Making Sense with Sam Harris - #11 — Shouldering the Burden of History

Episode Date: June 27, 2015

Sam Harris and Dan Carlin (host of the Hardcore History and Common Sense podcasts) discuss American interventionism, the war on terror, and related topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. Today I'll be speaking with a man whose work I greatly admire, Dan Carlin, the host of the Hardcore History and Common Sense podcasts. And Dan and I will be releasing this conversation jointly on both of our podcasts. We're calling this a crosscast, which is analogous to a cross post one sometimes sees on blogs that publish the same content simultaneously. It turns out we have many listeners in common, and many of you have been urging us to have a conversation together, I think anticipating considerable disagreement on issues like the war on terror and state security and foreign policy. And I don't know that we collided as much as anyone might have expected, but we had a good energetic conversation, which I greatly enjoyed,

and I hope you will too. So in a moment, I give you Dan Carlin. Hey, Dan, how are you doing? I'm good. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. Well, listen, as my fans know, I have been frequently referring to you as the greatest history professor on Earth at the moment,

and I know this may cause you to blush, but listen, I'm just a huge fan of your Hardcore History podcast and have been recommending it to anyone with ears at this point. That is very dirty pool to start off a discussion with a compliment like that, because now what am I supposed to say, Sam? You said some of the nicest things, and I really appreciate them. Thank you so much.

And listen, isn't it amazing that we're doing, we're having these kinds of public discussions in the realm of, you know, the virtual realm here where everyone gets to watch. I mean, the modern technology has taken us back almost to an Athens-type situation where we can have these sorts of public conversations and we don't require some TV network to figure out if they can sell airtime or whatever for something like that. It's a pretty interesting new world.

Yeah, yeah. And I do not say this to preempt any of the hard-hitting criticism. Which always comes, yeah, from me. That's what I'm going to do, exactly. Yeah. But actually, this is a question I wanted to ask you, though. You refer to yourself as a fan of history, and you are at pains to distinguish yourself from a professional historian or the legions thereof who may, in fact, be watching your show or listening

to it and scrutinizing it for errors. Do you get pushback from academics? What's that experience like for you? Well, I have to be honest. I think my own opinion here, but I think everybody's been remarkably generous and nice to me on everything because I had envisioned a completely different kind of program when we started it. I wasn't going to talk about any sort of narrative history at all. I was just going to talk about any sort of narrative history at all. I was just going to talk about, isn't this weird? And isn't this funny? And the sort of stuff history majors used to talk about on their lunch break.

And as the show evolved, the audience wanted more of the background. And so it sort of, it went into territory I wasn't perhaps, I had never given a lot of thought to, you know, do I want to go challenge historians or something like that? And this is why we use so many quotes and whatnot during the program, because, you know, I think coming from the position that you know you're not an expert, you're not pretending to be an expert. So when you make some sort of statement, we feel like you want, I think we call them audio footnotes. You feel like you want to have someone there to say, listen, it's not me saying this.

Here's a couple of historical points of view you're still picking and choosing so it's not totally fair but at the same time i think i build that into the way we do things i think if i was a professional historian with all the credentials and published all this i would approach the program differently because i'm not i make sure that every time we say something we try to have somebody who is credible and who is trustworthy or at least who we should listen to a little bit more than the podcast host back up what I'm saying. So it's become a key way that the show has evolved to take advantage of the fact that I'm not a professional historian. that caveat actually cuts, however, because in my career, I have weighed in on a variety of questions that fall outside the official area of my academic expertise. And occasionally, I get pushback on this very point that you don't have a credential which

would cause someone to be confident about your opinions in this area. Let's say, you know, on the topic of religion, for instance. But many of these areas simply require that one read the books and be attentive to one's sources and have conversations with experts. And at a certain point, you're playing the same language game the experts are. And, you know, it's certainly appropriate to have humility and be attentive to the frontiers of one's ignorance. But, you know, in science, this really breaks down quite starkly because I'm surrounded by scientists who simply do not have the academic bona fides you would expect, and yet they are contributing in various areas of science at the highest level. There are physicists who don't have PhDs in physics.

There are computer scientists who don't have even college degrees. I'm in dialogue with an expert on artificial intelligence now who never went to high school, right? So at a certain point, it's a matter of how you can function in a given domain, not a matter of what your CV looks like. And scientists, as long as you're making sense, accept this far more readily in my experience than people in the humanities. And I'm just wondering just how you view it, in my experience than people in the humanities. And I'm just wondering just how you view it, because unless you're making mistakes and not correcting them, I don't see how you're not functioning as an expert on those topics

you touch. And I mean, maybe there's a distinction between, you know, if you want to be an expert on World War II, or at least the Nazi side of it, you really need to deal with primary sources in German. And that's some wrinkle there. But I'm just wondering how you see that. I think it sort of depends on the specialty we're talking about. So, I mean, for example, take a surgeon who operates on people's brains. I think we can both agree that, you know, you're not going to want your amateur brain surgeon coming in and saying,

listen, I read this expert, and this is how he suggests we do it. So there's a specific specialty there. I think bringing up the humanities, though, is a wonderful point because the humanities, by its very nature, I mean, look at the subjects that make up the humanities, law, religion, language, arts, music. I mean, these are all things with much more leeway, I would say, in terms of even the creative than you get in something like brain surgery, for example. And so I think the way to put it would be that, you know, you were just suggesting that people outside the expertise have something perhaps that they can bring to the table. In a lot of these cases, I think it three-dimensionalizes things a little bit to have somebody from another discipline apply, you know, the mode of thinking common in their discipline to an unusual realm.

In other words, in order to get a 360 degree view of things, sometimes take a historical event. You might want to have the Second World War examined by somebody who's an expert in military affairs, obviously, or somebody who's an expert in international relations is going to write a book with a different point of view. One of the best books I ever read on the Second World War was done by an economist who looked at it from a completely different point of view. And so in that sense, I think you can three-dimensionalize reality. And that's what you're looking at when you look at history. You're looking at a moment in reality. And there are multiple, a Rashomon sort of a variety of ways to look at things. What I maybe bring to the table is I'm looking at this from outside the specialty. You know, when you deal with a lot of historians today, you are dealing with scientists in a certain realm. I mean, these are people that aren't going to talk

about things that they can't quantify. Any good scientist is going to want to be able to back up what they say in a peer reviewed journal. That's how a lot of historians are today. But the specialty of what they study takes away that ability to look at things from a farther away lens, right? So in 50 years ago, you would have had all these historians who would have been just fine looking at events as though they were, you know, in a satellite and give you these big pronouncements. Most historians today wouldn't be comfortable with that. The problem is, is historians aren't dealing with brain surgery. They're dealing with human beings. And that by its very nature is hard to quantify and hard to get your mind around. So I guess it gives me a lot more leeway than a brain surgeon. I just and

they've been very kind with me, all these professionals. I don't think they sometimes like the way I will dramatize events. But I but I look at this as like what what Alfred Hitchcock famously said about what drama is. Drama is just reality with the boring bits taken out. And that's kind of how I look at the history show. I'm giving you the story that an author would give you or a writer would give you or a historian 50 years ago might give you. Yeah, yeah. Well, what you're doing is fantastic. And that'll be my last dollop of praise before we get into areas of controversy. That's it. It's got to stop now. That's right. So I've been hearing echoes and rumors from among our mutual fans that you and I should have a conversation about the sorts of things you treat on your Common Sense podcast,

which I have listened to, frankly, less. I've only heard a few episodes of it, but I get a sense that people are expecting us to not fully align on questions of foreign policy and just war and the war on terror and the role of Islam in inspiring the terror side of that war, etc. And so, you know, I don't know how much you know of my positions on this, but I suggest we just sort of meander into this these areas and see what happens. Well, sure. And maybe we could start with, you know, how do you keep getting these people angry with you? I mean, when Sam Harris, if you Google Sam Harris, there's going to be all these wonderful moments like the Ben Affleck moment and all these other things. You know, I always, you know, I feel like I've got pretty thin skin when it comes to things like Twitter and all those other things. How do you deal with these situations and then how do you go back and do them again? I mean, it seems like the position you put yourself in is to enjoy that

because you're going to just do it again on the next show. Yes. Well, I guess there's a Freudian diagnosis for this. I'm not going there. I'm just suggesting it again on the next show. Yes, well, I guess there's a Freudian diagnosis for this. I'm not going there. I'm just suggesting you might consider it. Yeah. Well, you know, I realized at some point that it doesn't bother me to be hated for positions I actually hold.

If someone understands what I think and they think it's reprehensible and they want nothing more to do with me as a result, that I'm fine with. The thing that gets under my skin and which unfortunately I have to deal with more than anything else is a frank misunderstanding of what my position is or just a malicious distortion of it so as to spread a misunderstanding of it. And I deal with that more and more now. And unfortunately, there is no way to deal with it elegantly, comprehensively, and effectively. You can't keep writing letters to the editor. You can't follow your critics around cleaning up the mess

they're making. And it is much easier to make a mess than to clean it up. So yes, wherever you go and you see my views discussed, you see just total distortions of them. And that does wear on me. And I've, as a result, attempted to pick my battles. And I avoid certain controversies now, frankly, because I anticipate the cost, both in terms of time and annoyance, and then just decide it's not worth it. And I actually just gave up a book contract that was the best book contract I ever had and maybe will ever have. But I decided the topic was just going to put me in an all-front, 360-degree mode of fighting critics whose first impulse is to more or less ignore all of the nuance in my argument. So I'm being more selective about the kinds of battles I pick now, although I'm liable to sort of stumble into any area of controversy in the middle of a conversation like this and reap the whirlwind. But it's annoying, but I think some of what this conversation would be if we touch those topics is me distinguishing what I actually mean from what many of these people like Ben Affleck think I mean.

I actually mean from what many of these people like Ben Affleck think I mean. Well, and it's funny, too, for those who maybe don't understand, and I've only had the tiniest, tiniest sampling of what you must go through, Sam, but people will point me sometimes to, say, a Reddit page or a bulletin board somewhere where the headline topic will be, Dan Carlin said blank, is he right? And you'll read what it says you said, and you never said it. But there'll be hundreds of responses of people debating what an idiot you are for saying that, even though you don't even know how to begin to correct that element. And you just think, you know, if this continues to proliferate over time, the Internet will be full of stuff that I never said, can't defend, and that people slam me for. So I can only imagine how you get it. And you're dealing

with topics that require huge amounts of nuance and lots of clarifying statements and lots of disclaimers and all that other stuff. And if you just take a piece out of that to sample in a blog, it's really hard to give the overall impression you're trying to convey on any of these subjects. We all have that problem. Yeah, and also what I'm dealing with is I'm coming up against certain taboos which are just kind of amplify misunderstanding. So the taboo around criticizing religion as opposed to other sets of ideas, that is something that people are really biased against tolerating.

biased against tolerating. They think there's something indecent just as a matter of principle in criticizing people's deeply held religious convictions, whereas there is nothing wrong with criticizing their false ideas about history or biology or anything else. And there's also a lot of white guilt and understandable guilt over the history of slavery and colonialism and just the sheer wealth imbalance between the West or the developed nations and the developing ones. And so a criticism of Islam in particular gets mapped onto those concerns about inequalities in our world, and you get a lot of confusion. It's interesting to look at cases that pass through this filter more or less undistorted. So for instance, for me,

the case of North Korea, you get pretty perfect convergence from people in the West, liberal or conservative, on the wrongness, the ethical wrongness of the regime in North Korea. And I think more or less everyone would acknowledge that if there was something we could do to liberate the North Korean people without too much bloodshed, we should do it. It's kind of like, it's really, it's a hostage crisis. We have a couple of maniacs or generations now of maniacs with bouffant hair, holding millions of people hostage, starving some significant percentage of them, and brainwashing them with an ideology that is just clearly totally out of register with any real understanding of what's going on in the world. I mean these people think they're a master race. They're essentially a cargo cult armed with nuclear weapons.

And I think it's a – so if you talk to liberals and conservatives about this, the real problem is just a practical one. There is no way to resolve this hostage crisis without massive loss of life. They have nuclear weapons. That's one problem. But even short of that, they have so much artillery aimed at Seoul that there's no way to do it without a horrendous war. But if we could wave a magic wand and change the situation and disabuse these people of their mythology and their intellectual isolation and cancel that regime, everyone acknowledges that would be a good thing. And yet, if you try to move that to a similar consideration of Islamic theocratic regimes, jihadist regimes or Islamist regimes, things begin to break down

under the influence of political correctness. And so I just put that to you as a potential starting point and await your words. Well, let me suggest a difference. Take the North Koreans, for example, and we talk about brainwashing. I think your analysis was right on. But here's the thing. If all of a sudden they allowed an actual free election in North Korea, it'd be interesting to see the results. It'd be interesting to see if the brainwashing took hold to such a degree that people there voted to continue the regime, or if all of a sudden, you know, like the emperor having no clothes, we would see that all these people are actually more savvy and are able to resist the brainwashing more than we think and vote to do away with the regime.

That'd be interesting to have. And the reason I ask that is because when I think about these Islamic, the extreme regime, so for example, the sorts of state that an ISIS ISIL is trying to put together, for example, or even let's just say one that that's been a more functional and valued member of the world community, let's say Saudi Arabia. If all of a sudden you had free and fair elections in Saudi Arabia that included all adults able to vote, be very interesting to see what the results were. And so when you when you talk about the ability of whether it's liberals or let's call them paleo conservatives or anyone else to look at a situation and agree that a north korea is a tragedy and wouldn't it be nice if those people are freed and doesn't this also apply to these um islamic regimes i'm not sure i remember getting

an email from a woman and she lived here in the west but she was islamic and i had made some comments about women in burqas and and the rights of women in some of these countries and i had used that as a particular, you know, touchstone. And she wrote me back and she said, listen, no offense, but this is what you don't understand not growing up in this society. She says, I want this. I want this burka. And she called it something else. There's another word for it. She says, and I was raised in a society where we began as little girls to look at this and couldn't wait until we got to the age. And she said, now my views may not be representative. And certainly different

regions and different areas have different feelings about this. But from the traditional, you know, little town I came from, I didn't see this as an imposition on my freedom. To me, it was a rite of passage. And it was it's a cultural change for me to see it as some sort of inhibition, because here in the West, I think she should have the right to wear a miniskirt, which is not something that might have occurred to her. And so, in other words, if you could go to these areas that the ISIS folks are beginning to take over or lose, as the case may be, and ask what the people there want, it'd be very interesting whether or not they want to be liberated. And, you know, you can have two kinds of liberation. You can have the pie-in-the-sky one, where we we say we're going to liberate you and in 50 years you're going to be like Germany of difference if I vote for this Democrat or this Republican? Nothing seems to change. So you start

to vote for lessers of two evils. I think those people would react in a similar way. So I guess what I'm saying is there might be a difference between a country where it really does look like all these people are captives, like North Korea, and another country like Saudi Arabia, where you're just not sure if you actually polled people in a free poll, if they would say they wanted to continue to live like that or not. There may be a cultural difference. It's hard for us to notice. Yeah, well, I think this goes to the foundational issue of whether anyone can want the wrong things and whether there's a place to stand where you can say that they, in fact, they do want the wrong things. They have been brainwashed, as I said, in the case of North Korea or some concatenation of causes has led them to – has trimmed down their worldview in such a way that doors to human flourishing are closed to them or closing to them. And someone outside that culture, someone who has not been brainwashed by it, could open those doors.

So, for instance, literacy for women. I think that is an intrinsic good and it really doesn't matter how many women you can get to tell you from behind their burqa that they don't want to read. They don't know what they're missing. It's possible not to know what you're missing. It's possible not to know what you're missing. And I think once you strip away political correctness, you have to agree that being born a woman in Afghanistan anytime in the last 30 years was to be unlucky, was to be an unlucky woman by and large. Now, it's not to say that you couldn't find one happy woman there who, if given a chance to sample all of the human experiences on offer, would, for whatever reason, realize that she is happiest in a burqa not reading.

That's possible. But that's not how most of the women there came to live the lives they're living. These lives have been imposed on them. And for the most part, when you listen to the expressions of relief and humility and clarity that you get around this notion of wearing the veil in the Muslim world, I don't hear too much around wearing a burqa but wearing lesser veils like the hijab. You are hearing that as a response to the thuggish misogyny of the men in those cultures. Women are treated like whores and considered to be whores if they're not appropriately veiled. They are groped and in most of these societies beaten for not being appropriately veiled. It's just when you have that kind of stigma around the empowerment of women or just the sheer – just the mere sexuality of women.

And when you have every man's notion of his own honor predicated on the chastity of the women in his life, well, then there's, yeah, it's two sides of a coin. And no doubt many women feel relieved to be appropriately veiled in those cultures. And I'm also not holding up the miniskirt as the ultimate example of psychological health with respect to variables like youth and beauty and female sexuality, etc. There may be interesting things to talk about there. But I don't think there really is much daylight between these theocratic societies within the Muslim world. I'm not saying all of the Muslim world fits this description. societies within the Muslim world, I'm not saying all of the Muslim world fits this description,

but when you're talking about the Taliban or ISIS or any of those contexts and something like North Korea, which we recognize rather readily to be a condition of brainwashing in a political cult as opposed to a religious one. But what do you, and see, this is where I always have my issues with that. If somebody were going out there and making and when I say somebody, I mean somebody in our government, if somebody in our government were standing up and saying, listen, part of what we're doing in this world is making the world safe for women to walk the streets and to vote in their societies and to drive and to enjoy everything. You know, it's a human rights question. Right. And I agree with everything you said about that. But the problem then becomes one of selectivity.

Somehow we care about these things as a country with a foreign policy where we happen to have reasons to care, right? Afghanistan might be important or Iraq might be important. But in a country like Saudi Arabia, which isn't just doing these things but which in an educational sense is a bit of a fountainhead for these ideas and the most extreme of the extreme ideas, but they get a pass. for these ideas and the most extreme of the extreme ideas, but they get a pass. Well, so that is, we should plant a flag there because that, I think we will both agree, is really a perverse result of our dependence on their oil. And if we could pull that off the table, then I think things look very different. They get a pass because we need them to be our friends or have needed them to be our friends almost at any moral cost. But then let's talk about that because it's better than putting a flag there.

I would make the case that so much of the problems that we are having as a result of, shall we call it the radicalization of a region, has to do with the fact that we're over there and they don't like it. And the reason that we're over there in large part has to do with the resources. Oil is obviously, you know, petrochemicals of any kind, obviously the main reason. But there are others. But we're over there. And, you know, I was thinking the other day about how we would

react and you know sam you've heard my shows this is how i think but but i always try to think to myself you know how would we react in a comparable situation and it's funny i was reading not that long ago a book on the iranian revolution of 1978-79 and they were talking about how the shah's secret police in iran were so good at monitoring any gathering of people that might be seditious that might want to overthrow the government in any sort of capacity to replace it with any sort of government and the one place the shah had a hard time was when these people would meet in mosques and meet over religious purposes because it was difficult for the shah's government to you know crack down on religious people without looking bad to their own population they had their own reasons for not doing it but it created a safe zone that involved religion in a way

that 30 or 40 or 50 years previously back in the era where you had guys like nasser trying to push a you know by middle standards, secular sort of nationalism where where those people were sort of forced into the arms of making, you know, in the same way we might have a Red Dawn scenario in this country if we had a bunch of Islamic people stationing their tanks on our territory because something, you know, under our ground was a national security interest to them. I have a feeling we would be doing things. I mean, we might not be slitting throats ISIS style, but I bet we'd have some guys in big trucks with gun racks in the back that were fond of planting explosives sometimes. I mean, I don't think we would react all that

differently. I think the fact that there's a religious overtone to this makes us feel like we would react differently, where if you took the religious overtone out and just put us in the same situation, I bet we're not all that much nicer than some of these people we see fighting what they see as outside colonialists or people foisting their culture or stealing their resources or what have you. Do you think we'd be all that different

if the shoe were on the other foot? Well, I think the analogy breaks down a little bit because we're not stealing their resources. I mean we're not stealing oil from Saudi Arabia. We are just protective of it because we need it. Now, I think we – that's a problem we absolutely must solve and we should be running a Manhattan Project to solve it. And the technology is very much within reach. We could all be driving electric cars.

We could all be on solar. We could have true resource security, and that would be an extraordinarily good thing to do. The analogy breaks down for me because, one, we're not mere invaders of these countries. Now, you know, I didn't support the war in Iraq. I think it was a terrible idea, especially a terrible idea in retrospect, although I think the argument could have been made for it more or less along the lines I just gave for the North Korean case. You had a virtually psychopathic dictator and a hostage crisis, and it would have been a good thing if the civilized world could have found a way to intervene and liberate the Iraqi people, except for the fact that the level of religious sectarianism in that society caused it to explode into civil war.

And so and I don't hold us responsible, nor do I think anyone should hold us responsible for the millennia long internecine hostility between Shia and Sunni. That's entirely a religious confection. But surely, Sam, it was a known quantity that needed to be taken into account. It's why there were people at the highest level saying, don't do this. This is a fractured society that's being held together by a vicious strongman. And if you take the vicious strongman out, who the heck's going to hold it together? It's Yugoslavia without Tito all of a sudden. Yeah, well, but it just it points to the differences that that religion introduces into these these sorts of events. But wait, wouldn't wouldn't ethnic tensions play the same sort of role in some of these other societies? I mean, religion, it's not a unique situation. It's a variable that could be replaced

by other variables in other places. I mean, the Nazis were, there was a religious component to it, but it wasn't primarily religious, but there was an ideological concept that played the same variant role in their situation. I think you could find hundreds of those, an ethnocentrism, a racism, a superiority complex, ancient ethnic hatreds, any of those things plays that same variant role. Well, it's not the same. There are other forms of us-them thinking, no doubt, and you just

ran through the list. So racism and xenophobia and any kind of in-group, out-group tribalism gets people to go to war with each other periodically. But the notion of paradise, I think, changes the equation significantly, which is to say true belief in paradise and in martyrdom as a way to arrive there. In fact, as the most reliable way to arrive there. And the Christian tradition really has never even had that the way it exists within Islam. And so the psychological phenomenon that I'm most focused on and most worried about, frankly, is the fact that you can be someone without any political grievances. You've never been mistreated by anyone. You're just a guy who grew up in the suburbs of Marin County or Maryland or any of these places where we've seen people so-called self-radicalize, where an internet meme gets into their head. They may have been born

Muslim or not. But at a certain point, they decide, well, Islam is really worth looking into. And they read the books and they go down the rabbit hole and they decide, yeah, you know, jihad is incumbent upon every Muslim male. There's nothing more beautiful or important to give your life over to. And paradise really exists. It really is waiting for me. I'm going to get there. I'm going to get the virgins. All of this stuff is believed by the kinds of people who are being recruited to ISIS. And they're going over there in a spirit of jubilation. ISIS is not acting like a bug light for the psychopaths of the world or the depressed people of the world who just want to die in the desert. These are people who are highly motivated. They feel a great sense of meaning. And we might say that, well, this is not such a big phenomenon. We're just talking about some tens of thousands of people at this point coming from other societies

to join the Islamic State. But that phenomenon is a window onto the psychology of what is happening in these societies among the indigenous people who are committed to these ideas. These are, these societies, among the indigenous people who are committed to these ideas. These are – there's a deep kind of transcendental meaning taken on board when you actually believe these things. And it explains why you can get mothers to just celebrate the suicidal atrocities committed by their sons and why people can – I mean a very chilling conversation I just read and excerpted in the next book I'm publishing in the fall was between this former Muslim, a Muslim now atheist, Ali Rizvi, and a supporter of the Taliban after the school bombing in Peshawar in Pakistan in last fall where 150 students were massacred by members of the Pakistani Taliban. And a supporter online was expressing his support and Ali got into a bit of a debate with him. And he just pulled back the veil on this sort of thinking.

He said, listen, you are a materialist. You don't believe in paradise. Therefore, you think that these kids were just annihilated. They weren't. We know them to be in paradise because they've not taken on the sinfulness of their apostate parents. And we did them a favor. There's no problem killing these kids. killing these kids. And the problem I'm dealing with in talking to people like, you know, many of the people who are probably among your listenership, is that secular liberal Westerners burn a lot of

fuel trying to convince themselves that anyone actually believes this stuff. The moment you take on board the proposition that millions and millions of people actually believe in paradise and they think there's no problem with death. When all these jihadists who say we love death more than the infidel loves life are actually giving us an honest statement of psychological fact. The moment you take that on board, you have to admit the game has changed. Now, it's not totally changed. It's not like it shares nothing in common with the other sorts of tribalism you mentioned., it's not totally change. It's not like it shares nothing in common with the other sorts of tribalism you mentioned. And it's not that politics never plays a role here. And it's not that we don't do stupid things like ignore the sectarianism between Shia and Sunni. But

the thing I'm focused on, which has me worried, is the fact that you can get educated Westerners even to believe this stuff and to be motivated to act on the basis of these ideas. But Sam, here's the thing. You suggest in the tone of the argument that this is unusual or that this is singular or that this is different. It's a variant of human behavior we've seen over and over again, especially in what, you know, I was having a talk with a Southerner not that long ago who was talking to me about the Civil War and talking about the American South before the Civil War is what he called an honor culture. And these honor cultures are common throughout history. I mean, you take, you know, the arguments that you were saying about

paradise and the willingness to die and embrace death and enjoy death and make it beautiful and something to be sought is exactly the way my stepfather, in absolutely horrifically scared terms, by the way, talked about how they felt about fighting the Japanese in the Second World War, right? And it was almost, it wasn't quite secular because there's a religious overtone to the whole thing. At the same time, the feeling of one of the most important things being to scratch off the imperial chrysanthemum on your rifle so that it was marred before you died and didn't fall into the hands. I mean, all these things you just your mind reels.

But what it seems to show is it's a window to a certain human experience which is recurring and not that uncommon. The idea the Spartans had that the people who were born in that society were born to die for the state. That's what they were. They go have more sons so that the state will be glorified when they die. I mean, it's just this this I mean, what's the old line that one Spartan had when his wife was going to see him off to a certain death? And she said, you know, kind of what do you want me to do? And he said, marry someone else and have a lot of sons. someone else and have a lot of sons. I mean, the whole society is predicated on an honor system which says you die for the state or you die for the underlying cause that justifies the state, whether that's the emperor and his infallibility and his godlike nature or whether it's somebody actually telling you what God wants and what awaits you on the other side. It seems to me

that we're taking something that is not singular and not that unusual when you look at the entire breadth and reach of history and making it sound that way. Well, I would agree it's on a continuum. There's no question that people have found... And it's not always religious. No, the continuum is not. There's a religious continuum, but that's part of a larger continuum, which is just ideas motivating people to give their lives over to a greater cause. Don't you agree that that will always exist? You get rid of this particular ideology that's motivating these suicide bombers, there will be something else. Well, no, I think we genuinely make progress in this area.

I think that, for instance, Christianity, apart from a few pockets of fundamentalism in the West and a few aberrations that we're in the process of overcoming, I think Christianity has moderated itself significantly as a result of its collisions with modernity, with science and secular politics and notions of human rights and just the fact that in the developed world, most Christians most of the time have more that they want out of life than is suggested between the covers of the Bible. So they ignore the bad parts in the Old Testament. They ignore the bad parts in the New Testament. They try to focus on Jesus and half his moods. The truth is most people, no matter how Christian they are, don't spend a lot of time reading

the Bible in its entirety. And they are very different, for the most part, than Christians in the 14th century. And so I believe your podcast on this topic was called Prophets of Doom. When you listen to what it was like in that community and how credulous these people were and how expectant of the end of history in their lifetime, those people are in a minority, a tiny minority within the Christian tradition, even I would argue among fundamentalists in the United States. You can get fundamentalists to talk about the rapture and their expectations of it in their lifetime.

But in terms of what is – the beliefs that are operative for them day to day, those have been knocked back considerably since the 14th century. And what I would argue is that while it's not a total difference of kind, what we're confronting in the Muslim world now is a little bit like a tear in the fabric of time. And we have the Christians of the 14th century pouring into our world armed with modern weapons. billion Muslims, but it covers a disconcerting number of people throughout the world in Muslim communities east and west who are motivated, animated by a very literal and comprehensive reading of these texts, the Quran and the Hadith. And there are a few differences between Islam and Christianity that make it even more incorrigible than Christianity was. The Koran does not have a line like we have in Matthew, render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's and unto God those things that are God's.

And that line does a lot of work for Christians who just want to get out of the state business. And that's a problem. And so we have to find a way forward within the Muslim world for genuine reform. And there are people working to do that. And I'm trying to help these people do that. I've collaborated on a book with one of them, Majid Nawaz. There are people who are doing really heroic work and really risky work. I mean, that's the other thing that is quite disanalogous at this moment in history, to stand up as a Muslim and say any of the things that I have just said very likely will get you killed in a hundred different countries at the moment. And that's a problem that we as a global civil society have to find some way to overcome. Couldn't you make the case, Sam, that, I mean, for example,

I mean, you mentioned something very similar to this. You go back and you read the Old Testament of the Bible, as the Christians call it. There'll be stuff in there where it says that you should stone women who are not virgins on their wedding night. And if you did that today in the name of Judaism, more than 99% of Jews would think that was crazy. And the reason is why. You ask why?

Because once upon a time, it not only was crazy, but the book authorized it in a way that maybe some of the people in an ISIS or some radical Islamic group would say their text legitimized. But here's the thing. But before you go too far down there, just don't forget your thought. But in defense of all the truly crazy Jews who still exist, there are those who will tell you that, no, no, it still holds. We just don't have a Sanhedrin. We don't have a consecrated religious body to enforce it. OK, I got you. I got you. There are people who will actually just say that all of that's just been put on pause. But if you saw it on YouTube, I don't know how many people are going to stand up and say,

you know, finally somebody's living up to the religion. I guess my point is, and you mentioned it, what we're seeing here is the vast majority of Islam. I know Islamic folks. I'm sure you do too. They don't seem anything like the people that we have a problem with. I have one who can quote the Bible like a televangelist. He quotes the Koran in multiple languages. And every time I'll ask him, I'll say, so I hear a lot about this aspect of the Koran.

Tell me what you think. And he'll explain the different ways they can be interpreted and the different Islamic thinkers over time and the way they've approached these things. The people that we're having problems with, by and large, are a minority. And there are people who listen to the problem that that Islam has in a sense that the Ottoman Empire played a partial role in before its disintegration was some sort of ability to proclaim what is heretical and what isn't a part of the religion. In other words, let's pretend you had this caliph

that people like ISIS always say they want, right? Somebody who could play, I'm sorry for the analogy, it's imperfect, but a Muslim Pope, let's just say. Not going to be able to deal with Shiite and Sunni things right away, but someone who could essentially say, because you'll often hear, there'll be some terror attack and you'll get a couple of Western Muslim leaders who will say, this does not represent true Islam. But true Islam right now is a difficult thing. It's a little like that guy who burns Korans in the U.S. South and says that he's a preacher. He has just as much to make these decisions as anyone else. If you have a caliph who is a religious leader who can say, listen, I can't stop them from doing that. But let me just tell you, you do that and that 72 virgin

claim is not going to come true. And who are you going to believe that that weirdo with his track record or me? Right. That that's missing in the system. And this is why, you know, if you look at the problems that we're having with Islam, the vast majority of Islamic folks are embarrassed and horrified by the whole thing and are getting blowback in their own personal lives. People who wouldn't hurt anything pay the price for people who would. And so and so you turn around and say, what can we do if you want to win this war? If you look at this as a war on Islamic extremism, then to me and you know, this is what I studied in school. I studied try to try to come up with victories, right? Military victories. It's a

hearts and minds conflict. Oh, yeah, you've. You've got the people that are going to win this war for us are Muslim. And so anything we do that alienates the people we need to win is counterproductive in the end. Well, I totally agree that this is a war of ideas that has to be waged by Muslims with other Muslims. They're the only people who are credible to those other people. Yeah, and it's a war of ideas and it is a civil war. credible to those other people. Yeah. And it's a war of ideas and it is a civil war. And we have to figure out how to help the true secularists and reformers in the Muslim world to win. But the one thing I take issue with in what you just said is that it's a tiny minority who support these ideas or this behavior. That, in fact, is not true. It depends what you're

talking about. Pick a number. Pick a number. Because there has been a lot of polling on this. And frankly, the only way we ever can gauge public opinion, you can't engage it by just meeting as many people as you can meet. You have to do it with opinion polls. But throw out a number. Let's play with whatever number you want to play with. He wasn't technically a jihadist. He wasn't perpetrating terrorism, but he spent five years in prison for his activities in Egypt. And he knows why radicals do what they do and he's in dialogue with jihadists. to come up with a counter-narrative for devout Muslims to disentangle Islam from the kinds of theology that you see justifying the behavior of the Islamic State and other, quote, radical or extremist groups. The problem, however, is that if you run an opinion poll in the UK asking, what do you think should happen to the Danish cartoonists

after the cartoon controversy? Or do you think the 7-7 bombers were justified in their actions? You get shocking levels of support for that. I mean, something like 70% of British Muslims think that the Danish cartoonists should all have been imprisoned. And I don't know what percentage of those think they should have been killed, but 70% don't understand the imperative that free speech win in this case. And those are British-born Muslims. Now, so you can only imagine what it is in Tehran or in Mecca. So the distinction that Majid impressed upon me is that between Islamists and conservatives. And this has always confused me, and it's now clear. And this is actually the distinction I was trying to make on that show with Ben Affleck, and you could see the results there.

Islamists are people who are trying to impose Islam on society politically. They want a state religion wherever they happen to have a state or wherever they live. They want society to be obliged to live under Sharia law. And jihadists are the subset of Islamists who are willing to do this through violence immediately. The broader set of Islamists just want to do this through some political process, but that the goal is Sharia law for everyone. Whether you're a Muslim or not, you have to live under an ascendant and triumphal Muslim state, and this is a global aspiration.

Now, most Muslims are not Islamists, And this is a global aspiration. Now, most Muslims are not Islamists. And I think the percentage is somewhere around 15 or 20 percent worldwide are Islamists. And there are differences among Islamists. But Islamists agree that Islam has to become the global religion. And there's no way to separate politics from religion. The rest of the Muslim world, now we're talking about something like 80%, they're not Islamists. They don't want their religion imposed from the state. But a majority

of that 80% is absolutely conservative in their views religiously. So they have views about the veiling of women and the honor implications of female sexuality and the appropriateness or the acceptability of homosexuality and free speech, etc., cartoons about the prophet. They have very conservative views which in any given moment may seem to align them with Islamists and jihadists and the people who burn embassies in response to cartoons. and the people who burn embassies in response to cartoons. But when you ask them about how they feel about the Islamic State or about al-Qaeda, they will tell you everything you would be consoled to hear. Of course they hate al-Qaeda. Of course they think al-Qaeda has hijacked their peaceful religion and they want nothing to do with it. But when you drill down on their specific moral attitudes, they are extremely conservative.

When you drill down on their specific moral attitudes, they are extremely conservative. And I would argue that – and as with Majid, that we have to apply pressure to both of these communities to embrace a global, pluralistic, liberal, secular mode of tolerance that is only subscribed to at this point by a minority within the Muslim world, not a majority. The numbers are not consoling, and it is, as you say, not something that a white infidel like me is going to impress upon 1.6 billion people. This has to happen within the Muslim world by Muslims. happen within the Muslim world by Muslims. But here's the thing. See, I think I think there's a a single and I've seen this and I'm going to I'm going to take it in another direction in a second to try to show how I think this is a recurring thing. And we've just plugged Islam in for something else. But I mean, let's let's take Islam out of this and let's go to a bunch of Americans down in the Bible Belt and say, do you think the newspaper in your community should show that piece of artwork that shows Christ in a beaker of urine? Right. What do you think? And should that be legal and what their reaction would be to that?

Or if you went to a bunch of people who were veterans of the United States military who served on, let's say, D-Day and said, States military who served on, let's say, D-Day and said, should people be allowed to urinate on the flag and then show other people that or wear T-shirts that show horrible manglings of the U.S. flag? And should that be legal? The difference is that while they may think that's horrible and worthy of a punch in the nose, they're not going to go blow up a shopping center because they're offended. So I think the offensive side of this is a very human way to behave. And I think you would get similar sorts of reactions if you frame the question a certain way from all kinds of groups of human beings being offended to the point of wanting to punch somebody. Pretty standard human reaction. The difference, as you would have pointed out, is the desire to kill somebody over

it as a way to intimidate them into behaving a way you want them to behave. And I would add further along that continuum, the difference once you believe that you want them to behave. And I would add, further along that continuum, the difference once you believe that you will go to paradise for doing so, or once you believe that your children, behind whose bodies you're hiding as a human shield, will go to paradise if they're killed while you're behaving that way. And again, I feel compelled to take a non-religious example to point out that- No, I just want, I'm agreeing with your, the continuum, the structure you're sketching out.

I think this kind of offense is a very human and universal principle. Yeah, and let's talk about a heroic death, right? Because, for example, you look and you study the side of the anarchist movement from 110, 115 years ago, which, by the way, every time I mention all the peaceful anarchists out there say, please distinguish my views from the ones you're talking about. But about 120 years ago, it was it was in vogue. Let's put it that way. For people who thought that that political change was so necessary, it was worth killing people over, to do something that involved what was known at the time as the propaganda of the deed. And the idea behind this was, is if you, let's say, assassinate,

and there were a bunch of foreign leaders, well, foreign from an American viewpoint, assassinated, there were even American attempts at assassination, in order to kill a leading figure, in order to get the publicity that comes with that and then encourages others to kill a leading figure, in order to get the publicity that comes with that and then encourages others to kill important political figures that are part of the establishment. The propaganda of the deeds whole idea was that you would be giving up the rest of your life, whether it meant you got hung for capital murder or spent the rest of your days in prison or whatever,

as a hero to the movement. It's like the old, you know, non-religious Soviet Union, the hero of the Soviet Union, right? The kid who turns his parents in so they can be executed at the camp because they were counter-revolutionaries. And then the little kid gets a statue devoted to him. I mean, these are not unusual kinds of things and they don't have to be and they don't have to be religiously driven to happen.

So when we talk about people that are offended and then lash out, I think I think something like that is where the rubber meets the road in terms of when you say in a free society, you know, how do we make it not OK? I mean, let me give you an example. Once upon a time, if you killed your wife when you found her in bed with another man, there are courts that might have let you off for that and juries that might have let you off for a lot less likely today because things have changed. But there's a lot of people out there you could interview who would say, listen, I'm just telling you, man, if you find your spouse out with somebody else and somebody gets shot, you know, not that not that hard to understand. So, I mean, I think you may you may have made a case when you talked about the time fabric ripped open and we're seeing a bunch of people with a mentality that used to be more widespread or that runs counter to modern liberal secular sensibilities at the

same time it's like saying that a bunch of people have a worldview that's dangerous and wrong and the way we're going to to solve that is by bombing and and do and doing things that end up providing propaganda to the people you're trying to beat that they can then use against the people we're trying to convert or at least keep on our side to say, see, these people talk a good game, but they kill women and children, too. And you can talk about things like intention all the time. But if it's your kid that gets caught in the crossfire when we're trying to get a bad guy in Pakistan, there's nothing I'm going to say to you that's going to calm you down and make you rational and not make you think I'm going to go get the bastards who did that to my kid. So you're creating the next round. You know, you know what I was going to go. I remember my train. I thought what I was going to go with this is say, you know, in a funny way as a kid. And I know you're about my age, too. We grew up at the at the at the last

half of the Cold War, the so-called Red Scare, which was so, I mean, for those of us who lived through it and were at least on my political viewpoint, it would drive you crazy how we were obsessed with this communist threat and just sure it was just out. And then once the spell was broken, you look back and you go, God, it's amazing we got so wound up over that. And then sort of almost in a historical sense, right afterwards, we now get this Islamic thing, which has almost been plugged in for what used to be a sort of a godless atheist ideological, you know, enemy to a extra God believing, you know, non-secular enemy. I mean, in a funny way, I feel like it's deja vu all over again. And I just have Islamic terrorists plugged in for,

for former Soviet, you know, spreaders of world revolution. But the justification that our government uses to impede on those very secular values that you were just defending is the same. It's a wonderful hammer with which to hit our constitution with, just like the Soviet Union one was before it. Well, it did get plugged in, but we should recall that it plugged itself in. We had September 11th, which was a moment where history intruded into our lives. I don't know how you felt, but I really felt that was the first moment where it was absolutely clear to me that I was living in history of the sort that I had read about in history books. had read about in history books, where we see that things can go totally into the ditch in a moment's notice, that there are forces aimed at your life that you were not aware of. And all of a sudden, there really is a burden in the current generation to get the maintenance of civilization

right. But I agree with you, there are many similarities there. And I think we should be dropping bombs very selectively. I think the problem of collateral damage is a huge one. I don't think we should overestimate the number of people who become radicalized as a result of our collateral damage. But I think it is a genuine phenomenon. But what's more of concern to me is that certain ideas, if merely accepted, create a condition for a total repudiation of the kinds of values we need the better part of humanity to embrace at this point, which is a commitment to free speech and equality among the sexes and and tolerance for diversity. We need these things globally.

We can't just live on islands of tolerance where we then are forced to interact with and suffer our poorest borders with genuinely intolerant medieval commitments. So we need to spread this worldwide, and it's a big problem. I want to – I feel like we have dealt with Islam as much as we need to at the moment. I want to actually make a lateral move to a similar topic and ask you what you think about this recent controversy around the Confederate flag and whether it can be displayed on the statehouse in South Carolina. displayed on the statehouse in South Carolina. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

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