Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (5 page)

I was ten years old, not bad at comparing things with numbers and figuring odds, and I thought the chance of us all being hit by A-bomb-driven flying glass was about the same as losing in a game of Russian roulette (which one of the Catholic boys in the neighborhood had explained to me) with a six-shooter. At that moment I remembered the same boy, Jay, also telling me about the “Immaculate Conception,” in which God came into a lightbulb and threw it down to earth, where it broke all over the Virgin Mary. And I thought about God playing Russian roulette with us all, with the Jews and Catholics and Communists, with atom-bomb lightbulbs.

In the early afternoon of November 22, 1963, I happened upon Mr. Danish, our math teacher at Sudbrook Junior High School, nervously pacing out circles in the hall with a portable radio pressed hard to his ear, mumbling with eyes shut, “My God, oh my God.” Mr. Danish was still at it an hour later when I passed him on my way to Mr. Feser’s arts and crafts class. A few minutes into class, the school principal’s voice broke in over the intercom: “President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas, today, where he died. Our prayers go the president’s family, to our new president Lyndon Johnson, and to our country. School will be closed for the remainder of the day. Please all stand in a moment of silence.”

A boy named Keith, who was standing across the worktable from me, made a funny face to his friend, Mike Beser, who giggled. Mr. Feser, wild with emotion, kicked Mike and dragged him into the hall. Poor Mike had giggled at the wrong time. But with that incident I became especially interested in Mike’s father, Jake Beser, who worked with my father at the Westinghouse Defense Center in Baltimore.

I knew that Jake Beser was the only person to fly both atomic bombing missions against Japan. Ever since the events of the previous year, I had become obsessed with how to save my family and friends from atom bombs, and the president’s assassination only made it more urgent to seek a solution. I asked my father how Mr. Beser could have done what he did. Was he the only one who liked it so much the first time that he did it again? My brother Dean would later interview Jake about this for a class project, and Jake’s response was much the same as my father’s: “We were still fighting Japan. They were throwing kamikazes at us and seemed willing to die to their last man. We were expecting to go to Japan as part of the invasion force. We thought more of us and more of them would likely die than in any previous campaign of the war. Then the bombs were dropped and it was all over. We came home instead of going on to fight and maybe die.” (I wish I had asked my brother for a copy of that interview, but he died in a plane crash that forever made me wary of happiness.)

My father told me many years later that Jake confided to him while they were driving somewhere together that he only got to fly the A-bomb missions because he had been “chasing a skirt,” but my father said he slept through the details of how Jake’s pursuit of the girl landed him in the
Enola Gay
over Hiroshima. Jake apparently also had walloped General Curtis LeMay after he told Jake: “If I’d known you were a kike, I wouldn’t have let you go [on the A-bomb mission].” The general never pressed charges, but Jake was the only one on the crew who wasn’t decorated or promoted. After the Kennedy tapes were released to the public, people learned that LeMay, an unfunny version of the General Jack D. Ripper character in
Doctor Strangelove,
had been pressing the president to preemptively strike Cuba and perhaps even Russia during the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy had recommended, instead, that those around him pause to read
The Guns of August,
by Barbara Tuchman, about the lead-up to World War I through a rapid chain of events that no one at the time had the patience or prescience to think through and avoid. There were some 20 million deaths in World War I, slightly fewer than half of them civilian, versus 72 million in World War II, with about two-thirds civilian deaths. Projecting the trend of casualties in major wars over the last two centuries (a mathematical trend known as a “power-law distribution”),
⁵
one might expect major wars to decline in frequency by about a factor of three but deaths from those wars to increase by a factor of ten (and to be overwhelmingly civilian).

“Maybe without Jake I wouldn’t be here. Or you,” I remember my father saying. I asked my father why America, or God, didn’t first show Japan how bad the bomb could be, and not have to prove it by melting the eyeballs of so many thousands of people. (I don’t recall a satisfactory answer, and to this day I still haven’t heard one from anybody.) That’s when I painted in Halloween colors and Gothic script the words: “God exists, or if he doesn’t, we’re in trouble.”
⁶

Some of my fellow nonreligious scientists believe that science is better able than religion to constitute or justify a moral system that regulates selfishness and makes social life possible. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit of historical or experimental evidence to support such faith in science (though science shows that institutionalized religious belief is not necessary to regulate selfishness or make social life possible). Neither do I think scientists are particularly well suited to provide moral guidance to society. As Noam Chomsky put it in response to my criticism of “new atheists” who claim to replace faith-based morality with science-based morality: “On the ordinary problems of human life, science tells us very little, and scientists as people are surely no guide. In fact they are often the worst guide, because they often tend to focus, laser-like, on their professional interests and know very little about the world.”
⁷

Of course, very good scientists seek to discover profound relationships that may underlie seemingly unconnected ideas and facts. What science can do is study religion and faith, just as it studies stars and stones or bodies and brains. Science can break down the components of religion and faith into simpler parts in order to make broader and deeper connections between them and other parts of animal and human nature. For now, though, the science of religion and faith—“faith” here including belief in jihad—is still pretty slight.

“Is it not that God and society are one and the same?” French sociologist Émile Durkheim famously conjectured.
⁸
By instilling tribal trust and common cause, imagined kinship and faith beyond reason, religions enable strangers to cooperate in a manner that gives them an advantage in competition with other groups. In so doing, religions sanctify and incite fear (which is the father of cruelty) but also hope (which is the friend of happiness). Between the Hecatomb and Humanity, religion’s polar products, the destinies of civilizations continue to evolve.

THE CAUSE

Humans and other primates have two preoccupations in life: health and social relations. Actually, they’re often the same: socialize to survive. But unlike our hairy distant kin, humans are also obsessively cause-seeking animals. So much so that we can’t help believing that the world was created for the cause seekers, or at least for the collectivity that seeks to show through sacrifice how much it cares. This belief that our world was intended for the committed community is what I call the Cause. It is a mystical thing, a product of our biological evolution and history that gives spiritual purpose to our lives. How and why this illusion came to drive humanity and make itself real in the creation of cultures and the religious rise of civilizations is the deep background that frames this work.

So what’s the foreground about? It’s about attempting to demystify terrorism, lessen our fears, and reduce the dangers of violent overreaction by talking with people in the field—especially terrorists, but also ordinary folk who know them, support them, and can easily become them—and then using science to probe deeper into how they think, feel, and behave. These are tales and studies in the wild about how and why people come naturally to die and kill for the Cause—people almost never kill and die just for the Cause, but also for each other: for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers—their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland, totem, or tribe.

A SOCIAL CREATURE, EVEN “I”

It’s only in the last few years that my thinking has deeply changed on what drives major differences, such as willingness to die and kill for a cause, between animal and human behavior. I once thought that individual cognition and personal aptitudes, together with the influence of broad socioeconomic factors like markets, media, and means of production, determined most human behavior. Now I see that friendship and other aspects of small-group dynamics, such as raising families or playing on a team together, trump most everything else in moving people through life. But I also see religion, and quasi-religious nationalist or internationalist devotion such as patriotism and love of humanity, as framing and mobilizing that movement with purpose and direction.

This change of mind was a long time coming. American culture, as most people who travel know, is exceptionally individualistic in one sense, but also inordinately fond of groups, at least in competition: in sports, in business, and even in the scholarly academy. Personally, I’m not comfortable with collective movements or fashions of any sort. I don’t like crowds, parades, political rallies, or spectator sports (except when my children are involved), and I’m even uncomfortable when people talk about winning or working as a team. Maybe that part of my social brain is just missing, like my memory for lyrics.

Whenever I would see military marches, I’d think that members of our species didn’t deserve their big brains, which waste so much cognitive power on the mindless refinement of swarming and herding. “Is that what it is to be human?” I’d wonder. “Regimented apes with guns?” At Columbia College in New York City at the end of the 1960s, the campus and the society around were feverish with social movement. I was keen on revolution then—we had a committee with professors, students, and cafeteria workers all set to change the world, Mao-style—and I was more than happy to raise my hand in favor of banning fraternities and ROTC (a college elective that focuses on military knowledge and preparation and that is unfortunately still banned at Columbia).
⁹
But I couldn’t get into the shrill swing of demonstrations against capitalists (mostly parents and other people with money) and pigs (police), or any of the crazy collective actions to promote “worker-student solidarity.” It wasn’t that I realized that skill with a skillet didn’t qualify someone to pass judgment on how quantum mechanics or the
Iliad
should be taught. I just didn’t like being a groupie.

But I think I’ve come to understand that without groups, and without sincere love of them by some, our species probably wouldn’t have survived. Neither would civilizations and their achievements have come about, for better or worse. A person alone can analyze history but can’t make it without others.

Two lines of evidence, which converge in this book, convinced me of the importance of group dynamics in determining personal identity and behavior. The first comes from my own fieldwork and psychological studies with a certain sector of mujahedin, or Muslim holy warriors, and their supporters—particularly suicide bombers, their friends and families. The second line of evidence that people are preeminently social actors rather than individual performers comes from my reading of evolutionary biology and human history.

Where do these two lines of evidence come together? In the fact that jihad fights with the most primitive and elementary forms of human cooperation, tribal kinship and friendship, in the cause of the most advanced and sophisticated form of cultural cooperation ever created: the moral salvation of humanity. To understand the path to violent jihad is to understand how universal and elementary processes of human group formation have played out in history and have come to this point.

Like
crusade,
the word
jihad
has many nuanced and even contrary connotations. Thinkers I respect tell me that I shouldn’t use the word
jihad
because it’s a notion that, in the sense of an inner struggle for rightness and truth, applies to a vastly greater number of peaceful people than to terrorists, and that is true. In Rwanda, for example, jihad is taught as “the struggle to heal,” and people in that most Christian of African countries have been converting in droves to Islam because many Muslim leaders and families there are widely seen, rightly, as having saved thousands of non-Muslims from being massacred while churches, governments, and the United Nations turned their backs during the genocide of the 1990s.
¹⁰
But the terrorism that I will talk about is called jihad by the perpetrators themselves, the jihadis. Of that there is no doubt. We’ll see that the idea of violent jihad itself covers a range of commitments. At one end, there’s the strictly nationalist
(wataniyah)
jihad of Hamas, which rejects any aid or association involving Al Qaeda and its ilk in the struggle for a faith-based nation. At the other end, there’s a new wave of Qaeda wannabes, like the young train bombers of Madrid: the
takfiri,
Muslims who would “excommunicate” fellow Muslims as lackeys of the infidel and de facto apostates, and so justify killing them, along with the infidels, to save the Muslim community from conquest and corruption.

Anthropologically and psychologically, terrorists usually are not remarkably different from the rest of the population. There are a few cruel kooks and some very bright individuals who go in for violent jihad, but most terrorists fall in between. Small-group dynamics can trump individual personality to produce horrific behavior in ordinary people, not only in terrorists, but in those who fight them.