The End of Faith (17 page)

SECULARISTS tend to argue that the role of Islam, or religion in gen- eral, is secondary to that of
politics in determining the character of a society. On this account, people are motivated
by their political interests first and find a religious rationale to suit the occasion. No
doubt there are numerous examples of political leaders' invoking religion for purely
pragmatic, and even cynical, reasons (the tenure of Pakistan's Zia ul-Haq seems a good
example). But we should not draw the wrong lesson here. A lever works only if it is
attached to something. Someone, after all, must believe in God, for talk of God to be politically efficacious.
And I take it to be more or less self- evident that whenever large numbers of people begin
turning them- selves into bombs, or volunteer their children for use in the clearing of
minefields (as was widespread in the Iran-Iraq war),38 the ratio- nale behind their actions has ceased to be merely political. This is not to say
that the aspiring martyr does not relish what he imagines will be the thunderous political
significance of his final act, but unless a person believes some rather incredible things
about this universe in particular, about what happens after deathhe is very unlikely to
engage in behavior of this sort. Nothing explains the actions of Mus- lim extremists, and
the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the Muslim world, better than the tenets of
Islam.

Given what many Muslims believe, is genuine peace in this world possible? Is the relative
weakness of Muslim states the only thing that prevents outright war between Islam and the
West? I'm afraid that encouraging answers to such questions are hard to come by. The basis
for liberalism in the doctrine of Islam seems meager to the point of being entirely
illusory. Although we have seen that the Bible is itself a great reservoir of intolerance,
for Christians and Jews alike as everything from the writings of Augustine to the present
actions of Israeli settlers demonstratesit is not difficult to find great swaths of the
Good Book, as well as Christian and Jewish exegesis, that offer counterarguments. The
Christian who wants to live in the full pres- ence of rationality and modernity can keep
the Jesus of Matthew ser- monizing upon the mount and simply ignore the world-consuming

rigmarole of Revelation. Islam appears to offer no such refuge for one who would live
peacefully in a pluralistic world. Of course, glimmers of hope can be found in even the
shadiest of places: as Berman points out, the diatribes of Muslim orthodoxy are predicated
upon the fear that Western liberalism is in the process of invading the Muslim mind and
“stealing his loyalty”indicating that Muslims, like other people, are susceptible to the
siren's song of liberalism.39 We must surely hope so. The character of their religious beliefs, however, sug- gests that
they will be less susceptible than the rest of us.

For reasons we have already begun to explore, there is a deep bias in our discourse
against conclusions of this sort. With respect to Islam, the liberal tendency is to blame
the West for raising the ire of the Muslim world, through centuries of self-serving
conquest and meddling, while conservatives tend to blame other contingent fea- tures of
Middle East, Arab, or Muslim history. The problem seems to have been located everywhere
except at the core of the Muslim faithbut faith is precisely what differentiates every
Muslim from every infidel. Without faith, most Muslim grievances against the West would be
impossible even to formulate, much less avenge.

Leftist Unreason and the Strange Case of Noam Chomsky

Nevertheless, many people are now convinced that the attacks of September 11 say little
about Islam and much about the sordid career of the Westin particular, about the failures
of U.S. foreign policy. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard gives these themes an
especially luxuriant expression, declaring that terrorism is a necessary conse- quence of
American “hegemony.” He goes so far as to suggest that we were secretly hoping that such
devastation would be visited upon us:

At a pinch we can say that they did it, but we wished for it. . . . When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when there is such a
formidable condensation of all functions in

the technocratic machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what
other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer. It was the system itself which created the objective conditions for this brutal
retaliation. . . . This is terror against terrorthere is no longer any ideology behind it.
We are far beyond ideology and politics now. . . . As if the power bearing these towers
suddenly lost all energy, all resilience; as though that arrogant power suddenly gave way
under the pressure of too intense an effort: the effort always to be the unique world
model.40

If one were feeling charitable, one might assume that something essential to these
profundities got lost in translation. I think it far more likely, however, that it did not
survive translation into French. If Baudrillard had been obliged to live in Afghanistan under the Tal- iban, would he have
thought that the horrible abridgments of his freedom were a matter of the United States's
“effort always to be the unique world model” ? Would the peculiar halftime entertainment
at every soccer matchwhere suspected fornicators, adulterers, and thieves were regularly
butchered in the dirt at centerfieldhave struck him as the first rumblings of a
“terroristic situational trans- fer” ? We may be beyond politics, but we are not in the
least “beyond ideology” now. Ideology is all that our enemies have.41

And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard view the events of September 11 as a
consequence of American foreign policy. Per- haps the foremost among them is Noam Chomsky.
In addition to making foundational contributions to linguistics and the psychology of
language, Chomsky has been a persistent critic of U.S. foreign pol- icy for over three
decades. He has also managed to demonstrate a principal failing of the liberal critique of
power. He appears to be an exquisitely moral man whose political views prevent him from
mak- ing the most basic moral distinctionsbetween types of violence, and the variety of
human purposes that give rise to them.

In his book 9-11, with rubble of the World Trade Center still piled

high and smoldering, Chomsky urged us not to forget that “the U.S. itself is a leading
terrorist state.” In support of this claim he catalogs a number of American misdeeds,
including the sanctions that the United States imposed upon Iraq, which led to the death
of “maybe half a million children,” and the 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa phar- maceuticals
plant in Sudan, which may have set the stage for tens of thousands of innocent Sudanese to
die of tuberculosis, malaria, and other treatable diseases. Chomsky does not hesitate to
draw moral equivalences here: “For the first time in modern history, Europe and its
offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely have
carried out elsewhere.”42

Before pointing out just how wayward Chomsky's thinking is on this subject, I would like
to concede many of his points, since they have the virtue of being both generally
important and irrelevant to the matter at hand. There is no doubt that the United States
has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can more or less
swallow Chomsky's thesis whole. To produce this horri- ble confection at home, start with
our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery,
along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third
Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent
disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the
Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol
for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the
rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy,
and fresh brimstone.

We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubt- edly, we are poised to do
terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as
a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent.
There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay
reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our mis- deeds over the years has
undermined our credibility in the interna- tional community. We can concede all of this,
and even share

Chomsky's acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analy- sis of our current
situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

Take the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant: accord- ing to Chomsky, the
atrocity of September 11 pales in comparison with that perpetrated by the Clinton
administration in August 1998. But let us now ask some very basic questions that Chomsky
seems to have neglected to ask himself: What did the U.S. government think it was doing
when it sent cruise missiles into Sudan? Destroying a chemical weapons site used by Al
Qaeda. Did the Clinton adminis- tration intend to bring about the deaths of thousands of Sudanese children? No. Was our goal to kill as
many Sudanese as we could? No. Were we trying to kill anyone at all? Not unless we thought
mem- bers of Al Qaeda would be at the Al-Shifa facility in the middle of the night. Asking
these questions about Osama bin Laden and the nine- teen hijackers puts us in a different
moral universe entirely.

If we are inclined to follow Chomsky down the path of moral equivalence and ignore the
role of human intentions, we can forget about the bombing of the Al-Shifa plant, because
many of the things we did not do in Sudan had even greater consequences. What about all the money and food we simply
never thought to give the Sudanese prior to 1998? How many children did we kill (that is, not save) just by living in blissful ignorance of the conditions in Sudan? Surely if we had all made
it a priority to keep death out of Sudan for as long as possible, untold millions could
have been saved from whatever it was that wound up killing them. We could have sent teams
of well-intentioned men and women into Khartoum to ensure that the Sudanese wore their
seatbelts. Are we culpable for all the preventable injury and death that we did nothing to
prevent? We may be, up to a point. The philosopher Peter Unger has made a per- suasive
case that a single dollar spent on anything but the absolute essentials of our survival is
a dollar that has some starving child's blood on it.43 Perhaps we do have far more moral responsibility for the state of the world than most of
us seem ready to contemplate. This is not Chomsky's argument, however.

Anudhati Roy, a great admirer of Chomsky, has summed up his

position very well:

[T]he U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it
judges others. . . . Its technique is to posi- tion itself as the well-intentioned giant
whose good deeds are confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives, whose
markets it's trying to free, whose societies it's trying to modernize, whose women it's
trying to liberate, whose souls it's trying to save. . . . [T]he U.S. government has
conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people “for their
own good.”44

But we are, in many respects, just such a “well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather
astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and Roy, fail to see this. What we need
to counter their arguments is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men
like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is not
hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it “the perfect weapon.”

Perfect Weapons and the Ethics of “Collateral Damage”

What we euphemistically describe as “collateral damage” in times of war is the direct
result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is
so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had
possessed perfect weaponsweapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular
person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property. What would we
do with such technology? Pacifists would refuse to use it, despite the variety of monsters
cur- rently loose in the world: the killers and torturers of children, the genocidal
sadists, the men who, for want of the right genes, the right

upbringing, or the right ideas, cannot possibly be expected to live peacefully with the
rest of us. I will say a few things about pacifism in a later chapterfor it seems to me to
be a deeply immoral position that comes to us swaddled in the dogma of highest moralismbut
most of us are not pacifists. Most of us would elect to use weapons of this sort. A
moment's thought reveals that a person's use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window
onto the soul of his ethics.

Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush
and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.)in the pages of writers like Roy
and Chom- sky, in the Arab press, and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would
George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have
targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs ? Would
he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether or
not you admire the man's politicsor the manthere is no reason to think that he would have
sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein
or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have
used them rather differently.

It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral
development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as
objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. We might
even conceive of our moral differences in just these terms: not all societies have the
same degree of moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment. Political and economic stability, literacy, a
modicum of social equal- itywhere such things are lacking, people tend to find many com-
pelling reasons to treat one another rather badly. Our recent history offers much evidence
of our own development on these fronts, and a corresponding change in our morality. A
visit to New York in the summer of 1863 would have found the streets ruled by roving gangs
of thugs; blacks, where not owned outright by white slaveholders, were regularly lynched
and burned. Is there any doubt that many