Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (43 page)

Niccolö Machiavelli was a Renaissance philosopher, diplomat, and military adviser who counseled the rulers of Florence how to play “realist” politics and use power to advantage:

And it must be understood that a prince … cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being oftenobliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion. And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variation of fortune dictate, and … not deviate from what is good if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.
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Machiavelli’s name has since passed into common language to refer to political or social moves that are astutely cunning or devious. There’s an influential school of evolutionary psychology that holds that our ancestors only became truly human when they mastered a form of social chess that involved Machiavellian mental acrobatics.
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The social Machiavellian must not only constantly weigh the benefit of a cooperative association against the cost of sacrificing individual opportunity. He also has to add in the expense of constantly policing the association. He must be able to monitor signals of honesty and deception, assess the reliability of those signals, and evaluate what damage might be done by others if they lie, cheat, or defect. He also must be ever ready to revise his own strategies, contemplate potentially more lucrative alliances that have their own drawbacks, and decide whether to defect himself. He must be adept at learning to feint moves and deceive when necessary, and to develop clear reasoning to avoid deception. Indeed, one argument for the natural selection of logical inference in human cognition is the need to see through the dangers of alliances, any and all of which are fraught with personal costs and perhaps mortal peril.

Philosopher Kim Sterelny argues, rightly I think, that modern society can make the Machiavellian game seem more basic to human life than it really is.
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The problems of deception and defection are much more serious where mass anonymity, impersonal communication media, mobility, and money facilitate defection. Mass anonymity means many one-shot interactions withpeople you don’t care about and who don’t care about you. Impersonal communication media convey little of the texture and tone of social life that gives meaning to cooperation, like a dried and pressed water lily uprooted from its pod in the pond, or e-mail spam. Mobility makes getting away with defection easy, especially after one-off interactions with strangers. And money makes defection attractive, because large amounts of portable gains can be whisked off from single interactions. But humans first evolved in far smaller social worlds where anonymity was unavailable, a shift to other groups was not a viable option, and defection from one’s kith and kin almost invariably soon led to a lonely death. The need and cost of policing people to pull their full weight were likely distributed over the whole collective and were fairly minimal.

“All warfare is based on deception,” declared Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu. The declaration was made some 2,500 years ago in
The Art of War,
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the oldest and perhaps most influential book ever written on military strategy. But this refers to warfare
between
groups, especially large groups of the kind Sun Tzu worried about during the Era of the Warring States. The sentiment provoked by war within a small fighting group is a far thing from a Machiavellian attitude. We might call it the Good Prince Harry sentiment, after Britain’s Prince Harry of Wales. Harry, a second lieutenant in the Household Cavalry, was redeployed out of Afghanistan when the news media found out about his presence there. He grudgingly left his army buddies, and the thrill of the team in action:

At least in operations then you are kept on your toes the whole time, that’s what the guys join up for, I guess, that adrenaline….

Once you are out in the middle of the desert and all you depend on is one another, to look out for each other, then it comes down to the fact that you are all mates, all ranks aside, you are mates and look out for one another…. You do what you have to do, what’s necessary to save your own guys. If you need to drop abomb … to save lives, that’s what happens.
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[Though Good Prince Harry’s unconditional love of his buddies may not quite extend to all members of his military unit, including Muslims he dubbed Pakis and ragheads.]
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In a large army, each soldier is rationally motivated to stay as much out of the fight as he can to avoid injury and stay alive. The dilemma is that if all the soldiers on a side behave rationally in this way, they won’t fight, the battle surely will be lost, and all may die. Armies have developed various ways of dealing with this problem in the course of human history. Two repeatedly stand out: Find and execute slackers and deserters, and keep the basic fighting units small and intimate to maximize team spirit. But in a small world that’s already cooperative, losing esteem in the eyes of one’s peers, and status in the community, is punishment enough when esteem and status are just about the only things that socially distinguish one person’s worth from another’s. And snubbing or shows of disdain cost the community little to execute in terms of time and energy lost from other activities. Keeping up team fighting spirit also comes with the territory at almost no extra cost.

To kill and die with friends, as in the jihad, almost invariably involves deep love of one’s group. Hatred of others may not even be necessary, only a fathomless lack of empathy and concern is. Being imbued with a righteous cause is usually not sufficient to die and kill for the group, but as we’ll see in the next chapters, it’s usually necessary to sustain war, especially against all odds.

CHAPTER 18
BLOOD SPORT: WAR MAKES MEN MEN

Homo homini lupus est.
[Man is the wolf of mankind.]

—THOMAS HOBBES,
LEVIATHAN,
C. 1650

The noble man’s soul has two goals

To die or to achieve its dreams

What is life if I don’t live

Feared and what I have is forbidden to others

When I speak, all the world listens

And my voice echoes among people

I see my death, but I rush to it

This is the death of men….

I will throw my heart at my enemies’ faces

And my heart is iron and fire!

I will protect my land with the edge of the sword

So my people will know that I am the man.

—ABDELRAHIM MAHMUD,
THE MARTYR
, 1937

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

—GEORGE SANTAYANA,
THE LIFE OF REASON
, 1953

THE NOBLE BEAST

There were two broad and overlapping epochs in human prehistory: one in which men primarily hunted animals, and another in whichmen primarily hunted men. The passage from one to the other may be the most important advance in human social evolution.

Humans cooperate to compete first against the elements of nature, and then against each other. Our ancestors lived in a world inhabited by rivals far more numerous, stronger, and more savage than themselves. It was a competition humans very nearly lost. Human salvation lay in persistent reliance on a social band of kin and kith for collective strength, and a special form of primate wit that made it work as a winning team.

The flip side of human teamwork is group competition. Our first major competitors were the prey we hunted and the rival animal predators that also preyed on us. Then other groups of people became humans’ most feared predators and choicest prey. No other species primarily preys on itself to such an extent. The senses of all hunting animals are most stimulated in the hunt, and humans are no exception.

Human history advances fitfully, in alternating intervals of war and peace. But wars accelerate history more than peace and the commerce that peace allows. War makes for better storytelling, is much better reading, and certainly plays better on television and the Internet. War is the most stimulating path to gain and glory our species has known. It’s exciting even when only imagined and lived vicariously, as in the always popular clamor for war, at least before the casualties come home. In the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war, Fox News had a text line running on the screen: “Give War a Chance.” When war came, commentary was breathless on all the channels. That’s a pretty normal way societies react to the prospect of wars they think they can win.

Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible: We would grow too fond of it.” Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan remarked, “I know of nothing more exciting than war.”
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Among the Freikorps, or “Free Militia,” forerunners of the early Nazi storm troopers (SA) and SS, militia members didn’t much know what they werefighting for, just what they were fighting against. Freikorps volunteer Ernst von Salomon described their mood:

There, on the other side of the divide, they wanted property and security in life…. They ask us what we believe in. We do not believe at all, in anything except action itself. Action for the sake of action. Nothing, only the ability to act. We were a group of warriors, drunk from the desires of the world. Full of the impulsiveness and the joy of action. We did not know what we wanted and what we knew we did not want. War and adventures, stormy emotions, and destruction. Our job was to attack, to rule.
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Warfare, the class commentator and author Barbara Ehrenreich argues,
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may be a continuation of the evolutionary drive to hunt and to avoid being hunted, but where human groups alone are predators and prey. The rituals of war, of blood sacrifice and savaging of flesh, credit this view. Ancient Greeks and Carthaginians would ritually sacrifice their own and offer burnt offerings of animals (hecatombs) to ensure good outcomes in war. The ancient Semites substituted animal for human sacrifice when they found the one true God.
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But like the pagan gods of the Celts,
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the Hebrew God demanded that his Chosen People slaughter every man, woman, and child of His people’s enemies, as well as all their pigs, chickens, goats, and cows. “Thou shalt not kill,” commands God, but that’s only for His Chosen People. Against rivals mere killing isn’t enough:

But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites…. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; and that with theblood of the slain and of the captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy.

—DEUTERONOMY 20:16–17, 32:42

Hundreds of years ago, in the American Southwest, the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon killed, butchered, and ate other human beings against whom they warred. Then they ritually defecated the remains in the hearths of their victims’ dwellings, probably to signal dominance and disdain.
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The nineteenth-century Native American tribes of the lower Colorado River did much the same, carrying off the heads of their victims to their village, where “they built a fire in a hole, and when it had burned to coals, placed the heads around the fire, as one bakes pumpkins, as an insult.”
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The sixteenth-century Aztecs of Mexico
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and the nineteenth-century Dahomey of West Africa
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conducted wars for the primary purpose of capturing sacrificial victims, whom they ritually ripped apart and ate. The early Spanish conquistadors would slaughter Indian idolaters whenever they pleased, and savage the women to make them love Christ. Twentieth-century German Nazi doctors would decapitate healthy but “subhuman” patients, especially those with good teeth, bake their heads for hours in crematoria until the flesh flaked off, and then give the skulls as office gifts.
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Still in this twenty-first century, in the Ituri forest district of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rebel forces of the Uganda-backed Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC) have been repeatedly denounced by the UN Security Council
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for grilling people on spits, boiling young girls alive, and cutting open the chests of Pygmies and other noncombatants and ritually “ripping out their hearts, livers and lungs, which they ate while still warm.”
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