The Psychological Sources of Islamic Terrorism
Naidoo
By Michael J. Mazarr
Michael J. Mazarr is professor of national security strategy at the U.S.
National War College. The views expressed here are his own and do not
reflect the policy or position of the U.S. government.
The threats we are now confronting have roots in surprising places. And yet,
even after September 11, and now post-Operation Iraqi Freedom, national
security by and large continues to be defined in the traditional way.
Threats are concrete, specific, and grounded in material capabilities. At
issue, for the most part, are political-military questions such as power,
territory, alliances, credibility, and prestige. Most important, the
response when challenged is to deploy the tried and true elements of
realpolitik - military action, coalition building, threats and promises,
intervention overt and covert.
But there is an inherently psychological character to the war on terrorism
that remains poorly appreciated: The security threats the United States
faces today have everything to do with the pressures of modernity and
globalization, the diaphanous character of identity, the burden of choice,
and the vulnerability of the alienated. That is not all that they have to do
with, and the influence of psychological factors lies in a larger context of
socioeconomic, cultural, demographic, and other realities. Yet those
material issues become most relevant, and most dangerous, when they are
breathing life into latent psychological distress.
This diagnosis is hardly new. Everyone these days seems to be talking about
the human effects of modernization and globalization, and the ways in which
frustration, rage, and ultimately terrorism spring up from the collision of
the new and the traditional. Works connecting radical extremist Islam to a
reaction against modernity have been around for decades; many have tended to
lay this phenomenon alongside the concomitant rise of fundamentalist strains
in other religions.1 Yet the full implications of this widely drawn insight
have not touched U.S. national security strategy and policy. What needs
special attention, in fact, is what this diagnosis has to say about the
cure - because it is an open question, one past which we have rushed in an
understandable desire to strike back at evil, whether or not phenomena that
are fundamentally psychological in character can be defeated with military
power or law enforcement efforts.
Homeless and alone
The best diagnosis of the extremist upheavals of the previous century and
today can be found in the philosophical tradition of existentialism. Amid
much variety, a consistent motif emerges: All existentialists worry that
modern, mass technological life tranquilizes people, drains us of our
authenticity, of our will and strength to live a fully realized life. The
result of this process is alienation, frustration, and anger. A few themes
stand out from this broad concept.
One has to do with the burdens of freedom and choice. By breaking the chains
of tradition and conformity, modern life offers a bewildering, paralyzing
degree of choice about everything from career paths to marriage partners to
fashion. When you can potentially be anything, the existentialists worry,
you may in fact be nothing - and have no identity at all.
And yet existentialists are also very much in favor of making choices and
being committed to them - so much so that passion is a second theme of this
literature. Most existentialists urge a passionate embrace of life, of
projects, of career. They revere the venturous and rash, the ones who try to
make a mark on the world. In this sense the self-help guru Tony Robbins
peddles a more truly existentialist therapy, a more sophisticated and deep
cure, than most tweedy philosophers would care to admit. Passionate
commitment, self-invention, and responsibility are, for the existentialists,
the route to authenticity.
Making passionate choices is, in turn, a very personal thing, and
existentialism celebrates the sanctity of the individual as against the mass
herd. Existentialists glorify individualism and worry about the potential
for a new style of degraded, thoughtless conformity.
Existentialists plead with all of us to be our own people, to think
rigorously and independently about what we believe, feel, and want. The
self-help movement as a whole - its emphasis on self-esteem and on
controlling one's own destiny - emerges directly, I would say inevitably,
from the existentialist diagnosis. Self-actualization is the route to social
harmony in the modern era. The problem is that many folks don't come close
to achieving it, and a few end up trying in ruinous ways. Neither embraced
nor cowed by the pressure of community, confused and angry loners rush off
in search of self-actualization and find, instead of Tony Robbins, Osama and
his like.
Existentialism also has a religion problem - or, rather, it insists that
modern society does. Not merely an assertion that "God is dead" (there are,
after all, existentialists who write in any of a variety of religious
traditions), existentialism more than anything contends that religion has
become an individual rather than a group enterprise. To be authentic, people
must confront religious questions independently and come to their own
conclusions. As an added benefit, religious experiences sought out and
brought to flower by personal commitment are far more lasting and intense
than those encountered in rote communal ceremonies.
Modern life is not encouraging of such spiritual commitment, however, as far
as the existentialists can tell. Their description of the authentic person
turns into a diagnosis of modern society, and they don't much like what they
see. Technological, materialist, denatured, and despiritualized, reeking of
the mass herd and the generic assembly line, the modern world is for most
existentialists a factory of inauthenticity. It is rootless in the complete
sense of the term: rootless from tradition, from heritage, from genealogy,
from place, from community. As its brilliant interpreter William Barrett has
emphasized, existentialism loathes nothing more than abstraction - the
generic, distant encounter with life that modern technological society has
substituted for direct personal engagement with it. It is worth quoting from
Barrett's Irrational Man: A Study in Existentialist Philosophy (Doubleday
Anchor, 1958):
Thus with the modern period, man . . . has entered upon a secular phase in
his history. He entered it with exuberance over the prospect of increased
power he would have over the world around him. But in this world . . . he
found himself for the first time homeless. . . . [His] feeling of
homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a
bureaucratized, impersonal mass society. . . . He is trebly alienated: a
stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus that
supplies his material wants. But the worst and final form of alienation . .
. is man's alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man
only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man
becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed
to subsist as best it can - usually to be dropped below the surface of
consciousness and forgotten.
The passionate yet calculating, vicious yet idealistic, brilliant yet
astonishingly misguided members of al Qaeda can be seen as, at least partly,
engaged in a search to reclaim these lost elements of their humanity, their
being.
Here the roots of fundamentalist terrorism intertwine and join with those of
many other anti-modern strains of thought from the past three centuries.
First there were the Romantics, Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge and later
American naturalist heirs to that tradition, who saw in belching factories
and impersonal cities and the worship of the twin gods Progress and
Technology the beginning of the end of mankind as a worthwhile project.
These woodsy poets would hardly have imagined themselves as forebears of
Nazism, and yet they were, in a very traceable way: With the marker of
intellectual history, one can draw a straight line from Wordsworth through
Hölderlin to Heidegger, and thence to the Nazi hacks. For all its
fascination with technology, National Socialism was a dreamy, romantic,
anti-modern movement through and through.
Even from the beginning, too, the existentialists were speaking the language
of purification through return to a simpler, more authentic imagined past.
Kierkegaard wanted to return people to communion with the first Christians;
Nietzsche would have hauled them all the way back to ancient Greece.
Modernism must be discarded, or at least radically reformed. And as Ian
Buruma has recently pointed out, "the idea that liberalism is mediocre,
unheroic, and without martial vigor" is not the sole possession of fascism
and Bolshevism and radical Islam; it is also "an old battle-cry of the
anti-liberal European right." Indeed, among some members of the conservative
political theory crowd in the West, there remains more than a shade of
precisely the same anti-modern project one finds in the extreme groups - the
same lack of comfort with the relativistic, value-free, unheroic modernism
of a secular industrial society.
Existentialism implies, and indeed often preaches, a rejection of whatever
moral system happens to hold sway. Nietzsche argued as much, certainly, but
there were also others - Heidegger most of all - who referred to our
"fallen-ness" from authenticity precisely because we stumble along doing
what we are told to do, mechanically doing what we understand to be the
right thing.
The ultimate manifestation of an authentic life, according to at least some
of the existentialists, is to regain control over the manner and purpose of
one's death. Here is Barrett again:
Only by taking my death into myself, according to Heidegger, does an
authentic existence become possible for me. Touched by this interior angel
of death, I cease to be the impersonal and social One among many, as Ivan
Ilyich was, and I am free to become myself. Though terrifying, the taking of
death into ourselves is also liberating: It frees us from servitude to the
petty cares that threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby opens us to
the essential projects by which we can make our lives personally and
significantly our own.
I am not sure that Heidegger was thinking of suicide bombers; he seems to
have had in mind more the internalization of our morality, the taking in of
the idea of death. But one is hard-pressed not to think of the stolid,
brutal authors of September 11, going about their placid lives and smoothly
traversing their petty cares sustained by the conviction that they had taken
their death inside, bought and owned it, and thereby achieved wholeness,
achieved greatness, achieved authenticity. They had attained the ultimate
freedom as espoused by another existentialist, Sartre: the freedom to say
No.
Looking for ties
We have, then, in the existentialist diagnosis, all the ingredients of
extremist, anti-modern terrorism. The recipe crops up again and again in
modern history - in Nazism, in Soviet communism, in Romanian and Japanese
religio-nationalism, and in the spurts of violent lashing out at modernity
from the Kaczinskis and the McVeighs that modern society tended to laugh off
until they became more numerous, more organized, and far, far better armed.
That the portrait of a confused, angry person lost in the choices and
options of the modern world is now a cliché doesn't make it any less
insightful. Passionate risk-taking and identity-seeking gone wrong on a mass
as well as a micro scale have haunted - and, from time to time, devastated -
the modern world. Inability to "find a home in the world," to quote
Heidegger, produces a desperate and sometimes violent search for the zealous
embrace of a tightly bound community in service of a heroic cause.
Eric Hoffer's study of such people, The True Believer: Thoughts on the
Nature of Mass Movements (Harper & Row, 1951), remains the best. All mass
movements, he wrote, "draw their early adherents from the same types of
humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind." That type is the
frustrated individual - people "who, for one reason or another, feel that
their lives are spoiled or wasted." Hoffer distinguishes between the
satisfied on the one hand and the frustrated and dissatisfied on the other:
People with a "sense of fulfillment," he writes, think that the world is
basically good and "would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated
favor radical change." Thus it is that radical movements must depict the
present as despoiled and ruined and point both to an idealized past and the
hope of a purified and restored future, quite literally creating a fantasy
in the minds of their followers. "What ails the frustrated?" Hoffer asked.
His answer:
It is the consciousness of an irremediably blemished self. Their chief
desire is to escape that self - and it is this desire which manifests itself
in a propensity for united action and self-sacrifice. . . . Such diverse
phenomena as a deprecation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a
proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt
the impossible, and many others which crowd the minds of the intensely
frustrated are . . . unifying agents and prompters of recklessness.
That is striking enough as a haunting preview of modern terrorism, but
Hoffer has more to say. Fanatical mass movements strive after a "primitive"
ideal. They find the modern world to be weak and worthless and uphold rough,
rigorous, self-sacrificial modes of life as an alternative. Theatrical to
the core, they strive for grand acts. They "religiofy" their ideology. They
tell a story of a glorious, purified future to be achieved through their own
strategies - along with a wondrous past that proves such a future is
possible. Through all of this, they inspire suicidal devotion: "To lose one'
s life is but to lose the present," explains Hoffer, "and, clearly, to lose
a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much."
Scapegoating is an essential component of the fanatic's toolbox. Generating
hatred against an enemy held responsible for the debasement of the present
and the destruction of the glorious past focuses energy. In the process of
all of this, members of such groups objectify everyone else - as well as
themselves. Their horrific acts become more comprehensible when we
understand that they have surrendered their self-control to the group: "They
are made to feel that they are not their real selves but actors playing a
role, and their doings a 'performance,' rather than the real thing."
All the old existentialist themes are here - alienated individuals in search
of authentic identity amid a debased mass society that has forgotten or
destroyed its virtues - and there is an ironic twist on the existentialist
prescription. The fanatic engages reality through objectification; he (or,
often enough, she) becomes authentic by playing a role. This irony bears a
powerful hint of the ultimate answer to fanaticism, fascism, and terrorism
because, deep down, these violent responses to the alienation of modernity
amount to just another form of delusion, a massive and monstrous
inauthenticity. In a desperate search for identity, the terrorist becomes
doubly alienated.
Choosing
The centrality of choice and freedom - economic, cultural, and political -
to the fabric of the modern world is hardly a new concept. Apart from the
existentialists, development theorists old and new, from Sir Arthur Lewis in
the 1950s to Amartya Sen in the 1990s, have been interested in it for
decades.
A recent study by three scholars (including the notable theorist of value
shift Ronald Inglehart) nicely lays out the mechanism. Socioeconomic
development furnishes people with the material resources they need to make
choices - money to educate themselves and to travel, capital to open a
business, and so forth. Cultural changes accompanying modernization
invariably produce, in every society yet studied, a greater emphasis on
values of self-expression and individualism. Then democratization slowly
emerges, adding political choices to the menu and, by creating a system of
effectively protected individual rights, creating a secure umbrella for
choice of all kinds.2 Inglehart and his co-authors refer to the resulting
combination of factors as "Human Development," and, as they say, choice is
the central theme. This should hardly come as a surprise because "the
concept that the core principle of modernization is the broadening of 'human
choice,' is implicit in modernization theory."
Choice flies directly in the face of tradition. "What is distinctive about
tradition is that it defines a kind of truth," writes Anthony Giddens in
Runaway World (Routledge, 2000). "For someone following a traditional
practice, questions don't have to be asked about alternatives." Under the
influence of globalization, Giddens argues, in the West "not only public
institutions but also everyday life are becoming opened up from the hold of
tradition," and in the rest of the world societies "that remained more
traditional are becoming detraditionalized." The result is something that
should by now sound familiar:
A society living on the other side of nature and tradition . . . is one
that calls for decision making, in everyday life as elsewhere. The dark side
of decision making is the rise of addictions and compulsions. . . . Every
context of detraditionalization offers the possibility of greater freedom of
action than existed before. . . . Self-identity has to be created and
recreated on a more active basis than before. This explains why therapy and
counseling of all kinds have become so popular in Western countries.
Fundamentalism, in this context, "is beleaguered tradition. It is tradition
defended in the traditional way - by reference to ritual truth - in a
globalising world that asks for reasons." As Hannah Arendt pointed out long
ago, it is when tradition becomes beleaguered that its defenders become most
impassioned; it is when "the tradition loses its living force and as the
memory of its beginning recedes" that the power of tradition "becomes more
tyrannical."
Anti-modern ideology
After lurking for a century or more in the nationalist, pastoralist,
anti-Western, and xenophobic subconscious of such countries as Germany,
Russia, Romania, and Japan, beleaguered tradition emerged to become the
author of the twentieth century's most heinous crimes and destructive wars.
Fritz Stern's The Politics of Cultural Despair (University of California
Press, 1961) referred to this reaction as the "conservative revolution."
(Stern was careful to distinguish a truly radical-fundamental brand of
revolutionary conservatism from traditional, cautious, temperate
conservatism.) Affronted by what it perceived as the immorality and
corruption of liberalism and modernization, the movement sought "to destroy
the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary
future." It fed on the simple fact that "our liberal and industrial society
leaves many people dissatisfied - spiritually and materially. The
spiritually alienated have often turned to the ideology of the conservative
revolution."
From the work of Stern and others, one can cobble together a portrait of
this anti-modern ideology. It despised materialism and, in at least some
guises, was abjectly opposed to commerce and capitalism. (Marxism and the
unique character of Russian communism have their own roots in romanticism.)
It decried the spiritual and moral emptiness of life. It insisted that
distinctive cultural values take precedence over universal ones;
cosmopolitan tolerance was the enemy. It represented a reaction to
urbanization and the destruction of various national myths of pastoralism.
The conservative revolution, the reaction against Enlightenment liberalism,
laid out specific political charges in addition to a broad philosophy. It
held that existing political rulers were irresolute and corrupt. In every
case it worried about the weakness of the particular nation/people relative
to competitors, a weakness brought about by flaccid modernity and the
decline of martial, nationalistic values. It held out an idealized past and
future and a vision of national or ethnic redemption. It employed sometimes
brutally canny conspiracy theories. Some scapegoated group typically took
the rap for national decline. In Europe, it was always the Jews, perhaps in
part because of their apparent close connection to all the values of
Enlightenment life - cosmopolitanism, education, tolerance, and commerce.
Apart from the local fifth column, there were also outsiders and external
influences to blame.
The movement had a longing for national heroism and a virile life that led
to an enthrallment with violence. It encouraged a tendency, especially among
the young, to await a "hidden savior" - whether the new Barbarossa or some
other national cave-dwelling myth. Generally the movement held a strange and
contradictory position on technology: violently opposed to the mechanizing
influences of modernization yet delighted to embrace technology, even
develop it in profound new ways, if it aided the agenda. Oddly, movements
begun as romantic, bucolic assaults on modern life have often ended up as
the engineers of the most scientific or industrial states of the modern
world.
Finally, all strains of this reactionary movement have professed dedication
to "faith" and religion, though sometimes of an essentially
secular-nationalist-mystical form. It is hard to exaggerate the importance
of the religiofication of the reactionary movements. It is just as the
existentialists predicted: With the death of certainty in a largely secular
and relativistic modernity, lost souls want not merely a generic answer to
their alienation, but an answer imbued with spirituality. So the movements
have portrayed the state as a religious vessel and have deified history,
viewing it (and most specifically their own advance to power) as the
expression of God's will.3
The recent book Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 2003) by Paul Berman is
excellent on this point and makes an argument similar to the one I am making
here. Berman catalogues the enemies of liberalism - Nazism, Bolshevism,
Fascism, and now some versions of radical Islam - and describes their common
features. Among other things, these commonalities include hatred of a
corrupt, despoiled cosmopolitan present; the worship of a pastoral,
righteous past; the longing for a utopian future; acceptance of or even
enthusiasm for dictatorship in service of this cause; and the designation of
hated enemies, foreign and domestic, as responsible for the evil present.
Berman traces the line of such thinking from current radical Islamist
intellectuals back to the same roots that, intentionally or not, underpinned
fascist and communist ideology. Early in the twentieth century, Berman
contends:
The old Romantic literary fashion for murder and suicide, the dandy's
fondness for the irrational and the irresponsible, the little nihilist
groups of left-wing desperadoes with their dreams of poetic death - those
several tendencies and impulses of the nineteenth century came together with
. . . the dark philosophies of the extreme right in Germany and other
countries, with their violent loathing of progress and liberalism. . . .
They gazed across the landscape of liberal civilization, across the many
achievements of democratic freedom, social justice, and scientific
rationality. And everywhere they saw a gigantic lie.
As a substitute, Berman explains, these emerging movements sought an
uncompromising vision - an ideal of submission to a complete and
encompassing ideology and system. "It was the ideal of the one, instead of
the many. The ideal of something godlike. The total state, the total
doctrine, the total movement." This, he argues with references to such
radical ideologists as Sayyid Qutb, is precisely the strain of thought
underpinning the modern terrorist assault against the Western world.
Thomas Simons, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and ambassador to
Pakistan who has studied the Islamic world since the 1950s, compares the
extremist terrorists of revolutionary Russia to those of the Islamic world
today in his book Islam in a Globalizing World (Stanford University Press,
2003):
The young of both times and places - the Russian world after 1870 and the
Arab world around 1970 - were seared by the frustration of always living
second-rate lives in relation to those at the cutting edge of globalization.
There are tremendous penalties for latecomers to the modernization
sweepstakes. . . . [T]his reality is painful, and the pain often is felt
most keenly not by the poorest, but by those who have progressed a little
and are frustrated in their aspirations to go further.
Of the perpetrators of September 11, Simons says, "They were killers to be
sure. But they were also uncertain young men, torn from their roots,
belonging nowhere, at home only in their small groups, frightened, exalted.
To understand them we can do worse than reread Dostoyevsky; we can do worse
than contemplate [Dostoyevsky's amoral student character] Raskolnikov in his
tiny room fingering his ax."
Managing mindsets
The widely voiced concern about globalization's assault on human identity
and security thus turns out to be grounded in some very basic concepts of
human nature and needs. An existentialist-psychological map of threats in a
global world would help to capture an important idea: If we are indeed
engaged in a war on terrorism, it is a war not against tank divisions or
infrastructure, but against a mindset. Our enemy's center of gravity lies in
the thirst of millions of young people, especially those in particular
regions of the world, for self-actualization, identity, and self-worth in a
world filled with daunting (and Western-tainted) free choice and options.
The origins of this threat are psychological, very much as existentialists
would understand them, rather than (primarily) political or material.
I am not for a minute suggesting that political issues have disappeared.
China's quest for regional influence, Russia's desire for a voice in
neighboring regions - these and many other political issues (as well as
associated phenomena such as nationalism itself) continue to shape world
affairs. Kim Jong Il may be motivated by specific psychological factors, but
the existence of his state and the threat it poses are not primarily
psychological challenges. Some terrorist groups possess agendas more
rational-political than fantasy-psychological.
My argument, instead, is that the balance has changed. The degree to which
these and other political issues become violent and dangerous, the degree to
which they pose a threat to American interests, depends to a greater degree
than before on issues of psychology, mentality, and perception. (The balance
has changed, in part, also because of the rise of modern, democratic trading
states more likely to favor stability and less likely to go to war with one
another than in the past - an argument made eloquently by the Bush
administration's own National Security Strategy.) In a global and
modernizing era, managing the political issues is no longer enough; we must
manage mindsets as well. These psychological issues are not likely to be
resolved in traditional ways and in fact may feed off of the unintended
consequences of the steps we take to deal with traditional threats.
The history of similar movements seems to support and bear out this claim
definitively. For a modern supporting example, take Egypt. Can we imagine
the growing disquiet there - an explosive stew of economic stagnation,
political repression and debility, rapid population growth, national
decline, and a context of growing tension between Islam and the West - being
cured with anything from the Bismarckian toolbox? What is the United States
going to do, invade the place? Short of that, what options are available? It
is an article of faith with the current administration that radical groups
are not "deterrable" once in possession of certain destructive capabilities.
But if so, then it becomes very nearly self-evident that American national
security policy - while it is still, in some ways, about tank divisions and
force-to-space ratios and the aeronautic qualities of the latest
fighter-bomber - must, if it is truly to protect us, become something much
more nuanced, anticipatory, and social-psychological in its ends and means
than it has ever been before.
In making this suggestion, I do not mean to downplay the socioeconomic roots
of terrorism. Economic decline, the deprival of freedom, and general
desperation and lack of hope are, in fact, precisely the problem. But it is
the mindset produced by this situation - a mindset to which radical
extremisms of all sort have always appealed, and for which the radical
dogmatists stand ready to offer a framework of blame and hate and violence
and totalitarian politics - that seems the more proximate cause of the
threat we now face. The two issues, socioeconomics and psychology, are of
course intimately linked. But the former mostly becomes dangerous when
joined to the latter - and, in my view, a fairly specific form of it. We don
't worry, after all, about a psychology of pure, distilled hopelessness in
destitute areas of the world. The existentialist diagnosis was always more
profound than the Marxist one; modern life raises the issue of who owns one'
s life choices - one's soul - far more urgently than it does the question of
who owns the means of production.
The mechanism seems to work similarly in most cases. The process begins with
disaffections of some sort - some combination of social, economic,
political, and cultural angst - built centrally and most profoundly on the
mechanism of a collision of identity and dignity in the transition from the
traditional to the modern, the non-Western to the Westernized, the rural to
the urban. The disaffections can also include a variety of related ills,
from economic stagnation to political repression to class divides. Into this
dangerous situation steps what has insightfully been called an "identity
entrepreneur" - someone offering a cure for popular alienation and anxiety.
Such persons draw power from the fact that they offer not merely a stale
social-scientific analysis, but a narrative - an actual story with a logical
flow from glorious past through rotting present to reglorified future. They
tell a story populated with heroes (those who rebel) and villains (the local
and global conspiracies that have laid the nation low) and even a climactic
point (the current moment). Often, a forcing function is required - a
widespread economic collapse, a war, an assassination - to jolt the populace
into outright rebellion. The result is action, in the form of revolution or
rebellion or terrorism, often ending in the creation of a new, even more
repressive and rotting state, which in turn sparks a democratic, free-market
revolution, sometimes imposed from the outside through an occupation after a
large-scale war. Arguably the overriding question for the Islamic world
today is whether it must traverse this entire destructive path before
widespread and lasting reform takes hold.
Critically, the radical and extreme mindset does not infect the whole
population at once. Initially it appeals to very few - those whose sense of
distress and longing for identity, whose searing personal experiences, make
them most susceptible to the identity entrepreneur's toolbox. Our task in
the war on terrorism, then, is to forestall the appeal of the identity
entrepreneur of terrorist violence before he reaches a much larger
audience - the turning point that has led to such devastating brutality in
the past century. And in this we may well be failing.
This consistency of modernization and its effects is the best answer to
those who would deny any meaningful connection between the experiences of
Germany, Russia, or Japan and the modern Arab world. An emphasis on cultural
difference leads some observers to claim that the divergent experiences,
histories, values, cultures, and so on of the West and the Middle East make
the sort of connections I am trying to make facile and ahistoric.4 The reply
seems to me straightforward and obvious. Modernization is a largely
homogenous and homogenizing force. The social tremors suffered in
modernizing societies look roughly the same the world over - and the
intellectual/psychological foundations for assaults against modernity in
such places as Germany, Russia, and Japan, while they certainly betray many
differences, have much in common as well. There seems no reason to expect
things to work out any differently in the Islamic world. Judging from the
rhetoric, complaints, and tactics of those now confronting Westernization
and its chief author and symbol, there is every reason to see a familiar
pattern at work.
This reality puts the lie to the notion that what we are seeing in some
corners of the Islamic world today is morally and psychologically more
crazed and extreme than anything that has ever issued from the West.
Writing, for example, in the New Criterion (January 2003), Roger Kimball
lauds the "relative political stability of Western civilization" and its
"pursuit of knowledge," comparing this tradition to Islam's more crimped and
inherently authoritarian promise of "security." He quotes, approvingly, the
columnist Mark Steyn, who wonders why only Muslims respond to religious
affronts by slaughtering innocent people. One can only speculate how these
writers would explain away such inconvenient episodes of Western slaughter
as the Crusades, the annihilation of Native Americans and native peoples
everywhere, the brutalities of colonialism, the horrors of the French
Revolution, and the Holocaust (one could go on for page after page). Human
beings are obviously capable of states of psychological distress so severe
that inflicting unimaginable horror seems not merely allowed but required.
To write this off as the habit of one ethnic or religious group is as
ahistorical as it is offensive.5
The jihad era
All of which brings us back to the roots of terrorism, to the motivations
and worldwide appeal of al Qaeda, which appear, on close examination, to
have much in common with the model of anti-modern conservative reaction
described above.
The analyst of terrorism Audrey Kurth Cronin has summarized the portrait of
religious-extremist terrorist groups in a manner that Nietzsche and Hoffer
would immediately recognize: "The jihad era," she remarks, "is animated by
widespread alienation combined with elements of religious identity and
doctrine - a dangerous mix of forces that resonate deep in the human
psyche." Terrorist groups in this camp appeal to people who "feel powerless
and left behind in a globalizing world."6 She continues: "Religious
terrorists often display a complete sense of alienation from the existing
social system. They are not trying to correct the system, making it more
just, more perfect, and more egalitarian. Rather they are trying to replace
it."
Graham Fuller, in his recent book The Future of Political Islam (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), similarly describes the basic revulsion with the modern,
technological present that exists in much of the Islamic world:
The deepest underlying source of Muslim anguish and frustration today lies
in the dramatic decline of the Muslim world, in over just a few centuries,
from the leading civilization in the world for over one thousand years into
a lagging, impotent and marginalized region of the world. This stunning
reversal of fortune obsessively shapes the impulses underlying much
contemporary Islamist rhetoric.
Osama bin Laden himself has referred to 80 years of Muslim "humiliation and
disgrace" as a main source of his grievance. The decline, moreover, is seen
as a very specifically moral and spiritual one; it is because Islam has lost
touch with the values that once made it great and because the specific
governments that now run much of the Islamic world are undemocratic,
unrepresentative, corrupt, inefficient, or worse. As Bernard Lewis has
stressed, too, Arab ventures at modernization have seldom fared well. It was
the Westernized Arab armies which were swept aside by the Israelis beginning
in 1948. It was Western-style parliaments and political parties that
underwrote the Western-style corruption and repression of many Arab
countries. It is hardly surprising, Lewis concludes, that "the rejection of
modernity in favor of a return to the sacred past has a varied and ramified
history in the region."
As anti-modern extremism has always done - indeed, as it is required to do
for psychological consistency - this emerging version views its enemy (in
this case America and the West) as weak, vacillating, and on the verge of
moral and social collapse. From the Iranian revolution onward, modern
extremist Islamic groups have seen the United States as irresolute. Did not
the Americans flee from Vietnam, from Lebanon, and from Somalia? In the view
of the radicals, Bernard Lewis concludes, America "has become degenerate and
demoralized, ready to be overthrown." This points to the importance of
toughness, of hitting back, of committing to a cause and not running when
costs - even human ones - appear. It points, in other words, to the crucial
role of successful outcomes in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Graham Fuller puts the bottom line this way: "The striking feature of our
'postmodern' era is the continuing assault upon the concepts and verities of
modernism. . . . [L]urking doubts about the universal benefits of both
rationalism and positivism existed from early on. . . . And the many critics
of modernity indeed found vindication of their fears in the moral blight of
the twentieth century." No set of critics, he suggests, is as impassioned,
committed, or angry as the radical extremists of the Muslim world.
Some will say that, if there is anger in the Arab and Islamic worlds, it
requires no reference to modernity to be explained. People in this turbulent
string of nations (especially the young males) are angry because of a lack
of opportunity, angry about regional and national decline, angry about
Israel and its policies and American support for them, and angry about
corrupt and oppressive local governments. They are not, on the surface,
angry about "modernism." What is fascinating, however, is the degree to
which the resulting bill of complaints looks very much the same as all the
anti-modern extremisms of the past century or two. The symptoms of a
panicked, traditionalist, anti-Western, anti-globalizing reaction are many
and varied, and they touch political, social, economic, and ethnic issues.
But the root, the fundamental process, lies deeper, and it is a common one.
Fighting fanatics
If the parallels to earlier anti-modern extremisms are valid, what we are up
against is something far less amenable to compromise, negotiation, or even
deterrence than Bismarckian methods are able to recognize. The "balance of
power," for all its rhetorical punch, is a rather effete way to deal with
globe-swaying rivalries. If the intellectual and psychological position of
the al Qaeda recruit shares the many elements of anti-modern extremisms
sketched out above, then what the terrorists want has become too extreme to
assuage, too radical to coopt, and too persistent and widespread to "defeat"
in any truly political-military sense of that term. "Policy can never speak
to wrath," as Fouad Ajami has put it. Americanization-cum-globalization is
the one power that cannot be balanced; it is, instead, reviled and endlessly
besieged.
The terrorist campaign against the United States, the West, and the
developed world generally is merely the latest example of a much larger
phenomenon. This phenomenon is not (yet) a political-military threat in the
way that fascism and Bolshevism ultimately manifested themselves. It is not,
on this reading, primarily a political or religious phenomenon. It is a
social-psychological one.
But if so, then what do we do about it? And especially, what do we do that
is different from what we are currently doing?
What a social-psychological approach to the problem of extremist terrorism
does not do is undermine the importance of toughness or deny the simple
truth that the conflict (as it was against the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the
Japanese ultranationalists, and all their like) pits the modern world
against some truly evil people. Those fully in the grip of a fantasy
ideology are in many ways lost to the ideology.7 "The fanatic," Eric Hoffer
warned, "cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or
moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the
certitude and righteousness of his holy cause." Life without the enfolding
group and self-assurance of the cause would be "trivial, futile and sinful .
. . adrift and abandoned." Having subsumed his identity in the group, the
fanatical adherent cannot get it back again. Against such people there may
be only one meaningful response. In a broader sense, proving the willingness
of America and the West to stand up for themselves, to pay real prices and
run real risks in their own defense, is an important element of any strategy
for addressing the mindset of those who might be tempted to become
terrorists.
Yet here we run head-on into the basic dilemma embedded in anything we might
call a "war on terrorism." If what we are really dealing with is large
numbers of people striving for positive identities and self-actualization in
a world of fractured tradition, toughness can be only a piece of the
necessary answer, and a secondary one at that. What becomes quite obvious,
looking at the problem as an existentialist would, is the same point made by
many inside and outside government: By far the most important means to
counter the spread of extremist Islam will be nonmilitary. The roots of such
beliefs lie in national, historical, social, and economic places, and only
by attending to these other factors can we keep our necessary military
responses from becoming counterproductive.
This is, to me, the greatest danger of the war on terrorism as currently
incarnated. Surely, criminals and violent terrorists must be hunted down.
Just as surely, the mindset of the hard core of terrorist disciples cannot
be changed with "good behavior" or the offer of a scholarship to Michigan
State and a subsequent job at Microsoft or Starbucks. Some enemies are too
implacable to be reasoned with. And yet a larger sense of unease looms over
the enterprise because the bigger questions, the bigger objections, will not
be answered by killing or by a new emphasis on "political-military
credibility." Had a magic button existed in 1937 or 1938 that would have
slaughtered the top 100 Nazi leaders including Hitler, the underlying
social-psychological tidal wave of resentment and xenophobia and
totalitarian temptation would still have posed a grave threat to the
stability of the West. The same could have been said of the top 100
Bolshevik leaders or the top 100 leaders of similar movements in Japan,
Italy, Romania, and elsewhere. Surely, key people made a crucial difference,
and without Hitler there might not have been World War ii as we knew it or
the Holocaust. But there would have been trouble of some sort because
trouble was brewing within modernity itself, the product of a far larger set
of factors than the fiery, mirror-practiced speeches of a former Austrian
corporal.
This is, incidentally, the magic of the current moment in relation to
radical Islam. Islamism has no common global movement, à la National
Socialism. It has no Hitler. It has not coalesced into a monolithic body,
and it remains a secondary and even marginal force in nearly all Muslim
nations. In any measured, thoughtful effort to ease the burdens of modernity
throughout the Islamic world, we will find, in the governments and peoples
of the regions, a thousand allies for every enemy.
September 11 may ultimately be seen as an early warning sign of a sort we
did not get before we had to confront the other radical anti-modernisms of
the past century. It is almost as if a few especially ambitious and
diabolical Nazis had flown a Heinkel into the Empire State Building in 1935.
We have an opportunity to act more decisively than the world acted in the
1930s, and we have this opportunity in particular because of the
psychological character of radical violence as an answer to modernity: It,
too, is inauthentic, as much so as going to work in assembly-line monotony
for a whole meaningless career. It represents fake, rather than real,
self-fulfillment. Offered richer and more rewarding avenues to a prideful,
authentic identity, people will take them far more often than not.
Yet such inauthentic routes to hoped-for identity are also appealing, in
part because the West is not merely disrespected - it is also loathed.
Toughness, credibility, and military prowess will only get us so far; the
pursuit of them has in all likelihood passed the point of usefulness and
become self-defeating. As an example of why, take the psychological theme a
step further and imagine that we are dealing with the mindset of a single
individual. He has experienced recent personal failures, but has a rich
family tradition. He has become resentful of his bosses, who seem to be
running his company poorly, and of his business competitors, who are easily
beating him in the marketplace. He blames the business consultants who
constantly traipse through his offices, telling him how to do his work, and
nurtures dark conspiracy theories about their connection to a few scheming
coworkers. He has become angry and alienated. He has easy access to role
models of violent backlash and wonders whether he should follow their lead.
We are his team of psychologists. We see in him indications of depression,
frustration-aggression syndrome, and narcissism. What approaches might we
come up with to treat such a person? It is, after all, a complex case; we
are dealing with someone self-confident yet self-loathing, angry at himself
and his coworkers yet liable to blame outsiders for the failings, proud of
his family's business history yet unsure that its habits have left him able
to compete in the global economy.
I am not a psychologist, and I don't know what cocktail of therapy, career
coaching, or medication might be appropriate for such a case. But this much
seems obvious: Single-minded threats to deter and cow this individual into
the mute acceptance of his dismal prospects would not be enough and would
very likely backfire. Dealing with a personality fraught with so many
conflicting emotions would seem obviously to demand a careful, nuanced,
multifaceted response, not a bash across the skull aimed at intimidation.
Yet this is precisely the approach we seem to be following in the so-called
global war on terrorism.
Islamic modernity
We must, then, think about the so-called war on terrorism in more
encompassing terms than we are doing. Surely, we must deter, locate, and
destroy terrorists, but compelling historical parallels suggest that the
Middle East, and the Islamic world more broadly, could go very wrong in far
bigger ways than producing a few thousand desperate young men willing to
impale themselves on the frontiers of globalizing Westernization. We must
attend to a larger risk - the danger that very large numbers of people could
turn against modernism in very profound ways. In the process, we must ensure
that our responses to the narrower threat do not exacerbate the broader one.
Responding strategically to the threat of terrorism, specifically extremist
Islamic terrorism, means far more than raining smart bombs on Afghanistan
and Iraq. It means more than reshuffling departments in Washington and
deploying spit-shined passenger screeners at airports. Rather, if it is to
be serious, it must mean a broad-based effort to address the psychological
roots of radicalism and terrorism in the Islamic world. It means taking
seriously the character of the psychological balm on offer from the
"identity entrepreneurs" of radical Islam. To address the threat of
extremist Islam, Graham Fuller writes, "one of two things must happen:
either the conditions that helped impel Islamism into political life will
have to weaken or disappear, or some other force or ideology will arise to
meet the need more effectively." The most important level of the struggle,
Fuller concludes, "is of a more positive and constructive nature and
involves the need for change and reform in the Muslim world, attending to
deeper sources of grievance that constitute the soil for terrorism." A
mostly negative war against terrorism "will aggravate tensions within the
existing international order that help produce these radical movements. . .
. The psychological mood of the region is worse than ever before."
The alternative to a largely military response - the alternative, in fact,
to a "war" so named - is a strategy that lays engagement alongside
deterrence, human development alongside special operations, multicultural
outreach alongside border controls, and, most of all, positive identity
entrepreneurs alongside terrorist ones. It is a strategy that takes
seriously the larger, more dangerous phenomenon of which extremist terrorism
is merely a hint of what could come. It is a strategy, as Thomas Simons has
written, that takes as its centerpiece the strengthening and encouragement
of the numerous and varied elements in the Islamic world trying to find a
comfortable synthesis of modernity and Islam. "It may now be possible to
break the linkage of modernity with Western domination that has afflicted
the Islamic world for nearly two centuries," Simons suggests. "It may now be
possible at last for Muslims to shape for themselves a modernity that is
consonant with Islamic belief and Islamic authenticity. . . . [S]uch
syntheses of what is modern and what is Islamic are possible and
achievable." They are, as well, the keys to a successful, truly strategic
response to September 11. A number of them, incidentally, existed well
before March 2003. Those who claimed, and still claim, that Operation Iraqi
Freedom was necessary to light the spark of modernity in the Middle East and
the larger Islamic world must not have been paying attention to places like
Turkey, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among others. The spark had already been
lit, and if the United States had wanted to demonstrate the potential of
being both modern and Muslim, a half-dozen promising test cases were
available, none of which would have required us to go to war.
Of course, as has often been said, the challenge of marrying Islam to
modernity is one that needs to be worked out within the Islamic world,
between Muslims. But the United States will still influence the outcome -
for good or ill, in small ways or large. Our global and regional role, and
most of all our position as the leading exemplar of modernization and
globalization, ensure that we will have some effect on the process. One of
the most important American foreign policy challenges of the next
half-century is to do everything we can to ensure that the effect is a
positive one.
A strategy to achieve this goal could have several elements. One, as Paul
Berman has emphasized, ought to be a full-blown war of ideas to counter the
specific ideology of Islamic extremism - the sort of contest that the West
waged against Soviet communism from the 1940s onward and which it did not
choose to wage in any real way against Nazism before 1939. That war of
ideas, of course, does not posit Islam as its target - indeed, it would be a
contest conducted shoulder to shoulder with devout Muslims the world over
who are as offended and fearful of the violence and totalitarian urges of
their radical brethren as is the West. The goal of such a campaign would be
to furnish the people of the Islamic world broad and deep new sources of
information about the United States, the West, and their values and to
explain, with far more detail and persuasive force, the basis for U.S.
policies.
Another requirement is to address the sources of resentment to be found
within American policies. Multilateralism is not just a catch phrase; it can
be, and has been, an essential tool for spreading risk among allied nations.
Extremists may not be persuaded by a U.N. mandate - but vast millions of
others in the Islamic world, watching the global hegemon for signs of
humility and restraint, might cast a more suspicious eye on the extremists'
claims if Washington acts, again and again, in the name of the world
community. There is, too, U.S. support for Israel, which must somehow be
brought into balance with the larger requirements of our interests in making
Western-tinged modernism palatable to the Arab and Islamic worlds. Absent a
humane solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, absent some greater
perception of fairness in U.S. policy on this issue in the broader Arab
world, any other American initiatives will operate with an enormous, and
possibly fatal, handicap. If nothing else, the United States could
demonstrate much greater sympathy for the plight of average Palestinians
through economic aid, high-level visits, encouraging American ngos to become
more active in the area, and in other ways showing genuine concern and
investing in a brighter Palestinian future.
A psychologically inspired war on terrorism would address the need for
reform in a number of key countries, allied and otherwise - and address it
seriously, directly, and in conversation with reformers in those nations. It
would, inevitably, make efforts - knowing that they will be pinpricks, drops
in the ocean - to substantially expand U.S. foreign assistance programs in
the region by a factor of, let's say, 10 to 20. Every home, hospital,
school, or farm built with American aid dollars will work its effect on the
minds of a few, and perhaps more. Every young person drawn into hope for a
better life and away from the temptation to terrorism will count as a
victory of sorts. Finally, there is no substitute for attention at the
highest levels - visits from the U.S. president and his cabinet, over and
over and over again, to key countries in the Arab and Islamic worlds to
explain our values and our intentions, to speak to anger and resentment, to
try to understand and be understood.
What all of this boils down to is the requirement to underwrite a growing
set of alternative identity entrepreneurs. Dealing with this issue at its
true depths - as, among others, Eric Hoffer once emphasized - is not as
simple as mailing out videos of the wonderful life in the West. It is not
merely a matter of improving standards of living and piling U.S. Agency for
International Development projects into affected countries. Those who have
joined, or may join, radical extremist movements are desperately in search
of meaning and identity in a very concrete sense. They need a movement to
follow, a charismatic leader to revere, and a doctrine to absorb. They need
much more than facts - they need a narrative, a story, told by people they
respect, integrated into a human community they can join.
To combat the identity entrepreneurs of extremist Islam, we need others like
them - but others who offer not an identity based on violence, terror, and
the hoped-for utopia of seventh-century primitiveness, but instead a future
of greater freedom, higher standards of living, and continued expression of
national and cultural values. The major focus of our strategy, then, could
become the support for groups and individuals making the case for a happy
marriage of modernism and Islam. Such allies will not always be
"pro-American," and they will seldom be "secular" per se. But if they have
ideas and programs for addressing the insults to Arab and Muslim identity in
the modern world that can accommodate basic U.S. interests, and if they can
translate these ideas into concrete organizations, parties, or programs that
can offer membership and dignity and hope to large numbers of people, they
can become partners.
Who would such people be? What would a "strategy of identity entrepreneurs"
look like? A few suggestive ideas occur, categories of identity-seeking to
promote drawn from the agenda described above:
. Start a mutually respectful dialogue with Islamic leaders preaching
empowerment and nonviolence. Washington could engage leaders in such
countries as Malaysia, Turkey, and Jordan or prominent clerics and
political/religious figures in such places as India, Indonesia, and Kuwait
in a serious, ongoing strategic dialogue and be prepared to compromise in
our rhetoric, attitudes, and policy. These dialogues cannot be confined to
people who already agree with us or are perceived as Western allies; they
must engage as wide a spectrum of Islamic opinion as possible and start from
a willingness to come a long way to address their legitimate concerns about
American policies and intentions. The tougher their message, the more
suspicious of the West and the United States they might be (short of
advocating or condoning violence), the better placed they will be to serve
the psychological needs of their people.
. Embrace commercial entrepreneurs. To promote identity-seeking through
commerce, encourage investment, microlending, scholarship programs to
international mba programs, and other means of developing and encouraging
entrepreneurship as traditionally understood.
. Endorse political entrepreneurs. Taking seriously the psychological roots
of anti-modernism and terrorism recommends, even mandates, a more vocal
stance in favor of democratization and good governance on the part of
regional governments. This means endorsing and encouraging specific reform
advocates and leaders of movements (some of which will be distinctly Islamic
in character) trying to bring greater accountability to their countries. It
also means being critical of longtime U.S. allies offering support for the
current war on terrorism.
. Support nongovernmental organizations. Whether focused on development or
human rights, women's rights or Islamic values, ngos can speak for
frustrated groups and, at the same time, thicken the sinews of civil society
in many undemocratic states. In the West, they have often furnished avenues
for influential identity entrepreneurs to build followers and experience.
. Invest in cultural entrepreneurs. Rather than to promote American culture
everywhere, American foreign aid, public and private, could be used much
more explicitly to support the work of local writers, artists, and other
cultural figures trying to reassert a form of identity in the face of global
homogenization, especially those who serve up strong critiques of U.S.
culture and policies, so long as the proposed remedies are nonviolent. Both
by aiding such identity outlets and by being seen to do so, we could gain
much.
This approach is risky. In its economic aspects, it risks accelerating the
changes that are fostering alienation. In its investments in identity
entrepreneurs not obviously friendly to the West, it risks nourishing
incipient bin Ladens and Saddams and Khomeinis early in their careers. In
its embrace of more foreign aid and a somewhat tougher approach to Israel,
it risks forfeiting political support at home. And Yet it seems to be one of
the few approaches that takes seriously the psychological aspects of our
present challenge.
September 11 reminded us of the need to act boldly, some said, to change our
whole approach to national security. Perhaps we did change it - but not,
after all, by much. Ours is still a national security enforced by soldiers,
implemented by carrier battle groups and air wings. It is still national
security underwritten by "boots on the ground." It is still national
security conducted much in the manner of Bismarck.
And it is still, overwhelmingly, an approach to security that has shied away
from what is more properly seen as the "hard stuff." It is impossible to
observe post-war Afghanistan and claim that the United States made an
all-out effort to transform the psychology of people there and beyond. It is
similarly impossible to conclude that the psychological aspects of security
in post-war Iraq weighed heavily on American minds. Sadly, the encompassing
silence on elements of a possible strategy for shoring up modernity in the
Arab world is the strongest of all signals that, at the end of the day,
America hopes to bully its way out of yet another corner. A Bismarck might
react to bullying in the way we intend - correcting his course, moderating
his policies, counting his power chips and hoping for better days. Those in
the grip of anti-modern radicalism are likely to respond quite differently.
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Notes
1 See Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against
the Modern Age (Harper & Row, 1989); and Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God:
The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). For the connection to other
fundamentalisms, see Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds.,
Fundamentalisms Observed (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
2 Chris Welzel, Ronald Inglehart, and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, "Human
Development as a Theory of Social Change," unpublished paper available at
the home page of Inglehart's project at the University of Michigan, the
World Values Survey: http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/papers/KRIESJPR.pdf.
3 These last two points come from John Dewey's insightful study, German
Philosophy and Politics (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1942).
4 Paul Berman cites the Arab intellectual Tariq Ramadan to this effect in
Terror and Liberalism, 24-26. The same argument, unsurprisingly, comes from
a modern master of multiculturalism, Clifford Geertz. See his review essay,
"Which Way to Mecca? Part II," New York Review of Books (July 3, 2003).
5 Anyone who has any doubts about terrorism as a Western tradition can
consult, among many sources, Noel O'Sullivan, ed., Terrorism, Ideology, and
Revolution (Westview Press, 1986).
6 Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Behind the Curve: Globalization and International
Terrorism," International Security (Winter 2002-03).
7 See Lee Harris, "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," Policy Review 114
(August-September 2002).
--
"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias
they had warfare, terror, murder and
bloodshed but they produced
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had
brotherly love; they had five hundred
years of democracy and peace and what
did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Harry Lime in "The Third Man"