Sayyed Wild Abah
In the aftermath of the terrorist bombings in London, the usual analysis on the roots of extremism and terrorism, focusing on the socio-economic causes of violence, was repeated across the city.
| It's a mantra: "O-o-o-o-om mane padme root causes cycle of despotism globalization violence maginalization injustice poverty oppression hu-u-u-u-um..." |
Terror, according to this framework, is best understood as a reflection of a deep crisis in society, caused by poverty, a lack of opportunity and institutional support, in addition to social restrictions.
| That's what I just said... errr... chanted. |
A number of commentators ascribed to this line of thoughts so as not to provoke Muslims and associate terrorism with Islam.
| Cert'nly not! The Lutherans do the same thing. You just don't hear about it very often... |
Others agreed in the spirit of the moment.
Undoubtedly, this framework is popular with socio-political analysts and is based on a number of strong arguments. No one can deny that poverty, marginalization, despotism, and injustice are factors that contribute to the spread of extremism.
| Just chanting it makes it so. Do it enough times and you can levitate or put nails through your butt cheeks and not feel a thing... |
Yet, a closer examination of the backgrounds and actions of this new breed of terrorists, especially al Qaeda and similar groups, reveals a new reality that can not be accounted for by the above analysis.
| What? A new ingredient in the sociological soup? How can that be? |
It is well known that the suicide bombers who attacked US cities on September 11, 2001 were the sons of well to do families.
| Yeah, but they knew people who were marginalized and oppressed by globalized despots. Well, they knew of them anyway... |
They were Western-educated and specialized in the latest technologies which enabled them to use their knowledge of communications to commit heinous violence.
| And they call us a consumer society! Islam can't invent all those latest technologies, but, boy! Can they figure ways to make them explode! |
The fact is those who solely follow the socio-economic framework of analysis are mistaken; they believe that honesty and objectivity are exclusive to the intellectual class, while extremism and violence are popular amongst those who are unable to think for themselves and therefore easily succumb to fundamentalism.
There's so much wrong with that single sentence that it may be causing the lobes of my brain to separate. First, it assumes the existence of an "intellectual class," and assigns to it the ability to think for itself. Now, I don't doubt the existence of the turtleneck and Gaulloise set in Europe, and certainly we've seen them turn out for Susan Sontag's funeral here. I'm sure the Islamic world has its equivalent â the embroidered burnoose and antique narghileh set? â as well. But I'd also venture to say that here in the civilized world there's a rather largish class (not in the Marxist sense, though) of people who might be considered part-timers at the intellect game. Most of us whose undergraduate days are behind us managed to wade through enough Camus and Sartre and Hegel and those kinds of guys to at least pick up the general idea, and many of us can even recall Kirkegaard's first name, given enough time and maybe a hint or two. We read, then promptly forgot, what Bishop Berkeley had to say and we know that Descartes thought, and that if he hadn't we'd never have heard of him. So we have an intellectual grounding, too. Those of us who didn't go on to get Ph.D.s in Ph. then moved on to things of slightly more utility, which includes getting a degree in Phys Ed. or a ticket as an electrician. But we still know all about all this thinking stuff.
The other end of the postulated spectrum â and notice the missing 80 percent where the middle of the bell curve should be â consists of the Islamic equivalent of the cliche Alabama trailer park denizen, given to his beer (or in the Islamic case, religion), guns, beating his wife, and in general ready to fly off the deep end for no good reason, just because his holy man tells him to. Now, as anyone who's ever been to a trailer park can tell you, there are people just like that to be found there, but they're the ones who occupy the lower ten percent of the trailer park bell curve, while the middle to other 90 percent are perfectly normal folks, who're perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, some of whom could whip out Kirkegaard's first name from memory without even hesitating. We can tell that the group that's ready to erupt exists â we see them at every MMA rally in Lahore or Multan, just as we see them in the occasional riot when the Lakers or the Red Sox lose, and sometimes when they win. But we also regard them as socially retarded shitkickers.
Having pointed out the hole in the author's worldview, we can now move on to the meat of the argument... |
Two aspects of this line of thought immediately stand out:1- A critical arrogance or the view that the masses, by their nature, are gullible, irrational and receptive to extremist ideas.
| Good for him. He saw the hole. I still have problems with his terminology, since here in the good old U.S.A. we're fresh out of masses. We have plumbers, electricians, carpenters, salespeople of thousands of varieties, farmers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, factory workers, politicians, cowboys, laborers, cooks, dish washers, firemen, policemen, and what have you, none of whom consider themselves to be "the masses." None of us are faceless, even while those who presume to be our intellectual betters attempts to ascribe facelessness to us. Having lived among the faceless masses in a number of non-Western countries, I can attest to the fact that each and every member of the masses does indeed have a face. They don't even all look alike. Not only do they have faces, but they have Moms and Dads, aspirations, goals, things they'd like to accomplish in their short, brutish lives, which tend to be short and brutish because they're ruled (not governed) by their "intellectual" betters. These people tell stories, crack jokes, get into fist fights, make love, holler at their kids, and sometimes even go bowling. I think it's both a shame and a mistake to underestimate them. |
According to this perspective, the masses are unable to act reasonably and objectively as they are motivated by myth and imagination. They are accustomed to depravity and exploitation. As such, it is for the intellectual class, as the sole guardian of reason and logic, to create the social and economic conditions that will assist the masses.
| Which is where we come up with the approach of ruling them, rather than governing. |
2- A nihilist tendency or the loss of hope regarding attempts at social reform and the tacit acceptance of repression, exploitation, and despotism in Western societies.| I'm having difficulty with the idea of "repression, exploitation, and despotism" being ascribed to Western societies. "Kow-tow" is a Chinese word, and the practice itself was a lot more common in Eastern societies than in the West. Alexander's men were royally cheesed when he tried to introduce the practice to his court; honest Greek hoplites found such bowing and scraping to be beneath their dignity. Arabs, a thousand years later, took to it pretty readily. |
Both aspects are found in philosophical treatises, from Plato and al Farabi to Foucault and Derida.
| I'm not familiar with al Farabi, but Plato's vision of the perfect society was a.) unworkable, and b.) hideous. Foucault can only be comprehended while wearing a turtleneck and smoking a Gaulloise, so his postmodern opinion can be discounted. Give me time and I'll come up with something memorable that Derida said, and maybe even his first name... |
What happens when bigoted and extremist sentiments grow amongst the privileged few?
| They find an audience easier than the bigoted and extremist guy with the same idea down at the bowling ally... |
This is a provocative question. The evidence before our eyes suggests that the indoctrination and destructive ideologies that have terrorized the world in recent years are held by members of the elite.
| Bingo! When the guys down at the bowling ally get out of line the cops jug them. When they've got tenure they hold press conferences. |
It is easy to forget that rationality, in itself, doesnât protect against extremism and fundamentalism.
| It's also easy to forget that rationality isn't the exclusive province of intellectuals. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that because of their isolation from the common herd with their teevees and bowling allies and company picnics and firemen's parades, the intellects are probably less likely to be rational than the guy rounding up the carts at the grocery store. Not that I want to go to the other illogical extreme and Aaron Copeland the Common Manâ¢, who's capable of just as much stoopidity and venom as anyone else. I'm just pointing out that he's also capable of just as much TRVTH⢠and Beauty⢠as anyone else. It depends on the person, which is a view that allows for individuality for everyone, and the circumstances, which says merely that the guy who loans you his hedge clippers on Saturday may attempt to attack you with a chainsaw on Tuesday, assuming in the meantime you ran over his dog and off with his wife. |
In fact, it is sometimes the most effective tool to legitimize tyranny and inequality.
| What is? I got so wrapped in in what I was saying I forgot what he was saying... |
Nietzsche believed as much and Foucault analyzed the relationship between power and knowledge.
| "Golly, gosh!" he said, rocking on the front porch of his trailer house. "Nobody'd never done that before!" |
In fact, the brightest minds in the history of human thought have, for the most part, supported authoritarianism and justified repression.
| Whoa! Hold it! Stop! Halt! Cease and desist!... Just because they tell you they're the brightest minds in the history of human thought doesn't mean they actually are. Don't believe everything you read... No. Wait. I didn't mean that. Really. Now, read this carefully: "Put $500,000 into the Rantburg Pay-Pal account by Thursday evening or Descartes will cease to have existed." It's up to you, pal... |
The founder of philosophy, Plato, was known for his attacks on Athenian democracy which he sought to replace with the dictatorship of the philosophers. The rational Mutazilites who supported the interpretation of the Quran persecuted their opponents and, while Sufis were being persecuted for their opinions, the philosophers of Islam, such as al Frabi, Avicenna, and Averroes enjoyed the privileges of their association with Islamic rulers. This model applies to the Western world as well as the life of the founder of modern philosophy Descartes reveals.
| I hope you're getting the money together if you want to keep that paragraph... |
Recent information has shed light on the intimate relations between some of the most prominent German thinkers and the racist extremist Nazi ideology, Heidegger being a prime example.
| So what you're saying is that the very brightest minds the world has ever seen have all come up with totalitarianism in one form or another as the end result of their ponderings. It's the non-intellectual dullards, men like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Lincoln, Jefferson, and John C. Calhoun, who come up with other approachs to ordering the world that didn't involve jackboots and massive rallies, approaches that are inferior in some respect to totalitarianism. Then you can throw in the guys like Jonson, who were more concerned with getting laid, Wang Wei, more concerned with getting drunk, and the guys like Lin Yu Tang who weren't even singing from the same sheet of music, and discard them all. I can follow that. I can't agree, but I can follow it. |
Things are no different in the Arab World.
| "Worse" and "different" aren't the same thing. |
I was astounded, during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, to hear one of the most widely read Arab intellectuals justify Baghdadâs actions as âthe sacred violence that will usher in a new Arab renaissance.â
| Sounds like something Normal al-Mailer wrote while wearing a turtleneck and smoking something other than a Gaulloise. There was a lot of that going around at the time. Ad-Dusour called it a "glorious Arab stand," if I recall correctly. Sometimes you do things today and don't think about how they're going to look tomorrow or ten or fifteen years from now. |
It is wrong to assume that the roots of extremism lie in the masses and their erroneous beliefs, as Mohammed Arkoun says, basing his arguments on shaky anthropological premises.
| Nope. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. But if you lead a herd to water, statistically a certain number are going to drink, and a smaller number within that number are going to gorge. Selah. It is written. Someplace, anyway. You could look it up... |
Even if terrorist groups are supported by the masses, from time to time, they remain separated from the lower classes because of their elitist approach and their intellectual notions. These groups are also distinguished from religious elements who are mostly peace loving members of society.
| Depends on the religious elements. If you're talking about Capuchin monks, that's a true statement. If you're talking about Islamic holy men, that's a different creature entirely. Some few are holy men in something approaching the western mold. A significant number are much more like cogs in a machine, the ruthless and scheming minions of some other holy man, or a group of holy men, or someone â like Binny or Zark â who presents himself as being not only ever so holy, but also in possession of all the answers. |
Had it not been for isolated efforts to explain extremist positions as a reaction to Western foreign policy, extremist groups would have lacked any support from the masses.
| There would always have been a certain amount of support. See horses analogy, above. |
Intellectuals usually play two roles in society: they criticize society and contribute to building its foundation. The first responsibility is crucial to undermine dogma and combat idleness. The second is very dangerous and can, unfortunately, lead to a rise in fundamentalist ideologies and extremist thought that inevitably lead to exclusion, repression, and violence.
| The danger for intellectuals as a class extend far beyond that. Their most common failing is to take themselves much too seriously. The second most common is to assume that because they're thinking, they're comprehending, considering all the angles, understanding human nature, assessing accurately the way the world works. That's the failing in Marx, and it's been the failing in each and every other "profound" thinker, with the possible exception of Hayek, who built his world view on the basis of not being able to comprehend all the factors and being less able to manipulate them even if he could. I'd go on to the next most common failing, but I don't want to sit here all day and discuss common failings until I run out of numbers. Practice trumps theory each and every time, regardless of how profound the theoretician. |
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