The End of Faith (18 page)

New Yorkers of the nineteenth century were barbarians by our pre- sent standards? To say
of another culture that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social
development is a terrible criti- cism indeed, given how far we've come in that time. Now
imagine the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, bio- logical, and
nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the developing
world.

Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as 1968, at My Lai:

Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter. Many were
firing as they spread out, killing both peo- ple and animals. There was no sign of the
Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired at Charlie Company all day, but they car- ried
on. They burnt down every house. They raped women and girls and then killed them. They
stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or
scalps. Pregnant women had their stomachs slashed open and were left to die. There were
gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens
of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machine-gunned in a
ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.45

This is about as bad as human beings are capable of behaving. But what distinguishes us
from many of our enemies is that this indis- criminate violence appalls us. The massacre
at My Lai is remem- bered as a signature moment of shame for the American military. Even
at the time, U.S. soldiers were dumbstruck with horror by the behavior of their comrades.
One helicopter pilot who arrived on the scene ordered his subordinates to use their
machine guns against their own troops if they would not stop killing villagers.46 As a cul- ture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate tor- ture and
murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not.

Wherever there are facts of any kind to be known, one thing is cer- tain: not all people
will discover them at the same time or understand them equally well. Conceding this leaves
but a short step to hierar- chical thinking of a sort that is at present inadmissible in
most liberal discourse. Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions,
there will be better or worse ways to get those answers, and better or worse ways to put
them to use. Take child rearing as an example: How can we keep children free from disease?
How can we raise them to be happy and responsible members of society? There are
undoubtedly both good and bad answers to questions of this sort, and not all belief
systems and cultural practices will be equally suited to bringing the good ones to light.
This is not to say that there will always be only one right answer to every question, or a single, best way to reach every specific goal. But
given the inescapable specificity of our world, the range of optimal solutions to any
problem will gen- erally be quite limited. While there might not be one best food to eat,
we cannot eat stonesand any culture that would make stone eating a virtue, or a religious
precept, will suffer mightily for want of nour- ishment (and teeth). It is inevitable,
therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and
ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of “better” we
might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in
human happiness.

Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the nec- essary underpinnings of a
civil society, will find many Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the
fourteenth century. There are undoubtedly historical and cultural reasons for this, and
enough blame to go around, but we should not ignore the fact that we must now confront
whole societies whose moral and political developmentin their treatment of women and
children, in their prosecution of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their
very intuitions about what constitutes crueltylags behind our own. This may seem like an
unscientific and potentially racist thing to say, but it is neither. It is not in the
least racist, since it is not at

all likely that there are biological reasons for the disparities here, and it is unscientific only because science has not yet
addressed the moral sphere in a systematic way. Come back in a hundred years, and if we
haven't returned to living in caves and killing one another with clubs, we will have some
scientifically astute things to say about ethics. Any honest witness to current events
will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized
democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is
perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Mus- lim governments. Chomsky seems to think
that the disparity either does not exist or runs the other way.

Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the
chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the
Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What
are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human shields?
(What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American gov- ernment would have called
for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers ? What are the chances that Iraqi
soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint
unnec- essarily? You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a mounting column of
zeros.

Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a
child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this
“terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed
child mur- derer (we call this “collateral damage”). In both cases a child has died, and
in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpe- trators, be they
individuals or states, could hardly be more distinct.

Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life of a child in jeopardy is
unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a principle we can follow. The makers of
roller coasters know, for instance, that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime,
somewhere, a child will

be killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well. So do
makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools, chain-link fences,
or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute to the death of a child. There
is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable deaths of children on our ski slopes as
“ski- ing atrocities.” But you would not know this from reading Chomsky. For him,
intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all.

We are now living in a world that can no longer tolerate well- armed, malevolent regimes.
Without perfect weapons, collateral damagethe maiming and killing of innocent peopleis
unavoid- able. Similar suffering will be imposed on still more innocent people because of
our lack of perfect automobiles, airplanes, antibiotics, sur- gical procedures, and window
glass. If we want to draw conclusions about ethicsas well as make predictions about what a
given person or society will do in the futurewe cannot ignore human inten- tions. Where
ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.47

A Waste of Precious Resources

Many commentators on the Middle East have suggested that the problem of Muslim terrorism
cannot be reduced to what religious Muslims believe. Zakaria has written that the roots of
Muslim vio- lence lie not in Islam but in the recent history of the Arab Middle East. He
points out that a mere fifty years ago, the Arab world stood on the cusp of modernity and
then, tragically, fell backward. The true cause of terrorism, therefore, is simply the
tyranny under which most Arabs have lived ever since. The problem, as Zakaria puts it, “is
wealth, not poverty.”48 The ability to pull money straight out of the ground has led Arab governments to be
entirely unre- sponsive to the concerns of their people. As it turns out, not needing to
collect taxes is highly corrupting of state power. The result is just what we seerich,
repressive regimes built upon political and eco- nomic swampland. Little good is achieved
for the forces of moder-

nity when its mere productsfast food, television, and advanced weaponryare hurled into the
swamp as well.

According to Zakaria, “if there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism,
it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world.”49 Perhaps. But “the rise of Islamic fundamental- ism” is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem. A rise of Jain fundamentalism would endanger no one. In fact, the
uncontrollable spread of Jainism throughout the world would improve our situation
immensely. We would lose more of our crops to pests, perhaps (observant Jains generally
will not kill anything, including insects), but we would not find ourselves surrounded by
suicidal terrorists or by a civilization that widely condones their actions.

Zakaria points out that Islam is actually notably antiauthoritar- ian, since obedience to
a ruler is necessary only if he rules in accordance with God's law. But, as we have seen,
few formulas for tyranny are more potent than obedience to “God's law.” Still, Zakaria
thinks that any emphasis on religious reform is misplaced:

The truth is that little is to be gained by searching the Quran for clues to Islam's true
nature.... The trouble with thundering dec- larations about “Islam's nature” is that
Islam, like any religion, is not what books make it but what people make it. Forget the
rant- ings of fundamentalists, who are a minority. Most Muslims' daily lives do not
confirm the idea of a faith that is intrinsically anti- Western or anti-modern.50

According to Zakaria, the key to Arab redemption is to modern- ize politically,
economically, and sociallyand this will force Islam to follow along the path to
liberalism, as Christianity has in the West. As evidence for this, he observes that
millions of Muslims live in the United States, Canada, and Europe and “have found ways of
being devout without being obscurantist, and pious without embrac- ing fury.”51 There may be some truth to this, though, as we have

seen, Zakaria ignores some troubling details. If, as I contend throughout this book, all
that is good in religion can be had else- whereif, for instance, ethical and spiritual
experience can be culti- vated and talked about without our claiming to know things we
manifestly do not knowthen all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a
massive waste of time and energy. Think of all the good things human beings will not do in
this world tomorrow because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another
church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to print volumes upon
volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking of ignorant men. How many hours of human
labor will be devoured, today, by an imaginary God ? Think of it: if a computer virus
shuts down a nation's phone system for five minutes, the loss in human productivity is
measured in billions of dollars. Religious faith has crashed our lines daily, for
millennia. I'm not suggesting that the value of every human action should be measured in
terms of pro- ductivity. Indeed, much of what we do would wither under such an analysis.
But we should still recognize what a fathomless sink for human resources (both financial
and attentional) organized religion is. Witness the rebuilding of Iraq: What was the first
thing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiites thought to do upon their liberation?
Flagellate themselves. Blood poured from their scalps and backs as they walked miles of
cratered streets and filth-strewn alleys to con- verge on the holy city Karbala, home to
the tomb of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet. Ask yourself whether this was really the
best use of their time. Their society was in tatters. Fresh water and electricity were
scarce. Their schools and hospitals were being looted. And an occupying army was trying to
find reasonable people with whom to collaborate to form a civil society.
Self-mortification and chanting should have been rather low on their list of priorities.

But the problem of religion is not merely that it competes for time and resources. While
Zakaria is right to observe that faith has grown rather tame in the Westand this is
undoubtedly a good thinghe neglects to notice that it still has very long claws. As we
will see in

the next chapter, even the most docile forms of Christianity currently present insuperable
obstacles to AIDS prevention and family planning in the developing world, to medical
research, and to the development of a rational drug policyand these contributions to human
misery alone constitute some of the most appalling failures of reasonableness in any age.

What Can We Do?

In thinking about Islam, and about the risk it now poses to the West, we should imagine
what it would take to live peacefully with the Christians of the fourteenth
centuryChristians who were still eager to prosecute people for crimes like host
desecration and witchcraft. We are in the presence of the past. It is by no means a
straightforward task to engage such people in constructive dialogue, to convince them of
our common interests, to encourage them on the path to democracy, and to mutually
celebrate the diversity of our cultures.

It is clear that we have arrived at a period in our history where civil society, on a
global scale, is not merely a nice idea; it is essential for the maintenance of
civilization. Given that even failed states now possess potentially disruptive technology,
we can no longer afford to live side by side with malign dictatorships or with the armies
of ignorance massing across the oceans.

What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can
be criticized without the risk of physical vio- lence. If you live in a land where certain
things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books,
because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not
live in a civil society. It appears that one of the most urgent tasks we now face in the
developed world is to find some way of facilitating the emergence of civil societies
every- where else. Whether such societies have to be democratic is not at all clear.
Zakaria has persuasively argued that the transition from