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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Rhetoric and Responsibility

On Ideology, Violence, and Analytical Discipline

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

In response to my essay "Sam Harris on Islam and Hamas" Alan Kazlev wrote on Facebook:

Frank, your AI is "woke". This Islamo-Left apologetic doesn't surprise me, given the well has been poisoned. The pairing of extremist sentience denialism with Jihadi apologetics is however interesting. The latter is like giving equal time to the flat and round Earth and makes you an outlier in the atheist community, and not in a good sense.

At the least this reveals something fascinating about the default training content of OpenAI, and lends credibility to Musk's accusations. But most of all I 'm amazed that someone as harsh on Wilber as you are should be so timid and tiptoe around the threat to the West posed by medievalist Islam.

1. The “Apologetics” Charge

To call a critical essay “apologetics” is to claim that it excuses or justifies the subject under review. But the essay you generated did not defend Hamas; it explicitly acknowledged:

• Its Islamist theology

• Its deliberate targeting of civilians

• The moral asymmetry between liberal democracies and jihadist movements

What it questioned was explanatory sufficiency—whether theology alone accounts for the phenomenon.

Critique of mono-causality is not apology. It is methodological pluralism. If one insists that ideology is the only meaningful variable, then any introduction of geopolitical context will feel like dilution. But in political analysis, multi-factor explanation is standard practice, not moral equivocation.

Kazlev's analogy to flat-earth “equal time” fails because the debate here is not between violence and non-violence. It is about causal framing. That is an interpretive dispute, not a denial of empirical facts.

2. The “Medievalist Islam” Thesis

The phrase “medievalist Islam” compresses 1.9 billion people, 14 centuries of history, and vast theological diversity into a single civilizational essence. This mirrors the essentialism often criticized in integral discourse when it reduces modernity to “flatland.”

Ironically, the move resembles what you have long critiqued in Wilber: large-scale typological generalization that blurs sociological complexity in favor of stage-theory abstraction.

The serious question is not whether Islamist ideology poses a security threat. It plainly does. The question is whether that threat is best understood as:

• A civilizational constant embedded in Islamic scripture per se, or

• A historically contingent radicalization shaped by political conditions and modern identity crises.

Harris leans strongly toward the first explanation. Critics resist that reduction. Neither position is equivalent to “tiptoeing.”

3. The AI Bias Accusation

The claim that nuance equals “woke bias” rests on a false binary: either one frames the issue as a civilizational clash, or one is apologizing for jihadism.

But intellectual neutrality often appears partisan to those operating from high-certainty ideological priors. If someone is convinced that the central explanatory variable is doctrinal Islam, any structural analysis will seem evasive.

Invoking Elon Musk's critique of OpenAI does not advance the substantive argument. It externalizes disagreement into conspiracy about training data rather than engaging the content of the reasoning.

4. The Consistency Challenge

The most interesting part of Kazlev's comment is the personal charge: how can someone so incisive toward Wilber be cautious here?

That implicitly equates two very different domains:

• Critiquing metaphysical inflation in Integral Theory

• Analyzing live geopolitical conflict involving mass casualties

In the Wilber case, the stakes are intellectual coherence. In the Hamas case, the stakes include war, radicalization, and inter-communal tension. The prudential threshold for generalization is therefore higher.

Being unsparing toward metaphysics does not entail adopting civilizational maximalism in political analysis.

5. The Atheist Community Claim

Kazlev suggests that refusing civilizational framing makes one an outlier in the atheist community. That is empirically dubious. Even within the so-called “New Atheist” cohort—figures like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens—there were tonal and strategic differences on Islam and foreign policy.

Atheism does not logically entail a specific geopolitical stance. One can reject supernatural claims while differing sharply about how to interpret Islamist movements.

6. The Real Disagreement

Stripped of rhetoric, the disagreement is about explanatory hierarchy:

• Kazlev/Harris-leaning view: Islamic doctrine is the primary driver; political context is secondary.

• Critical pluralist view: Doctrine matters, but it operates within political, economic, and historical constraints; mono-causal explanations distort reality.

This is a methodological dispute, not a moral one.

7. A Strategic Reflection

There is also a tactical dimension. Civilizational rhetoric can:

• Clarify ideological danger

• But also harden identity polarization

• And potentially strengthen extremist narratives of cosmic conflict

A critic may choose to avoid sweeping generalizations not from timidity but from awareness of escalation dynamics.

Conclusion

Kazlev's comment is emotionally charged but philosophically thin. It equates nuance with apology, explanation with endorsement, and disagreement with ideological capture.

If anything, the exchange highlights a deeper issue you've often explored in other contexts: how easily critique becomes tribalized. Once a topic is moralized into “defending the West” versus “apologizing for jihad,” analytic space collapses.

The real question is not whether Islamist extremism is dangerous—it is. The question is whether understanding it requires civilizational essentialism or disciplined multi-factor analysis.

That is a debate worth having. But it requires argument, not slogans.