Author Archives: Doug

MORE FLAK FOR @SamHarrisOrg – or – What’s so special about airports?

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Since Sam Harris published his piece In Defense of Profiling, the internet has piled onto his arguments with rabid fury, prompting him to post an addendum:

Many readers found this blog post stunning for its lack of sensitivity. The article has been called “racist,” “dreadful,” “sickening,” “appalling,” “frighteningly ignorant,” etc. by (former) fans who profess to have loved everything I’ve written until this moment. I find this reaction difficult to understand. Of course, anyone who imagines that there is no link between Islam and suicidal terrorism might object to what I’ve written here, but I say far more offensive things about Islam in The End of Faith and in many of my essays and lectures.

In any case, it is simply a fact that, in the year 2012, suicidal terrorism is overwhelmingly a Muslim phenomenon. If you grant this, it follows that applying equal scrutiny to Mennonites would be a dangerous waste of time.

He goes on to defend some of what he imagines are his key ideas, but I think that he is missing the point even still.

I actually don’t believe for a moment that Sam is racist, and such a simple slander is often lobbed on top of an emotional response in the hope that it carries more weight. Well it doesn’t. I’m sure he accepts the genetic evidence that has demonstrated that we are all much more alike than many expected, and that it is possible for a dark-skinned person to have more in common genetically with a pale-skinned person than two pale-skinned individuals might.

That aside, Sam writes: “Imagine how fatuous it would be to fight a war against the IRA and yet refuse to profile the Irish?”

I hold that this idea is hardly fatuous, but rather a firm moral stand against scapegoat-ism and paranoia.

We should be against profiling for the same reasons that we should have been against Japanese internment camps in W.W. II, or the red-scare McCarthy hearings, or why we should be resisting the “stop and frisk” policy of the New York Police Department today.

In fact, I hold that following Sam’s logic requires that we enact a “stop and frisk” policy against people who appear Muslim (by Sam’s own definition) on a national scale. We must restrict, he seems to say, the rights of a certain subset of Americans, because despite their individuality, they happen to appear Muslim (whatever that means) and in the past, a small group of Muslims attacked us. Now this is a fatuous idea.

Location has no bearing on Sam’s argument. In other words, if we are to distrust Muslims in airports, we should distrust them everywhere – and we must not allow ourselves to believe that. If we do, suddenly an entire innocent population is a potential enemy. Individual liberty, identity, and individual humanity is lost. Fruitful bridges between cultures to promote compassion and understanding are burned. Our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters are no longer innocent until proven guilty, but vice versa. The road from legitimate suspicion to rampant paranoia is very much shorter than we think.

Sam is right to criticize the TSA. It’s hard for many of us to remember a time before our nail files were being taken away and our breast milk tested for petrochemicals, but not so long ago people could board an airplane much the same way they do a bus or a train.

We should ask ourselves – why do we demand such heightened security at airports, and not at bus or train stations, and at the entrances to shopping malls and other densely populated city centers? What is so special about air-travel that makes the danger to passengers so great? Is it the confinement of an airplane? The inability, once airborne, for help to come from outside?

Sam shares the story of how his wife accidentally passed through airport security with 75 rounds of 9mm ammunition in her purse. He is clearly skeptical about the TSA’s effectiveness, so why have the TSA at all? If this was his point, putting the profiling aside, he would have tremendous support (and no, I’m not suggesting he should say something because it’s popular).

We have, of course, 9/11 to thank for the TSA and for paranoia about air-safety. A small group of terrorists have used jet planes as weapons in the past, and people are disproportionally nervous about air travel to begin with, therefore the theater of security is supposed to be reassuring. Yet all of us have heard the statistic that you are far more likely to die on the roads than in the air, and if we think about the danger in terms of potential loss of life, surely a terrorist who de-railed a major passenger train at rush hour could inflict as much death. Fortunately, since the lessons of 9/11, no able bodied passenger today would allow such an incident to escalate if faced with a hostage situation on an airplane. We are our own security, thank you very much.

No Sam, profiling is not the answer. We’ll fight this fight the way we’ve always fought it, with boots on the ground doing hard gumshoe work. No one is suggesting that we have counter-terrorist agents infiltrate a Quaker meeting in an affluent suburb of, I dunno, Portland. However if we are to do so, it will be because hard detective work and evidence has suggested that the people are up to something.

When you suggest discrimination based on physical characteristics to the public, you are assuming that we all have the adequate faculties to distinguish an appropriate suspect from an inappropriate suspect. The cues that I pick up on when I’m riding a New York City subway have little to do with the color of the persons skin of their facial features or the style of clothing that they wear. It is not the type of body that they possess but their body language. Yet I cannot assume that my paranoid neighbor will not mistake a man wearing a Sikh head-wrapping for an Imam.

Sam, you must admit for a moment that there is an aspect of pride which will prevent you from withdrawing your claim or altering it. It is one thing to claim you are willing to change your mind when presented with sufficient evidence, it is another to actually change your mind when presented with an argument that suggests that the issue is far from as settled as you make it out to be.

We all know that there are risks, and I don’t believe we are deluding ourselves as much as Sam implies. We simply believe in the reasonable application of that old maxim, that they who would trade liberty for security deserve neither.

FIRST OF MAY – Three Years Done

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Happy May Day everyone! It’s hard to believe this is the third year that I’ve posted my traditional Bee Gees video to the blog. Relax and enjoy the sultry sounds of the brothers Gibb, and have a great day!

KILL YOUR HEROES – How Star Trek Shows Sam Harris is Wrong

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They say you should never meet your heroes, you’ll always be disappointed. As a former student of cinema, I often caught myself worshipping directors whose work moved me deeply. But as I mixed and mingled with filmmaking professionals over the years, I heard stories that boiled my heart. It seems Spielberg has been known to berate to tears new untested crew members because he can, in what I can only assume is some sort of hazing. Bryan Singer apparently has abused his position to demand sexual favors from attractive male cast and crew. Beyond Hollywood, one example would be the longstanding suggestion that Martin Luther King Jr. was a bit of a womanizer.

This shouldn’t surprise us, really. When people are granted so much money and influence, we should expect all kinds of odd maladaptive or inconsistent behaviour to emerge. I should also note in fairness that people have bad days, show different sides of themselves in different circumstances, and that rumors are just that and nothing more. I try not to judge individuals unless I have had a personal interaction that gives me a true sense of their character.

I love the work of Carl Sagan, and the example set by the character he played when seen on television (and make no mistake, when the cameras are rolling, almost everyone is playing a caricature of themselves). However even with Carl Sagan, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was occasionally arrogant or brash, or in short, human. We should not blindly worship any individual or idea. Our reasons for supporting their cause, work, or art should be based, like anything else, on evidence that it is constructive, ethical, etc.

Now as it relates to the secular movement, a common criticism has been that “new” atheism is a religion as much as any other, with the priests replaced by, among others, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who are blindly followed by their obedient flock. In my experience this may be true of a few, but it is hardly representative. We may get worked up into a bit of a frenzy from time to time and leave our brains aside, but I have no allegiance to Dawkins or Harris or Hitchens or anyone else. They have occasionally presented ideas which I have found useful in informing my own worldview. Some of their works have been truly brilliant in their lucidity, and some are batshit crazy. Sam Harris has just published such a piece.

In his short blog entry In Defense of Profiling, Sam makes no bones about it:

“We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.”

I’ll make no bones about it either – Sam’s piece is an irresponsible assault on our fundamental liberties. We should be against profiling for the same reasons that we should have been against Japanese internment camps in W.W. II, or the red-scare McCarthy hearings, or the notion that gay men should have been interned during the height of the HIV/AIDS panic in the eighties and nineties, or that anyone who looked Arab after 9/11 should have been attacked, or why we should be resisting the “stop and frisk” policy of the New York Police Department today. I can only imagine that Sam was in a heightened state of jet-lag induced frustration and anger to set aside reason and rant so – the style of the piece reads as much.

He is right of course, that the practices of the TSA are largely ludicrous. Yet demanding to pat down, grope, and remove the sandals of a young girl for security reasons (an example he cites) is just as ludicrous as his demand for profiling, and for similar reasons.

I have to ask you to follow me to a place some might feel uncomfortable – the realm of television science fantasy. It so happens that last evening I was watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Drumhead.” It is one of their finest episodes, and requires very little knowledge of the Star Trek canon for its message to be effective. Star Trek has long been recognized as a show that examined closely humanist values, and so I ask you to watch this sequence from “The Drumhead”, and then come on back for a wrapup.

It must be recognized that location has no bearing on Sam’s argument. In other words, if we are to distrust Muslims or those with a middle-eastern appearance in airports, we should distrust them everywhere – and we must not allow ourselves to believe that. If we do, suddenly an entire population is a potential enemy. Individual liberty and individual humanity is lost. Our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters are no longer innocent until proven guilty, but vice versa. “The road from legitimate suspicion to rampant paranoia is very much shorter than we think” indeed.

Sam deserves to receive fervent push-back on his piece, and for what it’s worth, this is my bit. I should also add that a letter against religious profiling was recently signed by a number of religious and secular organizations, including the Center for Inquiry, Council for Secular Humanism, and American Humanist Association. Read it here.