The Fight with Religious Terrorism is a Philosophical, Multi-Generation, Winnable Battle
Long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision.
Defeating an enemy such as politicized Islam is a multi-front battle — requiring police, military, plus diplomatic, cultural, and philosophical engagement.
Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists and others — our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin.
Terrorism is first a mindset — committing to a cause that includes a willingness to kill anonymous others indiscriminately.
Put yourself inside the head of a terrorist. You must learn not to see other humans as individuals: It is my group versus your group. You must not be open to reasonable debate and peaceful resolution: I shut off discussion and commit myself to fear and killing. You must squash any concern for justice: I am willing to kill indiscriminately. In most cases, you must decide that your own life on Earth is insignificant: I am willing to die for the cause.
Politicized Islam is now widespread in many parts of the world. It is well-funded and well-organized. It has many articulate spokesmen and sympathizers. And it has proved willing and able to execute audacious terrorist attacks.
In the West, we have done it before. We had our religious fanatics — but we tamed them. We can learn from our earlier success and apply its lessons to the present crisis.
How does one defeat an enemy with such a mindset?
In the West, we have done it before. We had our religious fanatics — but we tamed them. We can learn from our earlier success and apply its lessons to the present crisis.
Not too long ago in history, the Christian world was riven by bitter and nasty internal conflicts. Persecution, torture, and widespread slaughter happened wherever Christians encountered internal dissent and external disagreement.
This was not an accident, given Christian doctrine. Both intellectuals and activists were acting in accordance with their best interpretations of Scripture and the teachings of a long tradition of Christian authority.
Persecution, torture, and widespread slaughter happened wherever Christians encountered internal dissent and external disagreement. This was not an accident, given Christian doctrine.
Consider this roster of big names: St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin. Augustine and Aquinas are the two most important thinkers in the Catholic tradition, and Luther and Calvin are the two most important thinkers in the Protestant tradition. All four are without exception entirely in favor of killing those who disagree with them.
And Christians could cite Scripture and the words of Jesus himself: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Or they could re-tell the parable of conflict resolution, which Jesus ends this way: “But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me” (Luke 19:27).
The point is not whether this accords with your view of proper Christianity. The point is that this view was dominant among Christians then, just as its analog is currently widespread among followers of politicized Islam.
As with Islamists, Christians were taught faith and obedience. They were taught to seek their identity in something larger than themselves. They were taught to minimize earthly concerns, to focus on an afterlife, and to honor the martyrs. They were taught that dissenters and unbelievers were threats to the fabric of everything holy. So they became active participants in a dysfunctional culture of threats and persecution: kill or be killed.
As with Islamists, Christians were taught faith and obedience. They were taught to seek their identity in something larger than themselves. They were taught to minimize earthly concerns, to focus on an afterlife, and to honor the martyrs.
Yes, that is a simplification, for Christianity was divided into many fanatical and more moderate sects. There were also Jewish and Muslim minorities in the mix. And the religious rivalries and hatreds worked along ethnic and political rivalries and hatreds, as the English and the Spanish and the Dutch and the Italians and the Germans and the French loathed each other over grievances that stretched back for centuries.
But the West did achieve a culture of tolerance, and it did succeed in marginalizing its religious and ethnic haters. Now Christians from diverse schools live and work alongside atheists and Jews and Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists. And the English and the Spanish by and large get along, as do the Italians and the Dutch.
How did that happen? Because of philosophy — and a long period of cultural education and debate inspired by the humanism reintroduced into the West at the beginning of the Renaissance.
The humanists taught — often against vicious religious opposition — that life on Earth matters and that we should enjoy it. They taught that we should be rational, using our senses and our reason to understand the world and ourselves. They taught, increasingly as the Renaissance made headway, that each individual life matters and that we should judge people according to their individual characters and actions. They taught that each person is responsible for his (and even her) life.
A long line of thinkers from Montaigne in France to Galileo in Italy to Spinoza in Holland to Locke in England waged a multi-generational debate and succeeded in establishing individualism as the foundational principle of modern Western civilization.
The West tamed its religious fanatics only because humanistic philosophy prevailed. So the lesson for our time is that the way to tame religious terrorism is not by religious methods — we don’t need a “return to original Christianity” or to hope that Islam has a “Reformation.” For the long term, the Islamic world needs to learn and internalize humanistic principles — just as we needed to learn them — and just as we need to continue to uphold them vigorously in our own culture.
Of course that is a huge task. Cultural education is a constant and ongoing project that each generation must accomplish. For our generation, being tested as we are by a resurgence of religiously-motivated brutality, we face a challenge on two fronts.
One challenge is internal. We must ourselves remain committed to humanistic principles of naturalism, reason, individual freedom, and self-responsibility. We must understand them, believe them, and act upon them consistently as matters of principle.
That is why what is going on in our schools and universities today is so disturbing, as so many of our intellectuals and professors are infected with jaded, postmodern, anti-civilized ideology. That philosophy of irrationalism, collectivized race/ethnic/sex identity, and group conflict has done much to undermine a generation of young people — their ability to think rationally, debate constructively, and defend forthrightly the values of self-responsibility, freedom, and tolerance.
If we cannot defend those values, then we are defenseless against a committed Islamism.
The other challenge is external. Despite globalization, much of the Islamic world is still “Other” and is partially or totally closed off to our efforts to influence cultural developments within it. And that means that we must find ways to support its liberal, humanistic thinkers, and activists. They are few and they are brave, and they are currently in the position that centuries ago the minority of Western humanistic thinkers were in — arguing and persuading for cultural change within a broader culture that is still often intellectually primitive, superstitious, fanatical, and savage.
They deserve our support, as the survival and progress of both of our cultures depends upon it.
This essay was first published in Every Joe under the title “How to Tame Religious Terrorists”
About the Author: Stephen Hicks
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