Christopher Hitchens: Rhetoric, Religion, and Ramadan
Our short-lived Christopher Hitchens ends in our second episode and full-length decoding of the punchy Brit. This time we are examining one of his well-known religion-themed debates, debating the question 'Is Islam a Religion of Peace?' for The 92nd Street Y, New York with the academic and writer Tariq Ramadan. This one feels like a bit of a throwback to a post-9/11 & Iraq war world. New Atheism was still a cultural force with some punch but it had also received its own fair share of body blows since its earlier days as a plucky new contender. Regardless of how you feel about that particular genre, we suggest you don a fedora, pour yourself a stiff drink, and be prepared for a heady mixture of substantive points, moralizing rhetoric, and witty retorts from both of these seasoned debaters.Also covered in the episode Andrew Huberman and whether sad women's tears have unique properties, Jordan Hall teaches everyone how to play the guitar, James Lindsay discovers the Logos... and Chris tells us all about his office fridge adventures.LinksHitchens and Ramadan debate at 92nd Street Y New YorkHuberman's TikTok video about women's tears and his related tweetsJames Lindsay's Twitter thread on demons and the LogosReddit Thread with a link to Jordan Hall's Guitar tutorialDaniel Laken's free course on psychology methodology and statistical inference
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where a psychologist and an anthropologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh.
Today we are doing a decoding.
It's the afternoon, we've finished our daily tasks, our academic duties and we are getting some afternoon decoding done because that's the kind of guys we are.
Hey Chris.
I never finish my academic task.
That's a pure pipe dream.
I'm just taking a break from that.
So, what a world you live in, Matt.
In box zero, Chris.
In box zero.
That's what you want to aspire to.
Yeah.
Yeah, well...
One thing that set me off on the wrong foot this morning, Matt, and I'll keep it short, you know, keep it short.
I know, you know, we're a nice efficient machine.
Not too much banter.
People don't like the banter.
People like the banter, but we have things to do today.
I love it.
We have things to do today.
But yeah, when I came into my office, I inherited a small fridge from a professor who was leaving and gave me a fridge from my office.
And I presume somebody at the weekend turned to power.
Off for an extended period of time to the floor or the building because you know what happens when you turn the fridge off, Matt, for multiple hours?
It gets less cold, I think.
And what do you think happens to the ice inside the fridge?
It's a fridge freezer, I should say.
There's a small freezer compartment at the top.
What happens to the ice?
This is like one of those riddles.
Oh my god!
Is it a riddle?
What happens to ice whenever...
There's no power to a machine that is keeping it cold.
Oh, okay.
So you had a puddle on your floor.
Is that what happened?
That's right, but this room has carpet, Matt.
So I'm dealing with that.
I didn't want to deal with that in the morning.
Well, this is a great anecdote, Chris.
This is like your anecdote about nuts, how you were getting into nuts.
It's like the mirror of reverse.
That was a happy story, and this is an unhappy story.
They're both equally bland stories.
Very little interest to anyone except yourself.
Look, I didn't promise anyone excitement.
I'm purely discussing the impact on productivity I took this morning because of dealing with unexpected electrical issues.
Excuses, excuses.
You should listen to some Huberman or something.
You need to be min-maxing more.
You need to be enhancing your productivity.
Are you touching grass?
Are you gazing at the sun?
Optimizing your mornings?
I saw Huberman had a little tweet out promoting it and I also saw one of these YouTube shorts or TikTok shorts or whatever they are with him talking about a study which suggested that when men smell sad tears very important sad tears of women women who have been exposed to a sad stimulus They essentially are less horny.
They rear people as less attractive or whatever.
And I was listening to it going...
What?
This paper came out in Science showing that humans, men in particular in this study, have a strong biological response and hormonal response to the tears of women.
What they did is they had women, and in this case it was only women for whatever reason, cry and they collected their tears.
Then those tears were smelled by male subjects or male subjects got what was essentially the control, which was the saline.
Men that smelled these tears that were evoked by sadness had a reduction in their testosterone levels that was significant.
They also had a reduction in brain areas that were associated with sexual arousal.
And then I looked up the study that he referenced, and would you be surprised to learn, Matt, it's a small sample study with a lot of outcomes.
Only some of which, you know, reach significance.
A lot of p-values hovering 0.03, 0.02, 0.015 and so on.
Chris, I saw your tweet about this and I...
Did notice that the people had reported P is less than 0.02, P is less than 0.037.
Yeah, it's because it must be just right beside that, right?
Because, yeah, I know.
And the other thing is Huberman still, you know, he has a cadre of defenders.
I haven't spent a great deal of time with his content, but I would say he's guilty of overhyping relatively weak studies and throwing in maybe like hand-waving disclaimers, right?
But when I saw this, I had somebody respond on Twitter saying, you know, well, but this paper is in science.
I don't know if there's a different one that he was talking about,
but...
In any case, it's a paper where they tried to replicate a different research team.
How do you think that fared?
Probably not well.
Filed?
Yes.
You're kidding me.
You're kidding me.
So when men smell unhappy tears, it doesn't make them less horny.
They're just as horny as before.
We don't know yet, Matt.
The thing is, we don't know because the literature is just not advanced enough on this topic yet.
It's what you're saying.
Nothing can decrease men's horniness.
There's literally nothing known to science.
That is, that's the takeaway.
But it's just, I see people often respond and they're like, why are you being mean to such and such, right?
Like somebody that they like if they cite a study.
And I want to tell them, it doesn't matter who cites the study, right?
And it doesn't matter what the topic is.
The criteria for a good study is the same, right?
Now, do people apply it consistently?
No.
But the criteria is the same.
Low-powered studies that have multiple outcomes appear to be engaging in practices that allow for multiple researcher degrees of freedom to be exercised.
They're not pre-registered.
You know, sometimes the data isn't available or whatever.
You should be skeptical of the results.
That's all.
Just be skeptical.
Look for independent replications.
Look for how big the claim.
And then adjust your excitement accordingly.
Over-hyping studies is really common and it's always the same thing.
You don't have to dislike people to know when they're over-hyping studies or they're ignoring low-quality signals.
I'm just impressed.
And start talking about any topic and you will somehow bend it towards your own personal wins of the week and have an opportunity to rant about open science.
This is you to a team, Chris.
Look, you brought up Huberman.
You brought it up.
That's me.
And also, the point with the open science thing, Matt, is because it doesn't matter the topic, right?
Like, I'm not an expert on ivermectin studies.
But when you look at the literature, you see the same flags pop up.
When you look at supplement studies, you see the same flags pop up.
When you look at stereotype threat, you see the same flags.
So just learn the methods, learn the basic way to assess studies critically, and a whole world will open up to you where you can look at studies a bit.
Critical about them.
It's an exciting world.
It's called academia.
I need to do some research on what happens when you drink somebody's tears.
It's not like, you know, smelling.
Okay, that's not going to do much.
I can see why that didn't replicate.
I'd like to see some research into drinking tears.
Liberal tears.
Conservative tears.
What's the effect?
Irish tears.
Australian tears.
Matt's tears.
Yeah, yeah.
I agree.
So, anyway, that's Huberman.
And actually, Matt, we have a little bit...
Of a medley of various guru activity that we wanted to get to.
And in order to introduce that, I think there's a specific clip that people need to hear.
And I don't think we should give any introduction.
We should just let them hear the raw audio and people can judge for themselves.
Yep.
No editorializing.
I mean, I could go on forever.
So here's a fun one.
Music.
I'm going to propose that you learn how to play guitar, but I'm going to propose it in a way that is going to be almost completely the opposite of almost everybody's experience of that.
Take a guitar or any other kind of device and do exactly and nothing but this.
Pluck one string and listen to it.
Try to see how carefully you can sense the sound that it makes.
The difference between the strength of the plucking And the strength of the sound.
How it becomes quieter over time.
Literally just do that.
Then maybe, maybe, if you feel up to it, consider plucking another string and seeing if you can notice the difference between the two.
That's discernment.
That is discernment in its rawest, deepest sense.
And don't do anything more than that.
That's humility.
Don't try to rush into something.
Don't try to suddenly become, be playing Freebird or whatever, Stairway to Heaven.
Just learn how to listen to the sound of a single note being plucked and dying.
And maybe also, if you can, see if you can relate to that as the story of all lives.
And that's the sacred.
So there you go.
It's actually not that hard.
Yeah, that's pretty simple.
That's the secret.
That's how you learn guitar.
That's where we started, right?
That's how you learn guitar.
Well, like Jordan Peterson, you know, waxing lyrical over the country rock music he heard, that, you know, the divine is contained in those moments.
And yeah, I just, I love, there's so much the love about that clip, but also at the beginning, as somebody on our subreddit pointed out, he says, you know, pick up a guitar or any other device.
So it's not even specific to guitars.
It can be any other device.
Make two sounds with the device.
Just listen to them.
It's amazing, amazing stuff.
Look, that just stands alone.
It's a beautiful, shining gem.
Yes, what we want to do, what we thought we'd do is, you know, just revisit some of our previous topics, see how they're traveling, see whether or not they're still dispensing wisdom.
And that was Jordan Hall.
That was Jordan Hall.
For anybody who doesn't know, Sensemaker Supreme, teaching you how to play.
Guitar.
So now everyone in our audience, you know, you can say you're a guitarist.
Yep, yep.
And you're a more humble person.
You know how to play guitar.
You've learned how to practice discernment.
And what was the last thing you said?
Something about the interconnect?
That's the secret.
That's the secret.
So pluck a guitar, two strings, and that's discernment.
Stop!
That's humility.
You don't want to be plugged in three or four trying to play like a show-off.
And if you can detect the difference in notes, that's the secret.
Done.
Lesson one.
Finished.
Oh, God.
Now practice your strumming.
Yeah.
Jordan Hall does what he does better than any other guru.
He maxes out a particular dimension.
Of our thing, whatever that is.
So, he's good.
And another person, Chris, who has changed.
This is James Lindsay.
James Lindsay, he's evolved.
We've talked about this.
You know, he went from being, you know, anti-woke.
New atheist.
New atheist.
He started off new atheist.
Yeah.
And then became like a Twitter troll, essentially.
Anti-woke Twitter troll, yeah.
Your mom type stuff.
Right-wing reactionary.
Christian sovereign nations, weird sort of helper, outerer.
Yeah, Christian kind of like dancing around with Christian.
He's not a Christian, but he's playing footsie with Christians.
So, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, he's been good.
He's clearly stared into the orb of wokeness for...
Far too long, because it's had an effect on him, Chris.
And I will read out to you his most recent missive on the Twitter machine.
On a suggestion earlier, I watched a lecture from a Catholic priest who is also an exorcist.
It's about demonology.
Your favorite topic, Chris.
And it was sent to me, unsurprisingly, because it offers some insights into communist psychology.
Now, I don't believe in demons, but I got some insights.
So, the biggest thing that stuck out to me is that he claimed that demons are characterized by an absolute and intentional rejection of the assignment they have been given, and in that absolute rejection, they are damned and so work to negate what they were purposed to do.
I don't think there is a better definition for demonic than that.
having been led through self-pity to self-hate, takes it upon themselves to negate the true purpose for their being, which on some level they know, as rebellious angels, demons would know it perfectly.
He also pointed out that demons influence people through their emotions and their interpretations of features of their lives.
I found that accurate to the purpose of understanding communist psychology also, as I've been calling it a religion of pathos for some time now.
Now, I won't read the entire thing, but one last bit, Chris.
If we take the logos as the order and structure of the universe, Demonology would describe willful rejection of the Logos.
Nothing could make such an invitation better than emotion that eventually turns toxic.
Pathos turned pathological.
Self-pity to self-hate to just hate.
It goes on, Chris.
It goes on.
But really waxing lyrical and bringing in...
This has, I guess, been happening for a while now.
The old Logos.
Yeah.
The Logos.
It keeps cropping up, doesn't it?
Lots of people are interested in the Logos.
They're addicted to the Logos.
Everybody's talking about the Logos.
John Favacki, I think, also has a side interest in the Logos.
It's Game B. I think Game B, Jordan Hall as well.
It's probably on the Logos at the weekends.
So, yeah.
Yeah, that's cosmic, Matt.
That makes you think.
Yeah, it's...
I'm just sort of impressed or just curious as to the direction he's going.
It's this dovetailing of a kind of, I don't know, reactionary politics, but anti-workness, but also godliness.
He talks about being at war with the laws of nature and nature's god or merely being derelict will reliably return bad results.
Combined with self-pity, immaturity and entitlement, indulgence, this leads to externalizing one's failure and thus one's locus of control.
Destruction lies that way.
What is even he doing?
He's psychologizing...
Doesn't it end that thread with him talking about how discipline is the answer and training your mind to become a...
Essentially, as with all of them, wants to recruit people into looking up at him as the...
Would-be instructor on how to train your mind and develop discipline in the fields of modern corrupt culture.
It's so fucking boring, Matt.
They're carbon copies of each other complaining about the woke mind virus and they all cream their pants over the logos.
That's maybe a bit graphic, but I'm just saying they have an unhealthy...
Fascination with logos and Christian symbology and all this kind of stuff.
Like, get some new material.
Like, there's other religions.
Couldn't they go into the Hindu pantheon or something?
No, Christianity is the best one, even if you're an atheist.
Yeah, like, it is.
It's self-help, right?
He talks about, you know, growing a sense of mastery, becoming strong and not blaming others, growing into liberty, talking about being under God's law provides protection.
If we merely accept natural law, submitting to truth, truth, logos, in brackets, lends itself to success and peace.
Like, it's cosmic, it's anti-woke, it's religious demons, but also self-help.
I mean, Jordan Peterson's got a lot to answer.
It's Jordan Peterson.
It's like a knockoff Peterson-esque shtick.
And I don't think any of them know they're consciously doing that.
I mean, some of them, I guess, do.
But I think, like...
Lindsay's so incredibly unaware.
He's so lacking in self-awareness of where his influences are that, you know, he's adopted almost entirely the opinions and views of Michael O 'Fallon, right?
All the anti-globalist Alex Jones type stuff.
And he doesn't recognize at all that he didn't come up with those ideas, right?
That he has just swallowed them from an ecosystem.
It was around long before James was there and will be around long after he fades back into the ether.
So it's just, it is frustrating.
They're manifestations of the fucking egregore of annoyance.
They just feel like lost boys, especially James.
He's gliding around and sort of shifting from one sort of thing that provides some kind of meaning to the next, dispensing these supposedly words.
Extremophiles, Matt.
Extremifiers.
I think that partly explains along with the personality defects and that kind of thing.
But once you see people who are able to so fluidly glide across ideologies in such a relatively short space of time with little dissonance, I think it's just illustrative of the appeal of having some ideology or worldview.
Which explains things, right?
And which gives some attention and meaning and purpose and so on.
So it doesn't really matter what flavor it is.
And that's the consistent factor, I think.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think you're right.
Well, anyway, there you have it.
That's our two nuggets of wisdom for this week.
We're visiting a couple of previous gurus.
We've learned how to play guitar, identified the logos.
That should help people out till the next episode.
Well, yeah, I think so too.
So, let's turn our critical gaze to a figure from the past that we've discussed recently on our last podcast with Matt Johnson.
We discussed whether Hitchens was a guru, how he would fit into a modern guru ecosystem.
And we talked about a talk that we looked at of his from 10...
Years, 12 years ago?
A good while back.
It's Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan debate.
Is Islam a religion of peace?
So that's back in the old days of the new atheist movement at its height, I think, or at least in 2010.
So Hitchens in the video is bald.
So I think this was after his chemotherapy.
And I guess towards the end of his life, but he still has a lot of vehement and vigor to him.
And his interlocutor, or the fellow debater, Tariq Ramadan, is a scholar of Islam and international relations, I think, associated with Oxford or a professor at Oxford.
At the time of this discussion, riding high in recent years.
Dogged by various allegations, rape allegations, pretty serious ones.
So I think since 2018 or there, he's been facing multiple rape allegations in various countries.
Various countries?
Yes.
Well, the accusations are from people in different countries, so they're pursuing the legal system in those countries.
So I don't believe...
The results or sentences have been arrived at or guilt has been ascribed or that kind of thing.
You know, trials can tend to drag on through the legal system.
But in any case, whether innocent or guilty, it's fair to say that he's being preoccupied by these events in recent years.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think you mentioned, Chris, we're not going to be doing an episode about...
Tariq, but just out of curiosity, I think you looked at some other material from him and you noticed that he tended to kind of moderate or change his style of delivery and how forcefully he put things depending on the audience.
Yeah, I think he is an interesting character and I do have some clips from him because he's a Swiss academic with, well, you'll hear him describe his background, but he was and maybe to some extent still is.
Considered a very eloquent, moderate defender of Islam and a good debater.
As you might imagine, he also faced various criticism for stances that he'd take or positions.
And there were fairly consistent accusations that his message diverged depending on the characteristics of the audience he was speaking to and that he could endorse stronger positions when he had it.
He denied that.
And in any case, yeah, I think it's interesting.
His grandfather was involved with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood.
I think an influential person and well-known, which is why I think as well these controversies about the rape cases came as like a big deal, right?
So yeah, but it's a bit like jumping back into the time machine, you know, to...
Ten years after September 11th, but still debates around Islam and Islamic extremism still loom large.
And, you know, on the converse stage, accusations of bigotry towards Muslims and Islamophobia, which still exists in the contemporary space, but I think have been a little overshadowed.
Recent years, with perhaps the exception of Trump's Muslim ban, notwithstanding.
Yeah, so a time capsule back to an earlier internet era.
Yeah, and I think it's helpful to go back sometimes and look at stuff that isn't so current because with that little bit of distance, it's possible to look at the kind of arguments and look at how it's handled with a bit of dispassion without it being such a hot topic.
Yeah, I'm happy to go back in the time machine.
Also happy to look at Hitchens, get a bit more evidence on how he puts his arguments together.
I mean, I'm going to, spoiler Chris, I don't think I'm going to rate him as low as James Lindsay.
Or Jordan Hall.
But that still leaves a pretty broad window for nuance.
That's true.
There's a large space available outside.
A lot of headroom.
Yeah.
The Lindsay and Jordan Hall baseline.
Okay.
Well, so the moderator, I think, who kicks off the debate, they do a pretty good job in general during this talk of moderating things.
you know, there's good set times for the speakers.
It's kind of a classical debate format.
And actually, although the moderator a bit later in the talk ends up, you know, kind of leaning, I think, on one particular side more.
But at the beginning, she frames the two positions and I think did a pretty good job.
Like they could have just stopped the debate at this point.
So here's her
I've found that this question, is Islam a religion of peace more than any other, is now the one on people's minds?
But let's acknowledge that to many, the question before us tonight is either absurd or offensive.
To one camp, the question is absurd because the answer is patently obvious.
Just look at the headlines, they say.
If 9-11 is not convincing enough, what about the suicide bombers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Spain, Pakistan, and for God's sake, even a tourist retreat like Bali?
They say, what about Major Nidal Hassan?
A psychiatrist in the U.S. Army who shot his own colleagues at point blank after he spent years studying and reflecting on his Muslim faith.
Was he under the influence of psychosis or of Islam?
They ask, why do honor killings seem to be a Muslim phenomenon?
How could a religion of peace permit a father to order the death of his own daughter?
This camp says not only is Islam not a religion of peace, it is intrinsically a religion of violence.
The question is absurd.
The case is closed.
Yet there are others who consider the Islam and peace question not so much absurdly obvious as utterly offensive.
This camp asks, how can you condemn an entire faith, a religion followed by nearly two billion people, because of the atrocities committed by its fringe extremists?
They ask why blame the faith when the terrorists are clearly driven more by political ideology than by theology.
They ask why do we not apply the same judgment reserved for Islam to other religions?
Why didn't the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, Herzegovina, prompt widespread rumination on whether Serbian Orthodox Christianity is a religion of peace?
When Roman Catholic priests and bishops were complicit in the genocide in Rwanda, The world did not blame Roman Catholicism.
Yeah, I agree, Chris.
I thought that was an excellent introduction and really everyone could have gone home, I think.
Yeah, because there you go, you've got the two sides.
You're probably going to hear them elaborated on by, you know, Tariq or Hitchens.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
But they do.
They do.
They do go on.
They elaborate on those positions quite a bit.
So, who shall we hear from first?
Yeah, so let's look at some of Hitchens' early points.
One thing that's quite impressive about Hitchens, and I was reminded of it when I heard this, is he's very eloquent at making his arguments.
You know, I've made the point when Douglas Murray...
Or Eric Weinstein talks that, you know, they are also good with speech, right?
Maybe Douglas more than Eric in terms of making substantive points.
But I think with Hitchens, there's more precision because it actually feels very clear what he said after.
Like, you can agree or disagree, but his argument is crystal clear.
And that's, it was just so welcome because often with the...
Clips that we hear, there's a lot said and there's not much actual points made.
But let me play it and you can judge whether I'm overhyping it.
My first point completed.
The claim to govern everything from hygiene to sex and the afterlife, which contains detailed prescriptions for the good and bad versions of itself, again strikes me as somewhat totalitarian.
And they're both based upon...
Two very, very questionable and not very peaceful concepts.
One is the idea of a perfect human being, the Prophet Muhammad, and the other is the idea of a perfect book, the Quran, the recitation.
Now, the category perfect human primate or mammal and the category flawless book that could possibly not use any kind of change, revision, or editing are categories that do not exist.
There are no members of these categories.
Therefore, any challenge to this faith is bound to lead to heresy and to schism and does.
And just as all forms of absolutism and totalitarianism, leader worship and reveal truth, unalterable text, always do because they can break, perhaps, but they cannot bend.
and thus the latent potential of violence with
Yeah, yeah, so that's a good example, Chris.
A few points.
Firstly, contrasting Hitchens with some of these other loquacious characters is instructive because it's very different, right?
Yes, they're both nice speakers, right?
Very mellifulous.
But actually, Hitchens is different because he is making a very precise and clear point at the same time as sounding good.
Right?
Again, agree, disagree.
It's not about that.
It's about the precision and clarity of what he's saying.
That is not often the case.
But the other thing too, and this is getting a bit ahead of ourselves, I guess, but I want to get your opinion about this, Chris, because like on one hand, I agree with pretty much everything he said, right?
I thought those were good points about, you know, ideologies being brittle, essentially.
They can break, but they cannot bend.
When you confront a totalizing ideology which has revealed truth, which doesn't really permit flexibility or dissent, then the reaction inevitably tends to be harsh.
But all the way through this debate, I was thinking, well, these are excellent points, but they apply much more broadly than just to Islam, right?
This applied to essentially all the monotheist religions and other totalizing belief systems as well.
So even though I thought he was a great speaker, it was kind of slightly missing the point of the debate to me.
Well, yeah, we can get to that, I think, because it does come up.
But there's a clip where I think listening to this in 2023 rings a bit different than it would in 2011.
So whenever this original talk came.
So listen.
One very important question, the only one I've got time for now.
What happened to the word Christendom?
Remember, there used to be such a term.
It used to extend across the world, and the hope is that it would extend even further.
And it was unironically used to mean those areas of human civilization, and areas yet to be civilized, of course, where the word of Jesus Christ reigned or would reign.
And it's all gone.
The word is never used except historically or sarcastically now.
Not quite.
Not quite.
I often hear people talking about, if not Christendom, Judeo-Christian cultures and, by extension, the West, the underpinnings of the West, or Christian values being the core.
You know, that goes unacknowledged.
You need to only listen to speakers like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro.
Or Douglas Murray.
We're just talking about Douglas Murray.
I mean, this is the theme.
It can be presented in, like, a more polite version.
There's something especially good about Europe and European culture.
Or it can be presented, like, I've met people online.
They're from the American Midwest.
They're fundamentalist Christians.
But their views are indistinguishable from the Taliban.
When I actually had it, I flamed them for that.
I said basically that in so many words.
They went, yes, the Taliban have got that stuff right about what women should be doing.
Social conservatism.
And social conservatism.
Yeah, it does exist.
It is still around.
And that historical stuff about, God, I'm debating, I don't mean to be debating with itch and see it, but I just want to get this off my chest.
The idea that that...
Sort of idea of, you know, spreading Christianity and enlarging Christendom and bringing the word of God to the heathen who need to hear it.
I mean, that's not that long ago, historically, right?
Like, you don't have to go back to the Crusades to find those kind of thinking.
The colonialist theory.
Yeah.
So, again, I'm left with, even if you were to grant that, okay, in the 1980s or 2000s or whatever, Islam might well be more like that or more aggressive or whatever at this particular...
Historical moment.
Then how is that anything more than happenstance?
Yeah.
It seems very historically contingent to me.
Yeah, although there's another clip, it's continuing this point, and it's him talking about the Ottoman Empire.
And the thing that I do appreciate about this is, like, Hitchens knows his history.
Now, I'm sure you can find stuff that he gets wrong, oversimplifies him, and so on.
But again, it's just the contrast of the level of knowledge.
He displays here versus what we hear week in and week out, you know, listening to the lesser gurus.
But yeah, so this is him.
He's got more knowledge than Jordan Hall?
What about the guitar, Chris?
What about the guitar?
I don't know if he could play the guitar.
That's true.
That's true.
It's just, you know, even having recently listened to Bill Maher and Dave Rubin, this is just, it's the benefit of contrast.
But in any case, listen to this.
There was another empire involved in that war, the Ottoman Empire, which also came to an end.
Its other name was the Caliphate, the Muslim Caliphate.
It went to war on the side of German and Austrian imperialism and Hungarian imperialism, and it lost not just the war, having proclaimed a worldwide jihad against Christianity, except for German and Austrian and Hungarian Christianity, which were its allies.
And it didn't just lose the war, but by 1924, it had been dissolved by the Turkish leadership.
It lost the caliphate.
And that's the only one that still has supporters.
The other Christian and religious empires have all gone.
But the caliphate still has fans, not just in the Muslim world.
Sometimes referred to by Muslims as the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, but also in what some Muslims call the Dar al-Hab, the House of War, the part of the world that isn't yet Muslim.
There are caliphate clubs in London now and Berlin and elsewhere, quite important ones.
And what I want to know is why that is and what we should...
Think about it.
Now, Chris, again, I don't mean to be debating with Hitchens here because I actually generally like him, right?
I'm well disposed to Hitchens, frankly.
You need to apologise.
He's dead, Mark.
He's not going to come back from the grave and the Hitch slap you.
Oh, my God.
That would be terrible.
But my impression of the Ottoman...
So he was framing the Ottoman Empire as a fundamentalist caliphate, more intolerant than other...
I mean, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but that doesn't gel with my understanding of the Ottoman Empire.
I mean, broad brushstrokes because it lasted for, what, 700 years or something?
I mean, it was like a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, sprawling, massive empire for most of that time.
You know, yes, it was Islamic state, but...
You know, I thought it was understood that they were relatively tolerant towards other minorities.
As long as you didn't rebel and as long as you paid your taxes, you might have special taxes if you weren't Islamic or whatever.
But I didn't think it was particularly intolerant towards non-Islamic citizens compared to other empires of the time.
I mean, keep in mind we're talking from as far back as 1300 here.
Well, yeah, I took his point to be there primarily that there's been a lack of interest in continuing to pursue religious worldwide empires and that the caliphate being an exception to this because it, you know,
links to the Christendom point.
So my bar is low, Matt, for being impressed when it comes to courage because simply knowing...
I'm sure Hitchens would have a rebuttal and would be able to support what he was saying there.
I just thought the underlying argument that he was pushing...
I just didn't feel like the Ottoman Empire was a particularly egregiously intolerant empire compared to other empires that were around 1400s or whatever.
I don't know enough about the Ottoman Empire to say, but that is my impression too.
It's like the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire.
Which one was better?
Who do you know?
Let the historians decide because I have no freaking idea.
Anything that lasts for hundreds.
Of years is going to have a lot of bad stuff that happens under various rulers and also achievements of civilization and wonders that people can point to.
So I think it will be the way the history always is where a lot of people selectively focus on a particular aspect.
But I, in general, I would say that there is no medieval...
Regime that I would want to live under.
I don't want to live under any of them.
I don't think it was a good time to be a secular atheist.
I don't think secularists even existed in conceptual frameworks at that time.
I have heard that Jewish people living in medieval Christian Europe were subject to some restrictions and even some prejudice.
From time to time.
Just getting to the broader point around, yes, he's very erudite.
He makes a lot of interesting points and it's not like there's no substance to them.
It's just getting back to my theme of, as I listen to this debate, I genuinely enjoy listening to Hitchens.
Yeah, because he's just my kind of guy, I think, and just the way he talks and the way he thinks and the way, all that stuff.
But I was kind of unconvinced by his arguments because I just was, okay, Ottoman Empire, not perfect.
Okay, so what?
It's drama and much, man.
Anyway.
I will say one thing related to that is on occasion when I feel that people are using the upper-class Britishness as a means of generating audience.
Favourability, especially amongst American audiences, it grates a little, right?
I feel Douglas Murray has a very well-practiced...
What's the word I want to say?
Like, he's very well-practiced in this domain.
But I don't know if it's just me applying double standards.
But for instance, Matt, I find this interaction charming.
Roller than Incredibly Annoying when the moderator asked him to wrap up because he was going over his time.
Can you wind up now?
Yes, I can.
I can, yes.
And will.
Shall.
Shall, in fact.
Yeah.
See, I don't have your prejudice against English people.
No, you don't have any prejudice about accents.
Except for the Dutch.
Well, I'm saying he overcame my prejudice because that didn't annoy me.
Those little Jeeves and Worcester style comments.
That's to his credit that that is the case.
You know, like we discussed with Matt Johnson, there's rhetorical power to what Hitchens does.
And there's also substantive arguments.
And like all speakers, you know, his talks are kind of a mixture of this.
But in terms of rhetoric, I have a couple of examples, or at least what I think are rhetoric and are worth discussing.
So here's one.
This is like debate-style rhetoric, so here you go.
Now you will say, I can hear it already being said, you may be saying it already to yourselves because the defence mechanisms kick in.
And in any case, Laurie already said it for you.
And I hope Professor Ramadan won't feel the need to say it again, but if he does, fair enough.
You may say...
Ah, that's not the real Islam.
Those aren't real Muslims.
Now, isn't that a fascinating objection?
Is there anyone in this room, I exempt Professor Ramadan because it's his turn to speak next, is there anyone in this room who would care to arbitrate that question?
Who is to say, where is the authority that defines who is a true son of the Prophet or a true interpreter of his work?
So what you thought this was an example of?
Empty rhetoric?
No, not empty rhetoric, just good rhetoric.
So what I recognize from this is like, if you're debating someone, a useful thing to do is to highlight a point that they're going to raise in advance and say, you know, you might say this, but of course, that's empty and wrong, right?
So he brings up a defense which is obviously going to be raised to the points that he's making, and he, in advance, attempts to disarm it, right?
But he does it...
Even more strongly because he's like, of course, nobody will bring up that point because even, you know, the moderator has already raised it.
But if Professor Ramadan does that, you know, that's his choice.
So it kind of is, it's just, I'm not saying that it isn't...
You're just noticing a debate.
You're noticing a debate technique.
Yeah, and it's a good one.
Like, it works, right?
Because...
As the respondee, if you're like, well, I do want to just raise the point which, you know, that you said was not valid.
Like, it already puts you on the defensive.
And I think there is substance behind this point because, like, the point about who gets to designee it, like, the person which is a true representative of a given category.
It's not just that it'll be in regards to religious extremism or that kind of thing.
No.
It's, in general, one of the most common.
Well, those people are not category X, right?
Yeah, and I think that's a substantive point, right?
That's a good point.
Like, you can't just absolve yourself of, oh, those people aren't real Christians.
Oh, those people aren't real conservatives.
So, you can just sort of carve off any unpleasant or difficult, inconvenient segments of your group.
I think it is fair to say that if your perspective, if your philosophy, if your ideological point of view or whatever, if people are using that to justify...
Whatever.
The Khmer Rouge is killing fields or whatever.
You can't say, well, that's not real communism.
There's a better kind of communism that lives in my head that none of these examples you're citing have really captured.
And yeah, so I basically agree with his point.
So I didn't have an issue with that.
Yeah, I'm going to let Tariq respond to both of you on this point because I think he himself is a good debater and I have some sympathy with...
Various arguments that he raises and some, I think, are veering towards semantics and obfuscation.
But here's him kind of responding to that point and the larger point about the way Hitchens has framed the opening of the debate.
As a Muslim and as a believer, but as someone who is coming from within the realm of religions, it was quite clear that to put it that way was not the right question to ask.
Is Islam a religion of peace or is Christianity or is Judaism or is Buddhism a religion or spirituality of peace doesn't mean anything for me.
It's not the right question.
It's not the accurate question.
Not because I think that there is a good Islam and a right Islam, and there are people who are acting in Islam who are not representing what Islam is.
This is not my point.
I never said that, by the way.
But the point for me is really to try to deal with a phenomenon, with religion from within, and to try to understand the dynamics, and to understand the trends, and to understand the diversity.
So just to essentialize one religion by saying it's all about war, it's all about peace.
And even, you know, said by George W. Bush.
I like his voice.
He's got a very smooth voice.
What he's saying, though, isn't in terms of his form or his style.
It's not as precise as Hitchens, though, is it?
It's kind of more...
I don't know.
I thought...
Yeah, but I think it's the nature of the argument that he's making.
And I did think that he slides between things at times because of that.
There he said, for example, that it's not because he thinks there is a good Islam and the right Islam.
No, he's never said that.
But as we'll see in other clips, he does imply that.
And so it's an inconsistency, it feels like, as he shifts what...
But the fact that he's arguing religion is not just one thing.
To speak about it as a single unitary thing is like a simplifying point.
It's too silly.
It's George Bush.
I think that's a good argument, right?
And he did that thing, Matt, of responding to Hitchens' attempt to trap him by saying, no, I'm not so simple.
I don't say that.
I never said that, right?
And then...
So, again, that's like a kind of response.
You were just listening to this, like enjoying the debate.
You were just enjoying the parry and thrust of debate.
Yeah, because they're both good at it.
And I also, I think like you, Matt, you know, interested in debates about religion and, you know, the kind of...
Atheist and creationist debates and all those kind of things.
Not to mention that academically I've studied religion from the point of view of psychology and anthropology, but I do find these kind of engagements where there's different worldviews presented and people debate them when they're done right.
They're interesting.
Like, even if I find some of the points made annoying or, you know, like, to kind of obfuscate, I think it is good that we do this on occasion or these kind of things can be organized.
Yeah, no, fair enough.
Yeah, I was also sympathetic to his points, which is that he kind of rejected the premise of the debate question, you know, is Islam a religion of peace?
And I think Hitchens kind of did too.
Like, they both gave a nod to the fact that it was kind of a silly...
Question?
Yeah, too simplistic.
You know, I thought it was very fair what he said, which is that, you know, Islam as a global, historical, social phenomena is a vastly complex beast and you can't really make simplifying, flattening statements about it.
Yeah, so he elaborates on this argument a little bit more.
There's a couple of clips and I think this is a good illustration of like Tariq's kind of response.
Two points throughout the debate.
So here's a bit more.
And again, like you say, rejecting the premise.
The wrong question is trying to say a religion is one thing.
A better question.
So this is one point which is important.
But religions and all the religions and Islam, among all the other religions, are dealing with human beings.
And if you deal with human beings, you deal with violence and you deal with peace.
You deal with violence.
Because human beings, by definition, Have to do with violence.
They have to deal with aggressivity, with wars.
And to expect from a religion not to tackle the issue is just to dream of something which is not going to happen.
All the spirituality.
Go for Buddhism or go for the Bhagavad Gita.
You deal with violence.
So this is it.
Now, what is the answer coming from religions and from trance when it comes to violence and to peace?
This is the right question for me.
Do we have something which is coming and helping us to go towards peace?
This is, for me, the right question.
That's what you highlighted.
This happens all the time in debates.
Again, just to highlight that people change the question or say, well, actually, this is a better question to address.
Yeah, and that's fair enough, right?
That is actually a better question.
Is this particular ideological framework, is it sort of nudging people in a more positive direction or a less positive direction?
I mean, unlike you, Chris.
Oh, go ahead.
I was going to break all the rules of our format and cut to the...
Chase a little bit, because I'm actually just curious as to what you think.
Like, I was only vaguely interested in these questions about, you know, religion, good or bad, blah, blah, blah, discuss, you know.
And I got a little bit impatient with this debate because I realized that, like, what I think about it is just that the problem with religions is, all of them, is that apart from being a bit of a fantasy and...
Not connected to reality.
And apart from the fact that they don't really generally admit for flexibility and schism, Hitchens is right in saying that they are brittle.
The real problem is that they're like a Rorschach inkblot.
You know, basically anybody can peer into these sacred texts and pull anything out of it that they like, right?
If you're a happy person and you've got good intentions, you can pull out, you know, nice life lessons for being a nice person.
If you're an unhappy or an angry person, you can find justifications and rationalizations for pretty much anything you like.
So, my problem with religion generally, it's probably not too different from Hitchens, is that people can use these myths and these fantasies to justify anything they want, but I don't see anything special about Buddhism or Christianity or Islam in this.
What do you think?
Matt, Tariq has got you covered.
Islam is as complex as Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism and Hindus.
It's a diversity of interpretations.
Yes, you are right.
The Quran is for the Muslims the very word of God.
But many interpretations and many ways of dealing with the books.
The problem is not the book.
The problem is the reader.
It's the way...
No, no.
We have only 10 minutes.
So...
This is why when, for example, you take a text, and you can do this with the Bible, with the Torah, the Gospels, it's always the same.
Tell me the way you read, I will know what is in your mind, but not for sure what is in the text.
Yeah, like I kind of agree with Ramadan there in the sense that it's all in the eye of the beholder, right?
You can pull out anything you like, but I don't see that as a feature.
I see it as a bug.
I've got a problem with that.
So, yeah, I think that he's right.
There's a diversity of interpretations and all religious traditions are made up of multiple sects who disagree.
And even within the same sect, you have people that are more moderate.
More literal in their interpretations.
You have different traditions.
And it's not any one religion that this applies to.
This applies to all of them.
But the interesting thing is, his argument is that, well, there's multiple interpretations.
People can take what they want from it.
But that's a kind of argument that rests on there being no doctrinal interpretation that is orthodox.
And as we know, through the history of religions worldwide, that is not what people are usually happy to argue.
That's now, in moderate, multicultural societies, often an ideal which people ascribe to.
But historically, people died and killed each other over differing interpretations of sacred texts and very specific doctrinal points.
All across the world.
And yes, there are politics and things intertwined with it.
But the version of religion that Tariq is arguing for is a cosmopolitan, interpretivist, pluralistic form.
And that is a type of religion.
It is not the dominant form of religion, I think, across the world.
It very much depends on the country by country in geography.
That therefore, you know, extremists are the norm.
But I think hardline interpretations, which do not accord with multiple traditions being equally valid, are the norm across religious traditions around the world.
And so I think there's a little bit of...
If you're arguing it's all down to interpretation, I agree.
It is, because that's what people do.
But religious traditions and authorities...
Tend not to have such laissez-faire views about how accurate their interpretations are.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's kind of what I was saying, which is it's like a Rorschach inkblot in that if you choose to, you can peer at it in just the right way and find all positive messages and there's nothing bad here.
It's all good stuff.
If you look at it a different way, you can see it as a permission slip to do all kinds of...
Bad things.
And you can see it as a rationalization for why you think, you know, women have to stay in the kitchen and do what their husband says, right?
You know, it's a choose-your-own-adventure type scenario.
So, I don't particularly think that's a very strong argument in favor of any religion.
So, yeah, I was kind of dissatisfied with both of them because, like you said, Chris, like these two are definitely a cut above the general gurus that we cover, right?
They're thoughtful, they make good points, and so on.
I was still left dissatisfied because on one hand I felt like Hitchens' entire speeches, his entire line of argument, was almost like he'd taken the sort of standard pitch against religion in general and he just applied it to Islam,
right?
Didn't make anything specific about Islam.
And whereas, as you said, Professor Ramadan there, he kind of makes those...
Relativist, interpretivist kind of arguments, which is, you know, essentially implying that, oh, if you've seen these bad things, then that's not really the real religion.
The real religion, I promise, is all very good.
It's all very nice.
So, yeah, I didn't find either stance particularly convincing.
Well, before we get back to Hitchens' response to this, I'm going to highlight just a couple of rhetorically strong, I think, One-liners or techniques that Ramadan does that I thought are a nice mirror to what Hitchens is doing.
And this was a good line, I think, in regards to how people treat philosophy and religion.
I don't like all these intellectuals and philosophers and even journalists.
They are very keen on understanding the complexity of philosophies and the simplicity of religions.
That's not right.
That's a prepared line.
Definitely.
The complexities of philosophies and the simplicities of religion.
And actually, again, Matt, Tariq echoing you, he raised the point about the Ottoman Empire and, you know, the kind of interpreting history in such simplistic manners and empires existing in other places and times.
Let us also understand the fundamentals and then come to...
Some of the translation, the historical experiences.
Because as much as you can speak about September 11, you can speak about the 16th century under the Ottoman Empire, which was a great civilization with a diversity, Christians and Jews and even non-believers working and living together.
We are always speaking about Indonesia.
But we can prove everything with history if we don't get a sense of what are the principles we are talking about.
Yeah, I mean, I basically agree with him there.
I mean, again, I stand to be corrected by listeners who are better informed about history than me.
Hitchens might correct you.
He might.
Maybe you've got a clip, but, you know, in France and stuff in this period, they were waging crusades against other Christians in France.
I forget what they were called.
Huguenots?
Huguenots, maybe?
I forget the name.
There was another one in the south of France, anyway.
Yeah, like awful crusades, like awful ethnic cleansing, whatever you want to call it, out of some crazy doctrinal difference about the mystery of the Trinity or some bullshit.
Now, I don't know.
I'm sure the Ottoman Empire is guilty of all kinds of nasty stuff like every empire is, but I think they were generally happy to let...
It was a pretty cosmopolitan empire.
He's right.
There's a lot of different groups, all these different cultures, different religions living in it.
And generally, if you paid your taxes, you didn't revolt, you obeyed the governors or whatever, then they generally let the different cultural groups get along with their own little particular beliefs.
So, it may well have been a bad empire, whatever that means, but I don't think it was particularly ideologically puritanical.
At least to the extent to which some of the Christian kingdoms and empires were during the same time period from 1300 to whatever, 1800, something like that.
Well, there's one more clip again of Tariq expounding on this point, Matt.
So you're signed up for him.
You need to be there.
You and Tariq out for...
They're not discussing the Ottoman Empire.
Here we go.
You cannot deny the fact that through history, Muslims, in many situations, in many historical situations, were dealing with this diversity, and we learned from the Middle Ages, and we learned from the Ottoman Empire that Muslims are able to deal with diversity and take from the Jewish tradition.
Maimonides was speaking Arabic better than me.
He was a Jew.
And he was an intellectual, and he was a theologian, and he was dealing with respectful people.
So all these Muslims were wrong Muslims because they didn't understand that the final religion should not listen to the first modern history tradition?
That's not true.
You can't reduce this in such a way.
It's too simplistic to represent what a religion is and what a history and a historical experience is.
So there we go, Ma.
And I think another The thing that illustrates the kind of rhetorical force of Tariq is whenever he's talking, kind of condensing that point about, you know, that for him, Islam is about humans.
The problem is humans and the religion is a path to the answer.
I wouldn't say Islam is a religion of peace.
I'd say Islam is a religion for human beings.
It deals with peace and it deals with violence.
And it helps the people to go from violence towards peace.
It's a way towards peace.
But it's not a peaceful reality.
Because we are not peaceful beings.
We are all in tension.
Just to get that inner peace in us, and this is the starting point of the Islamic philosophy of human being, is really to start with your own self.
Look at your heart and tell me if you are at peace or you were at peace.
Yeah.
See, to me, that seems like double talk.
Like, I had a weird reaction to this video because, like, I basically agree with Hitchens, right?
Hitchens doesn't like religions in general.
Full stop.
And I'm basically with him there.
I don't like any of them.
And I didn't really like Ramadan's arguments sort of in defense of Islam, just saying that you can't blame religions for anything.
It's just if there's something bad going on, it's because people have got bad things going on in their hearts.
And so I'm like, it's like, well, maybe.
But does the ideological framework help with people being more tolerant?
Help with engaging in pluralism and cosmopolitanism and things like that.
I mean, I don't really see much evidence that it does.
But at the same time, I just didn't feel like Hitchens put his best foot forward in terms of arguing that there's something specifically wrong with Islam that isn't attributable to historical happenstance, historical contingency.
Well, let's see.
One thing that he does, Matt, is when Hitchens is responding to Tariq's outline there or Tariq's arguments there, he highlights that he changed the question at the start.
So he says this.
Well, I also don't think that the motion, if that's what it is, chosen for this evening, is a particularly good one.
But I knew about it as long as Professor Ramadan did, and I did at least agree to speak to him.
In spite of that reservation.
That's really good.
It's pretty good.
You know, I admire the craft.
I admire the art.
Hitchens is good at it, and I think he's better at it than Tariq Ramadan.
Yeah.
So, I think this is him responding to the point, but also using that rhetorical part that we've highlighted multiple times now.
So, this is him talking a little bit about, you know, the reader being the issue.
Now, you're right.
I was surprised to find myself saying, Professor, when you say that the problem is not the book but the reader.
In the case of the Quran, that is certainly true of me.
It's true probably of every book I've ever read, that there are difficulties I have with it or capacities I don't have with which to approach it or understand it.
But if I'm reading the Quran, I certainly say, well, I can't tell whether this book is the word of God or not.
I can only doubt that there is such a thing.
But I can hope that this was a bad day for God.
Can't I?
And I can hope to live in a country where I can say that and get applause.
Ah. Thank you.
Yes, and even Murph.
And don't think that isn't a precious thing.
Yeah, yeah, that is him.
That is most arch.
And quite effectively so.
I mean, you know, you can look at any of these holy texts and find all kinds of extremely unpleasant injunctions that is a little bit difficult to paper over with platitudes about it.
You know, just need to approach it in the right kind of way.
It really is all about love.
And, you know, he makes a good point too there about tolerance, which is that they're having this debate, I presume.
In the UK somewhere where you can make fun of the Bible and you can say that the Quran is full of nonsense and you can make these jokes and so on.
You can't do those things in a lecture theatre in Iran, right?
Yeah, and I've got two clips that speak to that, but there's one that's very specifically on that point.
But this one comes just before it, and I think it's good as well because it's like when he began that last clip I played by saying, you know, you're right.
I find myself surprised to say Professor.
Right, like that kind of nice aside.
He does it again here, and Hitchens...
I think one of the things that he's very good at is putting moral force behind his arguments.
Like, he argues passionately, and you can see that he thinks that things are unjust, right, or wrong, and that he will infuse his argument with that sentiment.
Not in a kind of demagogue way, but more in the way that, like, isn't this wrong?
Like, can't we all agree that this is wrong?
And he does this quite...
Neatly, I think, here.
I don't like the idea of a paradise reward for martyrs.
Don't like it.
It's not me, somehow.
Don't like the account, don't like the early accounts of village squabbles with the local Jews who've taken a look at the new claimant to be the Messiah and decided about him what they decided about the previous claimant.
He's no good.
He's not up to snuff.
Do you think the Jews are ever going to be forgiven for that, by the way?
For rejecting two in a row?
I don't think so.
Yeah, I agree with you.
He is rhetorically very forceful because it's backed up by, you know, a fair bit of substance.
But still, Chris, I return to my original criticism at the beginning, which is that, you know, all of his points apply equally well to every religion, right?
Well, well, how about this one then, Matt?
I'm allowed to stand here and say this, and there are many parts of Europe, I couldn't do that anymore.
Or I'd have to be very careful in who I'd invited for the audience.
I couldn't do it easily on the air, couldn't do it easily in print, couldn't do it easily in public, couldn't do it on certain campuses, couldn't do it with certain publishing houses.
Now, all of this has been done to us by the wrong Muslims.
Well, let's get together then, isolate who these wrong Muslims are, who've imposed a culture of violence-backed censorship upon us, and let's get rid of them.
And have an honest discussion about the text and the reader.
So he, you know, and he does this as well when he expands on the issue of fatwas and Salmon Rushdie.
His argument, and others have made it as well, is that burning the Bible may get you protested and various editorials written about you.
you're not going to be invited to dinner by the Pope.
But burning the Quran, if it gains attention, put your life at risk.
No, I think that's a fair point.
I mean, he's on relatively strong ground there when he's sort of arguing from those liberal sort of principles.
How can you say any kind of philosophy or ideology is one of peace when violence is endorsed for people that Disrespect it.
Look, I basically agree with both of them in that both of them said that it was a silly question because while I agree with that, I think that's true.
It's hard to say that all of that is not a reflection of historical contingency, right?
That there are different times and different places where disrespecting the Bible would have got you burnt at the stake, right?
So, we're saying that Islam is not a religion of peace right now.
Christianity is right now, but, you know, then it could be different in 50 years or 100 years.
And then are you really talking about the religions then?
Or, to get back to my other point, are they both just these Rorschach inkblots where cultures can take from them whatever they like?
Well, I think Hitchens sidesteps that a little bit because, you know, later in the talk, he does highlight whenever people are saying, like, isn't this a critique of religions in general?
He's like, yes, I wrote a book that says all religions are the problem.
So he would agree about that.
But do you notice, Chris, he never conceded that point, really.
You know what I mean?
He didn't say, I don't think Islam is a religion of peace.
I don't think any religion is a religion of peace.
Like, he didn't actually say that in the debate because it would have gone against his rhetorical line, right?
I thought he did concede that in the discussion part, but I felt like he kind of, you know, made the point like, didn't you listen to the opening part where I said that any ideology which requires people to believe that it has the whole truth and,
you know, that it relies on...
Supernatural claims to having the Word of God is a problem for a liberal society.
Do Jewish, Christian or other religions have a greater claim on being religions of peace than Islam?
I mean, is your beef really with Islam or is it with all religion?
Well, I'm sorry that the comrade from Yale tuned in so late.
I mean, late enough to miss the first four or five minutes of my ten minute introduction.
Devoted to a close exegesis of Professor McCulloch's realization that Christianity had out-genocided and out-wared and out-crusaded itself, finally by 1914.
If you care to pick up, I think you might be able to, and I'll sign it if you will, pick it up.
My book, God Is Not Great, you will find a discussion of the warrants for slavery, murder, So,
I took that to be saying that.
But isn't there an issue, Matt, that, like you highlighted, you know, there's a historical argument being made and there's...
Plenty of examples that can be given from all traditions, actually, with very few exclusions, including Buddhism.
I mean, I think in 2023, it's less hard for people to imagine Buddhist fundamentalism, but it shouldn't be hard for anybody that reads history.
You know, the Sri Lankan Civil War showed what Buddhist nationalism looks like, and the events in Myanmar illustrate what, like, violent...
Nationalism in a Buddhist flavor looks like.
I was thinking of Sri Lanka as well.
Like I've told you before, I was there at the end of The Troubles and saw some of the after effects of it.
And yeah, it shouldn't be hard.
Like the lesson that I took from all of this stuff, as well as having a passing acquaintance with modern history and the kinds of things that have been done, you could take your pick.
You could take Western colonialism and, you know, making money from rubber in Africa.
You could take the...
Terrible things that have been done in the name of communism or whatever.
You name it, people have the capacity to use any kind of ideological framework to justify doing whatever the hell they want, whether it's in Sri Lanka or Myanmar or Africa or Eastern Europe or Asia, wherever.
So, I just find it difficult to have any particular...
I mean, my problem is with those ideological frameworks that people can use to justify what they do.
It's hard to point the finger at any one of them in particular because while it might be true that one particular ideological framework might have been particularly at fault at this point in time, just pick a different time.
You know, go to a different century or a different part of the world and you can find examples that point the finger somewhere else.
Yeah, and I think that is a valid argument that people should bear in mind when they're making, you know, totalizing claims about specific traditions.
However, I do think that you could argue that, you know, what matters most to people alive now is the situation now.
And I think the case that Hitchens and others are making is that historical contingencies are what they are, but in the world that we live in now.
The religions are not equally likely to murder you for profaning their prophets.
And so the reach for historical examples, which I'm also prone to do as well, is seen as, you know, obfuscating that reality.
That there is a difference in the relative prevalence of, like, extremist movements.
Yeah, and I agree with that point.
If you sort of, if you restrict the question to being, okay, in this particular world, this particular timeline, in this historical contingency, our world, like right here, right now, then I would accept that.
But it's a kind of a weak...
To take a different example, Chris, we can point to, say, the West or America now and look at where political violence, political extremism is coming from, conspiracy theories, you name it.
And at the moment, I'd be pointing my finger squarely at the right wing, at that side of politics.
Now, that hasn't always been the case.
Yeah, and there's nothing inherently attributable to conservatism, I think, that lends itself to violence more so than radical progressivism.
At a different point in time, at a different place, you could point all of the political violence and stuff in the other direction.
So, you know, I definitely concede that point.
It's just that it becomes a much, much weaker point when it all depends on the historical contingency.
Right.
I have some clips that might speak to this point.
Tell me.
Egypt is ruled by Islam.
Is it Islam which is used there?
Mubarak is a secular president, isn't it?
Syria is a Muslim leader or is a secular state?
All the main societies where the government used this, because you know what happened.
It's easier to use the people to tell them, against the West you can demonstrate, but not against the government, which is an autocratic government.
So it's not religion.
It's political instrumentalization of popular emotions against the West just to make it a religious issue.
You cannot just avoid talking about political instrumentalization of countries where there is no democracy.
And these countries are not Islamists.
They are secular, autocratic countries.
Yeah, Chris, I mean, I'm glad you played that, because I think that's an excellent point, right?
Where, let's take Syria, for example, that's a part of the world I know you have an interest in, the Ba 'athists in rule there, and the same is true of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, right?
And you've got these autocratic, evil, frankly, regimes which have a political ideology that is secular.
At the same time, in the same world, you've got another regime in a place like Iran doing terrible things to women at the moment, using religion as a framework, as a justifying framework for what they do.
And this is just my own personal opinions now, not so much a critique of Hitchens or anything like that.
It's just, I mean, the takeaway I have from all of this stuff, as well as history, is that these bad things, these bad regimes, take Hitchens' point of view, the anti-liberal, anti-cosmopolitan, repressive regimes.
They can use all kinds of rationalizations for what they do.
And I don't like religion.
I'm an atheist.
I'm basically on Hitchens' team here.
But I also have to acknowledge that people can use all kinds of justifications for the stuff they want to do.
And I feel like it's historical, economic, and political contingency that is the main driving force.
And the ideological frameworks, yes, they don't help.
Like, it's not good that there are these pre-packaged frameworks you can pull out of the drawer there to justify things.
They're a bad thing.
But are they the driving force for these bad things?
I think not.
I have Hitchens' response.
I'm inserting myself into this debate.
I apologize, Chris.
I apologize.
Here's Hitchens' response to Matt.
I can't possibly disagree with you.
Of course, there's a great deal of opportunism.
And demagogy, and I'm certain hypocrisy as well.
And in fact, I will say that I've heard you and seen you saying that before, and I agree.
I don't think I would classify a country that hauls the Christian leader of its minority onto the TV to say, no, it's not possible.
It could have been any.
Exactly the same.
Political instrumentalization.
No, to give you a true example.
Instrumentalization?
No, I would not.
Nor would I describe the Alawite regime.
It's an Alawite sectarian regime, not a secular one.
That is funded by Tehran and is the funder of the murder gang Hezbollah as secular either.
No.
Don't insult me.
Not that it really hurts me that much.
I don't feel humiliated or anything.
So sorry, Matt.
He's arguing with your characterization of it being secular.
So how do you respond, Mr. Brown?
I mean, look, yes, as well as being Barthes, they're also members of the Alawite sect or whatever.
But Chris, I mean, you tell me, do you think that Islam is the driving force behind autocracy and repression?
In Syria, or is it just straightforward politics, you know, dictators doing what dictators do?
Now, I take the point that there's plenty of drivers towards autocratic tendencies and religious devotion is only, or religious fundamentalism is only one such driver that you can use.
And I think the Assad regime is primarily about keeping the Assad.
Family in power and in autocratic control.
So whatever they can use to those ends are what matters.
And I think that applies in a lot of contexts.
Yeah.
Chris, just take another example.
Take Russia at the moment.
Putin has recently been leaning towards this kind of orthodox, Christian, moralizing...
Rationale for a lot of stuff that he does, but is it the driving factor?
No, it's just another convenient thing to drape himself in.
That's how I see things anyway.
Yeah, but in those cases, I think the counter-argument, and it comes up a little bit towards the end of the debate, is partly because the moderator raises the issue about the...
Relative human rights and treatment of gay people and so on in Islamic countries, right?
And Tariq's response to this point is to say the following: What is happening now in Muslim majority countries is really before just looking at some dimensions of,
you know, the rights of Women within the rights of homosexuals, for example, is really to look at the situation in the whole society and the way it's progressing.
Now we have the great majority of the Arab countries.
They are under dictatorships.
There is no freedom.
Religious or secular society, this is the same for all.
So if you look at this and you are expecting from within an evolution in this society, forget about it.
Look now at what is happening in Turkey.
Turkey is changing, moving towards something which is a more democratic system.
And you see within that are rights and discussion and critical discussion that are possible.
So I would say that you cannot essentialize history and say the Muslims cannot do this.
It's evolving and it's changing and it depends where you can have this kind of discussion.
And the first, because there are priorities, the first is really to go towards democratization and transparency in the Muslim majority countries.
And if you go to Indonesia, even though we are far from a perfect system, you have much more discussion in Indonesia today about the principles, the critical reading of the text than you have in Arab countries.
So that case there, you have, again, the kind of focus on that there's plenty of...
Islamic-majority countries, and they're diverse, right?
They are not all the autocratic regimes in the Middle East.
You have Turkey, and you have Indonesia, and they are forging different paths, right?
And there are more moderate elements within them, which is true, though I think, again, that this defense would be made differently today, because, you know, Turkey is not noted in recent history for its democratic...
Autocratic reforms, right?
There's more a concerning autocratic turn relying on Islamist rhetoric, right?
And also with Indonesia, the turn has not been towards a more pluralistic, multicultural form of Islam, but a more hardline interpretation has been emerging.
And, you know, you had the mayor of Jakarta.
Being jailed for blaspheming against the Qur 'an and so on.
So there is some issue here that the moderate examples look a lot less moderate in 2023 than they do in 2010.
That's true.
I was in Istanbul a few years ago, Chris, and I spent a lot of time...
There was a student who was there at the conference too, like a graduate student who was...
Lovely guy and took me around and we spent a few days chatting and talking and he spoke in some depth about the turn Turkey has been taking and the same is true of Indonesia.
I mean, what do you think though?
I mean, all of this though is like a face vase kind of illusion.
You wouldn't say Rorschach, but you've said it too many times.
I'm going to use the different psychological, you know, the figure ground illusion there.
I mean, this is true.
This is undoubtedly true of...
Turkey and Indonesia.
But, I mean, to what degree is religion actually the driving force there?
I mean, isn't it like, yes, there are anti-democratic, authoritarian tendencies, a lot of concerning things.
I totally agree that religion can be, you know, moralizing precepts can be used as a political cudgel and a way of enforcing control.
And for that reason, I'm against it.
As I've said many times, I don't like any of them.
But to what degree is this reflective of the fact that this isn't happening in Christian countries, like nominally Christian countries, like the United Kingdom?
I was going to say United States, but that's maybe a bad example.
Let's say Germany, right?
To the extent that this kind of thing isn't happening in those places, doesn't it reflect the fact that these are very wealthy, high, you know, very stable, you know, healthy, functioning democracies?
And in places like Russia...
Which is nominally Christian and in other countries which are of different religions.
I mean, do you think it's religion that's having the wrong religion or simply having a religion that's the driving force here?
Or is it something else?
So in general, I think it's wrong to treat religion as if it's some separate sphere which cannot be invoked as a dominant driving force.
There's plenty of people that are primarily motivated.
By, you know, religious devotion.
I think Uganda's recent anti-gay bill that passed, or various predominantly Christian countries in Africa as well, or the fact that Ireland had not allowed abortions until relatively recently,
those cannot be explained, except with some reference to specific religious...
And it could be otherwise if the doctrines were different.
Now, if you're solely focused on singling out a specific religion as the one that has the only real problems with this, no, I think that's wrong because I think you can find fundamentalist stripes in all religions and that you tend to find that countries were More fundamentalist,
hardline forms of a religion have come to power.
There's a predictable tendency.
So the part I agree with is that you can find these trends in all religions, and throughout history, it depends on where they're most dominant.
And that, like you say, secularizing tendencies across the globe, to some extent, counteract that, regardless of the society that you're in.
And there's historical contingencies.
that I agree with Hitchens and others on is that even Dawkins to a certain extent that there is a tendency for people to want to carve out religion into the metaphorical space or the secondary concern for people where it's really about politics and it's really about other factors but I think that is in some respect an artifact of the fact that we are secular and that we imagine that religion is not this driving But
I think if you go back even 50 years in Ireland, religion is a hugely influential thing on people's lives and society.
So I think it's a little bit of failure of imagination of Western secularized people to imagine that religion still has such a dominating effect over a large part of the world.
Yeah.
I may have given the wrong impressions further.
I definitely agree with you that religion, like any ideological framework, does have an influence.
Ideas do.
And to give a personal example there, I had colleagues and very good friends that I worked with in Japan who were from Iran.
And one fellow in particular, like a lovely guy, there was one day he mentioned to me, somewhat pretty casually actually, that all homosexuals were child molesters and probably should be killed.
And I was quite shocked.
I took him up on this and we spoke at him.
He was quite embarrassed, right?
Because he didn't realize that I had gay people in my family.
He was kind of embarrassed.
And to give you a sense of what I mean here, there's nothing about his personality that was filled with hate or intolerance or anything like that.
He was like a gentle, normal person.
I'm sure he's in favor of more democracy, more liberalism, all that stuff.
He had some ideas.
Sort of injected into his head from the place that he grew up in and stuff that had been taken for granted as a belief system from where he was from that, you know, was kind of shocking to, whatever, Western sensibilities.
So, you know, that was an idea, right?
An idea that he had...
And it wasn't like a fault of his personality.
It wasn't a fault of anything, really, apart from the ideas that were floating around in the place where he happened to be born.
He wasn't even particularly religious.
So, yeah, look, I agree with you there.
I think in terms of the debate there, I mean, like I said, I'm kind of conflicted because on one hand, I am on board with Hitchens' basically atheistic stance.
And I'm not in favour of Ramadan's position there, which is I don't think religion is particularly helpful.
I've certainly never needed it as a help in my life to be a better person.
And I don't think it would make me a better person.
And you can point at a lot of things where all religions actually pushes people in a bad direction.
And as we talked about, and I think both of these debaters agree, is that it can function as, I'm going to say it again, a Rorschach inkblot.
Where people can use it as a justification and they can interpret the holy text in any way they like and they can use it as a justification for whatever they like.
And as it turns out, historically, it turns out to be a justification for reactionary, oppressive, ultra-conservative points of view.
And that's, you know, so it's just that when you look at...
Bad things that have happened in the world in one place or another.
I have to admit that in terms of the causal agency, I don't know that religion is that special.
You can see other political, ideological frameworks that are just as brittle, just as authoritarian, just as intolerant, that work perfectly well to justify people to do what it is that they want.
I think there's a good exchange that speaks to this, and it's a thing that both you and I know this, so we definitely want to touch on it.
So this is from earlier in the speech from Hitchens, when he's outlining again his kind of issue about, you know, totalizing claims.
Islam makes very large claims for itself.
Very large claims indeed.
It claims to be the last and final religion.
The last and final revelation.
When you see bumper stickers, everyone says you can't reduce major things to a bumper sticker.
It's not my idea to have bumper stickers saying Islam is the solution.
It's a well-known slogan, actually, of parties associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
They say Islam is the solution for everything.
It takes care of all your life and the one to come.
Sexuality, political economy, banking, diet.
Relations with other religions, everything.
It's a total solution.
What is creepy about the word total?
I hope I don't have to tell an audience like this.
It's the first five letters of the word totalitarian.
It's absolute.
It's absolute.
It's all-inclusive.
It's unanswerable.
And oddly, for a religion that makes such large claims, notice another thing about Islam, it doesn't particularly like having these claims questioned or scrutinized.
In other words, just as there is with all religions, an inverse relationship between the claims they make and the evidence they can produce for them.
So you had that point, Matt, about the totalitarianism starts with total and totalizing starts with total.
Wasn't that what he was saying?
That total solution, right?
The word total is in totalitarianism.
As we've pointed multiple times, Islam is not alone in making claims that it is the path to truth and that its holy text is the word of God, right?
That just puts it in company with pretty much all other monotheistic faiths.
And all religions are not shy from claiming that they have access to privileged truth.
So Tariq highlights the issue of this quite effectively, I think.
First, you know, when you said the first remark, say, okay, you know what, total, these are the first letters of totalitarianism, because Islam is a comprehensive religion, by the way, exactly like Judaism and Christianity.
I never met a rabbi, a Christian, telling me you are with God on Saturday and with the devil on Monday or in...
What is that?
But in Islam, it's as if it's all together.
It's a very simplistic way of dealing with Islam.
It's a comprehensive religion, but there are rights of God and rights of people, and you have to differentiate, and it's very old.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the debate in a nutshell, right?
Like, Hitchens is making a bunch of broadsides that apply perfectly well to every religion, and Professor Ramadan is saying, well, it's not just Islam.
Well, yeah, but he...
So the reason I played this, apart from just making sure we cover it, is also because where he goes after that.
And, you know, people talk about the hitch slap, right, where he had these good one-liners.
We've seen a couple of examples of them in this talk.
I think Ramadan delivers his own pretty good slap here.
And I will note, Matt, it's because he knows about his debate opponent, something which our gurus would be well advised to heed from.
Islam is this total mean totalitarian.
What's that?
These are the first letters of autocratic.
It's not an argument.
It's not serious.
And as I said, yes, we are talking about reading.
And by the way, it's for all the texts.
It's the same for the Marxists.
You know quite well about the Marxist tradition.
And you know what some Marxists did with the text?
It means that everything that Marx wrote was bad?
No.
Once again, it's a serious matter here.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
That's pretty good.
So you have to know that Hitchens in an earlier life was quite hardcore Marxist.
So that was a pretty good dig, right?
Yeah, and he's kind of making the point that we've been making throughout our commentary here.
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem, isn't it?
Like when you're relying on rhetorical flourishes.
That's why I said, Chris, at the beginning, I just, I don't know, I came away from this a little bit.
Frustrated.
Like you, I appreciate the fact that these two people are intelligent.
They are making substantive points.
It's a cut above the kind of public discourse we're seeing on YouTube and stuff these days.
But at the same time, it was just frustrating because they were kind of talking past each other, right?
Oh, it's still a performative debate.
And they're good at it.
I enjoyed aspects of the debate, but I also found it like frustrating to listen to at various points because I did think it veered, I think a lot of it was like rhetorical in nature.
But as we talked with Matt Johnson, I think with Hitchens and I also think with Ramadan, there's substance behind,
I don't like the obfuscation.
I don't like the slippage in the...
There still is a core disagreement, right?
And there still are substantive arguments being treated back and forth.
But this is why I think, Chris, I think you have a greater appreciation for public debate in general than I do.
And I think for me, the reason is these two could keep batting away at each other, making some good hitch slaps and so on, giving some good one-liners and sounding very good.
Fundamentally, what was going on was Hitchens was making a bunch of points against religion and totalizing belief systems in general.
Tariq Ramadan countered with, yes, you can use any ideological framework to justify good and bad things.
Religions are complex institutions with good and bad components.
Yeah, but people have done bad things with any belief system that you've got, even stuff like communism.
That's not even a religion.
And what was frustrating to me is that that never really got a response, right?
Like, it didn't build from there.
Like, there was no synthesis, right?
Kitchens never really addressed it.
Are you dying for the Omega?
You have enough of what is it that the G&B people are always talking about?
Or the thesis and the anti-phesis.
And what we need, Matt, is synthesis.
Yes.
We needed some more G&B with this debate.
That's my critique.
Yeah, you G&B bastard.
No.
Yeah, I mean, I knew what I was going to get and I got it.
That's the thing.
I've heard a million debates about this and I've heard pretty much all the arguments that the people want to make.
So this is just another flavor of it.
So I just appreciate it for what it is.
And I don't think there ever will be any of these kind of things where somebody admits defeat or that says this point is valid and I'm rejigging my position.
I just got what I expected.
That's the thing.
And it sounds like you got what you expected too, but you're frustrated.
You should expect more, Chris.
You should expect more because while I do appreciate it, I think it's generally a positive thing for these guys to be debating with each other and so on.
I mean, they don't really get anywhere, though, do they?
I mean, it's really a fundamental problem I have with the debate format, which is that Hitchens could have conceded those points and then...
Move to another position that would have been more interesting.
But he never did, right?
Or vice versa.
And vice versa.
Yes, I was about to say that, right?
Neither of them would concede anything because they're in a debate, right?
And you don't concede anything in a debate.
You're trying to win it.
Well, that's not fair entirely because I think they do at times concede.
It's just that they're kind of conceding points in order to land a counterblow as to why they're still right.
And that's how people usually concede arguments in my experience in academia as well.
Like there are rare exceptions.
That's not how I roll, mate.
That's not how I roll.
I'm like on a different level, mate.
I follow the Amiga principle.
The evidence comes and you completely shift.
But yeah, I don't know.
I think that in lots of these cases, there isn't a position where they can arrive at a, you know, An agreement, because there's fundamental differences in values.
And there's distrust of each other.
There's the view, I think, Tariq would believe that Hitchens is a bigot.
And other people, too, would regard Hitchens as bigoted.
And vice versa, with Tariq, there are people that would allege that he is hiding much stronger fundamentalist positions and running, what's that?
Interference?
Yeah, running interference for...
An agenda which is much more nefarious.
And so, you know, like the chance of them shaking hands and this is the best of what you can get is them meeting together in a room, agreeing to disagree and treating jibes.
Like that's...
I'm sorry, Matt.
You know, imagine no religion.
It's easy if you try.
It is easy.
They should all agree.
It's all stupid.
We should all just go and have a beer.
Oh no, he probably doesn't drink.
I shouldn't say that.
So there's one more exchange before we round the corner towards the end of things.
No, I don't think it's fair to say I like this exchange, but I think it's a good example of the moral force that I talked about earlier with Hitchens.
And when people are presenting arguments in such a way that they...
They allege that their opponent is supporting something terrible.
Now, Hitchens does it as well in this talk.
But Tariq, when he's talking about ideologies and how they can be used for good and bad, he's talking about, you know, the war in Iraq.
And he says this.
We all have to do something which is out of humility to check our people.
Because with the best means.
You can promote the bad or the worst attitude.
In the name of human rights, we want to kill people.
In the name of human rights, we can promote and support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where so many innocent people have been killed.
And I said it from the beginning, never forget that the blood of an Afghani or Iraqi innocent man or woman is as valuable as the blood of an American innocent man and woman.
No discussion about this.
So the best ideology in the name of human rights, in the name of democracy, could be used by people to promote the worst.
So let us be humble, instead of criticizing one religion and one ideology, to know that in our universe of reference, you will find people using our texts, our values, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad,
sometimes for peace and sometimes for war.
What did you think of that, Chris?
I thought it was pretty forceful.
I mean, we were citing communism as an example of an ideology, like a secular ideology that can be used to justify all kinds of bad things.
And, you know, you can pretty easily make an argument that these nice things like liberalism and globalism and so on.
I mean, you only have to look at colonialism, right?
At least a portion of that was justified by civilizing.
The people of the non-Western world, right?
Removing barbarism, right?
And bringing the light of Christianity to the benign nations.
But not just Christianity, like rationality and science and education and all of these things.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, as he highlights as well, it's not like the Iraq War was one that occurred without any recourse to ideology.
They actually have another exchange where Hitchens is arguing that, you know, people...
They weren't going into battle in Iraq in the name of Christ.
No one was ever summoned to vote for the war in Iraq in the name of God.
And the president's own church, as well as every other Christian church that I know of, was opposed to the war.
For whatever little difference that might make.
None to me.
And Tariq responds, saying, well, did you listen to the speeches by George Bush?
Because I...
But once again, you can just refer to the Constitution and you will have Muslims just referring to texts and avoiding the practical consequences and sometimes the policies that are promoted in one country.
And remember that the previous president, George W. Bush, was talking when going not for the same reasons as you.
Not from the same source, because you were supporting the war in Iraq, but he was doing it in the name of God.
So the Constitution here is not preventing someone from within to speak in the name of God, even if he's supporting exactly the same thing, that in the name of the peace that you are promoting, you are for the war in Iraq.
I think he has a point that can be made there.
So yes, the point that...
Under the best ideals, people can justify the worst atrocities.
It's certainly true.
And that is also the case in, like, communist regimes, right?
Like, the goal of communism as opposed to fascism.
Whereas fascism, at least, you know, they're both utopian visions, but the fascist one does have the kind of uber man at the top and exclusion of the...
Well, no, maybe this, as I say, it comes...
The exclusion of people, suppressive forces and communist state supply as well.
But all I want to mean is the communist ideal of a utopia where everybody is well-provisioned and there are no divisions between people by artificial structures.
It's a utopian, beautiful vision.
I don't know, does fascism have at the end of the day a similarly beautiful vision?
Rest on the bodies and the exclusion of anybody not belonging to a particular ethnic or national ideal.
Yeah, I think they do have a utopian vision by their lights, which...
It just involves people of a particular ethnicity living a pastoral dream.
Some fascist philosophers, not all fascists.
Maybe there's a weird fascist philosophy that doesn't rest on ethno-nationalism.
But anyway, my point is not to promote fascism or capitalism.
No, no, no, no, no.
You wouldn't.
I'm purely saying that people often view whatever ideology they...
Are supporting, even if it's engaged in the worst atrocities, to be ultimately on the side of good.
Maybe the atrocities are necessary to arrive at the golden vision on the hill, or maybe the enemies are just that inhuman that they deserve to be treated that way.
But yeah, that point is, I think, well-made and hard to argue against.
However, Hitchens does argue back, and I think he also makes good points.
Here it says a response.
that an Iraqi life is as precious as an American one.
Thank you.
And as someone who's visited Iraq quite a lot, had the occasion to think about it a good deal, I wonder if you could mention anything the United States has done in Iraq that is remotely as criminal, as sadistic, and as violent as the blowing up of the mosque of the Golden Dome in Samarra.
One of the holiest sites in the Muslim world, callously blown up by Sunni forces in alliance with forces who, perhaps I'd agree with them for once on this, were fascistic Ba 'athists.
Probably they got the weapons and the high explosive from them.
That makes it worse, surely.
Intending to start and successfully, in fact, initiating a civil war.
In which countless thousands of people have been killed.
Religious processions have been fired upon.
Funerals have been fired upon.
Korans without number, of course, been incinerated.
Much more importantly, children, old people, and civilians.
Now, where is...
I just wonder.
You must be able to quote it to me.
Where is the Sunni fatwa against this conduct?
Where is it?
Where is the authoritative statement of moral outrage?
Yeah.
It doesn't much like to be suggested that he doesn't know that Iraqi lives have seen value as American lives.
No, no, no.
Hitchens is not somebody who would take that kind of thing lying down.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we should just leave that.
I mean, if you and I, we don't want to get into deconstructing the...
Pros and cons.
And who's to blame for civilian deaths and so on in places like Iraq and Afghanistan?
Yeah.
I'm just imagining the Reddit threads, Chris.
I'm imagining the Reddit threads.
And look, I think the point that you can make without concern about Reddit threads is that what Hitchens wants to highlight there and what...
Tariq wants to Which
are correct, right?
There has been violence, there has been murder in both occasions, but both of them want to focus on the other aspect and not emphasize that.
But I think one point is that it didn't necessarily be the case that there's no actual answer or there's no position which is better supported in an argument, right?
There can be, but the chance that it will be arrived at via this format...
It's very unlikely, right?
Because essentially you're just gesturing towards, you know, atrocities, right?
Or deaths of civilians.
And unless you go into some, I don't know, some accounting, right?
And even then, it won't make a difference to the views.
So it's, yeah, it's just a matter of the clashing perspectives.
Yeah, I think that's well put.
That's why I just absolutely hesitate to make any kind of take here.
Recourse to some sort of utilitarian thing in terms of deaths and injuries.
I mean, you could cite the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan.
You can cite the carpet bombing of Dresden or Tokyo.
These were actions taken for good reasons, if you want to say.
Like, not religious ones, certainly.
Politically, arguably good reasons, but they were still very, very bad things.
And when you look at the incidents in Iraq, you can put a tally on civilian deaths that was instigated by the American interventions, you know, like directly as a course, as a function of, not just American, but Western generally,
Australia was involved too, interventions, deaths from airstrikes, for instance, but also a much higher death toll from...
The various sectarian conflicts that arose afterwards.
And then you start getting into a game of trying to point the figure and attribute things.
And like you said, it's people focus on the atrocities, I suppose, that support their arguments.
And yeah, I don't have a take to make.
Yeah, so I mean, you know, even when you look at like World War II, where there's kind of a general agreed upon view about who the good is and the bad is.
We're in that war.
But when you look at the fire warming of Germany or Japan or the second dropping of a nuclear bomb or why nuclear bombs were not dropped on non-inhabited areas.
Why not drop it on non-Fuji to make a point?
Yeah, that's my little historical bug there.
Yeah, but there just are terrible atrocities, even in a war where...
There is a much broader agreement about who's in the right and who's in the wrong overall.
And yeah, it's just to underline that point that the reality is always complicated and bloody.
And there's always examples to be cited to kind of support whatever interpretation you want to take.
But I will say that I think, Tariq, it's kind of a different point when they're talking about 9-11 and the response to it.
And Hitchens is complaining about there not being enough pushback about Hamas' manifesto or whatever it is that mentions the obliteration of Israel and so on.
I repeat my question.
Who has the authority to issue fatwas?
Is it Sheikh Karadawi, who sometimes very much expressed respectful, who on Al Jazeera gives advice on all kinds of things?
Some of them innocuous, sexual matters and so forth, doctrinal rulings, sometimes upon the legitimacy or otherwise of suicide bombing, if directed at Israelis.
Not just Jews, of course, but no, no, we draw the distinction.
On the other hand, Hamas, which does the suicide bombing, doesn't draw the distinction.
If I can't issue a fatwa against Hamas, if I'm a Muslim, If there's no one who will and they won't, surely someone could say we don't think Hamas should have on its website and manifesto the reproduction of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A Christian fascist fabrication that is one of the warrants for the Nazi exterminationist solution.
I mean, surely that's a question for the UN Anti-Racism Committee on a spare day.
Or, or since that spare day never seems to come, for some Muslim authority to say, no, brothers, don't, don't do that.
It doesn't come.
It doesn't happen.
Look on the website.
It's still there.
But Ramadan makes a point saying that, Hitchin says, were the voices condemning violence in the Muslim world?
And Tariq says...
Yes, I acknowledge the fact that there is a crisis of authority in Islam.
But, please...
Don't tell me today that you didn't hear the Muslim voices around the world criticizing and saying this is unacceptable to kill the people in the streets in New York and the condemnation was widespread by the scholars.
If you don't hear, of course, there's, you know...
Not less than 12 councils of Muslim scholars around the world, from Amman to Istanbul to Paris, Dublin, were condemning this.
It's as if they don't speak.
Because at the end, when the people are calling to kill for killing, they are heard.
But when people are condemning what is done in the name of their religion, it's as if they don't speak.
It doesn't make the headlines.
But I'm telling you that some scholars...
So I think that's a valid point, right?
There were people condemning the violence after 9-11.
I would imagine that there are condemnations of the sectarian violence in the Muslim world by various Muslim leaders, including in some of the more fundamentalist sects, I would imagine, as well.
But there's a kind of little...
Neat way, I think, that Tariq puts it, and he's talking about himself at this point, but I think it's a good argument on this.
And you know what is very interesting in the whole discussion?
When the people like what I'm saying, say, you know what?
What he's saying is good, but he's alone.
Minority, it's open, but he's alone.
But when the people don't like what I say, say, you know what?
He has huge followers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think you can still address, you know, which views are Yeah, it's a tricky one,
isn't it?
Like, on one hand, I don't think it's a good argument to just carve off extremists or people who do bad things in the name of On the other hand,
it's still very much the case that 99.9% of people of any persuasion don't commit any violence in the name of the thing that they subscribe to.
I mean, it's very much analogous to the silly thing that's on Twitter at the moment, which is once again, surprise, surprise, Chris, racial politics in the United States has...
Raise its ugly head again.
And I'm not tweeting at the moment.
I just look at it occasionally sometimes and then turn it off for disgust.
But, you know, there's these debates about crime, right?
And, you know, various inflammatory tweets about white on black crime and black on white crime, whatever, vice versa.
And these arguments about statistics and so on, they kind of obscure the fact that has been rightly pointed out by the various people that...
You know, 99.9% of people don't murder anyone, don't commit any crime, right?
And so when you talk about these categories, whether it's black people, white people, Islamic people, Christian people, it is meaningful to take account of the fact that you are talking, when you're talking about extremist acts of violence or crime or something extreme,
then you are talking about a tiny percentage of any population.
Yeah, so I think that's good to keep in mind, but there are also arguments about the little Sam Harris ringing in my ear, or Dawkins maybe as well, about the role of moderates in supporting the more extremist sex.
But you can also see it as the role of moderates in diluting the power of the more hardline movements in a religion.
Yeah, I do think there's a tendency to fixate on extremes.
But there's also the issue that it's the people at the extremes who tend to do the violent acts or be responsible for the rhetoric that accompanies atrocities and whatnot.
So it's a bit of a...
To be it back and forth.
Yeah, I think what you're saying is that the radicals or the extremists can be given a permission slip by the broader group.
I mean, you know, like a good example is the MAGA phenomenon in the United States.
Now, I'm sure, you know, like half of America voted for Donald Trump.
Maybe half of them have MAGA-esque sympathies.
You know, not all of them are rushing out to storm the Congress or to, you know, do extreme things.
But at the same time, The ideology that they subscribe to kind of gives a permission slip to unbalanced people that want to engage in these things.
So, I basically don't know.
So, you engage in which things?
Well, things like storming the Capitol building.
Oh, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah.
I mean, the reason I was just asking for clarity is in regards, like, there's that concept of stochastic terrorism.
Which is spoken about quite a lot now.
And I have no problem with that term.
I do think there's a risk that people over-apply it anytime that there's strong rhetoric that they don't like.
However, the risk is real, but I wish people applied it consistently because I think exactly what you're saying, that people can easily understand, if they're left-wing, they can easily understand the issue with people promoting Like derogatory hatred towards immigrants,
talking about how they're infesting society, talking about how we need to protect our borders and our women from these people that are coming in and how you don't actually need to be saying, pick up your gun and go and kill people for that kind of rhetoric to have an effect when people go into mosques and murder Muslims or shoot,
you know, at immigrants in border areas or whatever.
It has an impact.
That ideology has an impact.
Even if you yourself are, you know, a figure doing that and then saying, no, of course, we don't want anyone to kill anyone, right?
Yeah.
I'm just saying Mexicans are rapists.
I'm not saying you should do anything about that.
Yeah, they're not sending their best people, right?
But I do wish that people would apply that consistently because in the same regard, if you have an ideology which talks about a kind of...
Clash of civilizations and a religion which is true, whereas all those are a threat to the religion and that there is the particular word of God which you are promoting, right?
And there are various interpretations of religions where you can be warriors for the faith and be rewarded for that, right?
There's Buddhist concepts, there's Islamic concepts, there's Christian.
for your religion.
And now they can be interpreted metaphorically, but the point is, if you have that rhetoric, if you have rhetoric about martyrs being rewarded for doing their service for,
religion and whatnot.
In the same way, it can be used to justify isolated acts or it can be used by extremists in a way to justify extreme interpretations.
So
Yeah, I just want stochastic terrorism to be a concept which is applied consistently whenever people are concerned about it.
I'm not saying all ideologies are equally capable of motivating violence.
I'm just saying that it's notable that the people that are concerned about Islamist stochastic terrorism are the kind that aren't worried about.
Right-wing stochastic terrorism and vice versa.
And vice versa, probably.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm saying the same thing.
Like, I agree with you about those, and I agree with Hitchens, I suppose, with those concerns about Islamic ideology providing that permission slip.
I just look at the right-wing in Israel or look at contemporary Russia and ask whether or not you can see some...
Religious ideological justification for similar kinds of things.
And, you know, you can.
And I guess I just...
My frustration with Hitchens in this interview, which is I feel like he's on solid ground speaking to the thing that he truly cares about, right?
Which is that he hates all religions, right?
And he's in this debate talking about Islam in particular.
And I just didn't feel like he made a convincing argument that there was something special about Islam that couldn't be attributed to particular historical, geographic and economic contingencies of the modern world.
So, I think we've spent enough time on Hitchens and Ramadan and their back and forth debates and whatnot.
Maybe there's one quote that we can end on, which is maybe a nice call where they...
Let me just see.
Did they do that?
Something nice and conciliatory, Chris.
Let's draw a line under this.
We've had this blast from the past.
Nobody wants to talk about this stuff anymore.
Yeah, I don't know if that's true, but I'm not sure that I can find a note that is appropriately conciliatory.
But I can at least find Hitchens talking about the fact that they seem to both agree on the importance of pluralism and tolerance.
And now Hitchens uses it to get a dig in.
But nonetheless, here we are.
Now, you would do better, I think, Professor, if you identified yourself as a member of a very small and critical and endangered minority.
Someone who really is against all this, and will say so, and will also decry the fact that the religion itself can't seem to throw it off.
But you seem to have that a little bit...
Both ways.
Now...
Very well.
Yes, so then my closing statement is this.
If you want diversity, as much as the professor does, as much as I'm sure many people here do, religious diversity, cultural diversity, what you need for it is this.
you need a secular state with a godless constitution like this one.
Thank you.
Mick drop.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, I could sign up on that.
Like, I don't want to live under a theocracy, be it Jonathan Pajot's Christian theocracy or an Islamist theocracy.
They're all theocracies.
None of them are appealing to me.
Or an Irish Catholic theocracy, for that matter.
So, yes, there we agree.
Secularism, at least in terms of the government structure, seems to be...
It's good.
Yeah.
It's doing all right.
Yeah.
Politically, I'm in favor of debonair, cosmopolitans, knocking back a whiskey.
Or not.
It's fine if you don't want to drink.
If you want to live under a religious theocracy, I have no issue with that.
I just...
Don't want to be there with you.
You can go live as a religious theocracy and I will stay in a secular democracy.
So horses for courses.
Horses for courses.
But yeah.
Fair enough.
That's an excellent take, Chris.
Well, that's a good thing to end on.
Yeah, for a secular person to hold.
But anyway, what we should do, Chris, I mean, we inserted ourselves into this debate.
We couldn't resist our old new atheist.
Stripes reared their ugly hackles and we got involved.
But what are your thoughts about Hitchens more generally?
Is he a guru?
Does he make the gurometer go ping?
What's the deal?
Yes, I think he is a traditional secular guru in the sense of somebody offering a worldview and having revolutionary theories that he promotes a charismatic personality.
Attracts followers and whatnot.
But he was at his peak before the social media age, before the online ecosystems had properly, fully developed, I think.
And as a result of that, it's hard to say how he would have turned out overall.
Because when he died, essentially, although he had a following and was a kind of iconic figure in various regards, he was very much a traditional media pundit.
But what would Hitchens be like had he lived till now with Twitter in COVID with Jordan Peterson and the intellectual dark web and so on?
I can't quite imagine it and I can see it going the way that he becomes completely a secular guru of the toxic variety or that indeed he doesn't at all.
And he remains much more aloof and critical of that whole, you know, ecosystem.
I can't say where he would land, but in this material, I will say that I think it's a good illustration of how eloquent he was, how rhetorically forceful he was, and also how there was substance behind his positions,
but that he did take his positions often.
To, you know, a particularly strong position or polemical point of view.
And as a result, nuance is sometimes lost.
And I think he doesn't always address the responses, right?
So, like, he has 100% got a very strong polemical position that he's arguing for.
And I think there's perfectly legitimate for people to raise, like, critical questions about it.
And I think sometimes the rhetorical power Masked the strength of which his conclusion was entirely demonstrated.
Yeah.
Yeah, I sign off on that.
I actually, I kind of agree with Matt Goodwin in a way in that I think he wouldn't have gone the route.
Matt Johnson?
Sorry.
Are you coming out as a conservative nationalist?
No, no, no, no, no.
Cut, cut, cut.
Matt Johnson.
Sorry, Matt.
Yeah, I think I basically agree with Matt in that I give...
Hitchin's the benefit of the doubt.
I think he was too iconoclastic.
I think he was too independent.
I think he was too willing to disappoint people.
He was too confident in his ability to talk people around.
He wouldn't have gone the route of the kind of gurus that we cover.
That's just my guess in terms of more about his personality than anything else.
When I look at the Gurometer and I get a sense of the things that they do, I completely agree with you that I think he's a...
A secular guru in the non-majorative sense.
Like you said, predominantly as someone who is about putting together a forceful argument.
And he's not like us.
Like, you and I are like, oh, this, but on the other hand, this, but, you know, this, that, and the other.
You know, very wishy-washy.
That's not the kind of thing that builds yourself a reputation as a spokesperson for this kind of muscular, atheistic liberalism that garnered him so many fans.
The things we've got down there, like the narcissism, maybe a little bit of narcissism, but, you know, the grievance mongering, the pseudo-profound bullshit, the conspiracies, all that stuff, anti-establishmentarianism.
He really didn't show those qualities.
Yeah, he was a polemicist from a bygone age.
I guess I'm probably a little bit glad that I didn't find out what his tweets would look like.
It's probably for the best.
Yes, well, me too.
So, you know, but then again.
He could have ended up like Dawkins.
Yeah, you know, I know Dawkins has tweeted so many mental bad things.
He is somebody that was promoting James Lindsay not so long ago.
But he is also somebody who tweets about his honeypots being stolen at the airport and that one about the homeless person with the sign saying...
Need money for bitches.
Or some dog 69ing that he's seen in the street.
The moral of the story for him seems to be not a political one or an ideological one.
It's just that we should take our social media keys away from us.
As we get older.
As we get older.
At 65 or whatever, you retire.
You're locked out.
You hand over your Twitter account.
That's it.
You're gone.
Your reputation is intact.
That's how it should be.
Well, let's see if we live by those rules.
We're still both on Twitter for now.
Just barely.
Just barely.
Yeah, that's true.
That was Hitchens.
That was Hitchens.
We will next be looking at Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Isn't that right?
I believe he's the next on our...
Our list, the AI guru.
So we veered off the track because the opportunity to speak to a Hitchens expert came up.
But we'll be back on the street and narrow next time with very much a contemporary guru in the shape of Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Are the machines coming to kill us?
Yes.
Are they?
Are they?
Indeed.
So, Matt, I'm afraid I don't have reviews teed up for today, so we're going to uncharacteristically be efficient in ending the podcast.
But we are going to get Patreon shoutouts.
I haven't forgot about that.
But no reviews to tell you, no feedback, exciting, negative or positive otherwise.
You'll just have to imagine them in your mind and just, you know, in your mind palace, just imagine the fancy prayers and the condemning words and that'll have to suffice.
Yep.
Sounds good.
All right.
Shout out our lovely patrons and I'll go and cook dinner.
Okay.
So, patrons, Matt.
Benefits.
That's what we're doing.
Benefits.
Things that benefit them.
We're shouting them out.
We're friends with benefits.
That's how we think about our Patreons.
It is.
So, conspiracy hypothesizers.
That's where we like to start.
And what a bevy of conspiracy hypothesizers we have this week.
We have:
Oh, the policy lass.
I know her.
Fantastic.
And did I hear some Norwegian names there, Chris?
Did I hear some Norwegian names?
Probably.
Yeah, this is great.
We're getting some of that lovely, lovely oil money that they're all entitled to.
Yeah, that's right.
As we learned last time.
Thank you, Norway.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
So you will.
So you will.
So, next, Matt.
Revolutionary geniuses.
Revolutionary geniuses.
We have a few.
Who are they?
have their names juha vitamaki jenny wisent john gonsalves paul stockman seth dan perry sean veltman trenten
knurr gareth monroe christine flinders
That is our revolutionary geniuses for this week.
Fantastic.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess.
And it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
It will never cease to amuse that those kind of reactions can occur, right?
And seemingly no dissonance created, but that's why we love them.
I want to make a commitment here.
I think we should find a new Brett Weinstein clip and play it at the beginning of next episode.
Okay.
I need some more Brett in my life.
All right, I can deliver that.
I'll do that for you.
So, Galaxy Brain Gurus, much like Brett, we have several of those.
And the fact that they contribute so much is stunning.
It's stunning.
So, in that illustrious group, we have Christian Beale.
Not that one.
Probably Christian Ball.
Sharon Mandir.
The real Eric Weinstein.
The real one?
Oh, good.
The real one.
Yes, he's contributing.
Peter.
P.G. Klein.
Four Arsaf.
Four Arsaf.
Elo won one of those.
Jedi Mishap.
And Derek Varn.
All...
Top tier.
All Galaxy Wing.
Top shelf.
Yep, yep.
Top shelf figures.
16 years or more.
Yeah.
Here we are.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.
And you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
No.
Yeah?
No.
That's your reward.
That's what you get.
That's what you get for your $10 a month.
But you get live streams, you get access to the coding academia, you get other things too.
It's not just that.
You get the warm, rosy glow of knowing that you're contributing to something deeply important, something that could change the world.
That's right.
Because the beard between Hitchens and Ramadan from...
12 years ago or whatever.
It's very important.
It's very urgent.
It's telling its moment.
It's of this moment.
So, yeah.
Well, hopefully, you know, we sometimes go back into the archive of the guru world.
That's what we have been up to.
Hitchens had to be done at some point.
We are not these podcasters that just chase around like the current news of the day, you know, the current hot topic in a bid to get more clout.
No.
We're motivated.
That's right.
So coming up, AI and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Will AI destroy us all?
Matt and Chris, we're going to sort it out.
Andrew Huberman.
And so, yeah, I don't know if we can lay claim to that.
But, you know, whatever.
It's all rhetoric.
You can identify it now.
So just accept that.
But, well, it's been a pleasure.
Matt, I look forward to editing this with you for many weeks to come.
What are you talking about?
It's 2 hours and 41 minutes of pure gold.
No editing required.
You've exactly specified that so people will now know exactly how much we've cut out.
All right.
All right.
Well, I will see you next time.
Yes, we will.
Watch out for the distributed idea suppression complex and the gated institutional narrative.
