Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (42 page)

I tend to think that the extension of essentialism to social categories is another case of “tricking” or “misfiring” our universal and innate knowledge systems—this time by culturally tweaking our innate beliefs in biological essentialism. This cultural play translates into significant variation in how people essentialize their own group and other groups. As an example of this variation, considerour comparative study of Indonesian madrassahs.
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We found that 74 percent of the students in a school affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah (compared to 7 percent of the students at other schools) believed that all people “were born evil but some learn to become good.” Students who believed people are “born evil” were about eleven times more likely to believe it was their duty to kill nonMuslims. Students were also asked to imagine what would happen if a child born of Jewish parents were adopted by a religious Muslim couple. While 83 percent of students from other schools thought that the child would grow up to be a Muslim, only 48 percent of students at the JI school shared that belief. This essentialist belief that a child born of another religion could never fully become a Muslim correlated strongly with support for violence. Students with this belief were about ten times more likely than other students to believe it their duty to kill non-Muslims.

Mere belief in the group’s essential unity creates a looping effect,
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whereby people strive (or force others) to conform to group norms and stereotypes. For example, the categories Negro, black, and African-American have no sound biological basis. In the last century, many southern U.S. states adopted a “one-drop” rule, which held that a person with any trace of sub-Saharan ancestry (however small or invisible) could not be considered white. This was often informally extended to include dark-skinned Arabs from North Africa and the Middle East (as Sayyid Qutb witnessed during his sojourn in America), Hindus from India, Polynesians, Australian aborigines, and other genetically and historically unrelated “people of color.”

Over time, the people who are categorized and discriminated against in this way are compelled to behave as a group, whether they want to or not. This group behavior, in turn, makes the originally imagined group “real” in a social, economic, and political sense. To rectify past patterns of discrimination, members of discriminated groups seek to “empower” themselves andproudly claim group membership for their own (sometimes altering the group name to signal this shift). This only further reifies the group’s existence and channels its behaviors, though in often unintended and unforeseen ways.

Human kinds are constantly being constructed and essential-ized. For example, the categories “alcoholic” and “homosexual” did not exist as well-defined or coherent social categories before modern times, although diverse behaviors in past times can be retroactively described under these labels. Now, however, we find psychological and medical research seeking the hidden “nature” and “gene” underlying alcoholism or homosexuality, and a looping effect in organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous and in movements such as the one for gay rights. Instigated by Al Qaeda and reaction to it, the social categories “Arab” and “Muslim” are now going through some strange loops in our society and imagination.

FRIENDSHIP

When men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.

—ARISTOTLE,
NICOMACHEAN ETHICS
, C. 350 B.c.

Friendship has always been critical to human survival, ever since our big-brain but weak-body ancestors became human by forming strongly coordinated teams to forage and fight. “For all we know the bond of personal friendship was evolved,” speculated Nobel Prize–winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz, “by the necessity for certain individuals to cease from fighting each other in order to more effectively combat other fellow-members of the species.”
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Friendship is often a privileged candidate for imagined kinship,and friends often readily share essentialism bias. In today’s era of globalization and cultural fragmentation, friendship has come to the fore as traditional families and cultures disintegrate. As every parent in a family on the move learns hard, the dearest thing for young people who need to make their way in the world is to make and keep friends.

People are becoming more mobile and distant from their origins, and their relevant knowledge about the world is acquired horizontally through media and peers, rather than vertically from generation to generation. Larger social movements, with their greater moral causes, are not enough to prevent young people on the move from drowning in a sea of anonymity or motivating them to kill and die for others. For that you need smaller groups of friends.

In the case studies on terrorism, we’ve seen how friendships form for jihad in terms of imagined kin. But what’s the broader evolutionary appeal and logic of friendship that makes it such a robust strategy for sustaining larger groups and mass movements? And especially so in today’s world, where the larger movements transcend traditional ethnic and territorial affinities and aspirations? Friendship is a workhorse of innovation in Silicon Valley,
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a springboard to power in democratic politics, and the strongest base, or
al-qaeda,
for jihad.
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One problem with quid pro quo, the Golden Rule, and other reciprocity strategies for cooperation, is how they can spread in a population of strangers who may initially be suspicious of one another. Spatial constraints, like living or working in the same neighborhood, can increase the probability of encounters between would-be cooperators. So can social constraints on interactions, like belonging to the same linguistic group, profession, or academic discipline. When spatial and social constraints coincide or strongly overlap, as with a village or tribal lineage, and the number of people is small enough so that everyone knows everyone else either directly or through someone they know, then defectionbecomes relatively easy to spot and weed out. But as the world becomes more cosmopolitan, fakers, shirkers, and spies can rove into neighborhoods and mimic the prevailing linguistic dialects and cultural signals. With friendship, where the focus is on specific partners who are well known rather than on randomly encountered individuals, fairness and justice are taken for granted, and deception is much less likely to succeed.

Another problem for simple reciprocating strategies is how to deal with error and misperception related to other people’s acts and intentions. Especially if your prospective partner is a stranger and you’re unfamiliar with his customary ways of doing things, you may wrongly think he’s trying to cheat when he’s actually trying to cooperate. If you retaliate, then you’re forced into an endless and destructive cycle of retribution by accident and for no good reason. You might make a mistake in implementing your own strategy and defect when you meant to cooperate. Nobody’s perfect.

Especially when it concerns friends, people aren’t easily provoked into defection even if a friend cheats from time to time.
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Others may say to you, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?” And ignore them you may. Not because you’re irrational, but because you may have very different criteria for weighting interactions with your friends than with strangers or mere acquaintances. I have a couple of Mexican friends who over the years have taken more material advantage of me than you can imagine: They’ve hocked my guitar (when that really meant something to me), “borrowed” my car and left it a wreck to rot in a ditch, seduced my sweethearts (in younger years), and robbed me blind. But they’ve also put their lives on the line to save mine and even risked their skin to help me arrange the escape from prison in Guatemala of someone whom I knew to be innocent but who meant nothing to them (other than that the person they were helping was someone I cared to help). I wouldn’t trade that friendship for all the money in China.

Humans can’t remember, integrate, and update all past interactions with everyone else in a group beyond about five to ten individuals,
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more or less the number in a group of close friends, or clique.
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But even friends usually don’t closely monitor past dealings with one another, weighting and scrutinizing each transaction? Friends, however, do tend to concentrate their memories and interactions on one another and to be relatively uninterested in learning about or interacting with strangers once a sufficient number of friends is found.

Anthropologists Daniel Hruschka and Joe Henrich have developed a mathematical simulation of friendship as a stable and robust evolutionary strategy, which is forgiving toward preferred partners but tends to defect in interactions with strangers.
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The model’s assumptions are intuitive. People are sensitive to early interactions in a quest for reliable partners. If they encounter repeated defectors, they don’t continue to play with them, as in tit-for-tat and other iterated versions of the prisoner’s dilemma, but go off somewhere else to look for them. Once people build up a sufficiently strong group of preferred cooperators, they cultivate and maintain this small set of local relationships. They begin to stop looking for new partners and become slow to break with old ones.

This makes friendship a particularly useful and stable strategy in a large and noisy world. Friendship maximizes cooperation and trust among a happy few, while minimizing the menace of defection and deception from the multitude. But there’s also a potential downside to overreliance on friendship: By sticking only to friends, new opportunities to hook up with even better cooperators and to achieve greater benefits may be lost. Getting through from the outside to cliques of youthful friends is a hard thing to do, especially those on an adventurous moral mission, like jihad.

TEAMWORK

Groups usually best other groups because they function better as teams. Imagined kinship and friendship may benefit group survival and success by helping to foster teams, but teamwork itself is something even more basic. There are lots of nonhuman social animals, from wasps to wolves and sparrows to spider monkeys. But none manage anything close to the subtle complexity and innovation of human teamwork. Something is missing in them, something that only humans have. And that’s an awareness of what they have, an ability to represent how they are and what they believe and thus to imagine how to use what they have to make things different.

To think of a world different from the world, including heaven and hell, humans needed language and a few other mental tools. One of these other special human mental tools is “folk psychology,” the mental ability to take the perspectives of others and to “read” their minds. Language and mind reading function recursively, enabling people to think thoughts about the thoughts of others, and thoughts about their own thoughts, like Russian dolls nesting one inside the other. Other species may represent what’s around and have beliefs about the world. Only humans have beliefs about beliefs. Having beliefs about beliefs enables humans to be aware of “I” and “Other” and of the commonalities and differences between them, to imagine a world that is not the world, to distinguish fiction from fact, or to attribute a human state of mind to an animal, a group, or God. Folk psychology not only involves the ability to read minds, to take another person’s perspective, and have beliefs about beliefs, but also to empathize, to share something of another’s emotions, and so bind people together affectively for more effective action.

Teamwork, language, and mind reading perhaps co-evolved as a solution to the problem of relatively weak hominid bodies rivaling stronger predators to hunt big game. But whatever the evolutionarystory, no other species has anything remotely resembling the linguistic and mind-reading skills of humans. This enables people to conjure up imaginary worlds from which they can create new realities, to go beyond the here and now into the distant past and far future. But to imagine and bring into being new worlds, people also had to better learn to survive and thrive together. And that meant teamwork that went way beyond the coordinated hunting efforts of other social animals like lions and hyenas or baboons and chimps, including complicated forms of information exchange and care for one another.

Teamwork is not merely cooperative. It’s highly coordinated, and it both demands and favors special kinds of communication and cognitive skills. Members of a hunting group, war party, sports team, or space-shuttle crew have to be intimately acquainted with one another’s knowledge, motivations, physical capabilities, and actions. They must be ready to respond in an instant and as a unit, recalculating everything on the fly, in the face of sudden changes in a situation, unexpected threats, and each other’s unforeseen failings or successes. Teammates must be able to clearly signal to one another what course of action to take, at any moment, in whatever situation. Or they risk failure, losing the game, or death.

But what really did the trick, to produce behaviorally modern humans like us, was a team “spirit”: individual bravery for a common cause that could expand the group and make it fit to beat other teams.

MACHIAVELLI OR GOOD PRINCE HARRY?