Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (40 page)

In the long run, perhaps the most important counterterrorism measure of all is to provide alternative heroes and hopes that are more enticing and empowering than any moderating lessons or material offerings (jobs that help to relieve the terrible boredom and inactivity of immigrant youth in Europe and the underemployed throughout much of the Muslim world, will not alone offset the alluring stimulation of playing at war). It is also important to provide alternate local networks and chat rooms that speak to the inherent idealism, sense of risk and adventure, and need for peer approval that young people everywhere tend toward. It even could be a twenty-first-century version of what the Boy Scouts and high school football teams did for immigrants and potentially troublesome youth as America urbanized a century ago. Ask any cop on the beat: Those things work. It has to be done with the input and insight of local communities, and chiefly peer-to-peer, or it won’t work: deradicalization, like radicalization itself, engages mainly from the bottom up, not from the top down. This, of course, is not how you stop terrorism today, but how you do it for tomorrow.

Part V
WAR PARTIES—GROUPS, GODS, AND GLORY

At all times throughout the world, tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is the important element of their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase…. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over other tribes.

—CHARLES DARWIN,
THE DESCENT OF MAN,
1871

CHAPTER 17
ALL IN THE FAMILY: IMAGINED KIN, FRIENDSHIP,
AND TEAMWORK

Each [martyr] has a special place—among them are brothers, just as there are sons and those even more dear.

—“OATH TO JIHAD” FOR MEMBERS OF HARKAT UL-MUJAHEDIN,
A PAKISTANI AFFILIATE OF THE WORLD ISLAMIC FRONT FOR
JIHAD AGAINST THE JEWS AND CRUSADERS, AN UMBRELLA
GROUP FORMED BY OSAMA BIN LADEN IN 1998

H
earken, wrote Plutarch, to the counsel that Aristotle gave his pupil Alexander the Great, who went out to conquer the world: “to have regard for the Greeks as for friends and kindred, but to conduct himself towards other peoples as though they were plants and animals.”
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Now, cooperation within armies, empires, and transnational movements has nothing directly to do with kin and kith. So what might be the thinking behind Aristotle’s advice?

GROUP LOVE AND GENOCIDE

People overwhelmingly tend to favor members of their own group over outsiders in choosing their friends, business associates, andothers whom they interact and exchange with. It’s pretty universal in adversarial relationships to clump and split all potential allies and enemies into a binary opposition, such as good versus evil, where each side’s hidden essence is characterized as “good” by one’s own side and “evil” by the other side. Human minds simply adore binary oppositions, whatever the domain of thought.
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Try this experiment: Gather a bunch of students or even perfect strangers and, by a flip of the coin, arbitrarily provide tags identifying some as belonging to an “A” group and a “B” group, or a “Green” group and an “Orange” group; you’ll soon find members of each group spontaneously forming emotional bonds with one another.
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You’ll also see the A’s and Greens systematically discriminating against the B’s and Oranges while showing generosity to their own group in matters both trivial (sharing candy) and consequential (fighting).
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Typical binary oppositions today include “us” versus “them,” “civilization” versus “barbarism,” “believers” versus “nonbelievers,” and so on. “Al Qaeda” functions today mainly as a characterization of hidden essence: “evil” for those who oppose the label, “good” for those who adopt it.

In Los Angeles, a stranger with a blue hat risks being shot if he happens onto the turf of the gang called Bloods, whose color is red; sporting a red scarf is enough to get you killed if you chance into the territory of the rival Crips gang, whose color is blue. Bloods will not pronounce the letter C nor Crips the letter B. But many Reds will readily risk their lives to save a Red, and Blues to save a Blue.
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There’s little place for compromise in such environs; either you’re with one side or against it, or you’d better stay away.

If you’re a staunch Republican during a presidential campaign, your candidate is likely as honest and forthright as a person can be, but the Democratic candidate is an appalling cynic and liar. Democrats, of course, tend to think the reverse is true. Show a film clip of an Ohio State–Michigan football game to students at each university and ask them to objectively record every foul committed.If the game was held at Michigan, then Ohio students are sure to say the referees intentionally overlooked foul play. If held in Ohio, the Michigan students will bet the bank that the refs ignored rampant cheating. The same goes for the soccer fans of Manchester United and Arsenal, or Barcelona and Real Madrid. But when Britain faces Spain, playing for Britain or Spain is all that counts.
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The basic psychology of “us versus them” is much the same when ethnic, national, or religious groups compete for territory, vital resources, or membership. But the stakes are usually much higher (than candy, street turf, or a football or election victory) and can lead to war. Human warfare is vastly more lethal than inter-group conflict in other primate species.
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Genocide, the extermination of one group by another, is a frequent method of “conflict resolution” that humans have practiced since prehistoric times.
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We don’t know how frequent genocide was in human prehistory, but even its occasional occurrence would have favored the emergence of bravery—fighting at personal risk on behalf of one’s group. If losing the war results in genocide, you’re dead anyway; so better to fight with your all to the end to give yourself and your group a chance.

What isn’t clear is whether bravery was naturally selected as a genetic propensity in only some individuals, or to varying degrees in most or all individuals. Or perhaps bravery was culturally selected in the course of intergroup competition and warfare, emerging at some stage in prehistory, not as a biological adaptation of certain individuals to groups, but as a normative aspect of human societies. Culturally transmitted norms for bravery and heroic sacrifice, such as honor and esteem, might attract a variety of individuals. The wider the range of individuals attracted to bravery, the less the costs of sacrifice to each brave individual; thus, the more brave and united the society as a whole, the better able the society to wage war and compete against other societies.

What gives outnumbered insurgents and resource-poor revolutionariesthe ability to resist and defeat police and armies that have vastly more material means? Moral commitment to sacrifice for their group without regard for their own material reward. As long as jihadis show such moral commitment, as martyrdom missions attest to, then even overwhelming material efforts to destroy the jihadi movement may not be enough.

But what gets group commitment going in the first place?

BRAVERY AND HEROISM (PAROCHIAL ALTRUISM)

Altruism is the sacrifice of one’s own interests for the sake of others, as in giving to charity, lending a helping hand, or just taking time to offer directions to a stranger. Parochial altruism, especially bravery and heroism in war, involves sacrifice for one’s own group to the detriment of rival groups.
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Parochial altruism is a basic aspect of the evolutionary imperative of human populations to “cooperate to compete.” In all cultures, parochially altruistic acts are considered noble and good. Though what is good and noble in one culture and time can be evil and ignoble for another. Individuals within a society may also differ widely in their appreciation of the value of an altruistic act, such as suicide bombing or the struggle for civil human rights.

Charles Darwin, gathering an astounding amount of data from his voyage around the world as a naturalist aboard the HMS
Beagle,
¹⁰
and from other people’s observations, tried to show that all living kinds are basically competitive and selfish. The different forms of life, including humans and their cultural shells, develop through a process of natural selection that favors survival of the best competitors for resources. This, he argued in
On the Origin of Species,
promotes adaptations only for the individual’s own use in its struggle to gain resources to produce offspring: “good for itself,” but “never … for the exclusive good of others.”
¹¹

Under Darwin’s theory, if we give to charity or help children,strangers, and the infirm, it’s because we seek enhanced social status, or a heightened sense of self-worth, or affirmation of our belief that as we do for others in need so we expect others to do unto us should we become needy, or whatever else may serve our interests in the short or long run. “In the first place,” Darwin later wrote, “each man would soon learn from experience that if he aided his fellow-men, he would commonly receive aid in the end.” Charles Moskos, a former draftee who became one of America’s most respected military sociologists, observed: “In ground warfare an individual’s survival is directly related to the support—moral, physical, and technical—he can expect from his fellow soldiers. He gets such support largely to the degree that he reciprocates to others.”
¹²

Heroism and martyrdom, however, go way beyond the principles of reciprocity, such as quid pro quo or even the Golden Rule. Darwin puzzled mightily over what would motivate “the bravest men, who were always willing to come to the front in war, and who freely risked their lives for others?” Since the brave were off risking death—or dying—more than others, they would have fewer offspring on average. “Therefore, it hardly seems probable, that the number of men gifted with such virtues … could be increased through natural selection, that is, by survival of the fittest.”
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Of course, Darwin acknowledged that the brave warrior who survives the fight will often gain more power or wealth or social worth or mates, and so improve his chances for reproducing healthy and successful offspring in greater numbers. But if the risk of death is very high, then it is very doubtful that gain would outweigh loss.

How, then, could self-interest alone account for man’s aptitude for self-sacrifice to the point of giving his life—the totality of his self-interests—for his extended family, tribe, nation, religion, or for humanity? The puzzle led Darwin to modify his view that natural selection only produces selfish individuals. In
The Descent of Man,
he suggests that we humans have a naturally selected propensityto moral virtue, that is, a willingness to sacrifice self-interest in the cause of group interest. Humans are above all moral animals because they are creatures who love their group as they love themselves. “It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.”
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For Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection, moral behavior (along with mathematics, music, and art) was evidence that humans, as opposed to all other animals, had not evolved through natural selection alone: “The special faculties we have been discussing clearly point to the existence in man of something which has not derived from his animal progenitors—something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence … beyond all explanation by matter, its laws and forces.”
¹⁵

Needless to say, Wallace’s account of altruism as a spiritual creation beyond all material explanation did not sit well with Darwin’s empirical mind-bent. “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child,”
¹⁶
lamented Darwin in a letter to Wallace. But Darwin himself produced no causal account of how group love might have emerged, nor did he give any good reason why natural selection should have produced truly selfless devotion only in humans, other than to say that because our ancestors were so physically weak, only group strength could get them through.

KINSHIP, AND THE POWER OF IMAGINED KIN

For nearly a century after Darwin, evolutionary thinkers struggled unsuccessfully to reconcile the seemingly antagonistic concepts of“self love” versus “group love” in biological terms. The first real progress was made in the early 1960s by William Hamilton, a graduate student who happened to be fascinated by Hymenoptera, social insects that live in colonies, such as ants, bees, wasps, and sawflies.