"A general point about the mechanics of defamation: It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things. In fact, the very act of defending himself against such accusations quickly becomes debasing. Whether or not the original charges can be made to stick, the victim immediately seems thin-skinned and overly concerned about his reputation. And, rebutted or not, the original charges will be repeated in blogs and comment threads, and many readers will assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire."
Monday, April 8, 2013
Harris's Response to Greenwald
It's excellent. The contrast between the two is stark (here's his initial article for comparison). This isn't really new for Greenwald, of course. He distorts the people he disagrees with on the drone issue too. The opening passage is an excellent treatment of the frustration of dealing with people like Greenwald online:
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When discussing whether religions or cultures can ever be fairly criticized I think Harris should resort to using historical religions and cultures that are now gone. For example, a good number of my ancestors believed in human sacrifice, thought that they would go to Valhalla if they died in combat and thought it good sport to sail to England to murder, loot and capture slaves. (Statistically it is almost inevitable that some of those slaves became some of my ancestors.) No one would think for a moment that the world is not the better for Viking culture having effectively disappeared from the earth.
ReplyDeleteDaniel wrote that the following part of Harris's reply is an excellent treatment of the frustration of dealing with people like Greenwald online:
ReplyDelete"A general point about the mechanics of defamation: It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things."
Daniel, how does Greenwald qualify as the kind of person described here? To be sure, I find it kind of hard to pinpoint exactly what Harris is trying to say in this quote, let alone whether and if so in what way he thinks it would also apply to Greenwald. Since you do expolicitly say that you think these words (even regardless of whether Harris also intended that) also apply to people like Greenwald, I wonder if you can explain how they do.
(For what it's worth, it seems to me that Greenwald is not calling Harris names, but that he is making very specific accusations that he then tries to back up with arguments and evidence (the latter in the form of extensive in context quotes from Harris))
The racist/bigot stuff doesn't directly apply because as we went over he explicitly said he doesn't call Harris that (although he's not entirely free of that one since I talked about how he could understand why people might say that).
DeleteI was referring more to the entropy part. Much easier to bash without grounds than to defend oneself.
but it doesn't seem to me that Greenwald is bashing Harris without grounds. Au contraire, he provides a lot of arguments and a lot of evidence (mostly in the form of in context quotes from Harris) to back up his accusations. It may be possible to disagree with the arguments, to interpret the evidence in a different way and/or to reach different conclusions (and engaging with Greenwald's arguments and evidence appears to be exactly what Harris himself is doing in his reply), but it seems odd to say that Greenwald is simply making a mess and/or calling names or 'bashing without grounds'.
DeleteThe whole problem is they're wildly out of context. Much of his argument isn't cited, though, and there's plenty to cite on the subject that would have given a very different picture (no coincidence that those are the places where Greenwald would rather not cite).
DeleteAlso, you write: "It's excellent. The contrast between the two is stark (here's his initial article for comparison). This isn't really new for Greenwald, of course. He distorts the people he disagrees with on the drone issue too."
ReplyDeleteCan you say more (in general or concrete terms) about what you think the main differences are between Harris's reply and Greenwald's article? (e.g. would you say Harris doesn;t distort the people he disagrees with? (and in what way does Greenwald do that re drones?))
Can't say more now. Search on "Greenwald". Virtually everything I've written on him here has been specific complaints about his drone articles.
DeletePlease don't act like I'm dodging this - there's been loads of discussion of it. I promise - search and you'll find stuff. I'm pretty busy this week.
DeleteOh, God, why do you want to defend a total immoral dipshit like Harris against someone like Greenwald who actually has some principles?!
ReplyDeleteThe same reason you won't stop beating your wife even after she's bloodied and pleading for mercy.
DeleteYou can choose to a) follow someone's train of thought with moral integrity, and find out what they do and don't believe in and understand their reasoning in its proper context, b) ignore them completely or c) succumb to the reverse halo effect because it's easier than bothering to form balanced moral judgments.
I think Harris has a rather naive view of geopolitics, preferring to blankly attribute human motivations to state behavior instead of considering public choice theory. I also think he places too much faith in utilitarian calculus in moral considerations. I also take time to read his arguments to find out whether the accusations hurled at him (torture apologist, bigot, warmonger, xenophobe etc.) are true (they aren't). With this in mind, I can understand why Harris has the views that he has, while still knowing that he's fundamentally a good guy, not much different than Greenwald or you.
End result? The world has just a tiny bit more understanding and less unnecessary conflict, with no net reduction in moral integrity.
"If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things."
ReplyDeleteToday my facebook feed was full of bedroom-based sounding-off celebrating the demise of Mrs.Thatcher. Some of it though was done by journalists, including Greenwald. That said, given the state of print journalism Greenwald was probably writing his piece from his bedroom in his underwear.
To be honest I don't think it did her legacy any harm at all. If you're attacked by a certain class of people, then it's credit to you. Glenn Greenwald falls into this category. (That's not so say that Sam Harris doesn't too, I've hardly ever read him).
Regarding the whole drone thing.... What I've never got about the drone debate here is why anyone is talking about drones? To me the issue is: Why is the US killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
ReplyDeleteIt just doesn't make any sense to me, I don't see what it's supposed to achieve. The only thing I can see it achieving in practice is to encourage more people in those countries to join Al Qaida.
Unless Nuclear weapons are involved the only sane way to defend a country is to kill enemies *when they leave their country to attack yours*. Trying to kill people you think are enemies within their own country before they've attacked yours is nuts, it's never worked and it never will.
It reminds me of people calling someone a "Mellonite."
ReplyDeleteDaniel, I went and read that Greenwald piece, and I have no idea what your objection is. I just had to read the quotes from that guy, and yeah what is your problem? Greenwald specifically went out of his way to say he's not calling the guy a racist, he's saying he has irrational anti-Muslim animus. If those quotes are legit, then yeah he does.
ReplyDelete1. Exactly right - he does not call him a racist.
Delete2. Have you read Harris's response?
I started reading it, but when he complained about defending himself from smears, and in conjunction with you saying Greenwald distorted his views, I went to the Greenwald piece to see what the smearing was. I didn't find any. The most amazing things in the Greenwald piece were the actual quotations from Harris. So I don't see how there is any distortion, and I don't want to read Harris explaining the difficulty of defending yourself against someone who literally quoted from him in several places.
DeleteThe only out here is if Greenwald is pulling a DeLong/Krugman, and Harris was saying those things to then follow with, "I explicitly repudiate those sentences." But I'm guessing that's not what Greenwald did here.
I maintain you'd get a lot out of reading on.
DeleteThis doesn't make sense to me: Harris writes that liberals should be more critical of what he views as dangerous tendencies of the Islamic belief system, and notes his belief that fascists are talking the most sensibly about the topic. People react by claiming that in fact, no, fascists are not talking more sensibly than liberals about the topic. Fascists are saying horrible things that are the opposite of sensible. And then Harris gets huffy about being quoted out of context...
ReplyDelete... but the context - that his larger point is about liberals - doesn't modify the offending statement in any meaningful way!
There's no way he could convince me, Daniel, that the quotations Greenwald gives are nice things to have said, but I admit this sentence made me chuckle (in a good way):
ReplyDeleteIt is mathematically true to say that whatever probability one assigns to Jesus’ returning to earth to judge the living and the dead, one must assign a lesser probability to his doing so from Jackson County, Missouri.
Daniel is right, Harris is much more reasonable than the few quote people mention make him out to be.
DeleteHowever, I'm suspicious about what he was aiming at. I think that like Krugman he very nearly says crazy things, but he pull back from them just enough to make a convincing argument later. His fans are then left with the impression that he's offered a convincing argument for something when he really hasn't. Like Krugman he obviously has far too much faith in the state, but at least he's sensible in some of his choices of enemies.
To give an example of one of Greenwald's distortions though, here's what Harris actually wrote about European fascists:
"The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization."
Greenwald wrote: "In sum, he sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims. As this superb review of Harris' writings on Israel, the Middle East and US militarism put it, "any review of Sam Harris and his work is a review essentially of politics": because his atheism invariably serves - explicitly so - as the justifying ground for a wide array of policies that attack, kill and otherwise suppress Muslims. That's why his praise for European fascists as being the only ones saying "sensible" things about Islam is significant: not because it means he's a European fascist, but because it's unsurprising that the bile spewed at Muslims from that faction would be appealing to Harris because he shares those sentiments both in his rhetoric and his advocated policies, albeit with a more intellectualized expression."
DeleteHow is what Greenwald says here a distortion of what Harris wrote?
About Harris I would say: "I don't want to completely litigate the guy from these sorts of quotes, but honestly - shouldn't they at least color our view of him? He's called himself a liberal. Then why does he always come across as so damned illiberal?"
ReplyDelete[I hope somebody saw what I did there]