Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (62 page)

The Zealots’ hope was that by their extreme sacrifice and the renown that they hoped to gain from it, the idea of Israel would survive. Two millennia later, this is how the government and people of modern Israel interpret their deed. Through glorious sacrifice in costly commitment to a cause that is based upon the absurd, cultural groups can aspire to survive much stronger competition and triumph in the end. Let’s try not to oblige the jihadis through our own intemperate reaction to their ploy.

Humans often use religion to cooperate to compete. (For example, in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the Pledge of Allegiance was altered to include God.) As Darwin noted, in competition between groups with similar levels of technology and population size, those groups will tend to win out that favor and transmit willingness to sacrifice some self-interest for group interests (which also promote individual interests in the long run). Most cultures celebrate costly personal commitments as morally good and glorious. Many such celebrations are timeworn collective rituals—including quasi-religious national celebrations—with proven success in fostering cooperation within the group and making it more competitive with other groups. That basic dynamic is still with us and is unlikely to go away. As we’ll see in the next chapter, it is especially palpable in traditional mainstream America, even more so than in other modern societies. But new globalized forms of religion, unhinged from traditional cultures and territories, now vie through the media for the mass of humanity. The jihad is one. Beliefs in the salvational power of human rights or evangelical atheism are also derivative forms. They all have common historical roots in monotheism, although they have very different moral priorities, so that the gods of one people become the devils of another.

CHAPTER 24
OUR RELIGIOUS WORLD

He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.

—JESUS OF NAZARETH, MATTHEW 12:30

And the Lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in.

—LUKE 14:23

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eligion is associated with large-scale cooperation within groups and enduring conflict between groups. Religious devotion is both universal and variable across cultures. Religion has been ordained both a weapon of oppression and of the oppressed: “The opium of the people,” wrote communism’s sire, Karl Marx; “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” proclaimed Ben Franklin as his motto for the new American Republic—a sentiment echoed by Poland’s Solidarity movement in mobilizing religion against the Marxist state.
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Religious inspiration has fired creative imagination to raise many of humankind’s greatest monuments, and religious conformity has shot innovation down.

So what is religion, heaven or hell? The answer, I think, is both, and everything in between.

And the jihadis’ dream? As clearly hell to us as it is heaven to them.

The moral differences between different dreams for humanity are clear, even if many elements of those dreams are the same.

WHAT’S UNIVERSAL ABOUT MORALITY AND WHAT’S NOT?

Belief in moral “rightness” or “truth” is a matter of faith. There is blind, closed, reactionary, and dogmatic faith, like the Holy Inquisition’s faith in the existence of witches and the power of torture to reveal the truth about the Devil. And there is open faith with reason and insight and the belief that cruel punishment demeans everybody’s life. Such faith motivated a small band of American colonists to oppose the mightiest empire in the world. It was faith in the good sense, the will of men of reason—a will bolstered by “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” however personified or disincarnate that Providence might be.

Recent studies suggest that there is a universal stock of moral intuitions that become part of any society’s moral faith. But the relative importance of each element of the stock can vary from one cultural group to another and help to foment conflict between them. The combination of moral intuitions into a moral culture is not a natural or logical determination, but an undetermined product of historical contingency and willful choice. Faith in the American Dream is one such product; faith in violent jihad is another.

Studies by social psychologists Richard Nisbett and colleagues suggest that human cultures fall into two broad categories, individualist (mainly the United States and Western Europe) and collectivist (much of the rest of the world).
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Anthropologist Richard Shweder and his colleagues argue that for so-called collectivist societies, there is also a strong “ethics of community” (authority, respect, duty, loyalty); often there is an “ethics of divinity” (purity, sanctity) as well.
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Here, too, there is evidence of universal cognitions.

Experiments by Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph involving thousands of subjects suggest that all of these elements may be part of every culture, but each element varies to a different degree from culture to culture,
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so that even within a single broad cultural faith, like the American Dream, there can be marked cultural differences. American liberals tend to insist on individual rights and are uncomfortable with pronouncements and institutions built on the foundations of “the ethics of community” and the “ethics of divinity” because they can lead to patriotic jingoism (overblown loyalty), inequality (subordination of the weak or disadvantaged), and exclusion (racism, proscriptive nationalism, and other forms of purification). Conservatives, however, want a more circumscribed, more interdependent social life, which requires a regulation of relationships that goes beyond addressing harm and promoting fairness to individuals. This includes limits to sexual relations, management of obligations and authority, and the control of group boundaries and borders.

Haidt and Joseph’s Internet Study of the Five Foundations of Morality in America

When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking?

Whether or not … someone was harmed [harm] someone acted unfairly [reciprocity] someone did something to betray his or her group [group loyalty]

the people involved were of the same rank or status [authority] someone did something disgusting [purity]

Using Jon Haidt’s questionnaire, psychologists Nadine Obeid and Jeremy Ginges found that, at least on some hot-button issues, conservatives clearly incline more than liberals to believe that others share their values. For example, pro–gay marriage activists are predictably “liberal” in that they consider addressing harm and promoting fairness to be high moral values (above 2.5 on a scale from 1 to 5), but not in-group cohesion, authority, or purity (all valued below 2.5). Anti-gay activists are predictably “conservative” in that they score high on all five moral values. But whereas conservative activists tend to underpredict how liberal activists respond, liberal activists strongly overpredict how conservative activists respond. Conservatives, it seems, are markedly less biased in their beliefs about the attitudes of the other side than liberals are on the issue, and they may feel that they have less far to go in reaching out to others.

Despite these moral differences inside America, and even despite the “culture wars” that sometimes seem to erupt from them, there is still a broad consensus about the “proper” mix of moral elements within a fairly narrow range compared to other societies around the world. The original American revolutionaries mixed the universal elements of morality in a very particular way. As I noted in chapter 22, the “self-evident” aspects of “human nature” that the Creator supposedly endowed us with—including “inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—are anything but inherently self-evident and natural in the life of our species. The social engineering of individual liberty required upgrading the element of individuality, that is, our innate awareness of individuals as self-motivated agents who can act on their own to achieve goals.

The focus of empathy shifted to people as individuals and voluntary participants in civic communities. The Americans also downgraded elements of authority, loyalty, and purity then current in European politics. The French revolutionaries who followed lowered the importance of the individual while raising that of one group, the nation. That’s why whole classes of counterrevolutionaries, rather than individuals alone, could be collectively condemned and punished regardless of any individual crimes they may have committed. Most modern revolutions and regimes follow the French example more than the American.

RELIGION IN AMERICA

I find it unsettling how uncurious so many of my colleagues and intellectual soul mates are to the historical underpinnings of American political culture and the genuine appeal of religious conservatism for so many of our fellow citizens. Like most of my French colleagues as well, who are generally not religious, they appear to think that people who insist on expressing their religiosity in public are peculiarly backward. For who—besides jihadis perhaps—would want to show such loony mental laundry to the world?

Recent economic studies (most notably
Unequal Democracy
by Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels)
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show that when Democrats have been in the White House, lower-income American families experienced slightly faster income growth than higher-income families and that the reverse was true when Republicans were in control. If people voted rationally for their economic interests, one would expect Democrats to be perennial favorites among the working poor and the middle class. Conservative whites who vote Republican generally cite “group values” of patriotism and national security as the most important issues in deciding who should be president. Over the last few generations, it’s only when these voters perceive the economy to be in truly dire straits, or when a previous Democratic administration has been successful in palpably increasing their prosperity, do patriotism and national security take on slightly less value than usual (though enough to tip elections).

Why is such apparently irrational behavior—at least irrational from the point of enlightened self-interest—so widespread in America?

American political conservatism is often allied with religious conservatism, although many Americans also believe in one without the other. Consider the expression of religious devotion in the United States, as indicated by belief in the Bible and by church attendance (averaged over three successive Gallup polls from 2005 to 2007). The classic division between the Blue states of the East and West versus the Red states of the South and Middle America is apparent: in the East and West, one in four people believe that the Bible is fable; in the South and Midwest, only one in seven believe that.

In his book
The Conscience of a Conservative,
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Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in the 1964 election, wrote:

Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being…. Conservatism’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing [individual] freedom?

For Goldwater, “Politics [is] the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.” The political implication of this rugged cowboy conservatism is to minimize government intervention in personal life. While religious conservatives generally agree that government should leave people alone, they also believe that churches and communities should take an active role in people’s social and even political life. As Francis Fukuyama notes in his book
Trust,
sectarian religious communities like the Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists “created small, tight-knit groups whose members were bound to each other through common commitments to values like honesty and service.”
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Herein lies the original power that created America.

NEITHER INDIVIDUAL NOR NATION: SARAH PALIN AND THE SECTARIAN COMMUNITY IN AMERICA

Unlike the centralized European and Canadian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, American congregations were, and still are, concretely rooted in local communities with strong personal ties. Americans voluntarily chose and supported their community church, internalizing and shaping the community’s egalitarian moral values, instead of being compelled to belong to a state-subsidized, hierarchical institution. Where American churches have emphasized the God-given individual impulse to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England in Canada have stressed the social virtues of that country’s first constitution: “peace, order and good government.”
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