Scott Atran :
In 2019, Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 50 Muslim worshippers in a rampage attack on a mosque in New Zealand, posted an online manifesto that cited as inspirations Roof and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who killed scores of youth at a leftist summer camp in 2011.
The manifesto, whose title, The Great Replacement, is a translation of the title of a book by French supremacist philosopher Renaud Camus that signifies “white genocide,” adopts the antipodal reasoning of violent jihad. It appeals to a transnational brotherhood in a clash of civilizations that pits one global identity (the white race) against another (global Islam) in a fight to the death for survival, with no place for fence-sitters. The Easter 2019 church and hotel bombings in Sri Lanka that killed and wounded hundreds, mirrors this polar logic, which ISIS supporters claimed as “bloody reward” for the New Zealand mosque attack and Western far-right leaders decried as Islam attacking Christianity.
The Christchurch killings, and the violently exclusionary philosophy justifying them, also appear to be motivating factors in the El Paso killings. The Inconvenient Truth, a white nationalist tract published in the same online forum (8chan) as Tarrant’s Manifesto just minutes before the El Paso killing spree, proclaims the necessity of violently terminating the “Hispanic invasion” that is “rotting the country from the inside out.” “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement,” declared the Texas killer.
Social media not only fuels the fire through viral messaging but also spirals up recruitment to the cause. As political scientist Richard Hasen notes, social media lowers “the collective-action problem” of an individual going it alone, because one can see that there are people out there like oneself. Neuropsychologist Molly Crockett describes how outrage-inducing messages come to be more prevalent and potent online than offline, with social media magnifying its triggers and reducing personal costs.
Moreover, research by sociologist Mark Granovetter shows that once an expected threshold of there being people like you is appreciably surpassed, then the number and pace of people who join the fold can rapidly ratchet up. Thus, the Daily Stormer website could boast in September 2017 that before Google and other major Internet sites banned it: “We used to be the biggest pro-white publication in the history of the world. With six million monthly unique visitors, we trounced the circulation of the Third Reich’s most popular tabloid Der Sturmer, which had 250,000.”
The “Clash of Civilizations” is an idea born in post-Cold War American intellectual circles, then purposely nurtured both by al-Qaeda and ISIS and many who oppose them, including xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that play off them. It is a woefully misbegotten idea, however enticing it is to simply divide a world of complex conflicts into a few, opposing camps.
In fact, jihadi terrorism and right-wing violent extremism represent not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their collapse, as people-especially young people in transitional stages in life-unmoored from centennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity that gives personal significance and glory.
This is the dark side of globalization. Individuals radicalize to find a firm identity in a flattened world. In this new reality, vertical lines of communication between the generations are replaced by horizontal peer-to-peer attachments that can span the globe, albeit in vanishing narrow bandwidths of information.
From jihadis in Europe to white supremacists in the U.S., the people most susceptible to joining radical groups are youth in transitional stages in life, seeking community and purpose beyond their genetic family. The attraction of community is especially keen where there are sentiments of social exclusion or community collapse, whether or not accompanied by economic deprivation. A purpose most readily propels action and sacrifice, including a willingness to fight and die, when it is perceived to be in defense of transcendent values regardless of actual costs or consequences.
As long-standing cultural and religious values that have bound individuals to one another into organic communities are eclipsed under social and economic forms that lack stability or are corrupted, countercultures of redemptive and salvational violence are prone to erupt from the resulting anxiety and alienation along prevailing political fault lines.
In The Escape from Freedom, written in 1941, German sociologist and psychoanalyst Eric Fromm argued that the anxiety that results from what 19th-century religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called “the dizziness of freedom” and the resultant social, economic, and political disruption once before impelled many people to seek the elimination of uncertainty in authoritarian systems, as with Nazism and Stalinism in the period between the two World Wars.
The quest for elimination of uncertainty, coupled with what social psychologist Arie Kruglanski and colleagues deem “search for significance,” are the sentiments most readily elicited in studies of both volunteers for violent jihad and militant supporters of populist ethno-nationalist movements. Yearning for significance and certainty, in turn, can lead to what cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand and colleagues depict as a “tightening” of political cultures toward more authoritarian leadership, diminished tolerance, and greater punishment for deviant behaviors from desired norms.
In the U.S, political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk find that nearly half of Americans lack faith in democracy and its deliberative processes involving consensus and mutual tolerance. More than one-third of young, high-income earners favor army rule-presumably to halt rising social unrest linked to staggering income inequality, job insecurity, and persistent failures in racial integration and cultural assimilation in an age of identity politics. “A man’s admiration of absolute government,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville more than 150 years ago in defending the still-revolutionary idea of a democratic republic, “is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”
The world’s general postwar trend toward greater tolerance and less violence relative to decades and centuries past-including the spread of liberal democracies worldwide (from 35 in 1970 to a peak of more than 100 in the early 2000s)-risks being thrown into reverse, spurred by transnational terrorism and the opposing countercultural forces of Islamist revivalism and ethno-nationalist resurgence that it mostly represents. In the World Values Survey, most Europeans under age 30 years do not believe that living in a democratic country is “absolutely important” to them.
As the Cold War wound down, democratic consensus within Western societies began fragmenting into increasingly many rival identity groups-each with a power-seeking ambition to redress an (often real) grievance, commencing with a rightward shift of the left’s formerly prototypical, aggrieved class of white male proletarians as women and minorities gained greater voice; but all progressively more polarized and in denial of others’ legitimacy.
A key psycho-political challenge of our age is: How do we maintain the “unalienable” rights of individuals, and respect the panhuman preference to form groups of common interest, in an open and competitive political system of mutual tolerance? How do we secure the devotion of its citizens and commitment to resist other devoted but “illiberal” actors, including violent extremists?
The framers of the American Constitution thought they had an enduring way “to break and control the violence of faction” that is the principal “vice” and “disease” of popular democracy, as James Madison put it in The Federalist No. 10. The remedy was to require the elected and chosen representatives of all parochial interests and factions to deliberate in a neutral place, in a new city and building distant from home and local pressures, where they could all openly debate seemingly opposing values and rival interests, find out what each side might be able to tolerate in others, and negotiate the distribution of material means for jointly realizing common as well as different but mutually tolerable interests.
Jet transportation, base-driven primaries, special-interest financing, and the digital amplification of moral outrage against compromise conspire to increasingly render ineffective that framework for detachment and deliberation-a framework that now may need to be readjusted in practice and in law to reestablish steps towards political compromise in order to curb the rising polarization and domestic political violence that threatens our security and undermines faith in the Republic.
(Scott Atran, Ph.D., Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford, University of Michigan).
In 2019, Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 50 Muslim worshippers in a rampage attack on a mosque in New Zealand, posted an online manifesto that cited as inspirations Roof and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who killed scores of youth at a leftist summer camp in 2011.
The manifesto, whose title, The Great Replacement, is a translation of the title of a book by French supremacist philosopher Renaud Camus that signifies “white genocide,” adopts the antipodal reasoning of violent jihad. It appeals to a transnational brotherhood in a clash of civilizations that pits one global identity (the white race) against another (global Islam) in a fight to the death for survival, with no place for fence-sitters. The Easter 2019 church and hotel bombings in Sri Lanka that killed and wounded hundreds, mirrors this polar logic, which ISIS supporters claimed as “bloody reward” for the New Zealand mosque attack and Western far-right leaders decried as Islam attacking Christianity.
The Christchurch killings, and the violently exclusionary philosophy justifying them, also appear to be motivating factors in the El Paso killings. The Inconvenient Truth, a white nationalist tract published in the same online forum (8chan) as Tarrant’s Manifesto just minutes before the El Paso killing spree, proclaims the necessity of violently terminating the “Hispanic invasion” that is “rotting the country from the inside out.” “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement,” declared the Texas killer.
Social media not only fuels the fire through viral messaging but also spirals up recruitment to the cause. As political scientist Richard Hasen notes, social media lowers “the collective-action problem” of an individual going it alone, because one can see that there are people out there like oneself. Neuropsychologist Molly Crockett describes how outrage-inducing messages come to be more prevalent and potent online than offline, with social media magnifying its triggers and reducing personal costs.
Moreover, research by sociologist Mark Granovetter shows that once an expected threshold of there being people like you is appreciably surpassed, then the number and pace of people who join the fold can rapidly ratchet up. Thus, the Daily Stormer website could boast in September 2017 that before Google and other major Internet sites banned it: “We used to be the biggest pro-white publication in the history of the world. With six million monthly unique visitors, we trounced the circulation of the Third Reich’s most popular tabloid Der Sturmer, which had 250,000.”
The “Clash of Civilizations” is an idea born in post-Cold War American intellectual circles, then purposely nurtured both by al-Qaeda and ISIS and many who oppose them, including xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that play off them. It is a woefully misbegotten idea, however enticing it is to simply divide a world of complex conflicts into a few, opposing camps.
In fact, jihadi terrorism and right-wing violent extremism represent not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their collapse, as people-especially young people in transitional stages in life-unmoored from centennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity that gives personal significance and glory.
This is the dark side of globalization. Individuals radicalize to find a firm identity in a flattened world. In this new reality, vertical lines of communication between the generations are replaced by horizontal peer-to-peer attachments that can span the globe, albeit in vanishing narrow bandwidths of information.
From jihadis in Europe to white supremacists in the U.S., the people most susceptible to joining radical groups are youth in transitional stages in life, seeking community and purpose beyond their genetic family. The attraction of community is especially keen where there are sentiments of social exclusion or community collapse, whether or not accompanied by economic deprivation. A purpose most readily propels action and sacrifice, including a willingness to fight and die, when it is perceived to be in defense of transcendent values regardless of actual costs or consequences.
As long-standing cultural and religious values that have bound individuals to one another into organic communities are eclipsed under social and economic forms that lack stability or are corrupted, countercultures of redemptive and salvational violence are prone to erupt from the resulting anxiety and alienation along prevailing political fault lines.
In The Escape from Freedom, written in 1941, German sociologist and psychoanalyst Eric Fromm argued that the anxiety that results from what 19th-century religious philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called “the dizziness of freedom” and the resultant social, economic, and political disruption once before impelled many people to seek the elimination of uncertainty in authoritarian systems, as with Nazism and Stalinism in the period between the two World Wars.
The quest for elimination of uncertainty, coupled with what social psychologist Arie Kruglanski and colleagues deem “search for significance,” are the sentiments most readily elicited in studies of both volunteers for violent jihad and militant supporters of populist ethno-nationalist movements. Yearning for significance and certainty, in turn, can lead to what cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand and colleagues depict as a “tightening” of political cultures toward more authoritarian leadership, diminished tolerance, and greater punishment for deviant behaviors from desired norms.
In the U.S, political scientists Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk find that nearly half of Americans lack faith in democracy and its deliberative processes involving consensus and mutual tolerance. More than one-third of young, high-income earners favor army rule-presumably to halt rising social unrest linked to staggering income inequality, job insecurity, and persistent failures in racial integration and cultural assimilation in an age of identity politics. “A man’s admiration of absolute government,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville more than 150 years ago in defending the still-revolutionary idea of a democratic republic, “is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”
The world’s general postwar trend toward greater tolerance and less violence relative to decades and centuries past-including the spread of liberal democracies worldwide (from 35 in 1970 to a peak of more than 100 in the early 2000s)-risks being thrown into reverse, spurred by transnational terrorism and the opposing countercultural forces of Islamist revivalism and ethno-nationalist resurgence that it mostly represents. In the World Values Survey, most Europeans under age 30 years do not believe that living in a democratic country is “absolutely important” to them.
As the Cold War wound down, democratic consensus within Western societies began fragmenting into increasingly many rival identity groups-each with a power-seeking ambition to redress an (often real) grievance, commencing with a rightward shift of the left’s formerly prototypical, aggrieved class of white male proletarians as women and minorities gained greater voice; but all progressively more polarized and in denial of others’ legitimacy.
A key psycho-political challenge of our age is: How do we maintain the “unalienable” rights of individuals, and respect the panhuman preference to form groups of common interest, in an open and competitive political system of mutual tolerance? How do we secure the devotion of its citizens and commitment to resist other devoted but “illiberal” actors, including violent extremists?
The framers of the American Constitution thought they had an enduring way “to break and control the violence of faction” that is the principal “vice” and “disease” of popular democracy, as James Madison put it in The Federalist No. 10. The remedy was to require the elected and chosen representatives of all parochial interests and factions to deliberate in a neutral place, in a new city and building distant from home and local pressures, where they could all openly debate seemingly opposing values and rival interests, find out what each side might be able to tolerate in others, and negotiate the distribution of material means for jointly realizing common as well as different but mutually tolerable interests.
Jet transportation, base-driven primaries, special-interest financing, and the digital amplification of moral outrage against compromise conspire to increasingly render ineffective that framework for detachment and deliberation-a framework that now may need to be readjusted in practice and in law to reestablish steps towards political compromise in order to curb the rising polarization and domestic political violence that threatens our security and undermines faith in the Republic.
(Scott Atran, Ph.D., Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford, University of Michigan).
