Oct 202014
 

http://onbeing.org/program/scott-atran-hopes-and-dreams-in-a-world-of-fear/84/history

“So if you take, you know, these polls if you put any credence in them, like the Gallup and Pew polls, you find that about 7 percent of the Muslim world has some sympathy for bin Laden. That’s about 100 million people out of 1.3 or .4 billion Muslims in the world. But then if you look who actually is willing to do something violent, you find that it’s an extremely, extremely small number of people. But when you look at of those thousands out of the 100 million who actually do anything, you find that the greatest predictor has nothing to do with religion.”

“The greatest predictor is whether they belong to a soccer club or some action-oriented group of friends. In fact, almost none of them had any religious education whatsoever. They’re all born again, sort of between the ages of 18 and 22. So if it’s not religious inculcation, if it’s not religious training, if it’s not even religious tradition, what could it possibly be? And again, it’s first of all who your friends are. That’s the greatest predictor of everything.”

“I interviewed this guy in prison in France who wanted to blow up the American Embassy and I asked him, “Why did you want to do this?” and he says to me, “Well, I was walking along the street one day and someone spit at my sister and called her sale Arabe, a dirty Arab, and I just couldn’t take it anymore and I realized that this injustice would never leave French society or Western society, so I joined the Jihad.” I said, “Yeah, but that has been going on for years.” And he goes, “Yes, but there was no Jihad before.”

“So it’s a sort of receptacle. You find it’s especially appealing to young people in transitional stages in their lives — immigrants, students, people in search of jobs or mates and between jobs and mates, and it gives a sense of empowerment that their own societies certainly don’t.”

“So let me just sort of give you two anecdotes that come out of my work with the Madrid bombing. So I went to trial and I interviewed, you know, the surviving plotters and their families and their friends. … While I’m in this neighborhood, two things struck me. First, all of those kids, none of them had a religious education to speak of. They all came into religion quite late. In fact, some of them right before the plots. And they were involved in Spain in petty criminal activities, drug activities, drug trading. It’s these guys who were killing themselves. Now what that means is they’re sacrificing the totality of their self-interests, which goes against all economic theory, and giving up their lives for an idea. Why? Because all of a sudden, they are telling themselves we really don’t want to be criminals. We want to be somebody. We want to be something significant in this world and this is our chance.”

“Well, I went to the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan and I posed this to, you know, foreign policy people. I said, “So what would you suggest?” It’s fascinating. They all come with data-driven, evidence-based arguments for what’s wrong and what we should do. I sort of said, “Look, guys, that’s not going to work. First of all, outside of the Academy, people are not interested in evidence and data or even truth. People are interested in persuading, in victory, and confirming what they believe in or love. Second, you haven’t addressed any of the emotional aspects of this which really drive people — revenge, revenge and fear. You haven’t even touched on those.”

“How do you lessen that? Why is it that an earthquake or what was called back in the 1920s in an old study by Henry Ford, the “jerk effect” when all of a sudden you hit a pothole, why is that so much more powerful emotionally than real threats? You know, if you look at the data, you’d find that even frequent flyers have a better chance of being killed by a lawnmower than in a terrorist attack. People aren’t worried about dying by lawnmower.”

See, here’s what I think is the greatest political challenge of all. In addition to dealing with fear and revenge, there’s something which I like to call sort of the principle of enmity. Human beings are most mobilized when we have enemies. Just look at novels. Look at the news. No one’s interested in happy, good-feeling cooperative things. I mean, when they’re tired of war and they’re tired of conflict and competition, then they’ll go back on it. But what really drives interest and passion is competition and conflict. So the question is, can we actually lessen conflict without having enemies? Well, there are two answers to that. One is the sort of Reagan’s proposal to Gorbachev. We can come up with some kind of enemy, maybe the enemy of my enemy, right? Or we can change it to a sort of abstract enemy like poverty or killing or something like that. That sort of reminds me of how I actually ended the book. You know, Abraham Lincoln is making a speech during the latter stages of the Civil War where he’s describing the Southern rebels as human beings like anyone else.”

“An elderly woman, a staunch Unionist, abrades him for speaking kindly of his enemies when he should only be thinking of destroying them. Lincoln says to the woman, “Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” If you think about it, wars are truly won only in two ways. You either exterminate your enemy or you make them your friends. I think that we have not thought very deeply about the latter alternative, especially when I see how we’re reacting to these young around the world.”

 Posted by at 3:46 pm

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