The World Has Changed--And It Hasn't: Part 2

I hadn’t planned a follow-up to my most recent post, but reading today has added some thoughts and points of view worth sharing. 

Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen in NYT writes about the participation in ISIS by volunteers coming from Europe. He writes: 

More than 500, and perhaps as many as 800, British Muslims have headed for Syria and Iraq to enlist in the jihadi ranks. In France, that number stands at about 900. Two adolescent girls, 15 and 17, were detained last week in Paris and face charges of conspiring with a terrorist organization. The ideological appeal of the likes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is intact. It may be increasing, despite efforts to build an interfaith dialogue, reach out to moderate Islam, and pre-empt radicalization.

Cohen quotes a Brit who works with those (men mostly—of course) who might make this jump: 

“One minute you are trying to pay bills, the next you’re running around Syria with a machine gun,” said Ghaffar Hussain, the managing director of the Quilliam Foundation, a British research group that seeks to tackle religious extremism. “Many young British Muslims are confused about their identity, and they buy into a narrow framework that can explain events. Jihadists hand them a simplistic narrative of good versus evil. They give them camaraderie and certainty. ISIS makes them feel part of a grand struggle.”

Anticipating what Roger Scruton has written (see below), Cohen states: 

Perhaps racked with historical guilt, European nations with populations from former colonies often seem unable to celebrate their values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Meanwhile, in the Arab world the central hope of the Arab Spring has been dashed: that more open and representative societies would reduce the frustration that leads to extremism.

Cohen concludes: 

[T]he deepest American and Western defeat has been ideological. As Hussain said, “If you don’t have a concerted strategy to undermine their narrative, their values, their worldview, you are not going to succeed. Everyone in society has to take on the challenge.”

So Cohen seems to conclude that we’re losing a battle for the hearts and minds of young men (mostly) who may have a connection (tenuous, as we’ll see below) to Islam. 

In this piece from TNR, writer Mehdi Hasan writes about the seeming weirdness of ISIS recruits and other would-be Islamic terrorists: 

Sarwar and Ahmed, both of whom pleaded guilty to terrorism offences last month, purchased Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies. You could not ask for better evidence to bolster the argument that the 1,400-year-old Islamic faith has little to do with the modern jihadist movement. The swivel-eyed young men who take sadistic pleasure in bombings and beheadings may try to justify their violence with recourse to religious rhetoric— think the killers of Lee Rigby screaming “Allahu Akbar” at their trial; think of Islamic State beheading the photojournalist James Foley as part of its “holy war”—but religious fervour isn’t what motivates most of them.

Hasan continues: 

In 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s behavioural science unit, was leaked to the Guardian. It revealed that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could ... be regarded as religious novices.” The analysts concluded that “a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation,” the newspaper said.

For more evidence, read the books of the forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman; the political scientist Robert Pape; the international relations scholar Rik Coolsaet; the Islamism expert Olivier Roy; the anthropologist Scott Atran. They have all studied the lives and backgrounds of hundreds of gun-toting, bomb-throwing jihadists and they all agree that Islam isn’t to blame for the behaviour of such men (and, yes, they usually are men).

This means we have to think outside many simple parameters (“It’s Islam”) that seem so easy and direct but that simply wrong (because simple). Hasan quotes Atran: 

Atran pointed out in testimony to the US Senate in March 2010: “... what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Quran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world.” He described wannabe jihadists as “bored, under¬employed, overqualified and underwhelmed” young men for whom “jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer ... thrilling, glorious and cool.”

Roger Scruton

Yesterday I got into reading Roger Scruton’s The West and the Rest: Globalization & the Terror Threat (2002). This heavy-duty philosopher (aesthetics, music, Spinoza, Kant, etc.) is also is an outspoken “conservative” in the Burkean tradition (he's not one of the “all Hayek, all day” stations), and he’s a fine essayist. In this book, he contrasts the doctrine and culture of Islam with those of the Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian West (many rivers flow in to the Western basin). He argues that the West has developed some fundamental tenants, especially since the Enlightenment, which sets it off from Islam. Some of the key differences go back much further, but because one can argue that the Enlightenment was the most significant change in Western culture in about two millennia, I think that Scruton rightly focuses on differences arising from the Enlightenment. For instance, that’s when Western Christianity—Protestant and Catholic—began to play a different role in public life. Scuton doesn't think that the West has done enough (in arugment) to defend its values and traditions in the face of criticisms and that this lack of an energetic defense only serves to inflame and energize would-be attackers.

What I get from Scruton (so far) focuses not so much on background of terrorists and would-be terrorists, as (for example) Atran does, but instead Scruton focuses on the high cultural differences, especially in politics and law. One might at first glance think that he contradicts those such as Atran cited in the TNR article by Hasan, but I don’t think so. What I think that the significant cultural differences establish is that immigrants to the West, especially from Islamic countries, may have a greater disjunction between their native culture (so defined by religion) and the culture that they find in the West. (Some other non-Western cultures, for instance, Chinese, would not suffer the same degree of culture shock.) Because of the depth of the difference, a deeper, more threatening sense of alienation can develop. Of course, this needn’t be true, as many from Islamic countries emigrate successfully to the West (U.S., U.K. Europe, Australia, etc.). But if alienation develops, as it can so easily in young males, then you have a recipe for disaster because of the compelling claims that they can recover from Islamic tradition. From reading today, one gets a sense of “cradle” Moslems prone to violence and steeped in fundamentalist Islamic culture are sought out by those who use Islam as a vehicle into a violent and totalizing movement.

 Thus, you have two different groups and sets of motivations to consider when thinking about how to counteract the threats that they pose.

The World Has Changed--And It Hasn't

Nassim Taleb begins a chain of thoughts

A confluence of reading in the last couple of days has brought the perplexing pattern of modern political reality to the forefront of my attention. Recently on Twitter, Nassim Taleb commented that UK philosopher John Gray was the only one to recognize that Islamic extremism is a reaction to modernity. While not contesting Gray’s insight, I suggested that Karen Armstrong came to a similar conclusion in her book The Battle for God, published in 2000. (N.B. Taleb later references the work of Scott Atran, whose work also addresses this issue.) Regardless of who first grasped or published this insight, it seems to be gaining traction. Ross Douthat, in his Sunday New York Times column, discussed the idea that liberal modernity has always spawned counter-movements and that ISIS is

only the latest. Communism and Fascism are the prominent predecessors to the claim of anti-modern, anti-liberal ideological leadership. Douthat in turn references an American Interest article by Abram N. Shulsky, which provides a longer-range consideration of anti-modern, anti-liberal movements. (Modernity and liberalism are not synonymous, but they are closely linked and nearly inter-changeable for these purposes.) Finally, I reviewed an article by British philosopher Roger Scruton, a “conservative”*, who argues that the West must vigorously oppose what he perceives as seven core distinctions between the West and fundamentalist Islam. Scruton writes:

In the public sphere, we can resolve to protect the good things that we have inherited. That means making no concessions to those who wish us to exchange citizenship for subjection, nationality for religious conformity, secular law for shari’ah, the Judeo-Christian inheritance for Islam, irony for solemnity, self-criticism for dogmatism, representation for submission, and cheerful drinking for censorious abstinence.

 All this has led me to ponder some questions and suggest some possibilities:

Taleb, Gray, Armstrong, Atran, and others who agree with them are correct in characterizing Islamic fundamentalism as a reaction to modernity. To see the phenomena of Islamism as simply a regression to an earlier (medieval) form of thought misses the crucial importance played by modernity. Alas, to many in Moslem nations, modernity appears in the guise of Western imperialism and militarism or cultural dominance. Fault lines (a la Samuel Huntington) between Islam and its neighbors aren’t new, but Islamist thinking about Islamic society and its relation to its non-Moslem neighbors does come in modern garb.

Liberalism, with its individuality, free markets, and lack of legal and social restraints, is a recent development in human culture. While we can’t pinpoint a start date, northwest Europe began the transition around 1500, and it gained momentum from the incredible economic change that started around 1800 with the Industrial Revolution. By 1900, “the West” (western Europe and the English-speaking countries) dominated the world stage. But as Europe was the vanguard of modernity, so it served as the spawning ground for the first anti-modern, anti-liberal movements. 

Nationalism, Romanticism, Anarchism, Communism, and Fascism, are all anti-liberal, anti-modern reactions (in varying degrees). All arose and exerted a significant effect on Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries (and to a lesser extent on the U.S.).

Some of these ideologies, such as nationalism and forms politics approaching fascism, are now at play again around Europe:  Putinism in Russia, Erdogan’s regime in Turkey, and Orban’s regime in Hungary. The Hungarian case is most intriguing because Hungary had seemed securely within the post-WWII, post-communist camp embodied by the EU—and it is the most surprising in which to see an aggressive anti-liberal, anti-democratic regime. 

To some, these developments call into question the thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. One can reach this conclusion if you read Fukuyama as arguing for the inevitable triumph of the Western liberal idea. I don’t think that’s what he argued. He argued that the democratic, market-oriented ideal no longer had a viable rival worldview. Who proposes a new worldview that can supplant liberal democracy? Not ISIS or resurgent fascism.

In addition, Fukuyama considered the problem of “the last man” and “men without chests” (both from Nietzsche). In some measure, the anti-modern viewpoints noted above seek to displace the logic and status of bourgeois society, and the problem could be endemic to the system, as Douthat suggests and as (I think) Fukuyama would admit. We might call it the thymos problem. (To what extent the thymos problem is a male problem is an intriguing one but one that I’ll set aside for now.)

Are we stuck in a low, sub-optimal equilibrium, with bourgeois society surviving but unable to put an end to the impulse to counter that's driven by atavistic urges? Is there a way out? To this, we’d have to turn to speculation. Dr. John Kemp, of the University of Iowa, for instance, in his Choosing Survival: Creating Highly Adaptive Societies, takes an optimistic perspective and suggests that the long-term trend impels nations and societies to move to open, modern social and economic institutions that include democracy, individual rights, and markets. But I’m not as confident of this trend. I fear that we will (at best) become stuck in a rut, economically, ecologically, and internationally, with the distinct possibility of a downward spiral if severe resource issues arise. With climate, ecological, and population pressures pushing hard on nations and societies, resource wars seem a distinct possibility, adding to and further inciting ideological and religious fervor.  

Another viewpoint, outside the mainstream box, comes from those best represented by Ken Wilber’s synthetic mind. (If you’re unfamiliar with Wilber, this movie review of Cloud Atlas from no less than the New York Review of Books, gives a brief account of his work and influence.) Wilber gathers and furthers many thinkers who argue that human culture is ready to step ahead and (presumably) out of our current stalemates. Wilber’s project has always fascinated and (largely) persuaded me. However, I believe that he’d agree that stepping up and out of current predicaments (fundamentalism, power politics, ecological and economic crises, etc.) isn’t guaranteed. Current political decisions shape our future. We can't hope to arrive at the Promised Land by drifting on the tide of history.

So it comes back to “What do we do now?” How aggressive can and should American policy be toward ISIS and other such anti-Western ideologies? Note that the Soviet empire and communism as a living ideology didn’t fall in a military defeat to the West. It collapsed from the inside because it compared so poorly to the West and because of its own internal contradictions. Our perceptions of the nature and extent of threats posed by anti-liberal, anti-Western ideologies affects how we respond to them. Anyone who supports the modern, liberal project—including those who seek to transcend it—must ponder these troubling issues. We have no easy answers, but our answers will shape our future.

*Americans, note well, that “conservative” by UK or European standards are often different from what we call conservative in the U.S., although Douthat, David Brooks, and David Frum are exceptional American conservatives in their greater concern for society instead of just economics, their articulate writing, and their—in a classical sense—liberal beliefs.

State Building: Governance and the World Order in the Twenty-First Century

The first issue that I should address comes from the fact that that I have posted this book review on my “Steve’s View from Abroad” website. What has this to do with India? While a far cry from the failed states that are the primary focus of this book, India, nevertheless, is a state (or states, as it’s a federal system) that fails to function effectively in many realms. Anytime I speak about India, I almost always mention the lack of basic government services and the effect that this has daily life. Poor roads, poor drainage, poor sewers, poor water and air quality—I could go on (and did with some dinner partners just the other night). I believe that India will gain a measure sophistication and decent quality of life (which includes and transcends a mere increase in GDP) when Jaipur no longer has garbage strewn upon its streets; when the poor living in shanties have found decent housing; and when the middle class has initiated a “Progressive Era” for India to clean-up political corruption and to address its failing infrastructure. India is far from a world-class economy currently, but if it can reach a critical minimum of an engaged middle-class willing to fight the good political fight, it has a future. A lot of work—a lot—remains to be accomplished, but it can happen. 

So issues of governance drew me to this work as one reason, but the other is the reputation of Fukuyama himself. Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, now much maligned, is a very interesting and instructive book. I read it many years ago to great benefit and delight. The benefit and delight came from understanding a train of political thought that I’d never grasped very well before. Plato, Hegel (via Kojeve), and Nietzsche were brought to life in a manner that I’d never before appreciated. The English tradition, with Locke, Bentham, Mill, etc. emphasizes rational, utilitarian man, homo economus. However, this older tradition, going back to Plato and Thucydides (although Plato wanted to crush all human instinct under reason), emphasizes thymos, our human demand for dignity and respect, the kinds of things that the English tradition, at least in economics, tended to downplay if not outright ignore. Fukuyama raised my understanding Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave, something that in a rush toward Marx, too much political theory ignored. For this education alone, Fukuyama’s book was very worthwhile. 

The other part of The End of History and the Last Man concerns the growing trend toward liberal democracy in the world, and here’s where people have come down hard on Fukuyama, considering him a failed prophet. However, I don’t recall (sorry, my copy not here with me) that Fukuyama emphasized that we would all become happy, bourgeoisie democrats. What I believe that he did—and on which he has not been rebutted—is to establish that no political system is more appropriate for human affairs than liberal democracy. As a practice, liberal democracy has not swept the field, but as an ideal (non-utopian), who stands as a contender? No other system, I submit, and for this reason, Fukuyama deserves more praise than the easy derision he has received. 

The criticism that The End of History and the Last Man has received hasn’t slowed Fukuyama, and he’s gained in prominence. I enjoyed his The Great Disruption and Trust, and well as a number of articles that he’s written. Meanwhile, the Panda (sometimes Hungry, sometimes Inscrutable), during her earlier visit India, was reading his most recent book, The Origins of Political Order (Part 1). She began it with some skepticism but concluded it with approval and assigned it to me to read (my copy awaits me in IC). Thus, when I saw this slender (179 p.) book, I took it up and read it in less than a day. It proved worthwhile, indeed. 

Written in 2004 after the invasion of Iraq and our incursion (if that’s the right term) into Afghanistan, it reflects on these experiences as well as the long list of “failed-states” that grabbed world attention in the years following the collapse of the Communism. Put simply, states (governments) serve crucial functions and when they fail (no longer function effectively), people suffer and often die. Fukuyama initially details the function of states and how these functions can vary. For instance, the state in the U.S. is much more limited than European states in the provision of services and policies. Think healthcare, for instance. While thoughts can vary in this regard, a certain minimum number of functions need attention. In addition, Fukuyama devotes a chapter to public administration, which proves to me, again, not only his mastery of a great empirical body of knowledge, but his ability to draw out some of the fundamental theoretical and practical aspects of a topic like public administration. 

Fukuyama discusses how public administration is an issue around the globe and identifies its unique problems. For instance, the agency problem, the scope of authority problem, and the motivation problem. Fukuyama criticizes the microeconomics approach to public administration and the institutional approach, at least to the extent that those approaches aren’t augmented by a sociological approach. Fukuyama notes that organizations, or more exactly, the individuals within them, are governed by group norms, personal relationships, leadership standards, and other non-economic motivations (without totally ignoring the economic issues). His example of the armed forces serves perfectly: men and women don’t fight and die for the great pay; they fight and die for each other. (By the way, this applies to terrorists as well. See Scott Atran’s work Talking with the Enemy.) Among our economics-envying social sciences, this may come as news. It shouldn’t, but at least in the current policy-making world, it does. (Economics, in the meanwhile, suffers from a perverse physics-envy.) Everyone should consider this from Fukuyama: 

            It has been a longstanding dream of the social sciences to turn the study of human behavior into a true science, moving from the mere description to formal models of causation with nontrivial predictive value, based on rigorous empirical observation. This project can be realized more readily in some spheres of human behavior than in others. Markets are susceptible to this kind of analysis, which is why economics emerged as the queen of the social sciences in the late twentieth century. But organizations constitute a complicated case. Individuals in the organizations look out for their narrow self-interests, and to the extent they do, the economist’s methodological individualism provides genuine insight. But to a much greater extent than in markets, norms and social ties affect individual choices in organizations. The effort to be more “scientific” than the underlying subject matter permits carries a real cost in blinding us to the real complexities of public administration as it is practiced in different societies. (123)

Agreed. Thus, theorists like Herbert Simon, James March, and Chester Barnard receive Fukuyama’s use and praise instead of more recent thinkers. In addition, I must note the fascinating account of Japanese public administration after WWII when American “experts” attempted to “fix it”. Amazing. 

Finally, Fukuyama addresses the issue of sovereignty, one in which the U.S. (especially the Bush Administration) and other countries often parted ways. To his credit, Fukuyama mentions Robert Kagan, whom I believe has been a critic of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. He cites Kagan’s appreciation of the differences between the U.S. and Europe on these issues. 

All in all, a short but powerful book. Having now experienced ineffective or marginally effective states (I’ll throw in Cameroon as well), I have a new and greater appreciation of the mundane but crucial work of government.

A Review of the Film "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" and a Consideration of the Ideas of Liah Greenfeld

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a film by Mira Nair, attempts to accomplish a great deal. Fundamentalism, which trails behind it the threat of terror and violence, is a crucial issue in our age. Nair’s film attempts to deal with issues surrounding fundamentalism by following the life of a young Pakistani. In doing so, the film attempts to pack a great deal into a two-hour story. Essentially, a young, bright Pakistani comes to the US to attend Princeton University. He graduates with honors, and is hired by a McKinsey-like company in New York City. He meets and beds a young artist, and then when it, when it seems like he’s on top of the world, 9/11 happens.

After 9/11, of course, things change drastically for him. He becomes the subject of airport searches and an unjustified arrest and interrogation. (The facts of the arrest and interrogation scenes struck me as over the top—or am I naïve?—given the utter lack of probable cause  and the sophistication of the protagonist depicted in the film, but this is endemic to the film itself). Returning to Pakistan, the young man begins to teach at Lahore University and becomes identified with radical views in the eyes the local CIA contingent. In the end, (spoiler alert), our young man rejects two types of fundamentalism: both the religious fundamentalism that leads to terrorism and violence, and the fundamentalism that the CIA and others deploy in their own Manichean worldview.

The film as well acted, well directed, and as I mentioned, except for perhaps trying to pack too much into the script, it was a decent storyline that explored some of the difficulties and challenges that such a young man would face.

Immediately before seeing this movie, I happened to read a blog entry by Liah Greenfeld. She’s a professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology at Boston University. (I found her piece on the website for Project Syndicate, which carries blogs by a wide variety of academics and intellectuals across a broad spectrum of issues.) In her entry, Prof. Greenfeld talks about the Boston bombers and their motivations in terms of her recently published book Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Harvard University Press, 2013) that argues an interesting hypothesis about not only the roots of terrorism, but also how the entire Modern Age affects us all. After reading the blog entry, I discovered and reviewed her personal website, her blog, and the blog she writes for Psychology Today. Her Psychology Today blog sets out the premises of her book in a continuing series of entries.

Greenfeld’s initial hypothesis starts with the growth of nationalism beginning in Tudor England in the 1500s, when the death and disruption caused by the War of the Roses created opportunities for unprecedented social mobility. This social mobility, along with new understanding of sovereignty, led to the rise of nationalism. From England, the idea passed to France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and around the world. Her second book, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (2003) argues that capitalism arose not because of the Protestant Ethic (Weber) or some unique event or asset in the West, but because the idea of economic growth, as opposed to the mere accumulation of wealth, became a touchstone of nationalist thinking in the rivalry between the nation-states of Europe. 

Her most recently published book (Mind, Modernity, Madness) argues that the views of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, two of the pillars of sociology and political economy, give us insight into what has happened in our modern world. From Durkheim, she pulls the concept of anomie, the idea that modern society cuts us loose and leaves us adrift from many of the traditional ties that moor our identity and self-concept, leaving us adrift in the modern world. From Weber, although she dismisses, as do most scholars now, his thesis that the Protestant Ethic was the guiding idea of capitalism, she nevertheless takes the premise that an idea or ideas were in fact the motive force behind this world-changing events that led to capitalism and modernity. (In this regard, she seems very close to what Deirdre McCloskey is arguing in her books, including The Bourgeois Dignity, although McCloskey apparently differs to some extent based upon the brief references to Greenfeld's work in Bourgeois Dignity.) 

In Mind, Modernity, Madness, Greenfeld argues that the most difficult and intractable of modern mental illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression, are primarily diseases of the mind and not of the brain, contrary to the current trend of contemporary thinking. She believes that individuals thrown into the modern condition often cannot cope with the challenges foisted upon them, and as a result, some suffer these illnesses. This thesis attracts me because I believe that for a long time now that we can’t account for all mental illnesses through biology alone. Some mental illness is without question solely of biological origin, but others have too much of a social-cultural component among antecedents and symptoms to allow us to look at biology alone. 

Let me share an example. Suppose someone is around the corner and you’re not aware that the other person is there. You turn the corner and confront the person. If you are not expecting that person, you are startled. If you thought you were alone in a house, for instance, you are likely quite frightened. The moment you see the person and react, we can record a number of biological changes that occur almost instantaneously. Your face reveals a startled expression, your shoulders hunch, your hands raise, while internally, your body is immediately flooded with adrenaline. Now, for our little thought experiment, let’s assume that we have a medical team present to draw a blood sample and do a quick check of your body. They report that you have extraordinarily high adrenaline in your blood, and your muscles are strongly flexed. So what to do? “Well, we can prescribe a medication to help you relax to counter-act the flood of adrenaline, and while we’re at it, a muscle relaxant”, says the good doctor standing by. So what was your diagnosis? Excess adrenaline in the blood and tight muscles, some would say. True. In addition, our medical team tells you that the excess adrenaline can be treated with prescription medication X. “Your problem,” they say, “is excess adrenaline”. You need to get that under control and you’ll be just fine”. Of course, there’s an alternative way to look at the diagnosis and an alternative way to look at the cause. I say, “Your mind has deceived you; the figure that you feared was your husband, who had been working quietly in the other room unbeknownst to you”. It’s a matter much like the story of the rope mistaken for a snake in a dark room. Our mind deludes us and causes us anxiety. Both of the explanations are true from their unique perspectives, but one, unless you’re into Big Pharma, presents a lower cost, more effective way to deal with the problem: let Mother Nature run her course and put a bell around your husband’s neck. 

All of the above is a long-winded way of saying that I find Greenfeld’s perspective very persuasive with many practical applications. Whether schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, and major depression are in fact essentially one disease, diseases of the mind unique to the Modern Age, I can’t posit with authority since this type of conclusion remains far above my pay grade. However, to take a side, I’d take hers. People who do and say things while hallucinating that we consider “weird” or “crazy” do so within their language and culture. Someone may believe himself to be Jesus or Napoleon if he lives in Europe, but probably not in India, where perhaps one would imagine oneself as Rama, or some other god. People may say or do “crazy” things, but they do so within a language and a culture. Per Greenfeld and me (for what the latter is worth), even the “crazy” behavior and its cause is at least in part because of culture and society. 

I’m eager to explore Greenfeld’s trilogy in more detail when I can get the books (too big to enjoy reading on the Kindle). I’m eager to continue exploring fundamentalism and the Modern Age. I think more than one scholar (Karen Armstrong pops to mind) has argued persuasively that fundamentalism is a disorder of modernity. I suspect that religion is a carrier of the real disorder and not the cause: like rats and fleas spreading the Black Death, the root cause is anomie and a feeling of social uncertainty and belittlement that latches on to religion (Judaism Christianity, Islam, Hindu, etc.) to serve as a carrier. A particular religion provides a ready-made story that can be bent to justify the feeling of a need to change the world and to right the injustices and wrongs experienced, even if the change requires wanton violence. (See this review of Reza Aslan’s How to Win a Cosmic War about how this virus ranges across the three great monotheistic religions.) 

I think that Greenfeld’s hypothesis as it applies to terrorism as we just witnessed it in Boston fits with the ideas of Scott Atran as well (see my review here). Before learning of Greenfeld’s work, I found Atran the most persuasive writer that I’d read on this topic, but I think that Greenfeld provides a more comprehensive perspective, which, by the way, also apples to acts of domestic terror (if we don’t limit terrorism to random violence that purports to have some political motive). Atran is good at identifying how small social groups reinforce norms that lead to acts of terror, but he doesn’t as effectively address what I think are the underlying issues of social or status dislocation that are behind these acts. I think Greenfields’s work gives us the more comprehensive viewpoint. Thus, the way I currently understand Greenfeld, she would not see a significant underlying difference between the Boston bombers, or the Newtown shooter; between jihadist acts of terror or those of the Oklahoma City bombers or the Branch Davidians.

The question I have for Greenfeld is that violent apocalyptic movements have been around for a very long time, certainly going back to biblical times; the Middle Ages are full of millennial movements. How do we distinguish such actions in the Modern Age from their pre-modern precursors?

Understanding how social and cultural factors influence and create acts of violence or dislocation is crucial for our ability to try to counteract these trends. Understanding the pressures as portrayed in a film like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, or as analyzed in Greenfeld’s book, are both sources that we must use to try to come to a deeper understanding. In my own opinion, in a society so concerned with economics and economic growth, we tend to focus far too much on material incentives as the primary driver of human action. While certainly significant, a deeper understanding of human motivations is called for. The passions are probably more important than the interests. People like René Girard are among those who try to take a deeper look at what is going on. Even going back to Thucydides, we see a more complex understanding of human motivation than what many of us have come to believe of late. Simple pain and pleasure are insufficient to understand the complexity of human motives. The human individual, by herself or himself, makes no sense unless we take into account the mirrors of society and culture. (This concluding metaphor comes from the serendipity of currently re-reading Robert Pirsig’s Lila.)