229. Exclusion as an incentive for terrorism
I speculated about why ISIS is so tempting to some young people, in item
227 of this blog. I granted that the usual explanation from exclusion, neglect,
poverty, discrimination and resulting poor perspectives for work, prosperity
and social recognition are probably correct. I added that there must be more to
it. Young recruits to ISIS not only come from poor, neglected neighbourhoods
such as the French ‘banlieues’ and the quarter of ‘Molenbeek’ in Brussels, but
also from reasonably well-to-do, ‘ordinary’ families, and some have had a good
education. I suggested two cultural reasons.
First, a thirst for absolutist, theistic religion as a source of higher
meaning to one’s life, sought with special poignancy in one’s puberty (which now
lasts well into the twenties of life). In Western societies such (Christian) religion
has evaporated in the lightness of being, while capitalist society does not
yield a replacement in some secular source of spirituality and meaning of life.
Second, I proposed that ISIS offers the opportunity to satisfy a
Nietzschean will to power, in the atavistic form of master-slave domination and
physical violence (rather than the sublimated form of striving to conquer
oneself in transcending oneself).
I now want to add something. I granted that the usual argument from
poverty and neglect probably still applies, at least to some recruits. Is there
any connection between this and the other reasons? I propose the following line
of thought.
Surprisingly, this will bring out the possible effect of the idea of
supreme duty from the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. What irony, if part
of Enlightenment thought were similar to motives for fundamentalist Muslim
terrorism, while ‘we’, in ‘the West’ see that as an attack on our Enlightenment
values, and mobilize ourselves to defend them.
Kant demanded that we base our ethics on an idea of supreme duty that is
absolutely pure of any motives of material desire, interest, position, or even
survival. One should do one’s duty even against one’s own interests, even
against survival. Kant added that we need to believe in God as a warrant that
satisfying this universal duty indeed constitutes the highest Good.
Kantian ethic took the empty, purely formal form of the ‘Categorical
imperative’: do only what you would want to raise to a general maxim for
conduct. Content concerning specific conduct was deliberately left out, because
it would make the rule dependent on circumstance, while it had to be kept universal.
It is as formal and empty as ‘in the will of God’ or ‘Inshallah’.
Philosophers Lacan and Zizek argued that this renunciation of all
material value and interest can only work if there is a masochistic,
higher-order (non-material, non-lust satisfying) love for such sacrifice of
material values or even life.[i] And that is precisely what
ISIS offers.
The point now is this. The lust for satisfying absolute, Kantian duty
renders the material values of income and wealth immaterial, irrelevant, indecent,
vile, to be despised. Now those material values were the values that some of
the ISIS recruits were lacking. In joining ISIS and its promise of absolutist
transcendence, that lack turns into virtue. The recruits can feel superior and
relish contempt for the material values that were withheld from them, and for those
who have those values, wallow in them, and who did the withholding.
For wat it is worth, the argument confirms my rejection of all forms of
absolutism, in ethics or anywhere else, as a correction upon Enlightenment
values.
[i]
Called ‘jouissance’ by Lacan.