The Psychological Sources of Islamic Terrorism
he best diagnosis of the extremist upheavals of the previous century and today can be found in the philosophical tradition of existentialism. Amid much variety, a consistent motif emerges: All existentialists worry that modern, mass technological life tranquilizes people, drains us of our authenticity, of our will and strength to live a fully realized life. The result of this process is alienation, frustration, and anger. A few themes stand out from this broad concept.
One has to do with the burdens of freedom and choice. By breaking the chains of tradition and conformity, modern life offers a bewildering, paralyzing degree of choice about everything from career paths to marriage partners to fashion. When you can potentially be anything, the existentialists worry, you may in fact be nothing — and have no identity at all.
And yet existentialists are also very much in favor of making choices and being committed to them — so much so that passion is a second theme of this literature. Most existentialists urge a passionate embrace of life, of projects, of career. They revere the venturous and rash, the ones who try to make a mark on the world. In this sense the self-help guru Tony Robbins peddles a more truly existentialist therapy, a more sophisticated and deep cure, than most tweedy philosophers would care to admit. Passionate commitment, self-invention, and responsibility are, for the existentialists, the route to authenticity.
Making passionate choices is, in turn, a very personal thing, and existentialism celebrates the sanctity of the individual as against the mass herd. Existentialists glorify individualism and worry about the potential for a new style of degraded, thoughtless conformity.
Existentialists plead with all of us to be our own people, to think rigorously and independently about what we believe, feel, and want. The self-help movement as a whole — its emphasis on self-esteem and on controlling one’s own destiny — emerges directly, I would say inevitably, from the existentialist diagnosis. Self-actualization is the route to social harmony in the modern era. The problem is that many folks don’t come close to achieving it, and a few end up trying in ruinous ways. Neither embraced nor cowed by the pressure of community, confused and angry loners rush off in search of self-actualization and find, instead of Tony Robbins, Osama and his like.
Existentialism also has a religion problem — or, rather, it insists that modern society does. Not merely an assertion that “God is dead” (there are, after all, existentialists who write in any of a variety of religious traditions), existentialism more than anything contends that religion has become an individual rather than a group enterprise. To be authentic, people must confront religious questions independently and come to their own conclusions. As an added benefit, religious experiences sought out and brought to flower by personal commitment are far more lasting and intense than those encountered in rote communal ceremonies.
Modern life is not encouraging of such spiritual commitment, however, as far as the existentialists can tell. Their description of the authentic person turns into a diagnosis of modern society, and they don’t much like what they see. Technological, materialist, denatured, and despiritualized, reeking of the mass herd and the generic assembly line, the modern world is for most existentialists a factory of inauthenticity. It is rootless in the complete sense of the term: rootless from tradition, from heritage, from genealogy, from place, from community. As its brilliant interpreter William Barrett has emphasized, existentialism loathes nothing more than abstraction — the generic, distant encounter with life that modern technological society has substituted for direct personal engagement with it. It is worth quoting from Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existentialist Philosophy (Doubleday Anchor, 1958):
Thus with the modern period, man . . . has entered upon a secular phase in his history. He entered it with exuberance over the prospect of increased power he would have over the world around him. But in this world . . . he found himself for the first time homeless. . . . [His] feeling of homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized, impersonal mass society. . . . He is trebly alienated: a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus that supplies his material wants. But the worst and final form of alienation . . . is man’s alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can — usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten.
The passionate yet calculating, vicious yet idealistic, brilliant yet astonishingly misguided members of al Qaeda can be seen as, at least partly, engaged in a search to reclaim these lost elements of their humanity, their being.
Here the roots of fundamentalist terrorism intertwine and join with those of many other anti-modern strains of thought from the past three centuries. First there were the Romantics, Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge and later American naturalist heirs to that tradition, who saw in belching factories and impersonal cities and the worship of the twin gods Progress and Technology the beginning of the end of mankind as a worthwhile project. These woodsy poets would hardly have imagined themselves as forebears of Nazism, and yet they were, in a very traceable way: With the marker of intellectual history, one can draw a straight line from Wordsworth through Hölderlin to Heidegger, and thence to the Nazi hacks. For all its fascination with technology, National Socialism was a dreamy, romantic, anti-modern movement through and through.
Even from the beginning, too, the existentialists were speaking the language of purification through return to a simpler, more authentic imagined past. Kierkegaard wanted to return people to communion with the first Christians; Nietzsche would have hauled them all the way back to ancient Greece. Modernism must be discarded, or at least radically reformed. And as Ian Buruma has recently pointed out, “the idea that liberalism is mediocre, unheroic, and without martial vigor” is not the sole possession of fascism and Bolshevism and radical Islam; it is also “an old battle-cry of the anti-liberal European right.” Indeed, among some members of the conservative political theory crowd in the West, there remains more than a shade of precisely the same anti-modern project one finds in the extreme groups — the same lack of comfort with the relativistic, value-free, unheroic modernism of a secular industrial society.
Existentialism implies, and indeed often preaches, a rejection of whatever moral system happens to hold sway. Nietzsche argued as much, certainly, but there were also others — Heidegger most of all — who referred to our “fallen-ness” from authenticity precisely because we stumble along doing what we are told to do, mechanically doing what we understand to be the right thing.
The ultimate manifestation of an authentic life, according to at least some of the existentialists, is to regain control over the manner and purpose of one’s death. Here is Barrett again:
Only by taking my death into myself, according to Heidegger, does an authentic existence become possible for me. Touched by this interior angel of death, I cease to be the impersonal and social One among many, as Ivan Ilyich was, and I am free to become myself. Though terrifying, the taking of death into ourselves is also liberating: It frees us from servitude to the petty cares that threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby opens us to the essential projects by which we can make our lives personally and significantly our own.
I am not sure that Heidegger was thinking of suicide bombers; he seems to have had in mind more the internalization of our morality, the taking in of the idea of death. But one is hard-pressed not to think of the stolid, brutal authors of September 11, going about their placid lives and smoothly traversing their petty cares sustained by the conviction that they had taken their death inside, bought and owned it, and thereby achieved wholeness, achieved greatness, achieved authenticity. They had attained the ultimate freedom as espoused by another existentialist, Sartre: the freedom to say No.
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