227. The cultural roots of ISIS success
Doubtless, the cause lies, in part, in frustration of young Muslims,
also in developed Western countries, from poverty and discrimination, mobilized
for indoctrination by fundamentalist Islamist zealots. But why are the latter
successful in their indoctrination?
I think the deeper cause is twofold. First, the fact that in the loss of
religion, secular, liberal, democratic, capitalist societies lack clear spiritual
values that yield an inspiration transcending hedonistic values of consumption.
ISIS competes with a stark, absolutist, transcendent, compelling, easily
grasped imperative, with a clear split between the good and the bad; the
faithful and the infidels. Second, ISIS offers the perspective of heroism and
exuberance in risk and violence, where Nietzschean masters relish the rush of
power over slaves. This combination of sense making in higher purpose and the
rush of violence seems unbeatable. I expand a bit on both.
In a recent review in the New York Review of Books, Michael Ignatieff
discussed a thesis by Michael Waltzer that in history secular revolutions have
been followed by religious counter-revolutions.[i] Examples given by Walzer
are Algeria, India, and Israel. Ignatieff concludes that the secularists
‘failed to create a powerful and convincing political culture that would offer
what religious faith still offers …, i.e. a spiritual home.’ Salafist Islam in
Algeria, Hindu fundamentalism in India, and biblical fundamentalism in Israel.
There are counterexamples, where secular revolutions did not engender
fundamentalist religious counter-revolutions: France, America, Russia, and
China come to mind. However, what they did offer was a secular transcendent
ideology as an alternative to theistic religion: French civic virtue in
‘laicité’, American exceptionalism, and Russian and Chinese communism. Also
non-theistic ideology can yield a sense of transcendence, which is religious in
the sense of offering connection to something higher than the self.
Why, then, do some young people turn away from Western societies, lured
by ISIS? Has the inspirational value of Western societies been eroded? By what?
I suspect that it lies in the excrescence of neo-liberal market ideology,
supported by economic theory that claims to be value-free. But that is
precisely the problem: loss of values other than hedonism, efficiency and
economic growth. It does carry the value of liberty, but mostly in the negative
sense of freedom from interference, which turns into a license to exploit other
people and nature, for those who gather financial and positional power. There
is a lack of the positive freedom of access to resources, justice and
competencies, which has been eroded in ‘reforms’ for the sake of markets. That hurts
the lesser educated, the old and weak, and outsiders who are discriminated, and
lacks a spirit of transcendence.
Second, the lure of heroic violence and subjugation has been nourished,
I think, by a hotbed of thought fed by Nietzsche’s rejection of the ‘slave
mentality’ of Christian compassion and his celebration of the ‘will to power’.
In the wake of that, a shift has been going on from ethics to aesthetics, where
the self or life is to be constructed as a work of art (Foucault, Onfray),
stepping out of the symbolic order, in the ecstatic joy of ‘real’ life (Lacan).
Some of the texts (e.g. in Onfray’s ‘sculpting he self’) are redolent of
fascism.
I have been struggling with that in this blog. On the one hand I have
been advocating a Levinassian philosophy of the other, and on the other hand I
have tried to carve out space for a flourishing life for the creative
individual. I have tried to show that they are not antithetical, that regard
for the other is a source of a flourishing life. I have arrived at an ethic of
reasonableness, of discourse between diverse views, with notions of truth as
‘warranted assertibility’, and ‘debatable ethics’. It is a modest view of
‘imperfection on the move’.
Is this enticing, inspirational, transcendent enough to appeal to the
human spirit that cries out for the vertical transcendence of theistic religion?
I proposed a transcendence that is immanent, within life, and horizontal, from people to people, and is enticing
in furthering a flourishing life in the best use of one’s talents, to
contribute to the hereafter of what one leaves behind at death. Is this enough?
Is it strong enough to resist current evil?
I think that it could be, in the Nietzschean ethic of power in the form
of transcendence, transformation, reaching for the sublime even while knowing
that it will never be quite achieved. That can be exhilarating. It avoids the
atavistic regression to power in the form of violence that is found in ISIS.
[i] Michael Ignatieff, ‘The religious
specter haunting revolution’, The New
York Review of Books, June 4, 2015.
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