[David Brooks' February 20, 2015 column is quoted in full below]
The intelligent response to religious extremism
By David Brooks
The struggle
against Islamic extremism has been crippled by a failure of historical
awareness and cultural understanding. From the very beginning, we have treated
the problem of terrorism through the prism of our own assumptions and our own
values. We have solipsistically assumed that people turn to extremism because they can't get what we want, and fail to
realize that they don't want what we want but want something they think is
higher.
The latest
example of this is the speech that President Barack Obama gave at this week's
Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. It was a bad speech, but its badness is
no reflection on Obama, for it was the same sort of bad speech that all U.S.
presidents have been giving for the past generation.
Religious
extremism exists on three levels. It grows out of economic and political
dysfunction. It is fueled by perverted spiritual ardor. It is organized by
theological conviction. U.S. presidents focus almost exclusively on the
economic and political level because that's what polite people in Western
capitals are comfortable talking about.
At the summit
meeting, Obama gave the conventional materialistic explanation for what turns
people into terrorists. Terrorism spreads, he argued, where people lack
economic opportunity and good schools. The way to fight terror, he concluded,
is with better job-training programs, more shared wealth, more open political
regimes and a general message of tolerance and pluralism.
In short, the
president took his secular domestic agenda and projected it as a way to prevent
young men from joining the Islamic State and chopping off heads.
But people don't
join the Islamic State because they want better jobs with more benefits. The
Islamic State is one of a long line of anti-Enlightenment movements, led by
people who have contempt for the sort of materialistic, bourgeois goals that
dominate our politics. These people don't care if their earthly standard of
living improves by a few percent a year. They're disgusted by the pleasures we
value, the pluralism we prize and the emphasis on happiness in this world,
which we take as public life's ultimate end.
They're not
doing it because they are sexually repressed. They are doing it because they
think it will ennoble their souls and purify creation.
On Thursday,
Mona El-Naggar of The Times profiled a young Egyptian man, named Islam Yaken,
who grew up in a private school but ended up fighting for the Islamic State and
kneeling proudly by a beheaded corpse in Syria.
You can't counter a heroic impulse
with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more
compelling heroic vision. He was
marginalized by society. He seems to have rejected the whole calculus of what
we call self-interest for the sake of an electrifying apocalyptic worldview and
what he imagines to be some illimitable heroic destiny.
People who live
according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they
are governed by the thymotic [hunger for recognition] urge, the quest for
recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing
strength in confrontation with death.
This heroic urge
is combined, by Islamist extremists, with a vision of End Times, a culmination
to history brought about by a climactic battle and the purification of the
earth.
