Finally, a debate both worth having and worth listening to.
And obviously I’m not talking about either the Governor or Senate “debates” here in Minnesota. Until they give awards for bland and stultifying the four main combatants in those fights will go unrewarded and ignored for their powers of inspiration. (See Joe’s post on that issue.)
But the face off between Bill Maher and actor Ben Affleck on Maher’s HBO show last weekend was a far .. far … more provocative beast. Week in and week out Maher’s panel is invariably the most compelling “debate” moment on TV, for the simple reason that unlike the DC talk shows, “Meet the Press”, etc., his cast of characters doesn’t include John McCain and glaze-inducing, market-tested “messaging” gets slapped down with unabashed glee. (Here’s a link to a Salon follow-up with Maher.)
The topic last weekend was the liberal misconception that being a liberal means being open and accepting of anyone’s beliefs, without skepticism or criticism. The fact that Affleck missed that point and leapt immediately to charges of racism is what made the moment so interesting. Liberal v. liberal. Hollywood traditional variety v. envelope-tearing.
Specifically, Maher and atheist author Sam Harris (“The End of Faith”, which I highly recommend), were arguing the point that while, yes, organized religion in general is not something they regard as, shall we say, an evolutionary advantage, Islam is a particular problem. Arguably the most conservative of all the world’s major religions, with exclusion, restriction and intolerance toward women, gays and non-believers baked (or widely misinterpreted) into its central tenets, Islam’s propensity to affirm violence currently compares with the worst excesses of Christianity, Judaism and whatever else, which for those up on The Inquisition, the Crusades and the routine invocations of God at every call to battle is really saying something.
Maher and Harris make the point that being a liberal means having a responsibility to identify and speak out against intolerance in whatever form it appears, even when it comes wrapped in the supposedly sacrosanct cloak of another person/culture’s “faith”, i.e. whatever they choose to believe. Affleck the Hollywood heavyweight, instinctively playing the mass audience card, lost barely a second conflating this argument with racism and white fear of inherently violent, gun-wielding blacks.
You can watch the interaction for yourself, but what is on display is very traditional liberal thinking (Affleck’s), where true liberals take a maternal attitude toward all cultures and beliefs, essentially on the grounds that it is antithetical to “liberal values” to making large scale criticisms of any culture (Islam being more culture than race, despite Affleck’s knee jerk inter-mingling with racial bigotry). Put another way, freedom of religion means that if they say they’re doing it because they believe it is the word of God who are we to disagree?
By contrast Maher and Harris are arguing, what for them at least, and I tend to agree, is a kind of Liberalism 2.0. An upgrade in both critical thinking and public courage that says today’s liberals, fully cognizant of science, evolution, modernity and an inter-connected planet, have a responsibility to call out intolerance wherever they see it, regardless of its time-honored, “divinely-ordained” trappings and self-righteousness.
I don’t hear either Maher or Harris arguing for some kind of secular jihad against Muslims. Far from it. Respite from the millennia of religion-sanctioned violence is their overall objective.
What they are saying is that if you are as committed to the full rights of women and minorities as you say you are, you seize opportunities to argue that suppressing those rights is never acceptable. As in anywhere by anyone, a professed religiosity be damned. This applies to cynical cultural/religious conservatives in the United States and no less cynical, self-serving mullahs abroad.
The ironic bind, which makes liberals of Affleck’s ilk jump the tracks, is that a call for a reasoned, sustained protest against religious-inspired intolerance sounds like a call for … intolerance.
And that is part of what makes this debate so interesting and vital. It would do liberals a world of good to argue out this point.
I watch Maher regularly. He and Sam Harris consistently paint ALL Muslims with the broad brush of extremism. The point supposedly being made by Bill and Sam last Friday was the perceived liberal failures in decrying treatment of women , etc. in Islam. In reality , it was just an opportunity for another rant against Muslims…period.
If you haven’t seen this video, it might be worth your while.
My response to Maher and Harris using a broad brush is that there appears to be some basis for their argument that intolerant, arch-conservative forces have a stronger hold over modern Islam than other major religions. I’ve seen the polls they refer to in the Affleck debate, not that polling is an infallible science.
Despite the flap Aslan walked into with his recent book, which branded him as some kind of a radical leftist to the usual suspects, I see him as a fairly traditional thinker, certainly not someone inclined to publicly entertain the possibility that a major religion is so resistant to modernity that it still believes depriving women and minorities is a divinely-ordained tenet.
Ask Salman Rushdie and others if they think Islam is an obstacle to the evolution of full freedom for all, i.e. “liberal values”.
As a Muslim living in the Middle East, I can assure you that your statement that there is “some basis” supporting Maher’s contentions is, at best, uninformed. He said the majority of Muslims want others dead because of their beliefs. That is patently false. And as a religion, Islam treats women much better than the extremists (and Fox News) would have you believe. Practices often attributed to religion are, more often than not, rooted in culture and not Islam.
Well, I don’t know, Dave. I’ve seen the polling out of western Europe and it isn’t flattering to the Islamic majority. The polls could be BS, but there is, it seems to me, (and Maher-Harris) that there’s a conservatism inherent in Islam that while it is rivaled by other religions – ultra-orthodox Judaism, take-your-pick of Christian subsets — has/is providing moral shelter for an appalling level of intolerance. You say Islam “treats women better”, which to my ear comes with a paternal tone, where the male is directed/obligated to extend a special level of respect to the less empowered female. My argument would be that in a culture based on equality as a fundamental tenet there’s no need to offer assurances than women are treated as equals, because the question never even comes up.
And I’d be happy to learn where that “culture based on equality” exists. Certainly not the U.S. (And it is “David,” not “Dave.”)
Quite frankly, I think there are a whole lot of “Christians” who are obstacles to the full freedom for all…and that definitely includes women.
Absolutely true … as Maher and Harris have argued on countless occasions. A central criticism of organized religions is how their prelates (and Islam has no centralized control over their’s) have abused basic concepts of trust, honesty, charity, equality etc. As outrageous as the extremes of Christianity and other religions have been in the past (and still are today, some argue) the minority of Muslims who accept/condone/practice open intolerance and second-class status for women, gays and so on is larger and more problematic for world culture today than similar sub-groups within other major religions. Hence their comments. “Good liberals” have a problem with appearing “impolite”.
It sounds like an interesting debate, with Affleck taking the extreme post-modernist viewpoint–which, by the way, has been entrenched in many universities now for at least a couple of decades.
Many contemporary scholars of culture and consciousness point out that we’re ready to move on into post post-modernism, whatever that may end up being. The fact that people are having debates like this may be a sign of that.
It should be a wider debate, and as both Maher and Harris have argued, include an honest assessment of the value of all organized religions. Spirituality is one thing. “The Church” is something else entirely. But this Affleck-Maher debate presents traditional liberals with the intellectual/ethical question of whether they’re being drawn over to the side of bigotry and intolerance, or whether they’re stepping up to make a stand against intolerance on a grand scale. While I tend to agree with Maher-Harris that modern Islam “is a mess”, lacking anything like an internal hierarchy to correct the worst excesses of zealots (like, you know, the Vatican … ), I’m just as interested is seeing if there is any appetite for the debate. To my mind “liberal values” means an openness to honest discussions of provocative subject matter.
The difficulty with debate has been that those who engage in extreme post-modernist cultural discourse are as intolerant as those they criticize for intolerance, championing a broad no-questions-asked tolerance which they do not extend to those with whom they disagree. Ken Wilber, in his book “A Brief History of Everything,” calls this p-m error “performative contradiction.”
I’m not sure we’re ready for debate yet, judging from the extreme emotionalism triggered by the Maher-Affleck confrontation. But maybe we’re ready to get ready for it.
Fantastic post, Brian. Very thought provoking.
Liberals like me get very nervous about painting groups with too broad of a brush (unless they’re right wingers). We’re lovable that way. But when I look at this Pew survey, I wonder if I have been painting Muslims with too narrow of a brush, by thinking acceptance of murderous acts are limited to “a few extremists.” When a huge swath of any population won’t rule out honor killings for pre- or extra-marital sex (e.g. three-fourths in Afghanistan, two-thirds in Iraq, half in Palestine, etc.) , that doesn’t look like a “narrow band of extremists.”
Pew is pretty reputable, but I sure hope it is somehow wrong.
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-morality/