David Berlinski: The Devil's Delusion

No doubt the civilizing insights of modernity appear considerable in Santa Barbara, where Sam Harris lives; but as travel broadens one’s mind, it enlarges one’s perspective, and those civilizing insights of which he writes are apt to seem a good deal less persuasive five thousand miles farther to the east, where modernity expressed itself in cattle cars rumbling from all the ancient civilized cities of Europe in order days later to deposit their famished, suffering victims at German extermination camps.

Some insight. Some modernity. Some civilization.

Having dismissed Jewish beliefs as divisive, Harris is concerned to affirm that they are misguided as well:

“It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If having half of your people delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could.”

On the other hand, I suppose that Harris might speculate on what is equally an interesting matter of evidence, a concept that he values in the abstract and on every occasion ignores in the particular. The Jewish people yet live, and even in Eastern Europe—even in Poland—they have returned to their ancestral homes; but the thousand-year Reich, that lies buried in the rubble of German cities smashed to smithereens, or ground under Russian tank treads, or destroyed by American artillery, or left to wander in its exiled millions across all the violated borders of Central Europe. And if God did not protect his chosen people precisely as Harris might have wished, He did, in an access of his old accustomed vigor, smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.

There is a queer quality of logical brittleness to everything that Harris writes, because every argument he advances stops before it has become relevant. The moral concerns that are prompted by biology? The list is already long: abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, infanticide, cloning, animal-human hybrids, sexual deviancy. It will get longer, as scientists with no discernible sense of responsibility to human nature come extravagantly to interfere in human life. In his Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris argues that “qualms” about stem-cell research are “obscene,” because they are “morally indefensible.” And they are morally indefensible because they represent nothing more than “faith-based irrationality.”

These remarks are typical; they embody a style. And they invite the obvious response. Beyond the fact that it is religiously based, just what makes the religious objection to stem-cell research irrational?

Those who find these questions troubling—me, for sure—find them troubling because atheists such as Sam Harris remain so resolutely untroubled by them. His convictions are as tranquil as his face is unlined. That bat squeak of warning that so many religious believers hear when they consider stem-cell research, abortion, or euthanasia sounds at a frequency to which he is insensitive.

This is very odd considering that what moral philosophers have called the slippery slope has proven in recent decades to be slippery enough to seem waxed. It is, if anything, more slippery than ever. In 1984, Holland legalized euthanasia. Critics immediately objected that Dutch doctors, having been given the right to kill their elderly patients at their request, would almost at once find reasons to kill patients at their whim. This is precisely what has happened. The Journal of Medical Ethics, in reviewing Dutch hospital practices, reported that 3 percent of Dutch deaths for 1995 were assisted suicides, and that of these, fully one-fourth were involuntary. The doctors simply knocked their patients off, no doubt assuring the family that Grootmoeder would have wanted it that way. As a result, a great many elderly Dutch carry around sanctuary certificates indicating in no uncertain terms that they do not wish their doctors to assist them to die, emerging from their coma, when they are ill, just long enough to tell these murderous pests for heaven’s sake to go away. The authors of the study, Henk Jochensen and John Keown, reported with some understatement that “Dutch claims of effective regulation ring hollow.”

Euthanasia, as Dr. Peggy Norris observed with some asperity, “cannot be controlled.”

If this is so, why is Harris so sure that stem-cell research can be controlled?

And if it cannot be controlled, just what is irrational about religious objections to social policies that when they reach the bottom of the slippery slope are bound to embody something Dutch, degraded, and disgusting?

How many scientific atheists, I wonder, propose to spend their old age in Holland?

Nothing. This is the answer of historical experience and a troubled common sense. It is the answer of Christian theology, and finds its expression in the doctrine of original sin. Having been asked by his biographer, James Boswell, for his opinion of original sin, Dr. Johnson responded in words to which he drew particular attention: “With respect to original sin, the inquiry is not necessary, for whatever is the cause of human corruption, men are evidently and confessedly so corrupt, that all the laws of heaven and earth are insufficient to restrain them from crimes” (italics added).

One need hardly be a Christian to appreciate the wisdom in these remarks. When Christopher Hitchens asks how much self-respect “must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin,” the only honest answer is that for most of us, self-respect is possible only if the squirming is considerable.

Men are not by nature good. Quite often, quite the contrary. And for this reason they must be restrained, by threats if possible, by force if necessary. “Perhaps,” Richard Dawkins speculates, “I… am a Pollyanna to believe that people would remain good when unobserved and unpoliced by God.”

I am under most circumstances the last person on earth to think Richard Dawkins a Pollyanna, but in this case I defer to his description. Why should people remain good when unobserved and unpoliced by God? Do people remain good when unpoliced by the police? If Dawkins believes that they do, he must explain the existence of the criminal law, and if he believes that they do not, then he must explain why moral enforcement is not needed at the place where law enforcement ends.

To scientific atheists, the ancient idea that homo homini lupus —man is a wolf to man—leaves them shaking their heads in poodle-like perplexity. Sam Harris has no anxieties whatsoever about presenting his own views on human morality with the enviable confidence of a man who feels that he has reached the epistemological bottom. “Everything about human experience,” he writes, “suggests that love is more conducive to human happiness than hate is.” It goes without saying, of course, that Harris believes that this is an objective claim about the human mind.

If this is so, it is astonishing with what eagerness men have traditionally fled happiness.

If the universe is as scientists say it is, then what scope remains for statements about right or wrong, good or bad? What are we to say about evil and great wickedness? Whatever statements we might make are obviously not about gluons, muons, or curved space and time. “The problem,” the philosopher Simon Blackburn has written, “is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part.”