Fighting Fire with Ire: 3 Lessons from Noam Chomsky's Takedown of Sam Harris

[cbayer]

http://religiondispatches.org/fighting-fire-with-ire-3-lessons-from-noam-chomskys-takedown-of-sam-harris/



BY ANDREW AGHAPOUR MAY 12, 2015

The day before Mayweather fought Pacquiao, New Atheist Sam Harris released an email sparring match he’d had with famed linguist and leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky. In his bestselling book The End of Faith, Harris had accused Chomsky of drawing a “moral equivalence” between 9/11 and the 1998 U.S. missile attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, which the Clinton administration had allegedly believed to be a chemical weapons factory.

The ensuing debate, which occurred over a four-day email exchange, is the most uneven public intellectual bout in recent memory. Chomsky repeatedly called out Harris’s rhetorical evasions and sloppy thinking, at one point describing one of Harris’s arguments as “so ludicrous as to be embarrassing.”

For his part, Harris was persistent and calm, but he seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the scope of Chomsky’s critique. Harris repeatedly asked Chomsky to be more polite, and offered to let him revise his comments before publishing the exchange. Chomsky refused the offer.

Here at The Cubit we read a lot of bad arguments, and you might be surprised to learn that Chomsky’s refusal to just be polite came as a welcome surprise. Here are three take-home lessons from the Harris vs. Chomsky Fight of the Century.

more at link

[trotsky]

1. What does this have to do with religion?

Sam's status as a "New Atheist" really doesn't mean anything here - the argument is about American foreign policy, etc.

Looks like this was just an opening that someone knew they could use to bash "New Atheists." Keep up the good fight, cbayer. Perhaps someday soon that loose collection of individuals with no political power at all will be crushed before you.

The first comment (at least it was at the time I read the article) kind of made a connection to religion:

I read the full exchange and it appears to me that Chomsky was not at all interested in having a conversation with Harris from the very beginning. I didn't find the exchange enlightened me with respect to either point of view.

With respect to the picture at the top of the article. I'm not convinced that Harris is arguing from the point of American exceptionalism. The larger point is that in certain parts of the world, principles founded upon the Enlightenment have not made as much headway as others. When the eternal soul holds more sway than the treatment of people in this life, we end up with all sorts of justifications for bad behavior. The Clinton administration made a horrible mistake, but they couldn't fall back on a holy book as a justification - 9/11 is the opposite.

Now that would be an interesting topic to discuss, but naw, let's drag out the New Atheists and flog them again.

[rug]

2. About as miuch as Harris' support for Bsh's invasion of Iraq.

You really should read the exchange before reaching for a talking point.

[Jim__]

3. Harris' evasion of Chomsky's question about an al-Qaeda caused Al-Shifa like event was pathetic.

Chomsky's question as stated in his initial essay:

Or take the destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, one little footnote in the record of state terror, quickly forgotten. What would the reaction have been if the bin Laden network had blown up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the facilities for replenishing them? We can imagine, though the comparison is unfair, the consequences are vastly more severe in Sudan. That aside, if the U.S. or Israel or England were to be the target of such an atrocity, what would the reaction be? In this case we say, “Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake, let’s go on to the next topic, let the victims rot.” Other people in the world don’t react like that. When bin Laden brings up that bombing, he strikes a resonant chord, even among those who despise and fear him; and the same, unfortunately, is true of much of the rest of his rhetoric.

And Harris' evasion of the question:

...

1. Imagine that al-Qaeda is filled, not with God-intoxicated sociopaths intent upon creating a global caliphate, but genuine humanitarians. Based on their research, they believe that a deadly batch of vaccine has made it into the U.S. pharmaceutical supply. They have communicated their concerns to the FDA but were rebuffed. Acting rashly, with the intention of saving millions of lives, they unleash a computer virus, targeted to impede the release of this deadly vaccine. As it turns out, they are right about the vaccine but wrong about the consequences of their meddling—and they wind up destroying half the pharmaceuticals in the U.S.

What would I say? I would say that this was a very unfortunate event—but these are people we want on our team. I would find the FDA highly culpable for not having effectively communicated with them. These people are our friends, and we were all very unlucky.

2. al-Qaeda is precisely as terrible a group as it is, and it destroys our pharmaceuticals intentionally, for the purpose of harming millions of innocent people.

What would I say? We should imprison or kill these people at the first opportunity.

...

If he seriously wants to speak with Chomsky, he needs to at least attempt to address the issues.

[cbayer]

4. I don't know why Harris was intent on making this public.

It's really doesn't reflect well on him at all.