Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (6 page)

Although there are few similarities in personality profiles across jihadi groups, some general demographic and social tendencies exist: in age (usually early twenties), where they grew up and where they hang out (neighborhood is often key), in schooling (mostly nonreligious and often science oriented), in socioeconomic status (middle-class and married, though increasingly marginalized), in family relationships (friends tend to marry one another’s sisters and cousins). If you want to track a group, look to where one of its members eats or hangs out, in the neighborhood or on the Internet, and you’ll likely find the other members.

It is possible to empathize with jihadi warriors and believers without needing to sympathize or share their conviction. This makes field study with them possible. The main goal of such study isn’t to get you to feel or justify their sentiments, but to enable you to better appreciate the origins, character, and implications of these. If appreciation of them is faulty, then efforts to do something about them are likelier to fail.

THE DIVINE ANIMAL

Now to the second line of evidence on us being social animals, with a peculiar kind of self-realizing imagination. More than half a million years ago, the Neanderthal and human branches of evolution began to split from our common ancestor,
Homo erectus
(or perhaps
Homo ergaster).
Neanderthal, like
erectus
before, spread out of Africa and across Eurasia. But our ancestors, who acquired fully human structures of brain and body about 200,000 years ago, remained stuck in the savanna grasslands and scrub of eastern then southern Africa. Recent archaeological and DNA analyses suggest that our species may have tottered on the verge of extinction as recently as 70,000 years ago, dwindling to fewer than two thousand souls.
¹¹
Then, in a geological blink of the eye, they became us, traipsing about on the moon and billions strong.

How did it all happen? No real evidence has emerged from science for any dramatic change in the general anatomy of the human body and brain or in basic capacities for physical endurance and perception. The key to this astounding and bewildering development, it appears, is mushrooming cultural cooperation and creativity within groups, in order to better compete against other groups.

The story of humanity has been the religious rise of civilizations, however secular in appearance the recent chapters of the story appear. The formation of large-scale cooperative societies is an evolutionary problem, because evolutionary theories of reciprocity based on kin relations or quid pro quo (scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) cannot account for the fact that people frequently cooperate with strangers of unknown reputation whom they will never meet again and whose loyalties they cannot control.
¹²

But religious beliefs and obligations can reinforce cooperative norms by conferring on them sacredness, and with supernatural punishment or divine retribution for breaking with those cooperative norms. Supernaturals are the unimpeachable authors of what is sacred in society. Sacred assumptions—like “God is merciful to believers” or “This land is holy”—are beyond reason or fact. Unlike secular social contracts, they cannot be fully expressed and analyzed because they include inscrutable propositions that are immune to logic or empirical evidence—like “God is all-seeing and all-powerful,” sentient but bodiless, or “good deeds will be rewarded in a heavenly paradise,” which no one can ever disprove.
¹³
Sociologists and anthropologists argue that sacred beliefs and values authenticate society as having existence beyond the mere aggregation of its individuals and institutions.
¹⁴

Tribal humans began merging into multitribal chiefdoms and multiethnic states lorded over by moral gods. A reason for these divine beings: to make large-scale cooperation possible between anonymous strangers. Historical and cross-cultural analyses indicate that the larger a society’s population, the more likely it is to have deities who are concerned with managing morality and mitigating selfishness.
¹⁵
In the Fertile Crescent, at Eurasia’s epicenter, the Hebrew tribes converged to create the concepts of One God and humanity. This God was powerful enough to preserve His chosen, blessed few, even as they scattered far and wide. For a thousand years, the religious empires of Christendom and Islam battled to save the souls, and capture the fortune and manpower, of the unchosen residue of humanity.

This historical spiral toward larger human polities was nurtured and sustained by culturally tricking and tweaking various aspects of our biologically evolved cognition in order to cope with a self-generating epidemic of warfare between expanding populations. Religion, for example, is neither a naturally selected adaptation of our species nor innate in us. But we are biologically primed by evolution to be on the lookout for potential predators, and especially guard against intelligent and cunning agents like ourselves. So hair-trigger is this survival sensibility that we see enemies in clouds or hear them in the wind. It’s only a short step from imagining invisible agents to believing in their supernatural existence—a step motivated by fears of death and deception, and hopes of success and salvation. I’ll show evidence that this tricking and tweaking of our species’ innate and universal sensibilities is what creates religion from cognition.

Imagined kinship—the rhetoric and ritual of brotherhood, motherland, family, or friends, and the like—is also a critical ingredient of nearly all religious and political success, and another example of trick and tweak. From an evolutionary standpoint, imagined kinship isn’t all that different from pornography: It too involves manipulation of naturally selected proclivities for passionate ends that may be very far removed from evolutionary needs but create a cultural reality of their own. When imagined kinship combines with team spirit, amazing things are possible: like winning battles against all odds, achieving civil rights, or you and your buddies blowing yourselves—and your perceived enemies—to bits.

It is a combination of imagined kinship and religion—or more precisely religions with morally concerned supernaturals—that made large-scale human cooperation (and competition) possible, with war a main motor for realization of these large-scale social developments. In
Imagined Communities,
Benedict Anderson describes the birth of the concept of the nation as basically a reformulation of religion and the imagined kinship of ethnicity. Secularized by the European Enlightenment, the great quasi-religious isms of modern history, as political philosopher John Gray calls them
¹⁶
—colonialism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, communism, democratic liberalism—harnessed industry and science to continue on a global scale the human imperative of cooperate to compete—or kill massively to save the mass of humanity. The War Against Terror is another moment in this continuing saga of our species toward an unpredictable somewhere between All against All and One World.

Even the idea of human rights is an outgrowth of monotheism, brought down from heaven to everyone on earth (in principle) by Europe’s Enlightenment. Before monotheism, human groups didn’t consider other human groups to be of one kind (Greek philosophy and Buddhism contributed to this development, but didn’t quite get there). Human rights—including inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are anything but inherently self-evident and natural in the life of our species; cannibalism, infanticide, slavery, racism, and the subordination of women are vastly more prevalent across cultures and over the course of history. It wasn’t inevitable or even reasonable that conceptions of freedom and equality should emerge, much less prevail among strangers. These, when combined with faith and imagination, become legitimized by their transcendent “sacredness.”

THE CRASH OF CULTURES

Traditionally, politics and religion were closely connected to ethnicity and territory, and in more recent times to nations and cultural areas (or “civilizations”).
¹⁷
No longer. As French political scientist Olivier Roy astutely notes, religion and politics are becoming increasingly detached from their cultures of origin, not so much because of the movement of peoples (only about 3 percent of the world’s population migrates),
¹⁸
but through the worldwide traffic of media-friendly information and ideas. Thus, contrary to those who see global conflicts along long-standing “fault lines” and a “clash of civilizations,”
¹⁹
these conflicts represent a crisis, even collapse, of traditional territorial cultures, not their resurgence.

Many made giddy by globalization—the ever faster and deeper integration of individuals, corporations, markets, nations, technologies, and knowledge—believe that a connected world inexorably shrinks differences and divisions, making everyone safer and more secure in one great big happy family. If only it were not for people’s premodern parochial biases: religions, ethnicities, native languages, nations, borders, trade barriers, historical chips on the shoulder. This sentiment is especially common among scientists and the deacons of Davos, wealthy and powerful globetrotters who schmooze one another in airport VIP clubs, three-star restaurants, and five-star hotels and feel that pleasant buzz of camaraderie over wine or martinis at the end of the day. I don’t reject this world; I sometimes embrace it. But my field experience and experiments in a variety of cultural settings lead me to believe that an awful lot of people on this planet respond to global connectivity very differently than does the power elite. While economic globalization has steamrolled or left aside large chunks of humankind, political globalization actively engages people of all societies and walks of life—even the global economy’s driftwood: refugees, migrants, marginals, and those most frustrated in their aspirations.

For there is, together with a flat and fluid world, a more tribal, fragmented, and divisive world, as people unmoored from millennial traditions and cultures flail about in search of a social identity that is at once individual and intimate but with a greater sense of purpose and possibility of survival than the sorrow of here today, gone tomorrow. For the first time in history, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union shattered the brief illusion of a stable, bipolar world, most of humanity is politically engaged. Many, especially the young, are increasingly independent yet interactive, in the search for respect and meaning in life, in their visions of economic advancement and environmental awareness. These youth form their identities in terms of global political cultures through exposure to the media. Even the injustices of the blistered legacies of imperialism and colonialism are now more about how the media paints the past to construct contemporary cultural identity than about the material and mental effects of things that happened.

Global political cultures arise horizontally among peers with different histories, rather than vertically as before, in traditions tried and passed in place from generation to generation. Human rights constitute one global political culture, originally centered upon the Americas and Europe, and the quest for rights is a growing part of what former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski called “the global political awakening.”
²⁰
The decidedly nonsecular jihad is another political culture in this massive, media-driven transnational awakening: thoroughly modern and innovative despite its atavistic roots in the harsh purity of the Prophet’s original community in the Arabian Desert. Jihad offers the group pride of great achievements for the underachieving: an englobing web of brave new hearts for an outworn world tearing at the seams. Its attraction, to youth especially, lies in its promise of moral simplicity and of a harmonious and egalitarian community whose extent is limitless, and in its call to passion and action on humanity’s behalf. It is a twisting of the tenets of human rights, according to which each individual has the “natural right” of sovereignty. It claims a moral duty to annihilate any opposition to the coming of true justice and gives the righteous the prerogative to kill. The end justifies the means, and no sacrifice of individuals is too costly for progress toward the final good.

I don’t know how this crisis of territorial cultures and the ensuing conflict of global political cultures will play out in the end. But my purpose here is to help find a hopeful way forward. The intention isn’t to relativize violent extremism, but to understand its moral appeal as well as its usualness in the sweep of human evolution and history, so that we may better compete against it.

What’s wrong with current thinking about the causes of jihad and martyrdom? What motivations are being overlooked or ignored? What else could be done to reverse the tide? A good part of this work will respond to such questions. During the Cold War, there was an attempt to figure out communism’s appeal and what to do about it. About jihadism, we still hear that it caters to the destitute and depraved, craven and criminal, or those who “hate freedom.” Politicians and pundits assure us that jihadism is nihilistic and immoral, with no real program or humanity. Yet charges of nihilism against an adversary usually reflect willful ignorance regarding the adversary’s moral framework. Talk to the Devil himself and understand that jihadism is not any of this, and we may more readily win the competition where it counts most, in coming generations.