagined, highly artificial Islam that draws a clear line of demarcation between an ungodly Western “them” and a righteous “us.” The actors in this scenario seek to gain their goals without any of the ethical or moral considerations elemental to the Islamic tradition, employing instead the cruelest methods to achieve their ends.”

 What Khaleed Mohammed is telling us, in contrast to Warner’s exaggerated vision of a Sharia monolith, is that the Islamic radicals impose “their own brand” of Islamic law that “has little to do with methodology or consideration of the goals of the Sharia, as understood by the classical jurists”. Those puritans “are not scholars in the field”. This “means a return to an imagined, highly artificial Islam that draws a clear line of demarcation between an ungodly Western “them” and a righteous “us.”” So Bill Warner, for his political purposes, has focused exclusively on the legal interpretation used by unschooled radicals, adopting uncritically their us vs. them dualism, that is an “an imagined, highly artificial Islam” while claiming that he is simply giving us the “facts” of Islamic law, about which he wrote a book.

People truly interested in Islam and violence might want to read a book about that topic, realizing that violence is only one dimension of the vast Islamic story, instead of listening to marginal figures who have no relationship to the actual scholarly community that interact and criticize each other’s works, and who uses his isolated studies to wage a counter holy war against a fabricated monolith called Islam.

At the very least Warner has not engaged the massive scholarship on Islam, instead reading the history for his paranoid political purposes so that the vast terrain of Islam becomes the radical interpretation of violent radical groups. Warner focuses on the oppressiveness and dangers of Sharia law, even going so far as to accuse US corporations and universities of practicing Sharia, by their alleged adherence to political correctness. But Prof. Khaleel Mohammed steers a middle course between rightwing Islam deionizers and left wing Islam apologists. 

 In “Islam and Violence” we learn, contrary to Warner’s reduction of Islam to three texts, that “Islamic law is found in an enormous corpus of volumes that document the rulings, opinions, and discourses over the span of many centuries” (Abou El-Fadl 2014: xxxii). It covers a vast array of topics, from rulings related to worship, criminal law, personal status, family law, commercial law, international law, constitutional law, and inheritance.”

 Khaleel Mohammed criticizes two other scholars, Tyan and Lewis, and asserts: “Contrary to what Tyan and Lewis would have us believe, there has never been any single Islamic creed or law about jihad, since there is no singular authoritative body in Islam. All we have from Muslim writers throughout the ages are numerous legal opinions that may all be equally “normative” (Mottahadeh and Sayyid 2001: 23–29; see also Abou El-Fadl 2007: 21–22; Afsaruddin 2015: 70–81).”

 And, in contrast to Warner’s scary contemporary Sharia monolith, we learn that: “The current state of Islamic law in every single Muslim-majority nation seems to be that of outright confusion…… In Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan, Iran, and Yemen, Islamic law seems to be enacted without any reference to the goals of the Sharia to promote what would seem to be ethical and moral practices to please the Divine.”

ON BILL WARNER

As we can see from a cursory glance of the massive literature form a novice working for only a week, there is a diverse, contentious, fact and interpretation-laden debate about what Warner confidently proclaims. For his anti-Islamic jihad Warner has selected a narrow portion of the historical story and then fixated on particular sacred texts to produce an Islam for his political purposes that has little relation to the realities of contemporary Islamic life and its history. 

 Warner says he’s only stating facts. That’s only half the story of writing history. ALL history writing is value-laden. We have to choose which facts to include, how to describe those facts, and what story those facts will tell. It’s true both that there are facts AND that every telling of those facts, even a chronology, is laden with values or moral choices. Warner, perhaps because he is not a historian, appears not to know this.

CONCLUSION

Bill Warner reads history to serve his present paranoid purposes. His given name is Bill French, but he chose the pen name “Warner” presumably because he sees his mission, post-9/11, as warning us of the coming Islamic theat. He fears the Islamic hordes coming to Europe and America and imposing Sharia law. To prove that fear is justified he reads Islamic history tendentiously selecting the facts to scare us about Islam’s true intentions. So his “history” is of a politicized religion that migrates outward to conquer and destroy its enemies and impose harsh Sharia law on its victims. His map shows one big mass of Islam, like a contagion or blob, that relentlessly subsumed and crushed other religions and cultures. And, of course, imperialism and domination is one part of Islam. We could also concoct a scary map of a blob-like European Christianity spreading over North and South America crushing the indigenous populations until European Christianity was supreme. And we could link that ruthless Christian genocide to recent attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. But history isn’t about religious creeds driving zealots to do its bidding, although that is one dimension of a complex picture true scholars try to discern.

 My survey of Islamic scholarship suggests there are two dangers: rightwing demonizers and liberal apologists. Bill Warner is one of many examples of the former and there are many examples of the latter. So we need to go to the scholarly sources. Of course, there too battle lines will be drawn, but the pressure to document sources and the peer-review process allows us to discern what we can and can’t say and believe about historical and contemporary Islam.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x549127?fbclid=IwAR3QL7JELbjTe9zA4KrInE3EsHNZgxdSQ1IIOeA4zL2phXlRINTKLLta02Y

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=4077262138984235&id=100009874782316&substory_index=9

I wrote a reply to this article by Jeffrey Dorfman:

Dorfman is generally right on the economics, but ideologically blinkered on the politics. He agrees with Karl Marx who appreciated the amazing productive power of capitalism.

It’s what happens to the working people of the society when that productive output is not redistributed that causes the problems. Who gets the fruits of all that productivity and who bears the costs of all that material abundance? Without people-power – democracy - the spoils will be distributed unequally. We’ve seen this with the great increase in inequality due to the great shift to the economic and political right in the US over the last forty years that has been initiated by the Republicans and aided by the spineless Democrats.

Dorfman’s right, Bernie and Alexandria aren’t socialists. Their stated policies are similar to, and an extension of, FDR’s New Deal. They want to correct the undemocratic and unequal effects of capitalism. They want to change the distribution side – who gets what – and not the production or supply side – who owns or decides what is made, how it is made and who gets what. The progressive New Dealers want to change the distribution side and socialists want to change the production side.

But it’s not Bernie and Alexandria’s fault that they are not socialists. It’s that these political-economic labels are ridiculously misapplied in the US mainstream media. Bernie et al. are adopting “socialist” because now, post-2016, it is not a complete liability. If that wasn’t the case, and “socialist” was still a dirty word as it was pre-2016, they’d probably work hard to get people to call them “progressives” A progressive being a somewhat-further-to-left liberal (Medicare for all rather than Medicare only for the over 65, for example).

In the same skewed way Republicans aren’t “free-market capitalists” as they’re misnamed in the US. They support corporate welfare - the government helping the capitalist class - in myriad ways: government bailouts for corporations, tax breaks predominantly for the wealthy, massive government subsidies for research and development, support for anti-free trade patents and copyrights, military spending, use of public lands and the public airwaves at rock bottom prices, etc.

Dorfman can only see two types of economies: welfare-state capitalism or authoritarian socialism. And, it’s true: a lot of the countries that have been called socialist – government owning the means of production – have been authoritarian. But, due to his ignorance of politics, Dorfman totally ignores the crucial insertion of the political concept “democracy” in the label “democratic socialist.” Democratic socialism is different from authoritarian socialism. Wouldn’t authoritarianism be antithetical to the democracy democratic socialists want? That’s why his linking of the US left to supposed authoritarian regimes is a kind of red-baiting. Call it “pink-baiting.” A typical move of the politically ignorant.

Democratic socialists should point to a different kind of socialism. One where working people have more control over how and what is produced. We might also call it “workplace democracy” or “economic democracy.” There are successful examples of it, the most famous being Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain. An amazing story of a successful workers’ cooperative that’s been working for sixty years. (Successful doesn’t mean unproblematic, we’re talking about humans after all.)

Outside Dorfman’s purview there are capitalist economic systems that are not Nordic welfare-state capitalists or authoritarian “socialist” systems such as the old Soviet Union. There is the possibility of market socialism, as in Mondragon. In market socialism the people have more power on the production side, but there is still a free market. A nice book that explains how that would work is After Capitalism by David Schweickart. Bernie et al. could also find historical precedent in the “evolutionary socialism” of the much maligned early 20th century Marxian Eduard Bernstein, who advocated a gradual progress to socialism that passes through welfare-state capitalism to a democratic socialism.

Dorfman, like most mainstream economists, doesn’t understand that political citizens taking actions create economic outcomes. He seems to attribute the “wealth that allowed the luxury of …. generous [Nordic] government programs” to some abstract entity called “capitalism.” Yet in the next paragraph we learn that “reasonably powerful” unions exist in those countries. European countries in general have had much more powerful left-socialist movements and unions than the US. They fought and fight to create and keep those “generous government programs” that Dorfman seems to think capitalism magically distributes to them. The US has been much more productive than the Nordic countries over the last 40 years, but because of the declining political power of ordinary people we’ve had stingy government programs rather than generous ones.

Another example of Dorfman’s political blindness is his description of Venezuela as a dictatorship. While that fits with the US media’s mainstream misinformation about Chavez and Maduro, Chavez and Maduro were elected many times in elections as fair as US elections. And is it socialism that caused the problems in Venezuela or was it the two problems that have dogged oil-rich countries whether “capitalist” or “socialist” throughout the second and third worlds: overdependence on a valuable resource when the price is high – oil - and rampant corruption? It wasn’t Chavez’s socialism that caused him to rely on Venezuelan oil when the price was high to fund virtuous social programs, it was poor economic decisions. But he shared this defect with a long line of capitalist leaders before him. Venezuela has been prone to both of those common problems well before Chavez was born.

Nicaragua, after the overthrow of dictator and US ally Somoza, had a mixed economy. Perhaps if they hadn’t been terrorized by the US-funded contras, blockaded by the US and pushed into dependency on the Soviet Union, their early mixed economy could have succeeded.

Still, for all his unthinking parroting of the political confusion in the US mainstream over the labels “socialist” and “free market,” Dorfman is a libertarian, free-market capitalist who finds the Nordic countries correction of undemocratic capitalism acceptable. That’s great! Take him as an ally as long as he supports moving to an environmentally sustainable, capitalist, Nordic-like welfare-state economy. Just because Bernie et al. aren’t socialists doesn’t mean they aren’t proposing good and workable solutions to the US’s reverse Robinhood, corporate welfare state. The inequalilty of the present US economy would be greatly improved by a progressive step backward to FDR’s New Deal. Perhaps we can view the new progressive left’s ideals as democratic socialist, but like old Eduard Bernstein, they are trying to make it happen gradually through a revival of FDR-style welfare-state capitalism.

Chomsky Harris Debate

There was a recent exchange between Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris here

The issues aren't clear from the exchange. This may clarify:

Chomsky knows Harris's views, Harris doesn't know Chomsky's. Chomsky's been arguing against such views as Harris's and has developed a critique of such views for fifty years. Harris doesn't even know Chomsky's arguments or position. He could know Chomsky's positions and still disagree, but he needs to understand what a radical critique of the US role in the world says and the evidence for it.

Harris is taking a useful aspect of judging moral culpability - the intention of the perpetrator - and applying it to large social events. Chomsky - probably - is fine with the distinction between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter - where the intention of the person is taken into account - but that doesn't mean he thinks you can take powerful, large, social actors and apply the same individualistic criterion for assessing their moral actions.

I think Harris should not focus on intention when determining the morality of social actors' actions. Then he is vulnerable to Chomsky's argument that Hitler claimed good intentions. Harris, I think, should focus on his claim that the US is a more morally developed society and that the actions they are taking, not only are designed to make others morally more developed, but, more importantly, that the results of their actions create moral improvement for others. Harris's point should not be that Clinton or Bush didn't intend to hurt people, but that the effect of their actions over time is moral, social, or economic, improvement for others. If that's the case, then Harris can say the Japanese, the Nazis and Al Qaeda aren't doing that. They may say they are protecting the German people or making the world better by restoring Islam, but they are not. I don't think Harris would be right if he argued that, I agree with Chomsky's view, but I think that's what's crucial in Harris's view.

Harris lists the horrors of American actions over its history, but he doesn't take the next step. The next step is to ask: What social understanding explains all the results of US actions? Harris is saying: Yes the US has done bad, but we're basically creating good. Chomsky is saying: When you look at the results of US actions over time, Harris's explanation doesn't hold up. If the results of a system's foreign policy are consistently bad we start to say that attributing the bad results to unintentional mistakes - the US as well-intended but clumsy giant - doesn't work anymore. That could be a debate between them. But Harris would surely lose. Chomsky has a staggering wealth of knowledge about just those facts and Harris doesn't. But someone else politically knowledgeable might be able to challenge Chomsky's understanding.

What they should be arguing is: what have been the results of US actions in the world over an historical period and what does that tell us about how the social structure of the US functions to produce those outcomes? We shouldn't focus on intentions when we analyze social events, we should look primarily at the results of social actors' acting over time and find an explanation that explains the most data. I've found Chomsky's fact-based, moral and logical view the best.

On Bergson

Note: I'm trying to put some of my notebook observations on this blog without being so persnickety about the quality.

The thing I never got about the French philosopher Henri Bergson was why he was so popular for a time and why he lost popularity so completely. So often when he was mentioned the standard thing to say about him was that he was the most famous philosopher in the world in the pre-WWI period and then he was forgotten. I remember reading in Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy a dismissive article about Bergson.

It would commonly be said of Bergson that he theorized duree which is our subjective experience of time in contrast to objective, clock time. Like the way boredom makes things slow down and interest makes time go by faster. Didn’t seem like much when described like that. But I knew that Gilles Deleuze wrote a book called Bergsonism and reinterpreted Bergson in the late sixties and saw great insight there. So what was the Bergson story?

Bergson, according to Suzanne Guerlac in her book Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, is saying that a background presupposition of our taken-for-granted conception of reality - not even to be noted - is space. Whatever happens has to happen within a container, a space, a field, an environment. The place in which things occur.

Bergson contrasts pure duration - duree -which she says he says can be distinguished from “time.” Because space is presupposed to be there holding whatever is, time is conceived along the lines of space, as a holder - past, present, future - of what happens. History happens “in” time (“in” being a spatial category used to described time). As if time is a thing that exists and contains the contents that occur in it.

Bergson is saying that what we experience subjectively are qualities, differences, but not just differences in quantity but difference in quality. So his example of the piece of paper illuminated by four candles and then progressively unilluminated as each candle is blown out. Is there a quantitative reduction in brightness, so that the white paper gradually looks black (after the fourth candle is blown out) or are there a succession of different hues going from white to greys to black? Is objective time and the space everything is happening within the real reality and the subjective experience of qualities the more ephemeral reality? Bergson reverses it so that the world is seen what it looks like when what arises in our experience and its qualities are taken to be fundamental.

Here is the French connection to phenomenology and Buddhist practice. Even Modernist literature and their focus on first-person subjective experience. Perhaps there is a French tradition getting at the lived subjective experience, life as lived, going back to Montaigne. And more recently Maupassant, Bergson, Joyce (in Paris), Beckett (in France), Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze. Even Foucault and how self and consciousness are formed. And Pierre Hadot and how the Greek philosophers were interested in "spiritual exercises" to train oneself to experience life rightly.

Areas of Interest

After studying for thirty years I recently realized how many themes of interest I have that keep getting picked up, satisfied for the time being, and then set aside. I thought I'd try to list some of these areas of interest. Some of them are relatively new. Some of them I left in graduate school in the eighties and always wanted to explore again:

Romanticism. The German variety from the late 18th and early 19th century. I never learned the difference between all those German “S-C-H’s”: Schiller, Schelling, Schleiemacher, the two Schlegels. I see though that there is a philosophical anti-foudationalism there and I’d like to understand it. Started reading Frederick Beiser's well-written intellectual histories, The Romantic Imperative and others.

Pragmatism. Looking at the Notre Dame Philosophical Book Review site there are some new books on Pragmatism. Since it is my basic philosophy I'd like to see what people who can explain it well are saying about it. So read Robert Schwartz's Rethinking Pragmatism and Michael Bacon's new introduction to Pragmatism.

The other day I saw on the new book shelf at my college library an introduction to The Kyoto School of philosophy. This is the school of philosophy that arose in Japan in the 20th century and used western philosophical language and techniques to philosophize an Eastern way of understanding existence and the world. I’ve always thought I’d like to understand better what philosophers using a analytic style would do with Buddhist concepts and that’s what these guys did.

I’ve always wanted to understand Spinoza better but haven’t found the right book for it.

Recently I read a compelling reinterpretation of ordinary language philosophy. It's always intrigued me but it always seemed dry and dusty. But Avner Baz’s book When Words are Called For interprets ordinary language philosophy as a radical critique of central parts of contemporary philosophy.

I’ve always wanted to understand how those who practice philosophical counseling understand it and distinguish it from psychotherapy. I got a couple books by Peter Raabe on it. Looks like they have trouble defining what philosophical counseling is.

While I assume – because of my assimilation of Chomsky’s political insight – that Iran is being set up as a useful enemy by the American political establishment and media, I didn’t really understand contemporary Iran well. I just figured it’s an authoritarian Islamic state and bad, but of course not to be threatened, sanctioned and attacked as the US is doing. But the recent book by longtime policy insiders Floyd and Hilary Mann Leverett, Going to Teheran, is quite an eye-opener. They say that the Islamic revolution of 1979 was an authentic revolution and that Ayatollah Khomeini was an authentic revolutionary. I always figured he was an evil guy (remember those eyebrows?) who established with others an authoritarian Islamic state. The Leverett’s always refer to “The Islamic Republic of Iran” instead of just “Iran” to emphasize that there was a genuine attempt at, and that there is a genuine kind of, democratic republic in Iran. That it is an Islamic-democratic hybrid and that the people do have some say. They even present solid evidence that the last elections that re-elected Ahmadinejad, which were presented in the American media as fraudulent, were actually as legitimate as elections generally are in democratic countries. More recently, the current elected president, Hassan Rouhani, is considered, by Iranian standards, more moderate than Ahmadinejad.

I want to understand more about what Charles Peirce, the pragmatist philosopher, said about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Did he really see ethics as more fundamental than epistemology and aesthetics as more fundamental than ethics?

What are the further implications of seeing knowledge as a kind of social status that some information has conferred upon it by a social consensus, rather than as a designation of the information’s validity according to some independent means of validation?

I still want to get back to Hegel. Maybe through Robert Pippin, maybe through Zizek, and maybe through Fredric Jameson. Not sure I want to read Hegel himself.
Some day I’d like to try reading Lacan himself. I spent a couple years in a reading group reading secondary sources on him: Bruce Fink and Slavoj Zizek.

The concept of the normative seems to be big these days. It still seems murky to me. This new book by Joshua Gert, Normative Bedrock, seems to take an approach I like, but I’m having trouble getting into it.

I still would like to read some Bakhtin after reading in a study group a selection from Tzvetan Todorov’s The Dialogical Imagination. I like Bakhtin’s attempt to see meaning as originating not just in contexts but in specific, unique contexts that, because they are the context that are occurring right now with these people who are talking, gain meaning from what has just been said and what we anticipate saying. It could link up with Baz’s interpretation of ordinary language philosophy since he criticizes both the semantic and the contextualizing approaches to determining truth and meaning by focusing on not trying to create a theory of meaning. That ordinary language philosophy is, Wittgenstein-like, a careful dismantling of the need for such theories. Maybe a kind of philosophical therapy.

In general, through pragmatism, ordinary language philosophy, Nietzsche, Buddhism, phenomenology, Bakhtin and others I seem to keep wanting to get away from abstraction and systems to a thinking that focuses on the texture of lived experience. Philosophy as being used to alter ourselves for the better and so having practical purposes.

I want to read more Zizek, but not commentary on Zizek, because he’s so enjoyable and delightful to read. And he gives lively and understandable descriptions of tough thinkers’ thoughts.

I’d like to finish Richard Bernstein’s Praxis and Action.

I’d like a nice book on Kierkegaard and to read again, in the Hong translation, the parts in Concluding Unscientific Postscript about subjectivity. As I recall the passages on subjectivity are so compelling that it seems while reading them that subjectivity is the true reality and the starting point for any thinking or living. That’s rhetorical skill!

Still want to read Adorno again and the Frankfurt School but not sure what. Maybe the nice looking history of the school by Rolf Wiggershaus.

More Hayden White. Still want to read all of his Metahistory.

I’d like to understand the dichotomy between the figural and the literal. Does literal correspond to the correspondence theory of truth? Literal meaning how things actually are? But isn’t that a philosophical assertion: how things actually are. We live a culture in which the surest knowledge is from the natural sciences and so what is "literally" true is what is physically true and not metaphysically true. Compare how those from medieval times may have thought that God and the soul were literally true and nature was a metaphor, messages from God, to be interpreted. This difficulty with the idea of the literal underlay Nietzsche’s metaphorization of language. That metaphor or the figural comes first and then comes literality.

I'd like to review Max Weber's sociology and the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz. I could never get into Schutz because I was so politically minded and much more attracted to The Frankfurt School thinkers. Perhaps I could appreciate Schutz now.

I still want to understand theories of the placebo effect. If the placebo effect has to be ruled out as a cause of healing against every new medicine, and if it also is superior, sometimes, to doing nothing and letting the body heal itself, how does it work? What is the physiological mechanism by which we heal ourselves better than our natural process because we think we're getting medicine? Mind over matter doesn't explain much since almost everyone would see mind as a result of the matter of the brain and nervous system.

Chomsky and Zizek and the Journal

The recent “feud” between Chomsky and Zizek that the Wall Street Journal is promoting is only interesting for the use it is being put by the Journal. Reading Chomsky on politics in 1982 transformed me into a lifelong learner, reader of Chomsky and reader of Chomsky’s political critics. His empirical accuracy over a thirty year period has been astounding (check out the 500 pages of footnotes that accompanied the book Understanding Power). Contrary to many who are fans of Chomsky’s political critique, I’ve also loved the work of Salvoj Zizek. Chomsky’s statements implying that Zizek’s work has no value are wrong. I’ve found Zizek’s insights stimulating, helpful and fun. I don’t think I would understand what’s valuable in Lacan without Zizek and Bruce Fink. So I think Chomsky is wrong about Zizek and Lacan, and Zizek is wrong about Chomsky. They are both great in their domains. I do think that Zizek’s comments about contemporary political events – like the war in Afghanistan – are weak. That kind of stuff is Chomsky’s great strength.

It shows how skewed mainstream debate is that you can just state a crude version of Chomsky’s views and they seem foolish. But is the sense of foolishness in Chomsky’s views or in the mainstream assumptions that he is countering? What if it turns out that the mainstream assumptions are ludicrous – the US is pro-democracy, there is an Israeli-Palestinian peace process? If the radical argument against mainstream assumptions is seriously considered then the reader has to find out what’s right by exploring the issues. The Journal author doesn’t want the reader to do this and so the whole incident is presented as humorous and not to be taken seriously. Ironically, this is just the kind of journalistic behavior that Chomsky and Zizek help us understand. No wonder the author doesn't want to confront the issues they raise.

The whole point of the story of the “feud” is to marginalize these thinkers who offer a radical and rationally argued critique of western social and political structures and policies. Since the Wall Street Journal is a bastion of and, on its editorial page, a promoter of mainstream conservative policies they naturally oppose radical critique. Since the Journal is in the power position they can make fun of opponents. By not treating them seriously they can try to get their readers not to treat them seriously and instead use them for entertainment purposes.

Nietzsche and Klossowski

For the last few months I've been poring over Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. I had heard about it as one of the great Nietzsche interpretations, but I was unprepared for how great it is. What first intrigued me was the translator's quoting Michel Foucault's letter to Klossowski after the publication of the book in French in 1969. Foucault wrote: "It is the greatest book of philosophy I have read" and that in its quality it is "with Nietzsche himself." That's high praise! But it's true. I don't think I've ever read a book a second time right after finishing it the first time. I've told myself I would with some books, but never did. I'm just finishing it a second time and may start a third. I don't use it to derive arguments or know what Nietzsche really said. I experience it. It elaborates pretty precisely a proto-Freudian vision of existence and the world in which all that we take for granted as what makes things happen as they do are actually secondary or tertiary epi-phenomena or froth on the waves of reality. So consciousness, reason, the will, the self, distinct things, order all are plausibly, acutely and convincingly dismantled and seen as the result of an underground world of forces and impulses.

Recently a friend asked his standard question when I tell him about a thinker I'm reading: "What is the essence of the thinker's view in one sentence?" In one way it's absurd to try to summarize someone's thought in one sentence, but in another way it's an interesting challenge. He asked me to summarize Nietzsche and I thought my answer pretty good. I said: "Existence is a cacophonous melody."