value, part 2

As I mentioned in my teaser a couple posts ago, we had had a discussion at work a while back about Michael Moore's "Final Thoughts on the Death of Bin Laden". I commented that I agreed with most of Moore's analysis, but that I took strong objection to his characterization of Bin Laden as "a multimillionaire crime boss" who simply used religion as a cover for his dirty operations. Quoting Moore exactly:

"For nine years I wrote and I said that Osama bin Laden was not hiding in a cave. I'm not a cave expert, I was just using my common sense. He was a multimillionaire crime boss (using religion as his cover), and those guys just don't live in caves. He had people killed under the guise of religion, and not many in the media bothered to explain that every time Osama referenced Islam, he wasn't really quoting Islam. Just because Osama said he was a "Muslim" didn't make it so. Yet he was called a Muslim by everyone. If a crazy person started running around mass-killing people, and he did so while wearing a Wal-Mart blazer and praising Wal-Mart, we wouldn't automatically call him a Wal-Mart leader or say that Wal-Mart was the philosophy behind his killings, would we?"
[Full text: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/some-final-thoughts-on-death-of-osama-bin-laden]

I commented at the time saying that I thought Bin Laden was sincere in his religious beliefs, and it was aweful that Moore tries to sweep the role of religious fundamentalism under the rug and instead draw attention to his wealth, in the interest of re-inforcing Moore's favorite narrative that rich people and their insatiable greed are the source of all problems in the world. Bin Laden attacked the World Trade Centers, which to me seemed like a symbol of American greed, indicating Bin Laden and Moore would have felt very similarly on that issue. A fact Moore would like to obscure. Bin Laden didn't make his fortune doing shady business deals and illegal activities, as Moore's words suggest--instead, he inherited his wealth and used that as a means of accomplishing his other goals. (And yes, he did run some businesses on the side, but that was never the primary source of his wealth.)

Since then I've thought about it more, and read more, about Bin Laden's motivations, and I've come to a somewhat different picture from what I had what I had initially thought. Although still very different from the picture Moore paints.

Earlier this week, I got into a debate with my neocon friend recently when I posted a link to a Foreign Policy article arguing that the most recent GOP debate is a strong indication that neoconservatism is now as good as dead. The debate was mostly about whether the US should continue to maintain a much larger military force than everyone else in the world and use it to "lead" the world and enforce its values on other countries around the globe. But at some point the discussion turned into a debate about what motivates Islamic terrorism. He argued that the kinds of things Westerners consider "legitimate" motivations for Arab anger against the West (things like our support for Israel or our invasion of Middle Eastern countries) was a minor gripe to them compared to what really fuels their hatred of us, namely that we treat women as equals and share our movies and culture with them. I was arguing that if we weren't so aggressive with our foreign policy that groups like Al Qaeda never would have formed, and they wouldn't be pissed off at us, while he was arguing that they are pissed off at us because they hate our secular lifestyle and see us as having turned our backs on God.

After his comment about "treating women as equals" being what really fuels their rage, I went and googled for Bin Laden's own words about why he planned 9/11. Sure enough, there wasn't a single word in there about how we treat our women. Not only that, but he didn't have even mention any complaint at all about our lifestyles--it seems that was not a part of it at all:

full transcript of Bin Laden's explanation of why he decided to attack the World Trade Center in 2001

The most important paragraph is here:

"The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorized and displaced. I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy."
...
"And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children."

This served well to back me up on this argument, but after thinking about it, I realized that even I was a bit surprised at how little religion factored into it. Perhaps the 19 hijackers were in it more for religious reasons (maybe the only way he could convince people to be committed enough to take their own lives during the mission), but clearly Bin Laden was concerned more about human rights (even if he interprets events in the world very differently from how most people from the West would have, and "overreacted" from our perspective) than about what we do in our bedrooms or how we dress our women. The only reference to religion I see in the whole 18 minute speech he gave, explaining his motivations, is a few acknowledgements that God's will has been served, and that's pretty much it--nothing your average American wouldn't say in the same circumstance. The fact that he was caught hoarding porn during his last few years is more evidence that perhaps Moore was right that religion really was more of a cover than the main thing. But Moore was wrong to call him a "crime boss". That paints a picture of someone who is motivated by corruption and greed, and I see even less of that here than the religious aspect. Perhaps he enjoyed the fame and respect he got from taking on the most powerful country in the world, but surely he was intelligent and educated enough to realize how foolish that was. It seems clear from his statements that he was motivated mostly be a sense of revenge for perceived injustice.

This specific example, which I went into in a bit greater detail than I had intended, illustrates a more general principle that I think is true. Very often, when people appear to be motivated by religion, there is some more basic human drive that is motivating them (in this case, revenge) and religion is just an excuse. This explains why there are so many religions in the world, and so many interpretations of each religion. People need excuses for every possible action they might want to take, so they need religion to be flexible enough to be able to justify anything they need justified. Karl Marx had a name for this view of history, he called it "historical materialism", and of all the things Marx wrote about, I think this may be the one he was most correct on. Human actions are motivated by material, physical concerns, and yet our minds project all kinds of spiritual metaphorical meaning onto those base drives.

So in answer to the question of whether values can come ultimately from religion, I would say for the most part no. They are there inside us already, and religion is primarily something invented to try to justify them. Nevertheless, I also believe the opposite is sometimes true (although less so). Basic notions of fairness and justice can be affected a lot by what environment you grow up in, how you are raised, what early experiences you have, etc. They aren't all just hardwired by genetics. So to the extent religion represents a set of teachings about these kinds of things that are passed down from parent to child, I do think it can affect the values you have. It's in the larger scheme of things, looking at it from the point of view of multiple generations at once, where the purpose of religion is to justify whatever system of values seems to work well for that clan of people. It's a complex process where both can feed back into each other, which is one of the things I guess geheimnisnacht was getting at.

Another source of confusion related to this question (of whether values can come from religion) is when something looks like a values issue but it's really an issue of different people having different models of the world. Abortion is the most straightforward example that comes to mind. People often refer to it as a values issue, yet it's not. I've never met a pro choicer that doesn't believe in the sanctity of life, and I've never met a pro lifer that doesn't believe in the importance of freedom of choice. Where the difference comes in is in their understanding of the world. Pro lifers believe that there is a soul which God magically inserts into every fetus at the time of conception, and it is this soul that is the core of a person's being, not the body. Pro choicers, on the other hand, understand that this is a fairy tale, and that in reality consciousness grows slowly in all organisms from nothing into a full adult being. Which of these two models of the world you have will almost always determine your position on abortion. If there is a magical soul inserted at the time of conception, then abortion is no different than murder. If there isn't, then abortion is no different than fishing (killing a fish and eating it), since fish have roughly the same level of biological complexity (and presumably roughly the same level of consciousness) as a fetus. There is no difference between the values of one group and the other, it's not that pro choicers love to murder, or that pro lifers hate freedom. They both value the same things, they just see different ways to achieve those values because they have different models of the world. And a specific model of the world is something religion can influence directly, much moreso than values. So a lot of derived values end up being influenced indirectly by religion because it affects your "worldview". I tend to think this is the primary way in which values can be influenced by religion, and that a direct influence of values is a lot more rare. But I do think to what degree people feel comfortable or uncomfortable with certain behaviors (like say, taking someone else's toy without asking) can also be influenced by the culture someone is raised in, which goes hand in hand with religion. So in the end, my answer is "yes and no", it's a subtle influence and indirect in most cases, but it is still there.