E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

The Psychological Sources of Islamic Terrorism
From Policy Review, an article by Michael J. Mazarr is professor of national security strategy at the U.S. National War College.
.... 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. .... 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. ....

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. .... 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 .... The problem is that ... a few end up trying in ruinous ways ... and find, instead of Tony Robbins, Osama and his like. ....

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. .... Existentialism implies, and indeed often preaches, a rejection of whatever moral system happens to hold sway. .... 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. ... 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. ....

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. ....

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.” ....

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. 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. .... For someone following a traditional practice, questions don’t have to be asked about alternatives. .... 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.” ....

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. ....

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 ... 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. “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.” ....

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.” ....

A [positive] strategy to achieve this goal could have several elements. One ... 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 .... 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 .... 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. ....

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.
Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-06-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=35052