Sam Harris had an article in yesterday’s LA Times titled, “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals,
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists” (Hat tip: Kevin Drum). He argues that liberals don't accept that Muslim extremists are people who want to destroy the West. According to Harris, liberals are most willing to empathize with them than with the people who are doing everything possible to fight them. Here is the Money quote:
At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.
Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.[…]We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.
Before making those criticisms, Sam Harris asserted that he is a liberal as if confessing that sin made his arguments more relevant and more convincing. What irritates me about Sam Harris’s criticisms is the fact that he is willingly choosing to put liberals on the side of the Muslim extremists to delegitimate and to misrepresent the point of view. Harris is in fact saying that the larger truth of our century so far is that Western civilization is under attack and anybody who disagree about the characterization of the struggle and about the way for the West to survive has her/his head in the Sand. I know that in difficult times, people always want simple answers and that complexity is unappealing in those times precisely because it rejects simplicity and refuses to react without thinking things through. After reading Harris’s article one gets the impression that because liberals aren’t willing to ruthless are denying the significance and even fact that 9/11 happened and are stuck in a time where they believe that all we need is love. Every time, I read an op-ed such as the one of Sam Harris, which is so viciously wrong that it makes me want to throw up, I think of Camus and of one of his most famous quote, “Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.”
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