Much of what Scott Altran writes about the root causes of terrorism at the science website Edge strikes me as true:
The threat today is from a Qaeda –inspired viral social and political movement that abuses religion in the name of defending a purist form Sunni Islam, and which is particularly contagious among Muslim youth who are increasingly marginalized — economically, socially, politically — and are in transition stages in their lives, such as immigrants, students, and those in search of friends, mates and jobs.
Economic globalization, which has led to greater access by humankind to material opportunity, has also led to a crisis, even collapse, of cultures, as people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity. Today’s most virulent terrorism is rooted in rootlessness and restlessness. This gives an opening for embrace by the radical fraternity that preaches the jihadi cause, whose oxygen is the publicity provided by global media. The Qaeda movement is largely a diaspora phenomenon of people who enlist, rather than are recruited, outside their country of origin.
But not all of it:
The widespread notion of a “clash of civilizations” along traditional historical “fault lines” is woefully misleading. Violent extremism represents a crash of traditional territorial cultures, not their resurgence. Individuals now mostly radicalize horizontally with their peers, rather than vertically through institutional leaders or organizational hierarchies. They do so mostly in small groups of friends — from the same neighborhood or social network — or even as loners who find common cause with a virtual internet community.
When Altran writes about “historical ‘fault lines’”, he’s really talking about cultural fault lines. And when he’s talking about cultural fault lines, he really means religion. Which is a subject that many, if not most scientists, simply don’t seem to get, apart from believing it something of a nuisance. It is a subject about which they would often prefer not to think.
But for the better part of a thousand years, the Christian West faced a remorseless onslaught from the forces of a militant caliphate, The very scientific advances that liberal Western culture enabled were those that ultimately ebbed the Islamic military tide. Or at least those waves that were energized to direct, frontal assaults.
The West has, from at least the 18th Century on, transformed the hitherto dramatic “art” of warfare into something of an industrial science. We built great square rigged sailing ships, and the great guns to defend them, chiefly as a way of getting around historical antagonists who stood athwart our trading lanes. The rest is, as they say, history. To quote Hilaire Belloc:
Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
Nor airliners either, unless they can find a way to hijack them.
It’s all well and good for modern day intemperates at Finsbury Park to invoke the glorious victories of Salah ad-Din and agitate about throwing holy warriors to the fore, but after the first few thousands get mowed down, the others tend to take the counsel of their doubts. If young, rootless men with few prospects jolly up at the notion of waging jihad against Satans greater and lesser through stealth rather than direct confrontation, it is mostly because their elders have, under the painful tuition of colonialism and military defeat, abandoned the idea of symmetrical warfare. And it’s useful to remember that we in the West are tempted to self-congratulate over our comparatively advanced societies, believing our status to owe more to the inherent rightness of our ideas than to the force of our arms. Our cultural adversaries, backwards though them might seem to us, never put much stock in the idea that we have gotten it fundamentally right and they have not. They do not believe it still.
Altran recommends coming at the problem via the scientific method:
A key problem with proposals on what to do about radicalization to violent extremism is lack of field experience with the context-sensitive processes of selection into violence within these scenes. To understand and manage the local pathways to and from violent extremism requires science-based field research that is open to public verification and replicable, with clear ways and means to falsify what is wrong so as to better and better approximate what is truly right.
Science is a wonderful tool, but it’s just a tool – and if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. There’s no harm in using the scientific method to try and get at a way of reducing the lure of religiously-motivated violent extremism on the young and the restless. But if we ignore the cultural underpinning that enobles that violence, we have not driven quite to the root of the problem.
It may just be in the end that, no: We cannot all get along.
Back in 2003/4, Altran was the counter-terrorism flavor of the week, a variety of Sageman. Neither of whom has ever actually read the Koran or familiarized themselves with the Hadith, certainly not that you could tell from their writing. Which, of course, is the very “context-sensitive process of selection into violence” that Altran prattles on about. For that reason alone, pretty much all your readers are way ahead of Altran in the clue department.
Huh, I had a very different take on that piece. I thought Altran was explicitly suggesting that we need to use the best tool we have (science) to understand the cultural (religious) underpinning, the root of the problem, of religiously-motivated violent extremism. How else?
The kind of “scientific analysis” Altran proposes is the kind that leads to building youth centers to keep these boys out of trouble after school, interfaith exchanges to break down our religous prejudices (because after all, if you’re religious you’re dangerously prejudiced, unless you are Muslim, then you are in need of our understanding, and our failure forthwith is what leads these young men and various Amerikan wimmin to go join Al-Qaida via all these different social media that I need your continuing grant money to study)–that sort of thing that has worked so well in the past. As opposed to cracking open a book or two and actually trying to fill one’s mind with the stories and images and understandings of things that fill Muslim minds and which make all of them ultimately recruitable, even if right now they’re only self-selecting.
Altran was the flavor of the week six or seven years ago, and he’s still touting the exact same line he touted then. Whether his ignorance is willful or he’s just slow, he’s got nothing to say that matters except to other think-tankers and ivory tower denizens.
Science to me has been great at explaining determinate things, by that I mean forces in a dynamic system or other such purely physical, chemical process, etc. You strike a billiards ball in a specific way it physically can only move in a certain way in response. You apply a certain physical load to a beam it can only deform in a certain way.
Once science tries to turn its eye towards the interactions of humans with free will it breaks down significantly and instantly. Probabilistic theories and methods are a bad patch job trying to mask an endeavour that’s failing so bad because it’s fundamentally missing the point. There is no “replicable” scientific formula for when people chose to fight and how they fight. To think so is an invitation into a wild goose chase down the rabbit hole, and to blind yourself to the intangibles of human societies and the truly “art” that is warfare. And to look for the impossible is no way to fight a war.
I’d pass on this guy’s advice. Sorry.
The literature on human aggression is extensive and diverse; I’m inclined to think we learned a thing or two along the way. Why give up now, just because it’s a complicated topic?
I’m not saying give up, but don’t deceive ourselves into thinking approaching the subject matter from the framework of science will unlock some new mystery, that’s a dead end. Man is creature with free will of both passion and reason. Science doesn’t handle things like that well. Probabilistic and stochastic methods are more like writing down past events rather than granting any predictive (read replicable) ability. Politics, human nature and war should be the first studies of man in any society/civilization, but war, as Luttwak will point out, is a very paradoxical thing precisely because man has free will and human nature is so complex. Any way of war can be defeated. Any man can do the unexpected, the surprising, the irrational. As soon as “science” tries to declare a “replicable” law of warfare, someone who’s strategically adept will do the opposite to confound their adversary who starts to believe in it. If we start believing in one way of warfare or conditions that will lead to certain results we make only ourselves predictable and easy prey to those who have a “genius for war.”
First Lex,
Yes for the most and large part, just one small quibble:
“And it’s useful to remember that we in the West are tempted to self-congratulate over our comparatively advanced societies, believing our status to owe more to the inherent rightness of our ideas than to the force of our arms.”
The reason that the founders created something exceptional is because they believed that we were not exceptional, and therefore we needed the guardrails that they established, and built upon the principles that they believed.
It is “the inherent rightness of our (former) ideas” that led to the blessing of the force of our arms.
And then ProwlerAMDO:
Also yes; “Probabilistic theories and methods are a bad patch job”. There is no science in it, but there is a very accurate forecast if you pay attention to the Rainmaker: “There is none righteous, no, not one.”
A will is only free to do that which it desires.(Ordo salutis)
Always bet on black.
I’d rather us be the ones surprising our enemies when the “good bet” goes wrong (intentionally so) than be put in the position of always making the predictable bet so that the enemy will know what we’re going to do and knock the living snot out of us.
Remember, in war we don’t just bet black and come out ahead slightly more than half of the times. The enemy gets to make a bet too.
Was it Schwarzkopf who said that in war you don’t want to barely win, you want to win 100 to nothing?
A will is free to do that which it decides. We often do things we don’t desire to do, but what we have to do.
“God is on the side of the bigger battalions.”————-Napolean
(Unless the smaller ones have Maxims and the bigger ones do not–h/t Belloc)
Wasn’t it the Brits who had a saying that included the line “for we have the Maxim gun, and they have not?” For many years the sun never set on the British flag.
Although this thread began as a crtitique of Altran and “scientific analysis” Zane. PAMDO, et al., have done such a good job I think I’ll take a slightly different tack. It would also do well, I think, to remember that science & technology is neutral and that, perhaps for the first time since the industrial revolution, our enemies will have no need of an advanced industrial foundation/superstructure in order to obtain the necessary weapons to do us great harm or even defeat us. Drug/Petro-dollars enable very small numbers of educated enemies–educated mainly by those whom they would seek to destroy–to purchase off-the-shelf advanced wpns–weapons that are both cheap and capable thanks to modern science. And readily available on the open civilian markets–let alone the black/grey ones because of global commerce and the “dual-use” technology it propagates. (The ability of UAVs/mini-uavs to destroy, say B-2 bombers based in CONUS by mini-uavs launched by terrorists just out-side the base fence perimiter from public roads is a case in point.)
Thinking about our rapidly diminishing technological advantage over all our enemies–large and small– I am reminded of the following story:
Shortly after the invention of the telegraph (the internet of it’s day) some young under-secretary in Britian’s Foreign office was waxing rhapsodic about the great advantages in military and commercial communications it would bring to the Empire as well as the advancement of science and medicine via rapid sharing of research and thus advancement of knowledge, etc.
Foreign Minister Palmerston listened patiently until the young man finished, at which point he commented: “Yes, all you say is undoubtedly true, but just remember this: one day Genghis Khan will return–only this time he will have the telegraph.”
“What hath God wrought” (Samuel Morse) indeed…science plays no favorites. Quoting from memory here, I am reminded of the time Madame Curie first demonstrated the properties of radium and the science of the atom to several friends. One wrote later in a letter to a friend that the first thing that went thru his mind as a result of Mme Currie’s revelations & demonstration “was the sound of the voice of the ushers at door of the entrance of the Louvre at day’s end: ‘Closing time, gentlemen! Closing time!’ “
VX,
And here’s a perfect example of what you said (From Don Surber’s site)
Very much with Prowler on this one. Like saying gynecology is the scientific study of women, which it is, and therefore concluding gynecologists make the best husbands.
D**ned @*^%# moderation Algo-trolls!
Zane and Prowler … There’s a famous quote from a famous football coach that leaps to mind: “Winning isn’t everything … it’s the *only* thing.” Kind of applicable, isn’t it?
Marianne
In the life and death situation of war, yes that sums it up rather nicely
Reminds me of the time I was giving a Hangar Tour to a group of high-schoolers — I explained the anti-tank role of the TOW missiles on our AH-1Fs and that our doctrine was to engage from beyond the range of an armored vehicles anti-aircraft weapons.
One teacher opined that that didn’t seem to be fair, to which I replied, “You don’t pay me to fight fair. You pay me to *win*.”
“Our adversaries not putting much stock in our belief that we have gotten it right, and they have not” That is a fantastic summation. So many of the left do not realise that the opposition do not think like us. They have thier own, and to them, quite valid world view. We cannot just expect them to play nice with us, because we want to be liked. They belive just as strongly in thier position as we do, and will continue to do so. I do believe that, in time, we can convince them or the superiority of our position, but we must insure our survival until we can do so. The time has not yet come to put down the pointed stick.
Well put. The very heart of any conflict is that two different groups have staked mutually exclusive claims to something and are willing to fight rather than compromise, and usually think they have some decent chance to win.
Whether or not we believe that strongly in our way of life . . . I’m afraid too much nihilism and relativisim has infected our civilization with a significant amount of rot, and that this is giving the takfiri terrorists so much belief that they can win. How many reversals of the Jihad Jane example do you see out there? Far more westerners, with closed minds in the Allan Bloom sense of refusing to make value judgements and left in a society that offers nothing of historical majesty in its traditions or higher than materialistic/if-it-feels-good-do-it purpose in its future, are converting to Islam than the other way around. This cultural rot may have a lot to do with why birthrates in so many westernized nations are languishing below replacement value. From not wanting to put up with babies because it could cramp their lifestyle, to not wanting to bring children into a “polluted unfair” world, to trying to provide the absolute best possible material life to your children driving many to have only one they can lavish optimally all mean that right now the West is being solidly “out-evolved” by a highly fertile Islam. Survival of the fittest, with the fittest being defined as the ones that survive of course . . .
The assumption that the terrorists are born out of marginalised youths is flawed. The majority of islamist militants are local and Al Qaeda performs a subsidiary role. Al Qaeda is dedicated to the support of islamist struggle worldwide. There are islamist insurgents in Afghanistan, Algeria, Burma, Chad, Chechnya, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, Phillipines, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen that are locally staffed. These conflicts vary asymmetric to symmetric, depending on the local enviroment and opposition.
An ongoing focus on Al Qaeda is understandable, because they are the only ones attacking us over here. But it doesn’t get anywhere near the core of the problem to focus on the recruiting patterns of Al Qaeda militants. Imagine we were conducting a clandestine war with France, would we win by developing the perfect plan for defeating the French Foreign Legion?
Perfect analogy, angus.