The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [135]
“Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies,” Ferris explained to me when I initially doubted his thesis by suggesting all political beliefs are ideologies. “Both incorporate feedback loops through which actions (e.g., laws) can be evaluated to see whether they continue to meet with general approval. Neither science nor liberalism makes any doctrinaire claims beyond the efficacy of their respective methods—that is, that science obtains knowledge and that liberalism produces social orders generally acceptable to free peoples.” But, I rejoined, aren’t all political claims types of beliefs? No, Ferris responded: “To put it another way, (classical) liberalism is not a belief. It was a proposed method, which could easily have been found wanting in practice. As it has instead succeeded, it deserves support. Belief is not required at any step along the way—except in the sense, say, that John Locke ‘believed’ (or rather reasonably thought) that he was on to something promising.”27
Unfortunately, not everyone agrees that the overall goal of a society should be greater equality, liberty, freedom, wealth, and prosperity for more people in more places more of the time, as commentators such as myself, Timothy Ferris, and most other Western observers believe. Some societies—extreme Islamic theocracies, for example—believe that too much equality, liberty, freedom, wealth, and prosperity leads to decadence, licentiousness, promiscuity, pornography, prostitution, teen pregnancy, suicides, abortions, STDs, and sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Ed Husain recalled in The Islamist, his book about Islamic extremism and his indoctrination into the Muslim brotherhood in Britain, that their motto was “The Quran Is Our Constitution; Jihad Is Our Way; Martyrdom Is Our Desire.” One cell member told him: “Democracy is haram! Forbidden in Islam. Don’t you know that? Democracy is a Greek concept, rooted in demos and kratos—people’s rule. In Islam, we don’t rule; Allah rules.… The world today suffers from the malignant cancers of freedom and democracy.”28
Some Islamists hold as a higher goal obedience to God and his holy book, which leads them to believe in a rigid and hierarchical social structure in which, for example, women should obey men, should be punished for adultery by the death penalty, and should be treated under the law as property little different from chattel or cattle. In the words of the Pakistani journalist and pro-Islamic ideologue Abul Ala Mawdudi: “Islam wants the whole earth and does not content itself with only a part thereof. It wants and requires the entire inhabited world.… It is not satisfied by a piece of land but demands the whole universe [and] does not hesitate to utilize the means of war to implement its goal.”29
While science and liberty go hand in hand, what do you say to someone who does not believe in either? “Try winning an election,” is what Timothy Ferris would tell them, although this would likely fall on deaf ears since such people are almost never able to do so in a free and fair democratic election. Nevertheless, Ferris told me that he is optimistic about the future of democracy: “In practice there is more consensus around the world than is generally realized—at least within those parts of the world that have reasonably free media so that people can make fact-based decisions. It is not the case, for instance, that Muslim countries ‘believe’ that wealth and freedom are undesirable. That position, taken by radical Islamists, appeals to but a small minority. Polls repeatedly show that the majority of Muslims who do not already live in democratic countries prefer liberal democracy to other systems of government.”30 In fact,