The end of faith: Religion, terror and the end of reason
by Noel Rooney
[ bookreviews ]
This is a curiosity: the end of faith like the end of history, a Fukuyama-esque festival of serendipity? Not quite; Harris sees dystopia looming, and faith can't end fast enough for him. The end of religion then? Also no, but we have to wait for a mystical twist in the tale before that revelation. In fact, you could be halfway through this book without realising that it's not actually the manifesto of an anarcho-capitalist with a larger than usual dose of islamophobia.
Harris' opening gambits are infelicitous in other ways too, and will alienate a good number of potentially sympathetic readers. His description of a suicide bomber (which leads by presumption to a young Muslim, "naturally") wouldn't look out of place in a Samuel Huntington treatise (Harris occasionally quotes Huntington, usually with approval). Ignoring the history of suicide bombing - a practice begun by communists (that'd be atheists, then) and, even in contemporary Palestine, often carried out by secularist organisations as well as religious - makes Harris look like a run-of-the-mill uninformed polemicist. Which he isn't. Possibly.
Faith, particularly but not exclusively the religious variety, is the dangerous dog in the multi-cultural manger; this is Harris' big message. Here, I think, is his first category error; Harris is attacking not faith per se, but a peculiar variant of it, a delusion common to all the children of the Book (and one which divides them from each other as well as the rest of the world): that we own the exclusive truth because God wrote it down for us in a book, and since our book is the truth, the others must be wrong, however much all our books resemble each other. This is a species of faith, not the whole animal, and Harris never quite manages the synechdochial confusion.
The second category error hangs on the real point of Harris' book: he is mainly talking about Muslims, and Islam, and a cynic might be forgiven for thinking that he expanded the concept to 'faith' to cover his tracks. Harris continually conflates Muslims with Islam. He avoids this error in relation to Christianity and Judaism, which in a scholarly argument makes his apparent blind spot all the more surprising.
The arrogant, aggressive intolerance of the Qur'an is surely matched in every respect, and occasionally outdone, by Christian and Jewish scriptures; indeed, Islam takes a good deal of its cues directly from these traditions, to the point where an extra-terrestrial visitor would surely assume that there are not three religions, but one; and that the fighting was the excessive nastiness of intimates at odds.
If you can read past these obvious prejudices (and not every reader will), then Harris has some interesting things to say. His analysis of relativism as disguised absolutism is right on the money; and so is his distinction between faith and mysticism, both in terms of their respective intrinsic values, and their ontological adequacy.
And here he finally gets to the point. Harris is not a secularist in the strict sense of the word; he does not want to exclude the spiritual altogether, and in fact thinks it extremely important for us. But he wants to rescue spiritual practice from the clutches of faith-based religion. This ambition is not new, and Harris adds little new to it; although he attempts to give it new clothes in the shape of a lowering Salafist Islam waiting in the wings for its second chance at conquering the west.
So the crux of the argument is: mysticism confronts reality, by confronting its own states of consciousness, whereas religion peddles fantasy to those gullible enough to have faith in it. This comes briefly, almost like an admission, at the end of what otherwise looks for all the world like a diatribe against the intolerance of Islam.
Strangely, Harris does not address the issue of elite power in religion - the fact that, for instance, text-based western religions promote the notion of "simple faith" because it discourages individual interpretation of scripture, leaving doctrine safe in the hands of the elite. Powerful groups (this is certainly not unique to religion) tell lies to keep the masses pliant; whether the lies are metaphysical or merely xenophobic might reasonably be seen as surface detail.
Harris also doesn't address the universality of both religion and faith. In fact, to read him, you might think that this is a vestigial phenomenon which has attached itself, barnacle-like, to a few western texts, and to one in particular.
I don't quite know who will read this book or why. I do know that, whether Harris intended it or not, there is a good deal of grist here for a rabid right-wing mill; Harris' tone is often just a decibel short of shouted contempt, and his book may be proof-texted as much as any scripture by the same narrow sectarian hate-mongers he appears to be warning us against.
