Rethinking Islamist Terrorism
Dan Yankelovich

Participant
Harlan, if ever you needed validation for your premise that the real danger is within religions, not between them, today's mosque bombing certainly appears to make the case.

Participant
Harlan, I was loose with my statement, in that, a conflict between fundamentalists and modernists of the same religion still might be called a conflict between belief systems. What I am meaning to question, though, is whether or not the driving force is the belief system or is it competition at the basic human level for resources, status, power, etc. Are we focusing overly much on form and not enough on content? Might that be why events seem to outrun our conceptual abilities? When belief systems fail to enable the believers to compete successfully there is a real problem because it can be so very hard to transition from one set of beliefs to another. Such a transition is very disturbing to the container hierarchy as well as to the members individually.

I'm trying to think about the problem from a basic point of view (I don't know that this is "correct", but it doesn't seem to me to be useless). Environmental stress plays a very large role in determining behavior.

What I'm really asking is: if we think about it in these terms would we have different/more options to discuss? We don't seem to be making much headway using our current model (maybe I'm just impatient).

Participant
The problems in this discussion seem to me to be being approached with normal language and sentence structure, as though things are understandable and capable of being dealt with by the range of responses that have always worked for us. I doubt it.

The following is more poetic, like a collage, purposefully avoiding premature coherence. Kundera says in his Art of the Novel that the progress from Cervantes (moving into an incomprehensible world with old values) to Kafka and his total inability to go out at all, is the arc of the west

Which are you personally in favor of supporting?

Islam
Christianity
the West
Modernity
Communities
leading by tech innovation
Free markets
More equal distribution of outcomes within and among countries
patriotism
separation of church and state
spiritual guidance of governance
abandoning the messy present for tradition
abandoning the messy present for the perfectible future

This is just to point out that each of us carries a fairly unique mix of these, and even in a group such as this one, the mix varies, and is full of conflict, not just between us but within each of us.

The response is

terrorism
civil war
sectarian struggles within religions
militarism
loss of civil rights
unsupportable increase in security expenses
reengagement in democratic politics
focus on private life
increasingly inadequate press
world events as entertainment (death and sex)

In our fragmentation and lack of focus, we get more hysterical and depressed. Our reactions are more primitive and lack coherence. Being for power is unacceptable and being against has no alternative to propose. Leadership thus tries to lead despite our immobility.

Terrorism is the result of numerous forces: alienation, cultural humiliation, poverty of one's society (if not oneself), revenge in reaction to violence real or imagined.

The US reaction, toughen up, is understandable but totally contrary to psychology. It only helps opposition solidify its identity.

The European reaction, denial, while avoiding escalating violence, allows the negative economic and cultural forces to continue and increase their damage.

The West, I think, starting perhaps with the crusades, started an escalating version of the mess and furthered it with world exploitation in a series of rising and collapsing empires: Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, United States. The current world situation is a result of those risings and collapses.

Does the West (European civilization and its American outreach) have the capacity to respond diplomatically and humanly to the world, or are we, in our fragmentation, impossibly far from being able to act on our own values, preferring sub maximizations - that is, we deal with our accountants and lawyers to help earn more, keep more, pay less tax, and keep looking for angles, deals, safety?

I would accept the tensions within religions as dangerous, providing we are able to see that science, and western individuality are also in a religious war with each other. We cannot say that THEY are in a religious struggle but WE are not. We are, each of us, swamped by internal contradictions that are surfacing because the mainstream has reached the delta and spreads itself out into many rivulets and lose energy.

We are in an entropic civilization, we have lost any strange attractor to give us coherence. It is all fascinating, and very dangerous.

Population increase keeps destabilizing any arrangement. Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by which he meant that as each of us has in our lifetime moved from being one in two billion, to one in six billion, our personal self, the weight (as good a measure as GNP) is the quotient. We become lighter and lighter, insignificant, without impact, local culture and relationships are increasingly impossible, we are swamped by large forces. There are no niches, no interstices. Life on my little island is a romantic fantasy that only works for the rich who can afford the good views, or the social security retired who can live in the cheap places (they are fine), but younger people cannot even afford $500 a month in rent with no income.

Right now we have to face the issue: should the US back out of Iraq, or should we move forward, including the use of nuclear tactical weapons, and taking on Pakistan?

If keeping the Whitehouse hinges on such decisions, which way will decisions go?

Please take this in the spirit of Grand Rounds, where the house staff gathers to deal as a team with the most difficult patients, laying out all the x-rays, lab results, reports from the nurses and social workers, and start with the mess, and then think, what can happen, and what could make a difference?

Besides, we live here.

Participant
There is a striking cultural/political "clash" between the countries where Moslems are in the majority and "the West" where (except in Turkey) the majority is nominally Christian (with Judaism, Islam, and other creeds living in more or less stable mutual tolerance with Christian majorities). The clash has to do with what the American founding fathers called the need to separate church and state.

The continuing confusion about this idea is that many, even most, Americans do not distinguish between "church" (i.e. organized religion) and "religious" or "spiritual" faith and feelings. Most Americans, polled by pollsters, will profess a belief in God (by whatever name). A majority of these belong to some kind of "organized religion," which may in practice be important or marginal in their life experience.

A growing minority think of their spirituality as not necessarily connected with a creed, a liturgy, or a scriptural text, but more as an individual relationship with God -- a direct relationship established and maintained by faith and prayer but not requiring another human intermediary (priest, rabbi, mullah, guru).

This state of affairs reinforces the wisdom of what the Founders were saying in the Constitution and other American founding documents: that what needs to be separated from the "State" is Organized Religion. They were certainly not proscribing spirituality as an element in public affairs, as many of their writings, the The Federalist papers and otherwise, make clear.

These comments on "where we come from" are relevant to how we deal with the "Islamic world" in the years to come. We make much of the separation of church and state, and rightly so; the secular power of Iran's ranking mullahs certainly violates that principle. But our profession of that principle seems to say, or is taken to mean, that spirituality has no place in governance -- which makes Western notions of governance sound pagan.

So maybe we in the West should make clear that the ideas we call "human rights" and "fairness" come from spiritual convictions that are not necessarily rooted in Biblical texts that people in other "organized religions" are brought up to reject. They are, instead, ideas that have a universal application -- expressed in the 20th Century in many secular texts such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

In this perspective, there is no separation of spirituality from government. There is only the sensibly political idea that Organized Religions are not properly merged with political power. That still won't satisfy the mullahs that Fred has described; it will also be anathema to some Organized Religion groups in America. But it may appeal to many, perhaps most, in this country and around the world, who think governments should be invested with spirituality and take public ethics seriously, but who don't think clerical robes should be required for public office.

What about Israel? To survive in its chosen environment, to maintain U.S. and other external support, and eventually to reconcile with its Moslem neighbors, I think Israel will have to mutate toward a more clearly secular state. That doesn't mean denying its Jewish roots, but it will mean avoiding a future in which Arab Moslems outnumber its Jewish immigrants, finding ways to treat all citizens of Israel's democracy as citizens with equal rights to fairness, and tolerating the spirituality of all its citizens no matter what "organized religion" they may profess.

That will be an important test of Dan Yankelovich's "specifically religious response . . . emphasizing that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are all children of Abraham, and that no religion enjoys a monopoly of knowledge of God's word and meaning."

Participant
I found the following sentence of Doug's, followed by the wonderfully comprehensive message of Harlan, pushing me into asking the question following Doug's quote:

"Does the West (European civilization and its American outreach) have the capacity to respond diplomatically and humanly to the world, or are we, in our fragmentation, impossibly far from being able to act on our own values, preferring sub maximizations - that is, we deal with our accountants and lawyers to help earn more, keep more, pay less tax, and keep looking for angles, deals, safety?"

Wouldn't we be in better shape to "civilize" Iraq and other parts of the world if we first analyzed and admitted our own short-comings, and then set forth to "discuss" viable patterns for living on this stressed planet as an equally stressed society along with the others.

---------------

Of course my above thoughts are UNREALISTIC. But compared to our current national image and stated objectives?

Participant
Let's keep going. Further on the religious nature of the west, which is decidedly structured around divine providentialism, from biblical traditions, and science arises as part of that, with assumptions in tact. There is not a break in cosmologies or implications for society. . Take, for example, the very idea of "evolution", which indicates a line of unfolding that is preformed, given in the beginning. Hence all we need is points along the way, we do not have to establish the line.

The shift from Baconian event observation to Newtonian deductionism, hence avoiding the problem of induction, was done in a specifically religious environment with explicitly religious arguments. From a broader perspective, science will turn out to be every bit as religious as others. Hence separation of church and state is only "separation" from a privileged point of view. We must do better if our analytic frame is to hold the contradictions.

Participant
I highly recommend this analysis of Blair after Kelly and the rise of the new monarch.

One of the shocks is that serious monarchy is back on the agenda.

Participant
Several have mentioned the complexity of affairs and relationships, and I suspect that it would be a hopeless effort to try to identify themes and patterns to which we could respond with a rational strategy. The "themes" and "patterns" won't hold still long enough to lay a foundation.

Better I think, to deal with the whole world as "gray", back off a bit, and take one element at a time.

There are a few principles, a few causes, that we clearly must support -- those that are deeply within our heritage. Each has an opposite which we must oppose. Both sets together make up a sort of "standard" against which we can compare the pronouncements and actions of any player on the world stage -- domestic or foreign. We can encourage whatever matches one set and discourage whatever matches the other -- and we can try to better our own performance.

We have resources that others covet. We can make them available or withhold them, according as we think appropriate, whether to prime ministers, mullahs, generals, or tyrants (political or economic), avoiding alike grand alliances and designations of evil. Incremental judgments will probably, on balance, tend to be correct; declarations of policy tend, with benefit of hindsight, to seem foolish.

Participant
P. S. Dialogue, as suggested by Dan and others, can only help, and it ought to be encouraged over as wide a spectrum as possible.

I wonder if religious leaders throughout the Christian and Jewish world do, in fact, have personal contact with, and discussion with, mullahs, ayatollahs, and the like. If not, why not?

Participant
I like Ray's suggestions but, as I have suggested elsewhere, I think we need to take Ray's agenda in #180, add further ideas from Doug, Dick and others, and try to be more specific on our opening observations and goals before going after outsiders.

Participant
It seems to me that we need, for a functioning democracy, citizens who know how to participate. That means participation opportunities at neighborhood, town, city, geo-region, state, and national. We do not have these. Add the separation of rich from poor in the US and we see that we have a major problem. To me, the first question is, what forces have produced this condition, then, with some perspective on what we are up against, to begin to imagine and act on alternatives. Of course world events keep happening, and we have to assume that many may others will be doing their part.

They are unlikely to care about what we do here, but there is always the possibility.

Participant
From Doug Carmichael in a side conversation:

The idea of cross cultural communication implies that there are two. But as I see it, there are three.

Christian west vs. Islam
Modernism vs. Islam
and Modernism vs. the Christian west.

Each of us is torn apart by these divisions.

And if we add modernism is equated with globalization, which is really localization of ownership in ever smaller number of "centers" such as NY, London, ... well, which side are we on?

Because Bush is a polarizer, a reaction prone bully, the tension side rather than the dialog side predominates.

But perhaps underlying realities (population, Pakistan, poverty, procrastination) are so bad that conflict is all too likely.

Maybe the reality is, if there really is a big war, we would all rather be in New Zealand.

Ouch. So we are caught between peace and flight, not the hard work - that Dan and others point to, of really understanding this monster and being prepared to fight- in the way that Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, and such would understand it.

To which Ray Alden responded:

It seems to me there may be only two ways to get from here to where we'd like to be, given the present state of the world: 1) Total US military dominance over the middle east, with a resulting government (even if local in nature) imposed by force; or, 2) Admit we were wrong, back off, and try to make friends.

What middle course shows promise? Any promise at all?

And Don Straus adds:

This comment of Doug's reminds me of the early days of our on-line discussion of abortion. We spent almost a month of our 6 months together working on getting a common understanding of the issues we were addressing and some agreement on the "facts". Many at first thought this was a waste of time, but it turned out to be essential for the whole process. I think, from reading the issues of the Council on Foreign Relations, Times OP Ed pages, etc. that our most important agenda is to straighten out our own governing processes before we try to make a democracy out of Iraq. If we could get only a few ILFers to get interested enough to focus on US, we just might come up with something to ignite more participation in the future.

Participant
The middle course that Ray asks about is most likely to be the US having to ask the UN to take over, albeit under an American commander. The sticking points will be the business contracts that had been reserved for US corporations. It wasn't until the situation in Iraq exploded with the two recent bombings only indirectly aimed at the US that we now are ready to go back to the UN, hat in hand. Do you suppose that the complexity that Doug writes about is beginning to come clear to at least some of our leaders? Maybe not, but at least they realize we are in over our heads on this one.

Getting back to Dan's mission, we are now seeing a dramatic increase in terrorism, and with new targets. What position can we take on all this that might curb terrorism?

Participant
There are many possible "middle courses".

Does any of them show promise of success?

Participant
Dick, thanks for the posting and editing. Very helpful.

I am not sure that "curbing terrorism" is a first priority goal. If the larger issue is how to manage a post colonial world and avoid doing so by moving towards a new totalitarian empire, then would not simply curbing terrorism mean a support of business managed globalization for narrow economic interests?

If we take the view that the first step is to (re) create a rich multilateral approach to transborder problems AND MEAN IT (unlike what happened in Eastern Europe), then terrorism wilts slowly. That would mean the US embracing all the institutions: courts, protocols, treaties, that we have backed away from and leaving the rest of the world without a procedure for dealing with major issues.

Such a move would create a world culture of complex dialog rather than a world culture of dumb alignment (England), feigned dumb alignment (Australia), or opposition (France), with insincere dialog that is meaningless and uninformative

Such a world would attract bright people to try to figure it out, artists to tell the stories, and complex economic relationships that would be smaller scale and less based on bribery.

One can argue that such a mixed world parliament of the birds and beasts could never take on the hard issues and dealing with the real threats. But the current approach certainly cannot. We can either choose a military solution or a design solution.

I once did a workshop with the CIA on its future and at one point had to take on a brash fellow in a blue cashmere sports jacket and rep tie who was arguing for "taking them out before they get us" (about 1997), by saying "would you rather be firemen or architects? The group got it right away, and he was effectively cut off.

I would like to try some combination of the medical model and the architectural model, with due regard for the ills of social engineering.

I currently believe that we are doing the French revolution in reverse: that is, the FR was a reaction of the middle class to the disparity between its increasing power economically without increased political power. Today, rich elites have regained the wealth into smaller hands, but do not control the political apparatus. the Bush administration if redressing the balance, and Blair can be said to be doing the same. But what is needed is not the defenestration of the middle class but its increased wealth and health to use well the power of the democracies of which they could form the major part, with invitations for those above and below to join.

Participant
In my 1:63, 68, and 75, I put forward two propositions that seemed relevant to the topic. They were addressed to the opening comments by Dan Yankelovich, which were part of some larger paper he and others were drafting.

The two propositions were:

1. that the critical clashes these days aren't between "civilizations" but are crosscuts within them (between "fundamentalists" and others -- I called them "transmoderns" but the "others" may use other self-descriptions -- who are not as literal about ancient texts or as exclusive about who to work with in building viable societies).

2. that while it is clearly necessary to separate Organized Religion ("Church") from general government ("State"), it is wholly appropriate, indeed desirable, that institutions of government consist of people who are guided by moral precepts and spiritual motivations.

These two ways of thinking seem to me to make possible an approach to those Muslims (a too-silent majority, I would hope, among both peoples and clerics) who would prefer to live with, rather than try to destroy, the American and European majorities who want to live with, rather than destroy, them.

Such an approach of course requires a degree of humility that hasn't exactly been our middle name in recent decades, especially the current decade. In the Brussels Seminar mentioned in my 1:63, Mark Luyckx and I suggested that to begin a constructive dialogue with cultures different from those of the Atlantic Community, we might do well to start with a moment of truth telling along these lines:

"We are products of a secular industrial society. But we realize that we can no longer discuss political futures without also discussing questions of meaning, spirituality, and cultural identity. We are therefore asking you to join us in a serious effort to envision mutually advantageous futures for our societies. To do this, we will all have to set aside our superiority complexes, our intolerances -- whether based on scientific rationalism or on spiritual tradition -- and our dreams of having our views prevail worldwide."

If we can bring ourselves to engage in a dialogue on such terms as these, there is a chance we will find leaders and followers in "Muslim countries" who see possibilities for themselves in cooperating with us in economic and social development and nonviolent political dialogue. Some shift in Israeli thinking, along the lines sketched at the end of my 1:75, would also be necessary for this "Western" approach to be viable.

I'm talking about a substantial mind-shift here. But the alternative, the "clash of civilizations" which plays into the hands of terrorists and results in our hunkering down in ways that make "anti-terrorism" the overriding component of American foreign policy, may help us decide that this mind-shift is the best option after all.

I believe that this line of approach is quite compatible with the wider agenda suggested in Dan Yankelovich's opening comment, 1:3. That draft contains elements -- such as a UN role in Iraq, political and economic carrots, and the tough line on terrorism -- which certainly need to be part of a revised strategy.

What I'm suggesting are ways of thinking that might enable us ("the West") to conduct a civilized dialogue with the many elements in "Moslem countries" who don't regard terrorists as their natural allies -- and would, I hope, resist the label "Islamist" which tars them with the terrorists' brush.

Participant
I think that perhaps the choice Ray presents is not as easy as it sounds, nor are the ideas of Doug and Harlan. Much as I like the ideas, I can't help but think that the choice we must essentially make is between competition and cooperation. Now, for me that's kind of a no-brainer. Obviously cooperation is key to survival. But not everybody sees things that way. Logically, they might well ask "What is the cooperation?" Does the cooperation consist of us giving up resources in exchange for fewer attacks? I fear that most people, in a purely logical sense, will decide that's not cooperation - simply another form of terrorism. What do we, as a culture and a civilization, have to offer that the people of the mid-east really want? And, what does the mid-east, as a culture and a civilization, have to offer that we, the people, of the west really want? Not just the literati of the two ways, but the vast majority of the people? Do we know?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we each want what we most revile in the other. The West wants more meaning from life than what our material orientation and false pretence of religion offers. The Mid East wants more flexibility of belief and the opportunity to participate in a materially richer life.

Really sticking my neck out, I'll suggest that the present course chosen by both sides is achieving precisely those goals, but in a mechanical, rather primal way, with very little consciousness or reflection.

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