The following is a transcript from my Waking Up podcast (“Shouldering the Burden of History: A Crosscast with Dan Carlin”). The text has been lightly edited for clarity readability.—SH
Welcome to the Waking Up podcast. This is Sam Harris. 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 crosspost one sometimes sees on blogs that publish content simultaneously. It turns out we have many listeners in common, and many of you have been urging us to have a conversation, I think anticipating considerable disagreement on issues like the War on Terror, state security, and foreign policy. I don’t know that we collided as much as anyone might have expected, but we’ve had a good, energetic conversation, which I greatly enjoyed and I hope you will too. So in a moment, I give you Dan Carlin…
SH: Hey, Dan, how are you doing?
DC: I’m good, how are you?
SH: I’m great. Well, listen, as my listeners know, I have been frequently referring to you as the greatest history professor on earth, and I know this may cause you to blush, but I am just a huge fan of your Hardcore History podcast and have been recommending it to anyone with ears at this point.
DC: That is very dirty pool to start off a discussion with a compliment like that, because now what am I supposed to say? You said some of the nicest things, and I really appreciate them, thank you so much. Listen, isn’t it amazing we’re having these kinds of public discussions in the virtual realm here where everyone gets to watch? 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.
SH: Yeah, and I do not say this to preempt any criticism—
DC: Which always comes from me. That’s what I’m going to do.
SH: Actually, this was a question I wanted to ask you. 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 listening to your show and scrutinizing it for errors. Do you get pushback from academics? What’s that experience like for you?
DC: Well, I have to be honest. My own opinion here, but I think everyone’s been remarkably generous and nice to me on everything, because I had envisioned a completely different type 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 “Isn’t this weird?” and “Isn’t this funny?” and stuff history majors used to talk about on their lunch break. As the show evolved, the audience wanted more of the background, and so it went into territory I had never given a lot of thought to. You know, “Do I want to go challenge historians?” or something like that. This is why we use so many quotes and whatnot during the program, because I think, coming from the position that you know you’re not an expert, you’re not pretending to be an expert, when you make some sort of statement, we feel like you want “audio footnotes.” You want 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 I think I build that into the way we do things. 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 try to make sure that every time we say something, we have somebody who is credible and trustworthy—or at least someone we should listen to a little bit more than the podcast host—back up what I’m saying. It’s become a key way that the show has evolved.
SH: Well, I wonder how deep that caveat actually cuts, because in my career, I have weighed in on many questions that fall outside the official area of my academic expertise, and occasionally I get pushback on this very point, that I don’t have a credential that would cause someone to be confident about my opinions in this area—let’s say on the topic of religion. But many of these subjects 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. It’s certainly appropriate to have humility and be attentive to the frontiers of one’s ignorance, but 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 Ph.D.s in physics; there are computer scientists who don’t have even college degrees. I am in dialogue now with an expert on artificial intelligence who never went to high school, 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. I’m wondering how you view this, 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. Maybe if you want to be an expert on World War II, or at least the Nazi side of it, you need to deal with primary sources in German, and that’s some wrinkle there. But I’m just wondering how you see that.
DC: I think it sort of depends on the specialty we’re talking about. For example, take a surgeon who operates on people’s brains. I think we can agree that 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.” There’s a specific specialty there. I think bringing up the humanities, though, is a wonderful point, because the humanities by their very nature are all things with much more leeway than you get in something like brain surgery, for example. Look at the subjects that make up the humanities: law, religion, language, arts, music. I think the way to put it would be that 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 the mode of thinking common in their discipline to an unusual realm—in other words, get a 360° view of things.Take a historical event. You might want to have the Second World War examined by somebody who’s an expert in military affairs. Obviously, 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. So in that sense, I think you can three-dimensionalize reality, and that’s what you’re doing when you look at history—you’re looking at a moment in reality, and there are multiple Rashomons, 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. These are people who 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 they study takes away that ability to look at things from a farther-away lens. So fifty years ago you would’ve had all these historians who would’ve been just fine looking at events as though they were in a satellite and giving you these big pronouncements. Most historians today wouldn’t be comfortable with that. The problem is, historians aren’t dealing with brain surgery, they’re dealing with human beings. 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. And they’ve been very kind to me, all these professionals. I think they sometimes don’t like the way I dramatize events, but I look at this like what Alfred Hitchcock famously said about drama: Drama is just reality with the boring bits taken out. 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 fifty years ago might give you.
SH: Well, what you’re doing is fantastic, and that will be my last dollop of praise before we get into areas of controversy.
DC: That’s it. It’s got to stop now.
SH: So I’ve been hearing rumors from among our mutual fans that you and I should have a conversation about the sorts of things that you treat on your Common Sense podcast, which, frankly, I have listened to 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, just war, the War on Terror, and the role of Islam in inspiring the terror side of that war, etc. I don’t know how much you know of my positions on these areas, but I suggest that we just meander into them and see what happens.
DC: Well, sure, and maybe we can start with how do you keep getting these people angry with you? 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 feel like I’ve got pretty thin skin when it comes to things like Twitter. How do you deal with these situations and then go back and do them again? It seems like the position you put yourself in is to enjoy that, because you’re going to just do that again on the next show.
SH: Well, I guess there’s a Freudian diagnosis for this. It’s called masochism.
DC: I’m not going there, I’m just suggesting you might consider it.
SH: Well, 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, I’m fine with that. The thing that gets under my skin—which, unfortunately, I have to deal with more than anything else—is a frank misunderstanding of my position or a malicious distortion of it so as to spread a misunderstanding of it. I deal with that more and more now, and unfortunately there’s no way to deal with it elegantly, comprehensively, and effectively. You can’t keep writing letters to the editor. You can’t follow your dishonest critics around cleaning up the mess they’re making. It is much easier to make a mess than to clean it up. So wherever you go and see my views discussed, you see total distortions of them. That does wear on me, and as a result, I’ve attempted to pick my battles. I avoid certain controversies now, because I anticipate the cost, in terms of both time and annoyance, and then just decide it’s not worth it. I actually just gave up a book contract that was the best book contract I’ve ever had and maybe will ever have, but I decided that the topic was going to put me in an all-out war against critics whose first impulse would be to ignore all the nuance in my arguments. So I’m being more selective about the battles I pick now, although I’m liable to stumble into any area of controversy in the middle of a conversation like this and reap the whirlwind. It’s annoying, but I think some of what this conversation would be if we touched those topics is me distinguishing what I actually mean from what many of these people, like Ben Affleck, think I mean.
DC: 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 sometimes point me to, say, a Reddit page or a bulletin board somewhere where the headline topic is “Dan Carlin said blank. Is he right?” You’ll read what it says you said and you never said it, but there will be hundreds of responses of people debating what an idiot you are for saying it. You don’t even know how to begin to correct that element, and you just think, “If this continues to proliferate over time, the Internet will be full of stuff that I never said, can’t defend, and will have 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.
SH: Also, I’m coming up against certain taboos that amplify misunderstanding. The taboo around criticizing religion as opposed to other sets of ideas—that is something that people are really biased against. 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. There’s also a lot of understandable guilt about the history of slavery and colonialism and the wealth imbalance between the developed nations and the developing ones. So 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. For instance, on North Korea you get a pretty perfect convergence from people in the West, liberal or conservative, on the ethical wrongness of the regime there, 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 a hostage crisis. We have a couple of maniacs—or now generations of maniacs—with bouffant hair holding millions of people hostage, starving some significant percentage of them, and brainwashing them with an ideology that is clearly 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, when they’re essentially a cargo cult armed with nuclear weapons. And 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 conventional war. But everyone acknowledges that 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, that would be a good thing. Yet if you try to move that to a similar consideration of Islamist regimes, things begin to break down under the influence of political correctness. I just put that to you as a potential starting point.
DC: Well, let me suggest a difference. Take the North Koreans, for example, and brainwashing. I think your analysis was right on, but here’s the thing: If all of a sudden they allowed actual free elections in North Korea, it would be interesting to see the results. It would 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, 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. I think about extreme Islamic regimes, the sort of state that ISIS/ISIL is trying to put together, or even one 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, it would be very interesting to see what the results were. So when you talk about the ability of liberals or let’s call them paleoconservatives or anyone else to look at North Korea and agree that it’s a tragedy and that it would be nice if those people were freed and ask doesn’t this also apply to these Islamic regimes, I’m not sure. I remember getting an email from a woman who lived here in the West and was Islamic. I had made some comment about women in burqas and the rights of women in some of these countries, and I had used that as a particular touchstone. She wrote me back and said, “Listen, no offense, but this is what you don’t understand not growing up in this society.” She said, “I want this, I want this burqa.” (She called it something else; there’s another word for it.) She said, “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 “Now, my views may not be representative, and certainly different regions and different areas have different feelings about this, but from the traditional little town I came from, I didn’t see this as an imposition on my freedom. To me it was a rite of passage.” It was 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. So 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 would be very interesting to hear whether or not they want to be liberated. And you can have two kinds of liberation—the kind of pie-in-the-sky one where we say, “We’re going to liberate you and in fifty years you’re going to be like Germany is today,” or “We can liberate you and you Sunni folks will be living under Shiites who take advantage of you all the time.” It’s not a perfect world where we can offer these people a panacea either. So they’re often making the same sorts of choices in their heads that we’re making at the ballot box: “Are we going to get a lot of difference if I vote for this Democrat or this Republican? Nothing seems to change.” So you start to vote for the lesser 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 whether, if you actually polled people in a free poll, 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.
SH: 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 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 trimmed down their worldview in such a way that the doors to human flourishing are closed or closing to them, and someone outside that culture, someone who has not been brainwashed by it, could open those doors. For instance, literacy for women: I think that is an intrinsic good, and it really doesn’t matter how many women tell you from behind their burqas 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. I think that once you strip away political correctness, you have to agree that to be born a woman in Afghanistan any time in the past thirty years was to be unlucky. Now, that’s not to say that you couldn’t find one happy woman there who, if given the chance to sample all 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 lesser veils like the hijab), you are hearing 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. When you have that kind of stigma around the empowerment of women or 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, then 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, 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.
DC: And this is where I always have my issues with that. If somebody were going out there (when I say somebody, I mean somebody in our government) 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, 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. Afghanistan might be important, or Iraq might be important, but in a country like Saudi Arabia—which isn’t just doing these things but in an educational sense is a bit of a fountainhead for these ideas and the most extreme of the extreme ideas—they get a pass.
SH: We should plant a flag there, because that, I think, we agree is a really 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, at almost any moral cost.
DC: Let’s talk about that, because it’s better than putting a flag there. I would make the case that so many of the problems we are having as a result of, shall we say, the radicalization of a region have to do with the fact that we’re over there and they don’t like it. And the reason we’re there has to do in large part with the resources. Oil, petrochemicals of any kind, are obviously the main reason, but there are others. Sam, you’ve heard my shows, you know this is how I think—I always try to ask myself, “How would we react in a comparable situation?” Not that long ago I was reading a book on the Iranian Revolution of 1978/79 and how the shah’s secret police 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. The one place the shah had a hard time was when these people met in mosques and over religious purposes, because it was difficult for the government to crack down on religious people without looking bad to its own population. That created a safe zone that involved religion in a way that thirty or forty or fifty years previously—back in the era when guys like Nasser were trying to push a, by Middle Eastern standards, secular sort of nationalism. We might have a sort of “Red Dawn” scenario if a bunch of Islamic people were stationing their tanks on our territory because something under our ground was a national security interest to them. I have a feeling we would be doing things. 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 who 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. 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 culture on them 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?
SH: I think the analogy breaks down a little bit, because we’re not stealing oil from Saudi Arabia. We are just protective of it because we need it. Now, that’s a problem we absolutely must solve, and we should be running a Manhattan Project to solve it. 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 we’re not mere invaders of these countries. Now, I didn’t support the war in Iraq. I thought it was a terrible idea, especially in retrospect, although I think an 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 the level of religious sectarianism in that society caused it to explode into civil war. 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.
DC: But surely, Sam, it was a known quantity that needed to be taken into account.
SH: Of course.
DC: It’s why there were people at the highest levels 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.
SH: Yes, but that just points to the problem that religious sectarianism posed here.
DC: But wait, wouldn’t ethnic tensions play the same sort of role in some of these other societies? I mean religion is not a unique situation, it’s a variable that can be replaced by other variables in other places. The Nazis—there was a religious component with them, but it wasn’t primarily religious; an ideological concept played the same variant role in their situation. I think you could find hundreds of those. An ethnocentrism, a racism, a superiority complex, ancient hatreds—any of those things plays that variant role.
SH: Well, it’s not the same. There are other forms of “us-them” thinking, and you just ran through the list. Racism, and xenophobia, and any kind of ingroup-outgroup tribalism can get people to go to war with each other periodically. But the notion of Paradise, I think, changes the equation significantly, true belief in Paradise and in martyrdom as a way to arrive there—in fact, the most reliable way to arrive there. The Christian tradition has never had this doctrine the way it exists within Islam. The psychological phenomenon that I’m 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”—and an Internet meme gets into your head. A person may have been born Muslim or not, but at a certain point he decides, “In think, Islam is really worth looking into,” and he read the books and goes down the rabbit hole. Eventually, he comes to believe that “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 those virgins.” All 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 isn’t functioning like a bug light for the psychopaths of the world. It isn’t recruiting clinically depressed people who just want to die in the desert. The people who join are highly motivated. They feel a great sense of meaning. We might take comfort in the fact that at this point we’re only talking about some tens of thousands of people coming from other societies to join the Islamic State. But this phenomenon is a window onto the psychology of people throughout the world who are committed to these ideas. A profound feeling of meaning and purpose comes with actually believing these things, and it explains why you can get mothers to celebrate the suicidal atrocities committed by their sons. There was a very chilling conversation I just read and excerpted in the book I’m publishing in the fall, between a former Muslim, now an atheist, Ali Rizvi, and a supporter of the Taliban after the school bombing in Peshawar in Pakistan, where 150 students were massacred. This fan of the Taliban was expressing his support, and Ali got into a bit of a debate with him, and the guy 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.” The problem I’m dealing with in talking to ordinary people, like many of your listeners, is that secular, liberal Westerners have to burn a lot of fuel to convince themselves that anyone actually believes this stuff. The moment you accept the proposition that millions and millions of people actually believe in Paradise and think there’s no problem with death—and that all these jihadists who say, “We love death more than you infidels love life” are actually giving us an honest statement of psychological fact—the moment you understand this, you must admit the game has changed. It hasn’t totally changed. It’s not like it has nothing in common with the other sorts of tribalism you mentioned. 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 truly worried, is the fact that you can get even educated Westerners to believe these incredible ideas and to act on their basis.
DC: But Sam, here’s the thing. You suggest that this is unusual or singular or different. It’s a variant of human behavior we’ve seen over and over again. I was having a talk with a southerner not that long ago who was talking to me about the Civil War and about the American South before the Civil War as what he called an “honor culture.” Honor cultures are common throughout history. I mean, take what 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. That’s exactly how my stepfather, in absolutely horrifically scared terms by the way, talked about fighting the Japanese in the Second World War, right? That wasn’t quite secular, because there was a religious overtone to the whole thing. At the same time, the feeling that one of the most important things was to scratch off the imperial chrysanthemum on your rifle so that it was marred before you died and didn’t fall into the hands of the—I mean, your mind reels, but what it seems to show is a window onto a certain human experience that is recurring and not that uncommon. Spartans had the idea that people born in that society were born to die for the state. Go have more sons so that the state will be glorified when they die for it. What’s the old line that one Spartan had when his wife was going to see him off to certain death and she said, “What do you want me to do?” He said, “Marry someone else and have a lot of sons.” The whole society is predicated on an honor system that 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 somebody actually telling you what God wants and what awaits you on the other side, it seems to me that we’re talking about something that is not singular and not that unusual when you look at the entire breadth and reach of history.
SH: Well, I would agree it’s on a continuum.
DC: And it’s not always religious.
SH: The whole continuum isn’t. Religion is just part of a larger continuum of—
DC: Agreed.
SH: —ideas that can motivate people to give their lives over to a greater cause.
DC: Don’t you agree that that will always exist? You get rid of this particular ideology that’s motivating these suicide bombers, and there will be something else.
SH: 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—has moderated itself significantly as a result of its collisions with modernity, science, secular politics, notions of human rights, and just the fact that in the developed world, most Christians want more 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, and they try to focus on Jesus in half his moods. The truth is that, most people, no matter how Christian they are, are very different from the Christians of the fourteenth century. 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 those people were and how they expected history to end in their lifetime—those people are now a tiny minority within the Christian tradition, even among fundamentalists in the United States. You can get fundamentalists to talk about the Rapture, but the beliefs that are operative for them day-to-day have been knocked back considerably since the fourteenth century. I would argue that what we’re confronting in the Muslim world now is a little bit like a tear in the fabric of time: We have the Christians of the fourteenth century pouring into our world armed with modern weapons. Again, this doesn’t cover all 1.6 billion Muslims, but it covers a disconcerting number of people throughout the world, in Muslim communities East and West, who are motivated by a very literal and comprehensive reading of these texts, the Quran and the hadith. And a few differences between Islam and Christianity make it even more incorrigible than Christianity was. The Quran does not have a line like the one in Matthew, “Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s and unto God those things that are God’s.” That line does a lot of work for Christians who just want to get out of politics. We have to find a way forward within the Muslim world for genuine reform. There are people working on that, and I’m trying to help them. I’ve collaborated on a book with one of them, Maajid Nawaz. There are people who are doing really heroic and risky work. That’s another thing that is quite disanalogous at this moment in history: To stand up as a Muslim and say any of the things that I’ve just said will very likely get you killed in a hundred different countries, and that’s a unique problem within Islam that we as a global civil society have to find some way to overcome.
DC: You mention something very similar to this. If you go back and read the Old Testament of the Bible, as the Christians call it, there will be stuff in there where it says that you should stone women who are not virgins on their wedding night. If you did that today in the name of Judaism, more than 99% of Jews would think that was crazy. 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 ISIS or some radical Islamic group would say their text legitimized. But here’s the thing—
SH: Before you go too far down there—don’t forget your thought, but in defense of all the truly crazy Jews who still exist, there are those who will tell you, “No, it still holds, we just don’t have a Sanhedrin, we don’t have a consecrated religious body to—
DC: To enforce it. Okay, I’ve got you.
SH: So there are people who will actually say that all of that’s just been place on hold until the Messiah returns, but they are a minority.
DC: Yeah, if you saw it on YouTube, I don’t know how many people would stand up and say, “You know, finally somebody is living up to the religion.” I guess my point, and you mentioned it, is that the vast majority of Islam—I know Islamic folks. I’m sure you do too—don’t seem anything like the people that we have a problem with. I know one who can quote the Bible like a televangelist. He quotes the Quran in multiple languages. Every time I say, “So, I hear a lot about this aspect of the Quran. Tell me what you think,” he’ll explain the different ways it 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. The problem that Islam has, in a sense, is that the Ottoman Empire, before its disintegration, had some sort of ability to proclaim what was heretical and what wasn’t a part of the religion. Suppose we 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—a Muslim pope, let’s just say, who’s not going to be able to deal with Shiite and Sunni things right away, but someone who could essentially say (because often there will be some terror attack and a couple of Western Muslim leaders 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 Qurans in the US South and says that he’s a preacher, he has just as much right 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 the 72 virgins claim is not going to come true. And who are you going to believe, that weirdo with his track record or me?” That’s missing in the system, which is why, you know, if you look at the problems 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 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—try to come up with victories, right? Military victories. It’s a hearts and minds conflict.
SH: Yes.
DC: The people who are going to win this war for us are Muslim. So anything we do that alienates the people we need to win is counterproductive in the end.
SH: Well, I totally agree that this is a war of ideas that has to be waged by Muslims with other Muslims.
DC: They’re the only people who are credible to those other people.
SH: It’s a war of ideas, and also a civil war, and we have to figure out how to help the true secularists and reformers in the Muslim world to win it. But the one thing I take issue with in what you just said is that it’s only a tiny minority who support the ideas and behaviors that need to change. That, in fact, isn’t true.
DC: Pick a number.
SH: There has been a lot of polling on this. And, frankly, the only way to gauge public opinion—you can’t gauge it by just meeting as many people as you can—is with opinion polls.
DC: But throw out a number. Let’s play with whatever number you want to play with.
SH: First, there’s a distinction we should make that was first impressed upon me by my friend Maajid Nawaz, with whom I collaborated on that book. Maajid is a former Islamist, a former radical who was trying to engineer coups in places like Pakistan. He wasn’t technically a jihadist, he wasn’t perpetrating terrorism, but he spent nearly five years in prison for his activities in Egypt, and he knows why radicals do what they do. He’s in dialogue with jihadists, and he now runs a counter-extremism think tank, the Quilliam Foundation, in the UK, trying to come up with a counter-narrative for devout Muslims to disentangle Islam from the kinds of theology that justifies the behavior of the Islamic State and other “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 them. I mean, something like 70% of British Muslims think that the Danish cartoonists should all have been imprisoned. I don’t know what percentage of those think that they should have been killed, but 70% don’t understand the imperative that free speech win in situations of this kind. And those are British-born Muslims. So you can only imagine what the percentage is in Tehran or Mecca. The distinction that Maajid impressed upon me is that between Islamists/jihadists and conservatives. 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, wherever they live. They want society to be obliged to live under Sharia law. Jihadists are the subset of Islamists who are willing to do this through violence immediately. The broader set of Islamists just want to do it through some political process, but the goal is Sharia law for everyone. This is a global aspiration. Now, most Muslims are not Islamists; I think the percentage is around 15% or 20% worldwide. And there are differences among Islamists. But Islamists agree that Islam has to ultimately 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%—are not Islamists; they don’t want their religion imposed by the state. But a majority of that 80% is extremely conservative in their religious views. They have views about the veiling of women and the honor implications of female sexuality and the acceptability of homosexuality and free speech and 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, but when you ask them 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, and I would argue, as would Maajid, that we have to apply pressure to both these communities to embrace a global, pluralistic, liberal, secular mode of tolerance that is subscribed to at this point by only 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.
DC: Here’s the thing. I’ve seen this, and 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 let’s take Islam out of this and go to a bunch of Americans down in the Bible Belt and say, “Do you think the newspaper in your community should publish that piece of artwork that shows Christ in a beaker of urine?”
SH: Piss Christ.
DC: Right. “What do you think? And should that be legal?” 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 say, “Should people be allowed to urinate on the flag?” And then show other people who are wearing T-shirts that show horrible manglings of the US flag—“Should that be illegal?” 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 being offended side of this is a very human way to behave—
SH: Yes.
DC: —and I think you would get similar sorts of reactions, if you framed 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 point out, is the desire to kill somebody over it as a way to intimidate them into behaving the way you want them to behave.
SH: And I want to 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, whose bodies you’re using as a human shield, will go to Paradise if they’re killed while you’re behaving that way.
DC: Again, I feel compelled to take a nonreligious example to point out that—
SH: But I’m agreeing with the continuum you’re sketching out. I think this kind of offense is a very human and universal principle.
DC: And yeah, let’s talk about a heroic death. For example, look at the anarchist movement from 110 to 115 years ago. Every time I mention it, 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 en vogue, let’s put it that way, for people who thought 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.” The idea behind this was that if you, let’s say, assassinate—and a bunch of foreign leaders, foreign from an American standpoint, were assassinated; there were even American attempts at assassination—a leading figure, you get the publicity that comes with it and that encourages others to kill important political figures that are part of the establishment. The propaganda of the deed’s whole idea was that you would be giving up the rest of your life, whether 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 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. These are not unusual kinds of things, and they don’t have to be religiously driven to happen. So when we talk about people who are offended and lash out, I think that is where the rubber meets the road in terms of when you say in a free society, “How do we make it not okay?” 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 were courts and juries that might have let you off for that. A lot less likely today, because things have changed. But there are a lot of people out there 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 hard to understand.” I think you may have made a case when you talked about the time fabric ripped open and how 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, that’s like saying that a bunch of people have a worldview that’s dangerous and wrong, and the way we’re going to solve that is by bombing and doing things that end up providing propaganda to the people we’re trying to beat that they can use against the people we’re trying to convert, or at least keep on our side, saying, “See, these people talk a good game, but they kill women and children too.” You can talk about intention all the time, but if it’s your kid who 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. I remember my train of thought, where I was going to go with this. I know you’re about my age. We grew up during the last half of the Cold War, the so-called “Red Scare.” For those of us who lived through it and were at least of my political viewpoint, it would drive you crazy how we were obsessed with this Communist threat. And once the spell was broken, we looked back and said, “God, it’s amazing we got so wound up over that.” And then, in a historical sense, almost right afterward we got this Islamic thing. What used to be a sort of godless, atheist, ideological enemy is now an extra-god-believing, non-secular enemy. I mean, I feel like it’s déjà vu all over again, and I just have Islamic terrorist plugged in for former Soviet spreaders of world revolution. But the justification that our government uses to impede those very secular values that you were just defending is the same. It’s a wonderful hammer with which to hit our Constitution, like the Soviet Union was before it.
SH: Well, it did get plugged in, but we should recall that it plugged itself in. We had September 11th, which was a moment when history intruded into our lives. I don’t know how you felt, but I felt that was the first moment when it was absolutely clear to me that I was living in history, of the sort that I had read about in books, where things can go fully into the ditch at a moment’s notice, where there are forces aimed at your life that you were not aware of, and all of a sudden you must shoulder the burden of actually defending civilization. But I agree with you, there are many similarities there, and I think we should be dropping bombs very selectively. The problem of collateral damage is a huge one. But I don’t think we should overestimate the number of people who become radicalized as a result of our collateral damage. I think it is a genuine phenomenon. But what’s of more concern to me is that certain ideas, if merely accepted, create the conditions for a total repudiation of the values we need the better part of humanity to embrace at this point—a commitment to free speech, political equality between the sexes, tolerance for diversity, and so forth. We need these things globally. We can’t just live on islands of tolerance where we’re obliged to interact with, and maintain porous borders with, genuinely intolerant, medieval societies. So we need to spread these values worldwide, and that’s difficult.
I think we’ve discussed Islam as much as we need to at the moment. I want to make a lateral move to a similar topic and ask what you think about this recent controversy around the Confederate flag and whether it can be displayed on the statehouse in South Carolina or on the license plates of people who are fond of it.
DC: But I don’t want to let you run away with the idea that we have to spread and we have to change these kinds of things, because I think—
SH: Okay, so maybe you can carry it through to here, because I’m saying we also need to spread these values within our own society. We need to spread them to the South as well, at least on this particular point.
DC: Okay, because I think there’s a Wilsonian, idealistic, rainbows-and-unicorns side to this idea that we have to spread our view of things to other peoples. And if you were going to say Islam, that’s a big enough problem, but there are places like China that call what you just mentioned and framed as a sort of human rights question—a universal minimum standard, shall we say, for modern people to embrace ethically—nothing more than “Western rights.”
SH: I’m comfortable saying that they’re wrong.
DC: But how do you change that?
SH: First, let me say that there must be things I’m wrong about too. I don’t think that I am in possession of the perfect moral code, which I don’t have to continually reexamine, but I think it’s fine for us to believe that on many points we are right—and “we” means, now, not just the United States. I would use the phrase “civilized world.” How that maps onto the developed versus the undeveloped world is not totally clear. I’m talking about people who are committed to freedom of speech and scientific progress and all the intellectual and ethical virtues that allow strangers from different parts of the world, and different cultures, speaking different languages, to collaborate peacefully on a common project of building a world where we can flourish. I view it as a global civil society that is struggling to be born.
DC: I don’t think that the majority of listeners to these podcasts are going to disagree with that as an ultimate goal. The problem in this world is that there are a lot of very powerful states made up of hundreds of millions of people who have a different view. The question is, how far are you willing to go in a crusade, essentially—whether it be a moral crusade to shame them into behavior, or something a little bit more muscular, involving drones and the Middle East and sanctions or whatever you want to say to get these people to convert to your view. If several major countries, let’s say China and Russia, decide that they don’t like the view of an open Internet, they don’t like the view of free speech and all that, what the heck are you going to do about it? There’s a big difference between deciding all of a sudden that you’re going to impose Western values on a small, relatively defenseless country and that you’re going to impose United States values on a large chunk of the world that is hostile to them. This idea that it’s our job or responsibility or duty to take our belief system and spread it elsewhere, while it may be morally defensible and justifiable theoretically, has awful, realistic, real-world consequences.
SH: I agree. I don’t dispute any of that.
DC: Thermonuclear war, once upon a time.
SH: What you’re describing is a practical limitation on our good intentions. It’s possible to apply pressure on a society in an attempt to make that society a better place, and it’s possible to fail in doing that, given how hard a task it is, and to make it a worse place—that is, to create more suffering than was there to begin with. And presumably it’s possible to succeed and actually liberate a people who would’ve been immiserated for another generation under the current regime. I think anything between those two poles is possible. I totally accept the spirit of your skepticism, that we are not well-equipped to invade and surgically remove a bad regime and then through our powers of persuasion reform the backward attitudes of the population. This is not something we can easily do. So I agree that our uses of force should be limited to what is absolutely necessary to stop the worst actors out there who we know are already culpable for terrible crimes.
DC: Yes, but what do you do about the worst actors that we cozy up to? One of the complaints I always had during the Cold War was that this was always portrayed as a values conflict, right? The values of the ethical West versus the leaders who wouldn’t allow elections and ruled their people against their will. And we would go as a country and either help keep dictators in power or foist dictators on people because we were afraid that if they were allowed to vote, they might vote for our adversaries. In other words, we were not living up to the very ideals that we claimed the entire ideological conflict was about. For example, one of the parts of George W. Bush’s speech after 9/11 where he talked about the gloves are off, and if you support terrorism you’re in trouble, you’re either with us or against us. And then we’re hands-off a bunch of our allied countries because of oil or whatever you say. Saudi Arabia is the great example for all time, but it’s not the only one. To me, when you let them off the hook, all bets are off. To me, that shows the reality of the situation beyond the talking points. There’s a big difference between what governments, all governments, say they’re doing and what they’re really doing, and I think sometimes we take them at face value too much. The Saudi Arabian thing is a perfect example. If you’re really going to defend Western values and try to take on what you might call radical or deadly Islam for people who think that they’re going to Paradise, don’t you have to say, “We’ve had enough with Saudi Arabia?” And let’s understand something: When I say we take their oil, the people of Saudi Arabia are not the ones getting that oil wealth, unless they’re getting it trickled down indirectly. It’s this cabal of people that we help keep in power who run the country. It’s a very different situation than if Saudi Arabia had free and fair elections and some sort of representative system.
SH: That’s the problem with any of these oil-rich states that can just pull their wealth out of the ground. They can buy off the people and never have to respond to their political concerns.
DC: They flog them! They don’t buy them off, they flog them if they say something against the regime.
SH: Of course. And that’s why very few do. I’m not defending Saudi Arabia at all. I’m just saying that the fact that we can’t do anything other than pay lip service to our values when confronted with Saudi Arabia is a symptom of our abject and unnecessary dependence on oil. If oil were worthless, we could take a very different line with them. I’m not saying we would invade them, because that would be analogous to the other misadventures we’ve had in the Middle East. But we could take a very hard line, whether it was sanctions or just non-collaboration. We could treat them the way the world began to treat South Africa during apartheid.
DC: To go back to the George W. Bush speech, when he said the gloves are off, you’re with us or against us. You’ve got to win this war by shutting down the ideological fountainheads. And when you don’t, it looks like you either don’t want to win the war or you don’t think we can win in this ideological Islamic hearts and minds conflict. If you don’t go to ground zero of the people polluting the hearts and minds and say, “Listen, the first thing that has to stop is this money to these religious schools that tell people they’re going to heaven if they kill an infidel,” right?
SH: That’s certainly part of it, no question. Saudi Arabia has been exporting Wahhabi Islam for decades, and while they’re a minority in the Muslim world, they have captured most of the mosques worldwide.
DC: Yeah, who’s making the textbooks? Exactly.
SH: Yes, they export the literature, they create the madrassas, and it’s all very sinister. Perversely, we’ve been funding both sides of the war on terror. But everything you’ve said here, you’ve put forward as though it muddies the water ethically, and I don’t think it does. It just muddies it practically. Yes, there are dictators we have not been able to distance ourselves from and have even decided to support, simply because they’re the lesser of two evils. Presumably we’d want a better dictator there, even a truly benevolent one. But because there’s not a benevolent one available, we back the one in power, because the alternative would be Islamic theocracy.
DC: But what happens, then, when a people who finally overthrow a government that wouldn’t have been able to stay in power so long without our support—if you believe the old idea that the people will inevitably take power back—what happens when they do? This is the problem we have with Iran. A lot of people made a lot of money and a lot of foreign policy hay by overthrowing the Mohammad Mosaddegh government in 1952/1953. A whole generation of American policymakers benefited from that. The problem is that when they’re dead and gone in 1979, there’s a revolution, and the people who look like the bad guys at that point are the people who kept the regime in power that everyone’s mad at. So long-term, we have modern policymakers paying for the temporary success of past policymakers. And you could say that that’s ancient history and water under the bridge, but we continue to play that same dynamic over and over again.
SH: Yes, it’s a problem, and each place is different. The Arab Spring has been different in different countries. Tunisia is not Egypt or Libya. But, at some point, we have to get a majority of human beings converging on the same basic values and aspirations—and how we work that magic is the problem we’re discussing. I think there are transitional moments where a specific society might not be ready for democracy. If you just open the polls and stain everybody’s finger purple, what you will get is a vote for a Sunni regime that’s going to turn around and kill all the Shia, or vice versa, or be in perpetual war with the West. And if you had engineered things slightly differently, or jus