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I might as well launch this series on [potential] 5GW Warriors with a link to a video I watched for the first time tonight showing a man, a stage, an audience, and memes at work recontextualizing religious belief.
I don’t know much about Sam Harris, although I’ve caught occasional references while surfing the Blogosphere. A little reading tonight confirms one impression I had while watching the video: Harris must surely be a controversial figure. Although very open to the reality and benefit of spirituality and ethics, he is hostile toward organized religious belief and considers the “closed-book” cognitive approach to be a very dangerous aspect of modern societies. However dangerous religious fundamentalism may be, in his estimation religious moderation may be even worse, simply because religious moderates tend to have no ability to see the fundamentalist belief system for what it is and thus allow the fundamentalists free rei(g)n.
One might wonder, as we have often wondered on D5GW, whether a 5GWarrior must always work clandestinely or may operate openly as Sam Harris operates. Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett is another figure who brings the question to the forefront, and I suppose Bill Gates should not be dismissed from consideration, either. Perhaps in a future update to this post or in an entirely other post I might address the question more thoroughly. For now, I want to present a consideration of Sam Harris in three parts: a) the video, b) some key quotes from the video that may bear on the subject of 5GW theory, and c) a few extra thoughts inspired by the video and the man. For a biography and deeper look at Sam Harris, I suggest searching through Google (although possibly, future posts on D5GW may dig deeper.)
ideaCity ‘05
The video is an appearance at the 2005 ideaCity Conference held in Toronto and seems to address the core of Sam Harris’ arguments (given, admittedly, my limited knowledge of the man.)[Sorry to those who do not have broadband connections; but you can check out the media page on Sam Harris’ website for a downloadable copy (that will take forever to download on a dial-up connection…An audio-only MP3 can also be downloaded.)]
Key Quotes
On [viral] discourse:
“We do not respect people’s beliefs. We evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons, and reasons are contagious.”
On religious fundamentalism and religious moderation:
“Another problem with religious moderation is that, it’s not only intellectually bankrupt, it is theologically bankrupt, because the fundamentalists have actually read the books, and they’re right about them.”
“Once we dignify the claim that the Bible or the Qu’ran (conspicuously) is a book, is a communication that is fundamentally different from any other book — be it the plays of Shakespeare or the Illiad — these books are not literature; they are the best books we have, in moral terms…Once we dignify those claims, we are really hostage to their contents.”
On the roots of Islamic extremism: Intelligence vs belief:
“ ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with religion; this is economics, it’s lack of educational opportunities.’ — I don’t know how many more engineers and architects have to hit the wall at 400 miles-an-hour for us to realize this is not simply a matter of education. The truth of our circumstance is quite a bit more sinister than that. It is actually possible to be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb and still believe that you’re going to get the 72 virgins. That’s how balkanized our discourse is; and that’s how easily partitioned the human mind is.”
In summation:
“I just want to say that whatever is true spiritually and ethically about our circumstance — there are no doubts that there are spiritual truths, there are spiritual experiences human beings can have, and there are ethical truths — whatever is true about that has to transcend culture. It has to transcend our cultural differences.”
“The endgame for civilization is not political correctness and tolerating all manner of absurdity. It is reason and reasonableness and an openness to evidence.”
[Extra Thoughts]
Incidentally, I’ve lately been re-reading portions of The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins (1989 edition), and I am struck by a convergence of thinking between Dawkins and Harris I most certainly wouldn’t have noticed if I had not also recently watched this video. [True, as you can see on Harris’ front page at his site, Dawkins is one of his fans…] While considering symbiosis between species in Chapter 10 of that edition, Dawkins launched into a consideration of the way slightly differently evolved members of a single species might interrelate, borrowing from the classical Prisoner’s Dilemma line of theory but also considering Evolutionary Stable Strategies, or ESS.
Dawkins considered three types of ‘players’: Suckers, Cheaters, and Grudgers. Suckers are always altruistic in their behavior toward their brethren, regardless of whether their helpful favors are returned; Cheaters will happily benefit from the activities of Suckers, but never return the favors; and Grudgers use memory of the actions of other players to decide whether to do something helpful for them. Once burned by a player, the Grudgers will spurn that player; but if helped, they will grudgingly return the favor.
On the subject of Harris’ argument concerning religious belief and the limits placed on discourse, as these play out, we might say:
Religious Moderates are Suckers
Religious Fundamentalists are Cheaters.
That is, the religious moderates enable and help the religious fundamentalists as a matter of course and in practice:
- “They [everyone] can believe what they want; their belief is entirely up to them, a personal matter; it’s their right to believe however they want.”
— but the religious fundamentalists will not return that favor:
- “Religious ‘moderates’ are really relativists; their belief is wrong, because there is only one belief accepted by God, the True Faith, and the ‘moderates’ will not acknowledge this.”
At least, this is the impression I have of Harris’ definition of these two groups of thinkers. More to the point: His warnings about the power of religious fundamentalists, and the threat posed by such fundamentalism, would have some basis from a theoretical viewpoint, vis-a-vis Dawkins’ consideration of ESS, since a population with both Suckers and Cheaters will ultimately benefit the Cheaters far more — until, perhaps, all Suckers disappear:
The average pay-off for both suckers and cheats will be less than that for any individual population of 100 per cent suckers. But still, cheats will be doing better than suckers because they are getting all the benefits — such as they are — and paying nothing back. When the proportion of cheats reaches 90 per cent, the average pay-off for all individuals will be very low: many of both types may by now be dying off of the infection carried by the ticks [ed. — i.e., not enough are left to find a helpful head-scratcher!]. But still the cheats will be doing better than the suckers. Even if the whole population declines toward extinction, there will never be any time when suckers do better than cheats. Therefore, as long as we consider only these two strategies, nothing can stop the extinction of the suckers and, very probably, the extinction of the whole population too.But what about a Harrisian Grudger? Dawkins considered a population that included the third type as well, and argued that a population of Grudgers might start very small and ultimately go extinct in the three-way competition, but if they gained a sufficient number, they would go on to dominate the system (as judged by population size and ESS strength.) I will leave greater speculation concerning what a Grudger might be from Harris’ viewpoint to others; but I will suggest one possibility.[Dawkins, from The Selfish Gene.]
In the video but not quoted here, near the end, Harris suggested the necessity for continually open discourse and open minds; or, you might say, minds willing to expand or be expansive; i.e., minds that have “openness to evidence.” These might be individuals who have beliefs but will grudgingly give up those beliefs, or alter them, when presented with compelling evidence supporting the beliefs held by others. However, this possible Harrisian Grudger does not quite fit the definitional dynamic I gave to the Harrisian Cheater and Harrisian Sucker, since both of those are defined by an acceptance of the legitimacy of beliefs not founded on evidence; but Harris categorically rejects such belief for his better world, and I would have a hard time defining a Grudger who won’t even grudgingly accept unsubstantiated beliefs. [I am tempted to say that Harris’ Grudger is really a Montaigne-Pyrrhonian; but I’m not sure he would agree and, in any case, I should probably not make that leap just yet!]
So the actual Grudger in this ménage à trois would probably be that believer who allows for unsubstantiated beliefs when meeting another Grudger who will do the same for him, but not for Cheaters: religious fundamentalists are out (really, only reduced to the fringe), but perhaps loose and largely temporary, shifting, back-scratching faith-networks form, in which people hop from one such network to the other as easily as changing jobs every few months or a year. If we step outside the theological box, we might see this sort of thing happening already.
I had many more thoughts inspired by the video, but have spent more space than I originally intended on the Selfish Gene tie-in! So I’m cutting it off after this. However, I couldn’t pass up a chance to link the above coinages to Dan tdaxp’s recent post, “Attractive and Repulsive Paradigms.”
Let’s consider the possibility that fundamentalists are like specialists in fields of study — whole groups are balkanized in relationship to each other; there are insular groups — but also let’s consider the possibility that each person’s mind is partitioned, balkanized. So, for instance, we might continue our tying-in by considering how easily a balkanized mind might hop, skip, and jump around the playing field —
— without ever really settling down for long. What would be the long-term effects, not only for any such given individual, but also for a society made up of many individuals who do this?
I shan’t go further right now, with this thought, although I’ll note that I saved that image from Dan’s site to my local folder titled “Static” before uploading it to D5GW.
Posted by Curtis Gale Weeks on Mar 22, 2007 07:20 AM
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7 Comments
Curtis, this is off topic, but I’ve emailed you about the troubles at Erato. I’m thinking of founding a successor site, and I wonder whether you could help.
Sam Harris may be a worthwhile 5GW warrior, but I believe the ultimate trans-generational warrior is Mel Gibson. Consider his activities across the spectrum of warfare: “0GW” in Braveheart (mob mentality); 1GW in The Patriot (regimented interior lines); 2GW in Gallipoli (massed fires); 3GW in We Were Soldiers (maneuver doctrine); and 4GW in Mad Max (anything goes). My question for your esteemed colleagues is: what Mel movie best represents 5GW? “Apocalypto”? “Last Temptation of the Christ”? (OK, he didn’t star — but close enough…) Or maybe something far more focused on exploiting the enemy’s network, like “Ransom” or “Payback”? Your thoughts?
So if cheaters are fundamentalist, does that make the Episcopalians cheaters?
Dan,
I must confess, you are confusing me.
“If cheaters are fundamentalists” is either an accidental ordering of the ideas mentioned in the post, or an intentional, ulteriorly-motivated re-contextualization of them. Either way, I think that your link and sparsely-worded rhetorical positioning is too clever by half, and likely to go over more heads than my own.
Perhaps you didn’t get the part where I linked the suckers-cheaters dynamic to Sam Harris’ argument, trying to put his view of a certain type of conflict or interaction before such a lens? As such, the area in the post where I address cheaters, suckers, fundamentalists, and religious moderates does not attempt a definitional discourse but rather a merely exploratory one.
In any case, following up on the metaphor… It would appear that the Anglicans are the Cheaters and the Episcopalians are the Grudgers.
— i.e., the Anglicans would have the Episcopalians adhere to the Anglican belief and are unwilling to consider anything other than that fundamental belief; but the Episcopalians, seeing the cheat, after previously being in alliance, are turning away from the cheater. The Cheaters in this scenario would be happy to use pawns to further their own belief — Episcopalians, gays — but the Grudgers are open to having their belief systems altered: not only away from the Anglican position, but also by reasonable gays and lesbians.
deichmans,
A weird line of reasoning, at first; but then I thought:
Given the sort of preparation some actors use for ‘becoming’ their roles, Mel Gibson’s acting career might have served him as an educational tool for understanding the generational warfare model — albeit probably more subconsciously than consciously unless he’s also taken such a view of his own career and added 2 + 2. He is an intellectual man, so maybe he’s drawn an abstract trend line?
Curtis,
Actually, this is what I was wondering about. (If I am using your concepts too early in their development, please correct me.)
The Anglican Communion’s request was that both methods of church organization be tolerated within the Episcopol Church. The EC’s response is that only their OneTrueWay may be allowed within the national boundaries of the United States. In the scnearior, the AC is attempting to allow both methods, while the EC is insisting on their universal, exclusionary ethical code.
To me, the EC comes across as absolutist, because they believe that all churches under their control must behave in one way, while the AC comes across as contextualist, as they encourage local churches to behave as they think is wise.
Dan,
I am working on developing my own concepts, but discussions like these help me. With the consideration in the post, I mostly used the metaphor to understand how Sam Harris views the moderates-fundamentalists dynamic; so it was a narrow consideration, involving only the two groups, Suckers and Cheaters, to put his conceptualization into another context — although I did extend it when I began to wonder how he might see Grudgers in the context of belief systems. If we kept to the Sam Harris view, I think we would need to say that he’d view the ECs as another group of religious fundamentalists, since they adhere to the Bible, however they interpret it. (In the video, he makes clear his own belief that the Bible can be interpreted in various ways, with some passages overlooked and others emphasized, on the basis of belief rather than evidence and reason.) However, I’m not sure of that, and I’m curious to know what he would think of the EC’s recent vote.
You have drawn out the metaphor by applying it to a context outside that video and Sam Harris; I’m game (obviously), but would keep in mind that we’ve entered into an area beyond that addressed by the original metaphor, although maybe (so, okay) the post also stepped somewhere beyond that area. I’m not sure that you and I are standing within the same circle, even if we’ve both moved beyond a consideration of Sam Harris.
Would you consider the following to be accurate?
The Episcopal Church actually had a vote which resulted in a majority opinion, but that vote would be nullified if the Anglican Communion had their way: The individual Episcopal churches in the minority could follow a different rule-set. (I’m assuming that other issues beyond the GLBT issue would be affected if an Anglican substitute leadership for those churches would not have to answer to the leadership of the Episcopal Church.) A U.S. analogy might be that some U.S. states could opt out of clauses in the U.S. Constitution if they found clauses in the UN Charter more favorable to them — if, that is, the U.S. government were forced to sign off on changes to the UN Charter a majority of U.S. States did not like. A better analogy might be: a minority of U.S. States could answer to a UN substitute for the President if their preferred candidate, who wanted to follow UN policies to a “T”, lost the general election.
But what about a different comparison?
The Anglican Communion may want the minority of Episcopal conservative churches to decide for themselves their manner of operation within the church; and the Episcopal Church, as expressed in a majority vote, may want GLBT Episcopalians to be able to decide for themselves the roles they wish to play in their churches.
That last may not make a full comparison. We might need to consider another.
The Anglican Communion would, if it could, dictate the choice-making limits of the Episcopal Church, just as individual conservative churches within the EC would dictate the choice-making limitations of GLBT Episcopalians.
Is it a matter of metrics — of what will be measured — in deciding Cheater status? A U.S. analogy would have us asking who is to have ultimate say: The Federal government, the State governments, the Individual? You seem to be saying that the altruistic-leaning AC wants to increase the range of those choice-making limits for individual Episcopalian churches, which reminds me of a period in the U.S. when the federal government passed resolutions allowing some states to choose slavery and others to reject slavery within their own borders. I.e., that the mid-range choice maker should have the power to decide its best interests while not returning the favor to the top-level or bottommost-level decision maker.
Except — there’s a fairly big difference, since an individual may more easily leave a church, any church, than leave a nation-state or state (even if those can be left as well), particularly in our society where state and Church are not inseparable. GLBT Episcopalians could actually leave the Episcopalian Church and/or conservative E. churches and form their own or find a liberal E. church — or, the conservative Episcopalian churches could leave the EC — or, the EC could leave the Anglican Communion behind.
But the reason I focused on the Cheater status of the AC is this: That they would dictate how the EC must operate, unwilling to change themselves to allow the EC to open its policies to enable the GLBT Episcopalian to have greater choice-making capabilities. The seven of 111 diocese of the EC who wanted alternative leadership are aligned with the AC in this purpose: they would gain the benefit which nearness to the other 104 would offer by subverting the choice-making capability not only of those 104 but also of individual GLBT Episcopalians. If you read the actual resolutions, you will see that the EC wishes to remain in fellowship with the AC despite differences, or, that is, to have an on-going dialogue; whereas, the AC more or less says there can be no on-going dialogue but only their way. You should note the differences that I see:
The EC is not attempting to dictate AC leadership standards or policies, etc., but proclaiming its own rights. This is not what the AC is attempting to do.
However, consideration of what happens in a population that is high in Cheaters is interesting: I mean, if none ever willingly helps out another — besides the few Suckers and Grudgers also in the population — how might competing Cheaters act toward each other? By this question, I’m not implying, necessarily, that the AC and EC are both Cheater Orgs; but all these other considerations made me ponder that question…as well as other types of interaction.