Separating Ideologies from Individuals

How to Win the War of Ideas

On December 7th, 2018 Sam Harris and Deeyah Khan discussed intolerance, hatred, and how to change people’s minds on Episode 144 of the Making Sense Podcast. It was a great podcast worth listening to in its entirety, but this post will focus on what I find to be the most important subject addressed: What is the best way to combat bad ideas?

Put simply, the main disagreement in this discussion arose from different ideas on how to affect change. Harris argued that you must attack bad ideologies — attack hateful and dangerous ideas themselves — because ideas drive behavior. You can logically deconstruct an idea and bring someone to a more rational and humanistic worldview. If you can change someone’s mind, you can alter their actions and behavior.

Khan sees that tactic of attacking sets of ideas as an alienating and ineffective one. She instead seeks to address whatever root issues lead someone to adopt an extreme ideology. She sees forces like economic disadvantage and feelings of powerlessness as being channeled into ideologies of hate as an outlet. Ideally, she would see such suffering alleviated, which would in her mind take away the impetus for people to get swept up in bad ideologies.

Since it is unlikely that we can end all suffering in the world, her primary tactic for changing minds is humanization. In her film “White Right”, Khan sits and talks empathetically with white supremacists, and in doing so demonstrates to them the common humanity of all people. In some cases, she even finds them renouncing their hateful beliefs after a few conversations.

In this way, Khan’s second method for changing minds is by attacking false beliefs at their emotional foundation via humanization. This is in contrast to attacking their rational foundations, as Harris would suggest. If a white supremacist has channeled negative emotion into an ideology of hatred and then finds himself staring into the eyes of a Muslim and not feeling any negative emotions, that ideology can crumble.

So the question becomes which of these views is more accurate? Is behavior driven from the top down as Harris suggests, with bad ideologies leading to bad actions? Or, as Khan would argue, is it simply the seeds of suffering, dissatisfaction, and ignorance that blossom outward into hateful actions?

And regardless of where these ideas come from, is it better to attack with reason or emotion? With logic or human connection?

How do you best combat bad ideas?

Pragmatism vs Idealism

This nuanced debate revolves around matters of balance. When is the right time to attack an ideology, or when might an attack on ideology have too great a negative impact on innocent people? One of Khan’s returning arguments against Harris is the fact that attacking entire ideologies leads to collateral damage. If you criticize the doctrine of Islam because it has the potential to lead to extremism, some will misinterpret that as a criticism of every single Muslim. Khan believes that kind of generalization may help fuel hatred and discrimination to entire groups of people instead of just the extremists.

In the short term view, I can see how the potential negative impact, like an increase in hate crimes and anti-muslim sentiment from those who are ignorant, could seem like too great of a cost for taking some well-deserved jabs at Islam. However, even in the short term, the negative impacts of the religious doctrine as it is (honor-killings, repression, the denial of basic rights to women and homosexuals, etc.) are terrible enough to warrant an all-out attack on certain tenants of Islam. Allowing these bad ideas to reign unchecked has too high of a cost even when just considering the immediate future.

That said, my intuition is to put greater value in the long term view. In the end, we can never really say when is the best time to attack ideologies (certain religious doctrines, racism, intolerance) that hinder the human race in flourishing over time. Some ideas simply need to be criticized, and we cannot be sure there will ever be a perfect opportunity to criticize that would not lead to some collateral damage for those who interact with the ideas in a more rational and harmless way.

The future is inherently uncertain. In that vein, it is important to recognize that there is always the possibility of dangerous doctrines spreading even farther than they are now. One bad idea in a religious text could influence human behavior enough to alter the course of history in a horrible way. One repressive idea could lead to dangerous and catastrophic restrictions on basic human rights and important values like freedom of speech.

As philosophers argue on the matter of existential risk: even if there is only a small chance of a world-ending event occurring, that small chance deserves an inordinate amount of attention because of the magnitude of the potential negative outcomes. That same concept can be applied to dangerous ideas like White Supremacy or the denial of rights to women spreading out of control and leading to dystopian futures.

When you are dealing with the future conscious experience of every living thing that will ever exist, you have to take even low-probability threats seriously. Every day on this planet, people plan their days based on ideas and stories written down thousands of years ago. A bad idea in a religious or philosophical text has the power to impact the world for millennia, and so criticizing and reforming ideologies is a matter of the utmost importance.

To direct that at Khan’s specific point about the focusing of criticisms at Islam causing more hate crimes and discrimination for Muslims, sadly it is best framed in terms of collateral damage. As heartless as that may feel viscerally, the harm that Islamic ideas cause most Muslims (repression of women and homosexuals, honor killings, denials of human rights, and in some cases extremist terrorism) is far greater than the harm caused by hate crimes and anti-Muslim sentiment.

This is difficult to intuit. It is much easier to put a name and a face to the instances of hate crimes and discrimination. They seem to be of greater moral salience, but in the end, that is a product of the limited capacity of the human brain. An all-encompassing view of the issue would show that the harms caused every day by bad religious doctrine, and the potential harms it poses for the future, make it absolutely worth attacking now.

The Sounds of Silence

Another issue is the tension that builds up when people are not free to criticize bad ideas. Norms and pressures around not talking honestly about the problems with bad ideologies empower those who are willing to voice difficult truths. Those people who still speak their mind often hold far more extreme and intolerant views than the average person.

By having a rational but unpopular position on one issue (like discussing the worst parts of the Quran or Bible) one can get a foot in the door, catching people’s attention and gaining credibility. They then have an opportunity to spread irrational and intolerant ideas, convincing people who would otherwise have never listened in the first place.

By being too worried about the anti-Muslim sentiment that criticizing Islam might produce, we empower and strengthen the extreme far right. We give a grain of credibility to someone that has one or two correct talking point and a thousand terrible ones. People who then actively stoke far more anti-Muslim sentiment (and therefore action) than would ever come from someone like Sam Harris talking about the flaws in Islam honestly.

Humanization

While I think her emphasis may be skewed, Khan is absolutely correct that more representation is necessary to help humanize people from the “outgroup” and mitigate intolerance and hatred. There is great power in novels and movies to provide a humanizing window into the life of someone different than yourself. Depicting someone complexly and emphasizing their humanity has the power to mitigate the fear and intolerance that too often arise toward someone unfamiliar. For example, I thought the movie Coco was a brilliant and humanizing portrayal of a Mexican family in a time in U.S. history where anti-Mexican sentiments were sadly on the rise.

I think representation is one important and effective way to reduce the collateral damage of criticizing harmful tenants of Islam. However, it is not a replacement. Emotion is a very useful tool, but some will still need to be convinced logically. Talking rationally about Islam or White Supremacy is important for combatting the behaviors these ideas encourage. Appeals to emotion and logic can be used synergistically.

Additionally, even if appeals to reason are not the most effective way to combat bad ideas, they are important for directing our attention and efforts. It is important to carefully consider the merit of beliefs so we can better decide which ideas need to be challenged. From that point, you can attack with emotion, reason, or preferably both.

Returning to the Source

Another point that Khan made multiple times is that the Muslims that carry the archaic ideas in the Quran, like the hatred of homosexuality, are the minority. Unfortunately, there is simply no evidence for that. Many polls like this one seem to show differently, and homosexuality is a crime in the vast majority of Middle Eastern countries that are predominantly Muslim.

At the end of the day, even if it is only the minority that is holding onto terrible views, the doctrine itself still needs to be attacked. Since the texts, the dogma, that all of the intolerance is based around explicitly tout hateful ideas, the possibility of backsliding into intolerance is always there, and likely. The fundamentalists who argue for intolerance have the weight and authority of the religious text itself to support them. Those trying to reform the religion from the inside are always fighting an uphill battle. Reformers have to appeal to compassion and reason, but it is difficult to gain ground when you are contradicting what are supposed to be infallible documents. Those preaching the most archaic interpretations of an ideology will always have the upper hand.

The Problem with Intuition

At the very end of the podcast, Khan commits a major moral fallacy by saying “you just need to meet more Muslims”. She implies that Harris does not have a humanizing view of Muslims, a grasp on their beliefs, and is too heartless to the collateral damage of good people.

No matter how many anecdotal encounters you have, you need to work with facts, and with the ideology itself.

This moral fallacy of only considering the individual human is dangerous because it lacks the balance we need. It is easy to be, rightfully, concerned by the genuinely rational and tolerant people who are unjustly grouped with the problematic parts of a religion. It is natural to be appalled by the risk of violence and intolerance that those people face when the religion they subscribe to is criticized. However, we cannot let that empathy blind us to the bigger picture and the need for balance.

As Sam Harris always says, we are in a perpetual war of ideas. Ideas are the “engines of behavior” and we need to explicitly connect the atrocities perpetrated by a believer with the idea that led them to act. Some people’s understandable empathy leads them to reject that there may be some necessary collateral damage in this all-important war of ideas.

The Myth of Good People and Bad People

Some people may get lost in this debate if they subscribe to the fallacy that there are good people and bad people. I cannot emphasize this enough: we should not hate or fear anyone for holding a destructive or intolerant set of beliefs. We should not hate or fear anyone for anything that they believe. The world we live in has billions of people who are trying to live the best lives they can while operating under the ideas that are convincing to them through no choice of their own. Again, ideas are the engines of behavior.

In regards to the problem of religious extremism, it is imperative to loosen the false intuition that “bad people are going to do bad things”. Instead, we must accept the massive role of ideas in guiding behavior. This is where the two sides of this issue best synergize.

Khan is right that some circumstances will make people more likely to adopt dangerous ideas. If someone is unemployed, angry, depressed, and isolated they are more likely to join a terrorist group such as ISIS. We should do everything we can to alleviate the suffering of all people in the world, and to provide better outlets for negative emotion. But we also have to realize that those emotions are not the sole cause.

As Harris argues, there are many examples of people with fantastic economic and social stability being captivated by the ideas of ISIS. A significant number of ISIS recruits are doctors and medical students, just to use one example of a “successful” group still being influenced by bad ideas, even without a significant oppressive impetus driving them toward those ideas.

Even for those who do find groups like ISIS or the Ku Klux Klan primarily because of their personal anger and frustration, we need to also attack the different outlets that those emotions might get channeled into. Even if the primary reason for a young man joining ISIS isn’t that he thinks their mission is rational and just, it is possible to make that path less attractive by poking holes in the poor logic of religious fundamentalism.

For at least the near future, negative emotions and unfortunate circumstances will be an unavoidable part of life. We need to do what we can to make the worst outlets for those emotions (religious fundamentalism, white nationalism) as unappealing as possible. That requires attacking bad ideas.

Conclusion

While Khan is wise to recognize many of the drives of human behavior come from negative emotion, and is doing great work in humanizing those that some think of as “other”, she is too dismissive of the power of ideas.

The world is in a perpetual war of ideas. We have to fight for the ideas of humanism and tolerance, and we have to fight against ideas of hatred and intolerance. Most importantly, we have to separate ideologies from individuals.

The inability to do this happens all too frequently. Famously, Ben Affleck attacked Sam Harris as a racist on an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher in 2014. Unfortunately, Harris is often unfairly maligned in this way by people who do not understand that a person is not equal to their beliefs. Affleck could not even see that calling Harris a “racist” was completely illogical since Harris is criticizing a set of ideas, Islam, not a group of people; Ideas that can be held by people of any nationality or ethnicity. Again: ideologies are separate from individuals.

People’s beliefs can change. There are no “good people” or “bad people”, there are simply people whose behavior is driven by the ideas that they find convincing. Rationality, discussion, and free speech are the best tools we have to combat bad ideas. By changing beliefs, we can change behavior.