The Reality of Fantasy
Sir, — While reading Lee Harris’s article, I became increasingly aware that he conveniently ignored issues such as retaliation, revolt, response to oppression, and fighting back. All these would be from al Qaeda’s point of view. You have assumed that al Qaeda is the one who has taken the initiative of destroying the Twin Towers, without provocation, and your conclusions about “fantasy ideology” rest on this premise. Since the U.S. is now supposed to respond to this aggressive action, your “fantasy ideology” provides insight into the minds of the enemy. But what happens if, in fact, the act of destroying the Twin Towers was an act of retaliation to an assault initiated by the United States? What if the so-called terrorists were responding to certain acts of aggression already undertaken by the Americans? Does it mean that the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups are living in “fantasy ideology,” or are they responding to a situation they face on a day-to-day basis?
In the limited exposure that I have had, I have arrived at an understanding of why a person or a group would want to become (in)famous as terrorists. It is either a lust for more power, fame, and absolute control (the U.S.) — or it is in response to that impulse in others. Most people living in a normal situation (like me) would never dream of committing an act of harming anyone else. First, we are more concerned with the economic and general welfare of our families, which leaves no time for unprofitable activities. Second, even when we are very angry at someone and may wish to kill our enemy, when it comes to actually committing the act, we always think of the consequences that would follow, which acts as a deterrent to going ahead with what we think should be done.
But what happens to a person who has lost all his worldly possessions and loved ones to an act of oppression committed by someone else? What is his state of mind? I feel that is the answer to the question of why most terrorist groups are born and why they commit such acts of aggression.
The Western media are painfully oblivious to the fact that their elected representatives are playing political and economic games in other territories. These leaders assume that whatever they think, plan, and execute is the right decision, irrespective of the consequences it has on other people. They have come to believe in themselves so much that it seems impossible to make a mistake. But the reality is, unless these decisions and actions give top priority to human conditions outside their own boundaries, they will find themselves faced with acts of aggression from people who have already lost everything and have nothing more to lose.
Shahnawaz S. Khan
Mumbai, India
Sir, — I found Lee Harris’s article interesting and somewhat insightful (“Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology,” August/September 2002). It has, however, at least four important failings.
First, the author, who claims that we should carefully understand the way others think, hasn’t even taken care to understand what Noam Chomsky thinks. Chomsky has said again and again that the attacks can be understood as a response to the U.S. government’s actions — Harris got that right. Yet Chomsky has also said, just as often, that the attacks were an evil act inflicted on innocent people. But Harris seems to group Chomsky with those who believe that America “had it coming.” When you say people “had it coming,” you are saying that those people deserved it. Yet Chomsky has taken pains to say that the people murdered on September 11 did not deserve it. That’s what “innocent”means.
Second, I thought early on that the author, having set up the importance of understanding an alien culture in which people think so differently from us, would actually try to understand the radical Islamic culture that he writes about. But he didn’t. All he did was assert his view of the culture. He gave us no reason for believing his view. I have no basis for thinking that he has paid particular attention to radical Islam. He may well be right, but no reader could come to that conclusion as a result of reading his article.
Third, after emphasizing the importance of thinking things through carefully, the author claims that George Bush — not generally known for being a careful thinker — had it exactly right about the terrorists’ motives within days, if not hours, of the attack. Again, the author might be right, but we simply have to take his view on faith, which, I gather, was something he was trying to persuade us not to do generally.
Fourth, Harris agrees with the critics of George Bush that using the term “evildoers” to describe the terrorists “dehumanizes our enemy.” But here Harris and the critics are wrong, and George Bush is right. Calling someone evil humanizes him. You wouldn’t call a bear evil even if the bear killed 3,000 people. When you call someone evil, you are saying that the person has the capacity to make moral decisions and made the wrong one. Only humans are capable of moral decisions. The true dehumanizers are those who refuse to make moral judgments.
David R. Henderson
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
Associate Professor of Economics
Naval Postgraduate School
Monterey, California
Sir, — I have read Lee Harris’s thoughtful and insightful article on the fantastical ideologists, including the Jacobins, French Revolutionaries, and modern European fascists. He left out (deliberately?) the Leninists/Stalinists and their New Man, the loonies of unending revolution (Trotsky, Mao, Pol Pot), and I suspect we have both missed a couple more.
However, I cannot help but suspect that this was a beautifully argued case to refrain from doing something. Buried in the article was the point that, if the victim of the fantasists’ actions is merely the object (the other?), then the object can do nothing and could have done nothing to turn away the fantasists. Therefore, Harris says, there is no reason to change any policies — and he specifically mentions the Middle East and Israel.
My caveat would be this: That the members of al Qaeda are now living in an Islamist fantasy may be because they were predisposed to seeing themselves as the inhabitants of a disadvantaged and denigrated civilization — a civilization that is clearly unable to influence America’s continuing and wholehearted support for Israel, its attempted and often successful manipulations of Arab polities, and its continued success in the rest of the world in imposing, peacefully or not, its will — often at others’ expense. They may be right.
Harris himself says that a fantasy gains its appeal according to the predilections of the fantasists. Is it not possible that the members of al Qaeda, having correctly identified the relative weakness and poverty of Islam and Islamic states, have adopted a congenial fantasy that can only be made the less congenial by changing some aspects of the real world?
My point, I suppose, is this: So long as the United States continues to unreservedly back the Israelis, the Arab world will continue to feel that there is no compromise possible — and the extremists on the Palestinian side will be given the very encouragement and comfort they require to increase their power and influence. The Arabs will know that their wishes are secondary to Israel’s — and to America’s. So long as the U.S. rubs its nose in that power disparity, there will still be educated, middle-class young men from Arab countries with a deep sense of grievance exactly calculated to look for a worldview, an explanation, that elevates their culture and beliefs above the level of historical discards.
It has been said by a cleverer writer than I that true evil starts when you start treating people as things — and I agree. Anyone who could fly an airplane full of people into a building full of people has more than started to treat people (including themselves) as things. However, it is just possible that they started down that road when they felt themselves treated as things — inconveniences, troublemakers, irrelevancies. Or is there no possibility of that in Harris’s analysis?
Justin Swain
Canberra, Australia
Sir, — It seems to me that Harris sets in false opposition the fantasies of radical Islam, which I grant, against the lucidly existential authenticity of a fictive, “utterly secular” America. Bush’s puritanically religious comments are read as if the American president, far from being the caricature of an ideologically delusional man painted by left-wing critics such as Chomsky, were some sort of cultural critic capable of self-reflexively turning the enemy’s fantastical rhetoric against him, thus providing an ironic or healthy “counter-fantasy” to the American people. I find this difficult to swallow.
Bush commits the same error, plays the same ideological game which he, as the leader of a delusionally religious state, has condemned. From where does Harris acquire this false atheist notion of contemporary American society? By what criteria does he propose that we judge the health or authenticity of a fantasy ideology? Clausewitzian pragmatism is here pushed to its limits as a philosophy of truth in international politics. Comparisons to other “fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century” seem spurious; recourse to discussion of the collective fantasies of Nazi Germany is not required in order to demonstrate the illegitimacy of National Socialism. Fascist politics, as with any system of social organization, must stand or fall on its own merits, not on a posteriori speculation concerning its psychosocial origins — which is interesting in itself, but completely beside the point.
After having read and thoroughly enjoyed Harris’s analysis, I remain skeptical that preemptive strikes against fantasy ideologies can be any more than the arbitrary interventions of whatever dominant ideological fantasy happens to be the order of the day in Washington. Even American pragmatism must be contextualized within its own deluded worldview. Ultimately, I agree with the obvious conclusion that it is not possible to reason with radical Islam. But let’s call a spade a spade. Harris goes too far when he attempts to sanctify the dubious mythmaking of our own Western leaders.
Matthew T. Hodgins
Montreal, Canada
Academic Quibbles
Sir, — Chester Finn presumes that no one can disagree that Harvard suffers from grade inflation (“An Open Letter to Lawrence H. Summers,” June/July 2002). He is wrong.
What Harvard suffers from is not grade inflation, but input inflation. The standards and competition for admission to Harvard are far higher than they were when Finn attended.
The “Gentleman’s C” is no longer common at Harvard because the kind of students who got them are no longer admitted to Harvard. Although legacy preferences are still prevalent, the competition for them has increased greatly. And the national market for Harvard has led far more top-notch students to seek admission. Naturally, when you have more students applying, and select better students for admission, better grades are almost inevitable unless some kind of correction is made. What Finn is demanding is grading relativism: giving a wide range of grades to students at Harvard, even if they deserve higher grades according to objective criteria. This may be a wise policy, since grouping at the top can discourage students from making top-notch efforts to get a high grade.
However, it is not obvious that ordering professors to give lower grades is the proper (or most effective) solution. Perhaps Harvard ought to create the “A+” grade to recognize extraordinary achievement by students, or perhaps it ought to admit more students from poorer backgrounds who would benefit most from a Harvard education and degree.
If Chester Finn is truly worried about Harvard’s academic standards, he should speak out against the massive preferences given to the well-off children of alumni and overwhelmingly white athletes at Harvard. Of course, if Harvard only admitted the best and the brightest, rather than the most privileged and well-connected, grade inflation would probably get worse.
John K. Wilson
Normal, Illinois
Sir, — Chester Finn’s “open letter” hit the nail on the proverbial head. Having lived for 30 years in Northfield, Minnesota, the home of two small liberal-arts colleges, Saint Olaf and Carleton, I have seen the problems described by Finn many times.
The destruction of any sort of academic standards to attain “diversity” has been scandalous. The creation of “ethnic and gender” majors and grade inflation are routine. To their credit, a few of the students so admitted work hard and earn their degrees, but the vast majority simply show up and learn little — except, perhaps, that there is a tremendous amount of white guilt which may be exploited to their advantage.
As Finn notes, this manipulation has destroyed the advantages American schools once could claim Why? Because academics have placed political correctness above and beyond anything else in higher education’s ethical standards. Doing this has allowed schools to insist on a certain brand of leftist politics as a necessary condition of employment in many hiring decisions. Once the left controls the academic world, they pass on their drivel to unsuspecting graduates.
To avoid such problems, read a variety of books, as I have always done, and set aside dreams of wasting your time at today’s universities. Eventually, the universities will run out of students, alumni, and contributors to their endowments.
Bill Kelly
Dundas, Minnesota
Sir, — Whew, what a powerful letter! I strongly agree with Chester Finn on the pomo relativism issue (which long ago infested and corrupted my area, lit studies), along with the rotc issue and the fashionable hatred of the U.S. itself rather than of some of its policies, an attitude rooted in the Vietnam War era.
However, I think affirmative action for the time being is a measured, even narrowly tailored response to the largely inferior schools that most African-Americans attend. Yes, it fails to distinguish the so-called privileged African-American from her less privileged fellow African-American, but I think the policy is far better than the call for the one-shot deal of reparations, and then after that some other bogus issue that clever racialists can conceive. The Stephen Carters and Clarence Thomases exist because of affirmative action. One knotty question that I must concede: For how long should affirmative action continue? I’m not sure.
Finn also writes, “There’s been the prolonged fuss about underpaid blue-collar employees at the world’s wealthiest university.” Fuss? This word trivializes the pay of those workers.
Besides a few quibbles I have, Finn has written a courageous letter indeed during these times.
Robert J. Wilson
Suffern, New York
Religious Excess
Sir, — After reading Stanley Kurtz’s article (“The Future of History,” June/July 2002), I’ve not been able to get out of my mind Jerry Falwell’s statement shortly after September 11 offering his theological interpretation of the terrorist attacks as being in some way the hand of God against a straying nation (or whatever). Since then, in various venues, when I’ve heard religious right spokesmen describing the essential qualities of Islam, what strikes me most is the domestic familiarity of some of these qualities!
Our religious zealots are our own. I’m not arguing for some kind of equivalency between our religious right and, say, the Taliban, as I heard some people casually do after Falwell’s statement. But our own religious right seems an ingredient missing from both Huntington’s and Fukuyama’s scenarios, as described by Kurtz in his excellent essay. Religion is great for inflating, legitimizing, and empowering deep-seated aggressions and clothing them for consumption in culture and politics. How that works out in this country as compared to the Middle East is different, but that doesn’t mean it is any less significant for the future of our institutions. To me this seems like a potential wrench in the workings of both authors’ arguments.
Laura Graham
Washington, D.C.
