Modern Liberalism has come a long way (wrong way) from classical liberalism, which was more akin to libertarianism, in opposition to aggressive foreign policy, opposition to increased state authority, and individual liberties held in higher regard than the state or collective. You can deny the socialism parallels, even refuse to accept the reality, but that makes it no less true.Sam Harris writes about the fallout from a recent visit with Joe Rogan on his blog:
I recently had a very enjoyable three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan on his podcast, where the topics ranged from jihad to probability theory to psychedelics. But I subsequently received a fair amount of abuse online for a few things I said about Islam and our adventures in the war on terror.
For instance, I appear to have left many viewers with the impression that I believe we invaded Afghanistan for the purpose of rescuing its women from the Taliban. However, the points I was actually making were rather different: I think that abandoning these women to the Taliban is one of the things that make our inevitable retreat from Afghanistan ethically problematic. I also believe that wherever we can feasibly stop the abuse of women and girls, we should. An ability to do this in places like Afghanistan, and throughout the world, would be one of the benefits of having a global civil society and a genuine regime of international law. Needless to say, this is not the world we are living in (yet).
The ferocious response to my discussion with Rogan about the war on terror has, once again, caused me to worry about the future of liberalism. It is one thing to think that the war in Afghanistan has been an excruciating failure (which I believe), but it is another to think that we had no moral right to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place. A significant percentage of liberals seem to hold the latter view, and consider President Obama to be nothing more than a neocon stooge and Islam to be an unfairly maligned religion of peace.
That is the failure of modern Liberalism, that those greats from Chaplin to Mises would not associate with that term today which brought such meaning and pride in their day. How far they have fallen.I regularly hear from such people, and their beliefs genuinely trouble me. It doesn't take many emails containing sentences like "The United States and Israel are the greatest terrorist states on earth" to make me feel that liberalism is simply doomed…
[continues at the Sam Harris blog]
Original Page: http://www.disinfo.com/2012/03/sam-harris-joe-rogan-islam-and-the-future-of-liberalism/
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