Disgust and the Ground Zero Mosque
Rod Dreher
The Ground Zero mosque controversy is actually a perfect illustration of the
difficulty we have in our culture discussing controversial issues, because, if moral
psychologist Jonathan Haidt is correct, people on opposite sides of the political
spectrum analyze these issues using somewhat different criteria. (I've been
blogging a lot about Haidt's work lately, but if you're a newcomer to his theories,
read this presentation he gave at an Edge conference to familiarize yourself with
the outline, and why this matters for public discourse). Haidt has broken down
five moral senses that contribute to moral reasoning: Harm, Fairness, Authority,
Loyalty, and Purity. The degree to which we care about those five areas
determines the basic stances we take on morality. Note well, these don't dictate
the content of our thinking, only the things we will take into consideration as we
reason morally. Haidt has found that everyone factors Harm (e.g., "Whom does
this hurt?") and Fairness into their moral thinking, but only people who generally
fall onto the conservative side of the American spectrum also factor in Authority,
Loyalty, and Purity. (Interestingly, outside the West, nearly everybody else
factors these things in as well, which is why, in a clever phrase, "Americans are
WEIRD").
As Haidt explains in that Edge lecture and elsewhere, the three factors
conservatives also bring into their moral reasoning all have to do with
establishing and defending the kinds of morals that promote group cohesion. It
should be easy to understand from an evolutionary point of view where these
instincts came from. In the West, we have over the past couple of centuries
centered our moral thinking around Kantian and Benthamite theories that,
generally speaking, measure morality by universal categories -- ways of
approaching morality that only concern themselves with Harm and Fairness, and
exclude the other three. This, Haidt says, is how the people in our society who call
themselves liberals (Haidt is one of them) see moral reasoning; they do not grasp
that quite a few of their fellow Americans draw on other sources -- or if they do
recognize this, they dismiss these sources as illegitimate. Unsurprisingly,
conservatives do not accept that we should not care about Authority, Loyalty,
and/or Purity (which is not simply about sexual matters, but about the degree to
which one believes that some things are "sacred," and therefore not subject to
justification through reason).
This gives us a useful prism through which to view the controversy over the
mosque. Nearly everyone agrees, or should agree, that there is a clear
constitutional right to build this mosque/Islamic cultural center two blocks from
Ground Zero. The controversy is over whether or not it's morally right to do so,
and, to a certain degree, whether it is wise. For liberals, it would be unjust for
Muslims to feel compelled to knuckle under to the irrational feelings and
prejudices of others. Besides, the Cordoba House would not harm anybody, and
might actually do some good as a symbolic witness both to the rejection of
Islamic extremism by the Muslims associated with it, and to the tolerance of
America, welcoming a prominent Muslim institution only two blocks from
Ground Zero.
To conservatives -- and I'm generalizing here -- the mosque is a bad idea. There
are very good questions conservatives have about who's paying for this mosque,
and whether or not the Muslims behind it are totally on the up and up (given how
unwise it is to take at face value pleasant and conciliatory words spoken by
American Muslim leaders). These are questions that could be settled, in theory,
through reasoned deliberation. What cannot be is the whole question of
Purity/Sacredness -- and that's what I believe accounts for the vehemence of this
issue on the Right. It strikes many conservatives as innately wrong to have an
Islamic center built so close to the site where one the most infamous attacks in
American history was carried out by pious Muslims in the name of Islam. Worse
(to them), this building is going up as a direct response to that act. As one writer
put it in a powerful essay against the Cordoba House project:
The claim that the events of September 11, 2001, had “nothing to do with Islam”
is an abject and destabilizing lie. This murder of 3,000 innocents was viewed as a
victory for the One True Faith by millions of Muslims throughout the world
(even, idiotically, by those who think it was perpetrated by the Mossad). And the
erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many
millions of Muslims as a victory—and as a sign that the liberal values of the West
are synonymous with decadence and cowardice.
I should point out that the author of that essay, the secular atheist Sam Harris, is
in fact not a conservative at all, and indicates in the piece that he's appalled to
find himself on the same side as prominent Republicans. You really should read
the Harris piece; he discusses in detail why it's not at all clear that the fanatics
who brought down the Twin Towers were outliers on Islamic tradition, and how
in his view we are discouraged from discussing the particularlity of Islamic
religious ideas out of a misplaced sense of courtesy. The point of the paragraph
I've highlighted here is to say that for the (liberal atheist) Harris, as for many
conservatives, Ground Zero is a sacred spot. The idea of an Islamic cultural center
linked to the patch of ground where thousands were murdered in the name of
Islam is offensive on its face, because it profanes the sacred.
It is completely beside the point for Cordoba defenders to point out that nobody
would complain about a Jewish or Christian center built near Ground Zero, or
that there were plenty of mosques near the World Trade Center before September
11, 2001. Cordoba House is explicitly founded as a response to 9/11, and is being
sited close to Ground Zero because of what happened there. That mosque
defenders don't understand why this upsets many people beyond their ability to
articulate shows an incredible tone-deafness to how the world actually works.
I get this, actually. It's how I first felt when the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz
controversy arose in the 1980s. I didn't understand what the objection was. Why
should Jews object to nuns praying for the dead there? Christians were murdered
at Auschwitz too. True (I thought), Jews have a point when they say centuries
Christian anti-Semitism paved the way for the Auschwitz, but can they not see
that this convent is a place of healing, of uniting a Church and religious tradition
that was so often the cause of Jewish suffering to the utmost concrete symbol of
Jewish suffering?
All these were reasonable objections. But what I finally realized was they don't
matter. The injury suffered by Israel at Auschwitz was so grievous that it really is
not my place, as a Christian, to tell Jews it is irrational for them to be offended by
the convent at Auschwitz. I tried to imagine what the situation looked like from
the point of view of Jew. When I did that, my rational arguments melted away, in
the sense that they lost their force. They weren't defeated by rationality, but they
were defeated by a sense of compassion for the Jewish people, and a conviction
that however irrational their strong objection to the Carmelite convent seemed to
me, the whole purpose of the convent -- to work at redeeming the Shoah through
prayer -- was largely obviated by the rejection of the project by Jews who believed
it profaned a place they hold as sacred in their memory.
This is pretty much what's going on with Cordoba House. No matter how wellmeaning its founders, and how rational their case may be, it will almost certainly
not do what they say they want it to do, because precisely the Americans they
wish to witness to with a message of peace are incapable of receiving and
affirming that message because they see Cordoba House at Ground Zero as a
profanation of something sacred. The fact that critics aren't bothered by the idea
of Cordoba House existing some distance away from Ground Zero tells you a lot
about the Sacred/Profane nature of the opposition. When you have to tell people
who see something as sacred that they really have no rational grounds for doing
so, you have lost the argument for hearts and minds, even though you may win
the argument in court, or in a formal debate.
True, you cannot operate by always yielding to the sensitivities of a particular
group. This is why political correctness is so harmful; it empowers a privileged
elite to silence its opponents, and to prevent the kind of open deliberation
important to the success of free societies. But there is a difference between
political correctness and prudent sensitivity. The last time the Confederate flag
controversy came up, I understood that for many white Southerners, the Stars
and Bars is not a symbol of racism and oppression, but a symbolic expression of
regional cultural pride. But it cannot be denied that for the black minority in the
South, it is a symbol of slavery and oppression. Prudence, as well as a decent
regard for the suffering blacks endured under that flag, dictated its shunning.
This was denounced by some as political correctness, but we err if we think that
just because we believe our intentions are good, and we have the right to do
something, that we ought to do it. But I'm getting afield here.
In conclusion, I want to join Conor Friedersdorf, whose view on Cordoba House
is opposite of mine, in lamenting that this issue is rapidly emerging as a defining
one in American politics during this election year. We have so many enormous
and enormously complex problems facing us that it's pretty close to calamitous,
in my view, that we may fight this fall's election over Cordoba House. To liberals,
this just goes to show how stupid the American people are, and how unprincipled
and demagogic Republican politicians are to be exploiting this issue. To this, I
would counsel stepping back from the reflexive rights-based liberalism platform,
and trying to view this controversy through a Haidtian prism. There's a reason
why the Ground Zero mosque has drawn such passion outside of rarefied elite
circles -- and it is far more complicated than so-called "Islamophobia." Cordoba
House is a powerful symbol of Who We Are. It defines us as a people. For some,
it's important that Cordoba House exist at Ground Zero because it will stand for
America as a cosmopolitan, tolerant nation. For others, it's important that
Cordoba House not exist at Ground Zero because if it does, it will symbolize a
nation that is so eager to affirm tolerance and multiculturalism that we profane
the memory of Islam's victims, and break faith with the dead. Cordoba House's
power as a cultural symbol, and a symbol of what the American tribe stands for,
could hardly be more stark. That many political and cultural elites (academics,
journalists, etc.) fail to appreciate its power in this regard -- and to appreciate
something is not the same thing as agreeing with it -- is a dramatic failure of
imagination. It is highly significant that even in New York City, the only borough
that supports the mosque is Manhattan (and then by a bare majority). Do the
Americans who live in a Manhattan of the Mind ever stop to consider why so
many of their fellow citizens find the idea of situating a mosque near the site of a
spectacular Islamic massacre of Americans to be profane? Or do they simply see
these Americans as flat-out bigots, end of story? What does it foretell about the
future of this diverse and fractious nation when such a deep and powerful divide
exists between the people and the powerful? True, there is always such a divide,
over any number of issues; but when the Sacred/Profane dynamic gives it such
emotional power, as it does in the Cordoba House case, we are trespassing on a
mystery, which by definition defies rational calculus.
I am reminded of these words from sociologist James Davison Hunter's seminal
work from the early 1990s, "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America." He
writes:
The second problem is that when progressivists have had the courage to break
out of that bind to talk about "our obligations toward one another" or the
"boundaries of community life," they often do so in languages that do not
resonate with anyone but those who breathe the rarified air of the university
campus. The great debates between liberals and communitarians over the nature
of justice, of rights and equality, of the good, and so on, for example, are almost
always pitched in an economic or philosophical language that is virtually
impenetrable for even the broadly read nonexpert. So too the idea proposed by
another school of progressivists thought, that our sense of moral obligation in
modern secular society derives principally from the concrete circumstances of
our everyday lives -- that community is possible because of the moral meanings
we socially create and recreate in the tedium of daily living -- is yet another
example of how inaccessible the intellectual languages of moral obligation are.
These two cases illustrate something else too; that is, the strong tendency within
a good part of progressivist thinking to ignore religion. The basic anthropological
reality is that most human societies have been religious -- transcendent faith, in
other words, have been the source of the moral obligation that underlies
collective life. Yet like the word "morality," the concept of religion or
transcendence is also very often dismissed by secular progressivists as "rightwing." Here too they are way off the mark. The point is that the failure to
articulate the constitutive elements of public order -- of limits and so on -- and
the tendency to reject the possibility of transcendence as a source of communal
renewal are two fundamental aspects of a progressivist public philosophy that
will alienate not only their opposition but the mainstream of American society.
The word "religion" is critical there. Not only are progressivists, re: the mosque,
refusing to take as seriously as they ought religion as a system of ideas that
actually dictate how people live in this world (something that a stern atheist like
Sam Harris actually does, to his credit), but they're also dismissing, or devaluing,
a sense of the sacred (as distinct from particular religions) as a source of meaning
in the everyday lives of people. From the point of view of many conservatives, the
Cordoba House controversy is yet again an example of the cultural elite (a word I
use in the descriptive sociological sense, not in the partisan sense) displaying a
contempt for their values. And, from a liberal/progressivist point of view,
conservatives are returning the favor. Anyway, in his book's narrative, Hunter
then goes on to criticize flaws in the orthodox/conservative approach to these
questions of public morality, and then concludes with a line that discloses the
stakes:
Among the weakness in both orthodox and progressivist alliances, then, is an
implict yet imperious disregard for the goal of a common life. [Emphasis his.]
I believe that the Manhattan Of the Mind people are going to win the Cordoba
House battle, because they believe rights are more important than the common
good, and there is no legal way to stop the construction of the mosque (nor, let
me add, should there be). But I believe the victory will be entirely Pyrrhic, in
more or less the same way it would be for a husband to defeat his wife on logic in
an argument, but to leave her so alienated that he undermines the strength of
their family's common life.
UPDATE: This morning I've learned some information that, quite frankly, came
as a surprise to me. It's from a recent CNN/Opinion Research Poll. Turns out an
overwhelming majority of Americans (68 percent) oppose the Ground Zero
mosque. You won't be surprised to learn that opposition is strongest in the South
(75 percent against), but you might be surprised to learn that opposition is strong
in the Northeast (65 percent) and the Midwest (same). Unsurprisingly, nine out
of 10 people who call themselves conservatives oppose it, and four out of five
Republicans. More interesting, 70 percent of self-described independents (and 61
percent of self-described moderates) oppose it. Even more interesting, 54 percent
of Democrats oppose it -- perhaps not altogether surprising, given that there is a
such thing as a conservative Democrat. The figure that was especially startling to
me was that 45 percent of self-described liberals are against this project. That's
nearly half.
Of course being in the majority doesn't make you right. Still, people who believe
that opposition to Cordoba House is limited to the populist right, or to marginal
cranks and bigots, are deceiving themselves. There is something else going on
here, and I continue to believe the work of Jonathan Haidt offers important
insights into what it is.
….From Big Questions Online