When Dalrymple Breaks Down

This is my response to Theodore Dalrymple's "When Islam Breaks Down," posted at the City Journal. Go read that first.

Theodore Dalrymple begins his critique of modern Islam with a discussion of his experiences in Afganistan. Let’s see what we learn! First, that he seems to support the Shah of Iran. Not gonna touch that one. Second, he writes about his naïve convictions about history that caused him to make vast generalizations. He writes about his broad, hilariously orientalist impressions of Afganistan. “You knew that they would defend you to the death, if necessary—or cut your throat like a chicken’s, if necessary. Honor among them was all.” Really? Even if you hate Edward Said, surely you must see his point when you read this shit? Furthermore, note the focus on his own personal impressions. This will continue through the piece, Friedman-style. Lastly, there’s nothing I hate more than the argument-from-conversion-narrative. His stupidity, ignorance, and quasi-racist urge to generalize about Afganistan and its people caused him to completely misunderstand what he was seeing – but now that he’s “seen the light,” he hasn’t learned anything about nuance, he’s just swapped in a new set of impossibly sweeping assertions.

So, next, onto Islamic oppression of women. Is this bad news? Fuuuuuck yeah. But guess what, it happens all over the world, in different societies, in different forms. His argument is, essentially, “this isn’t purely cultural because the problem isn’t as bad in other ethnic groups from the Punjab, therefore it is a problem with Islam.” So, first off, the Punjabi groups have been separated by religion for centuries, and probably converted along tribal lines to begin with, and then co-religionist tribes began to get closer over time. Second, the nexus between religion, culture, institutions, conservatism, and poverty is a complicated one, and he has nothing useful to say about it. For instance, some extreme practices – e.g. forced marriage to cousins – are traditional ones that stem from tribal culture. Others, like many of the extreme wahabist ones, are radical practices equivalent to American fundamentalism, and are threats to established order in Arab societies. Does he discuss why immigrants to crime-ridden, poverty-stricken cities might cling to one or reach for the other, or might commingle the two? Of course not, that would be too multiculturalist.

To him, Islam is a monoculture and has been since the middle ages, leading him to lines like “is anything intrinsic to Islam—beyond the devout Muslim’s instinctive understanding that secularization, once it starts, is like an unstoppable chain reaction—that renders it unable to adapt itself comfortably to the modern world. . . . I think the answer is yes.”

What does it mean for something to be intrinsic to a religion? Are we talking about things inherent in the text that defy any attempt at reinterpretation? Because there are very few of those. Or are we talking about interpretation, practice, tradition, etc? Those are anything but intrinsic. The core values of Christianity are radical poverty, pacifism, and compassion, and yet it was used to justify crusades, inquisitions, and the gospel of prosperity. The “inherent” values of Islam just don’t matter all that much, what matters is history and interpretation. And yet somehow Dalrymple can discuss the great schisms of Islam and then go on to talk about all of Islam in a single sentence with a straight face.

Actually, wait, let’s zoom in on that a little more. On the one hand, Dalrymple says that Islam has always been the religion of the State, and never had the experience of being underground like Christianity did. But then we have this:

“Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam—in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church—has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform.”

THIS IS THE FUCKING DYNAMIC OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. Deinstitutionalization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Claims of greater piety used to route around traditional hierarchy. He can’t see it because some elements are different, like the focus on overthrowing corrupt temporal regimes, but these differences aren’t just the differences between Islam and Christianity, they’re also differences about the authority of the state and the ability of the people to fight it and the right to self-determination – which is to say, a change of paradigm created by the enlightenment and by Western culture in the time between the 15th century and the present.

BTW, the retrenchment of violent conservative Islam when states fall is not purely a feature of Islam. First, dictatorships that force social change often fail to create lasting cultural effects – look at the rollback of women’s successes in former soviet republics, for instance. Second, the violent anarchy that succeeds many such regimes in Afganistan, Iraq, etc feeds extremists – in the early part of the 20th century, such unrest fed the extreme left as often as the right. Now Marxism is mostly dead, so we just see the rise of religious conservative loons.

Dalrymple's claim that “feminists are silent” about this stuff is perhaps the most obviously incorrect thing in the whole piece. Feminists were screaming bloody murder about women’s rights in the Muslim world back when Dalrymple still believed that the Afghanis were noble savages, and they haven’t shut up since. Meanwhile, Dalrymple wants to talk about “instances of unadulterated female victimhood” to avoid grappling with the massive number of women who are oppressed by Islam but also powerfully invested in it. He describes two girls smoking in burqas at the bus stop and says they want to take the burqa off, but did he ask them? What the fuck does he know about which aspects of their faith and culture are important to them? To say nothing of headscarves. Not all girls whose lives are circumscribed by religion or domineering family are controlled by money and violence, especially in England – most bindings are made of love and faith. I obviously think the world would be a better place if everyone would throw off the tyranny of imaginary beings (though conservative sexual mores and scary patriarchal families are obviously not powered solely by religion even though it serves to reinforce them). However, guess what? It will never happen, and acting like this problem will be solved by some means other than the rise of liberal interpretations of Islam, and immigrant women gaining more power within the religion instead of fleeing it or dying in the attempt, is profoundly short-sighted and ignorant.

“In my experience, devout Muslims expect and demand a freedom to criticize, often with perspicacity, the doctrines and customs of others, while demanding an exaggerated degree of respect and freedom from criticism for their own doctrines and customs.”

Remember, he’s not talking about violent salafis who kill cartoonists here, he’s just talking about everyday normal friendly muslims who happen to be self-righteous jerks. Has he ever met a devout asshole Christian? Maybe he should visit America someday. Dalrymple believes that this Islamic rigidity creates an all-or-nothing condition: either violent authoritarian jihadi misogynist, or drug-dealing gangsta thug on the mean streets of Manchester, with nothing in between.

“What I think these young Muslim prisoners demonstrate is that the rigidity of the traditional code by which their parents live, with its universalist pretensions and emphasis on outward conformity to them, is all or nothing; when it dissolves, it dissolves completely and leaves nothing in its place”

As opposed to other criminals, who retain more of their religious mores when they leave their less-restrictive faiths for a life of crime? Evidence? Anything besides bland assertion? But wait! We soon learn that Dalrymple's real objection is that these young muslim criminals pick and choose only the parts of Islam that benefit them. What he calls having your cake and eating it too,” I call “modern liberal religious practice.” Everyone picks and chooses; to a true fundamentalist all religious people are hypocrites. He’s just upset that poor inner city Muslim youth are assimilating to… the values of England’s poor, crime-ridden inner city. He would like this negative assimilation to be somehow related to intrinsic features of Islam, because otherwise he might have to think about why America has successfully integrated Muslim immigrants while Europe has failed.

In sum, this piece is not just bigoted and smug, but fundamentally stupid and actively counter-productive. The way Islam is going to change for the better is not mass abandonment, but liberalization and reform, and only Dalrymple’s profound historical ignorance prevents him from seeing that. One need only look at Amerian Muslims, a vital asset in counterterrorism, or the Bo-Kaap in Cape Town, to see pious, traditional Islamic communities in Western societies unmarred by fanaticism and violence. Dalrymple, by lumping all of Islam together as an inherently dangerous and threatening belief system, by pushing the Ayaan Hirsi Ali line over e.g. Tariq Ramadan, is doing the Islamists’ work for them. The clash of civilizations crowd doesn’t like Ramadan because he has all sorts of unpleasant conservative Muslim beliefs. Guess what? Religious conservatism is unpleasant, it oppresses women and suppresses free thought, and this is true from the orthodox parasites of Israel to the Christian dominionists of the bible belt. The difference is how these groups express their ideas and flex their power. Conservative Islamic leaders are always going to be dicks; our goal should be to support nonviolent dicks who support internal debate.

Dilettante

I'm working on writing a letter to Harvard, and am scrolling through their online course catalog to find classes I can gush about. Unfortunately, the classes that sound the most interesting are the ones about which I am the most suspicious. Consider this:

"Law and Psychology: the Emotions

Love, jealousy, guilt, anger, fear, greed, compassion, hope, and joy play important roles in the lives of lawyers and those with whom they interact. The most effective lawyers are not just good thinkers, they are also empathic students of human emotions. This seminar will offer students a chance to explore what is missing from the traditional law school rational actor model of human nature through discussion of readings primarily from psychology (but with contributions from economics, biology, philosophy, and literature) about the nature and operation of the emotions, the use of emotion in persuasion and negotiation, emotions and the good life, and the role of emotions in moral and legal decision making. Students will be asked to write short papers (1-2 pages) on each week's readings. There will be no required final examination or term paper."

Law can certainly benefit from the insights of economics, psychology, statistics, philosophy, and sociology. In the appropriate fields of law, it also benefits from biology, medicine, computer science and others. I am pleased to see that law school classes take this into account. But I can't help but feel that what classes like this one produce are dilettantes, who draw only the superficial lessons from the fields they dabble in.

I try to be responsible about knowledge. From my brief studies in history and biology, I am acutely aware of how much lurks beneath the surface platitudes of popular versions of these fields (and many others). I try to accept my profound ignorance about basically everything that matters in the world and move on.

Entering a profession where epistemic irresponsibility seems to be par for the course is an unpleasant prospect.

Thoughts on the death of Howard Zinn

History is not for you.

History is not there to make you feel better about yourself, by telling you how glorious things were. History is not there to make you feel better about yourself by flattering you with fantasies of persecution that have been our obsession since the maenads rent Orpheus (how romantic!). Even Galileo had it coming. History is not there to teach you a fucking lesson, or to tell you how to behave. There may be things to learn from history, but the past is not the present, and here is not there, and everyone can find an analogy to flatter their politics if they look hard enough. If you learn anything from history, learn a little humility. History is there to puncture the idiot tales of power and glory (or innocent suffering, or noble stalwartness) your mother and your teacher and your country told you.

History is a novel without a plot. Actually, that's misleading, because the world of the novel does not exist outside of the slice that is recorded. All of history exists, all the time, but you can only see randomly selected segments. At best, history can have theme, though of course that is written in by the historians. Everything is complicated, contingent, ambiguous. The only thing as consistent as the wretched things we humans will do to each other is our ability to consider the strangest things as normal. History is there to leave you bewildered at the variety of human experience, and terrified at the inscrutability of the past.

History is not for you. You are for history. If you're lucky.

How much for that justice in the window?

Finding unjust outcomes in the American justice system is trivially easy. Botched death penalty cases, forgotten rape kits, racist juries, the list of failures in the de facto implementation of criminal and civil justice can go on and on, with ten thousand causes and no solutions. Still, these are not attacks on the ideals that undergird our court system, but rather criticisms of the way these ideals are implemented. I am presently interested in another topic: the idea of individuals paying to retain the services of skilled barristers to advocate on their behalf.

Let us assume that hiring a more expensive lawyer increases one’s chances of winning a suit, criminal or civil in a significant way. Consider the public defender versus the high profile corporate defense lawyer. A few tens of thousands of dollars means the difference between guilt and innocence, or more often between ten years behind bars and six months of community service. In many cases, one cannot even bring a civil suit without the money to hire an attorney. If one does have the money for an attorney, the mere threat of expensive legal action can allow one to extract concessions from the less well-off. The more money one can invest in one’s cause, the better the outcome one can expect from the legal system. Money does not help the innocent more than the guilty; in fact, the reverse is probably true. Even after a verdict of guilt or liability, a good lawyer can significantly reduce the consequences to her client. There is no equivalent service a lawyer can provide to an innocent client in a criminal case.

In the American justice system, the more money you have to spend, the better the outcome you can expect. Discerning how much they affect the outcome is difficult, as we have no broadly applicable methods of assessing the accuracy of court decisions, and there are so many variables involved. Nonetheless, there is obviously a direct relationship here, and we can even imagine that a hypothetical program of sociological and economic research might come up with an approximate metric for how much money it takes to improve the chances of a particular plaintiff or defendant. What would we think of a justice system where lawyers were randomly assigned, but fees could be paid directly to the State to ensure a more favorable outcome? I am repulsed by the buying and selling of judicial consideration. But what is the relevant difference between this system and ours?

Regardless of how much money changes hands, in our system the decisions are still made by an objective jury or judge who supports what they believe to be the soundest position. One might argue that this alone is enough is enough to redeem the American justice system: one may be able to buy smart people to make one’s arguments, but at least the soundest position in court will prevail. I don’t find this particularly persuasive. If money greatly increases one’s chances of winning a court case irrespective of the merits of one’s case, which it does, then the jurists’ chance to choose the soundest argument is obviously not particularly effective at providing just outcomes. What else could possibly recommend this approach?

Growing up in America, we are so acclimatized to the pay-to-play nature of our justice system as to pay it little mind. In other civilized countries, however, courts are run very differently. In most of the nations of Western Europe, the judge has broad inquisitorial powers, and the advocates have a very diminished role, serving to ensure that the judge follows the rules and treats each party fairly. Furthermore, many European nations don’t rely on individual citizens to bring tort suits. Instead, government prosecutors have much wider license to bring suits against unscrupulous corporations and similar organizations, and the State is the only actor entitled to claim punitive damages.

European justice systems are certainly not perfect. During the trial of Amanda Knox in Italy, several American commentators, concerned that Knox was being railroaded, noted that she didn’t have a defense attorney to speak up for her in the same way that she would have in an American courtroom. Creating a justice system that produces the best possible outcomes is of course an extremely difficult task. The American justice system, however, should not even be considered as a viable option.