Perverted spiritual ardor

Spencer Tracy as Nationalism, with Walter Brennan tagging along in the role of Universal Democracy. From King Vidor, 1940, Northwest Passage.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Nationalist Solution", New York Times, February 20 2015:

President Obama thinks in combating terrorist extremism we should focus on the economic and political dysfunction from which it arises, like whether young people can afford to buy a Slurpee or not. This comes from his lack of historical and cultural awareness; he's obviously not listening to me. What he needs to deal with is the terrorists' perverted spiritual ardor, by giving them a dose of nationalism, as suggested by Walt Whitman. And the Muslims have to fix their theology, because it's not working right.

I'm not going to lie to you, the program Obama has been laying out this week at the 60-nation Summit on Countering Violent Extremism and summarized in a speech yesterday is not without its problematic aspects, but today's Brooksian critique isn't going to help you understand why. This is because Brooks is criticizing an imaginary speech instead, one that he feels better equipped to respond to:

President Obama gave the conventional materialistic explanation for what turns people into terrorists. Terrorism spreads, he argued, where people lack economic opportunity and good schools. The way to fight terror, he concluded, is with better job-training programs, more shared wealth, more open political regimes, and a general message of tolerance and pluralism.

(He's either forgotten how he thought he was in favor of tolerance and pluralism a little under a month ago or realized that he wasn't.) Obama explicitly denied this particular strawman account:

Third, we must address the grievances that terrorists exploit, including economic grievances.  As I said yesterday, poverty alone does not cause a person to become a terrorist, any more than poverty alone causes someone to become a criminal.  There are millions, billions of people who are poor and are law-abiding and peaceful and tolerant, and are trying to advance their lives and the opportunities for their families.... Fourth, we have to address the political grievances that terrorists exploit.  Again, there is not a single perfect causal link, but the link is undeniable...

Rather, he's saying, economical and political problems create conditions that can be exploited by "warped ideologies" and "twisted interpretations of Islam" which are themselves the effective cause. Also note that these aspects of the situation are not strictly speaking materialistic at all: the economic issue is not a question of whether young men can afford a Slurpee but whether they can find a morally satisfying place in society:

when people -- especially young people -- feel entirely trapped in impoverished communities, where there is no order and no path for advancement, where there are no educational opportunities, where there are no ways to support families, and no escape from injustice and the humiliations of corruption -- that feeds instability and disorder, and makes those communities ripe for extremist recruitment.

And a voice in a democratic order:

When people are oppressed, and human rights are denied -- particularly along sectarian lines or ethnic lines -- when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism.  It creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to exploit.  When peaceful, democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only answer available.

It's worth mentioning that Mona El-Naggar's story of the Egyptian Da'esh recruit Islam Yaken, last Wednesday, illustrates the importance of the political-economic issue: the Arab spring lit the young man on fire with ambition that the political-economic situation stopped him from realizing, and the failure of the revolution burned him out and left him nowhere to go but Syria.  How Brooks can read this tale the way he does—

He seems to have rejected the whole calculus of what we call self-interest for the sake of an electrifying apocalyptic worldview and what he imagines to be some illimitable heroic destiny

—I can't begin to understand. Yaken's "calculus of self-interest" was crushed by external events, as he worked like a hero for his simple dream and got nowhere in a society that was supposed to be changing but didn't, and Sheikh Yacoub and his huge movement offered him a social environment he could live in as an equal of the others.

The way to fight terror, according to Obama's speech, is completely the opposite of what Brooks imagines Obama saying, deploying on a wide variety of fronts: military, cultural-spiritual, economic, political, and social: the Da'esh warriors have to be killed, the Da'esh doctrine has to be countered, the catastrophic economic inequality in which terrorism breeds has to be mitigated, the political repression that cuts off the expression of nonreligious aspirations must be relaxed, and a historically normal atmosphere of religious tolerance has to be renewed.

I'm a bit dubious myself about all of these, really. The killing part is compromised by the fact that Hydras want you to cut their heads off, that's how they grow new ones. On points two and five, I love big government, as you know, but I don't think it's very good at effecting ideological transformation. As a veteran of official anti-communism and anti-marijuana propaganda in the early 1960s, if you know what I mean (they say if you remember the 1960s you probably weren't there, but I definitely remember that part). I thought this was pretty clear to the authorities, too, though perhaps not as clear as it needs to be:

“Unfortunately, as we all know, the government is probably not the best platform to try to communicate with the set of actors who are potentially vulnerable to this kind of propaganda and this kind of recruitment,” Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week.

“We try to find ways to stimulate this kind of counternarrative, this kind of countermessaging, without having a U.S. government hand in it,” Mr. Rasmussen continued. “People who are attracted to this don’t go to the government for their guidance on what to do, not the U.S. government and certainly not their governments in the Middle East.”

Sorry, Mr. Rasmussen, but if you're out there looking for them then I'm afraid you have a hand in them all the same, and it doesn't fill me with confidence.

As for the economic and political transformation, the part which is definitely within the purview of governments, are they really likely to do that in the Kingdom of the House of Saud or General Sisi's Egypt? It's a shame, too, because it might really work. David Brooks probably hasn't heard about this, but we have some of those perverted spiritual ardors right here in the US of A (H/t BooMan), in the form of abortion fanatics and Second-Amendment vigilantes and adherents of the Confederate States and what not, and when I wonder why there isn't more terrorism here among the Christian Identity brethren and the like, I tell myself it could be something to do with the economic and political outlets we have here, and the general presence of hope. That and the Medicare keeping the older potential terrorists in beta-blockers and scooters.

Mr, Humble Burkean Conservative Brooks, of course, thinks it's impossible for government to make any systematic attempt to improve people's material lives without dreadful unforeseen consequences, and yet somehow transforming their entire belief systems is a piece of cake, which a government can accomplish simply by inviting Syrians and Iraqis and Libyans and Yemenis to be nationalists. This comes from somebody who was just accusing Obama of "lacking historical and cultural awareness" and yet he himself knows even less than the screenwriters of Lawrence of Arabia!

You can’t counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision. There will always be alienated young men fueled by spiritual ardor. Terrorism will be defeated only when they find a different fulfillment, even more bold and self-transcending.

In other times, nationalism has offered that compelling vision. We sometimes think of nationalism as a destructive force, and it can be. But nationalism tied to universal democracy has always been uplifting and ennobling. It has organized heroic lives in America, France, Britain and beyond.

It can blow a bugle call like you've never heard before, and the universal democracy will be hobbling right behind! Personally, I'd be more optimistic about Obama's scenario, and going for the democracy first. Brooks says Walt Whitman, but sounds like what he has in mind is Rudyard Kipling, a recommendation from the heart of Empire to all you colorful desert folks. And a hallucinatory vision of the hero-patriots of the Maghreb and Arabia Felix and the Hindu Kush in their variegated regalia!

British imperial soldiers at Victoria's 1883 Jubilee celebrations, P.H.G.H. Michel in Le Petit Journal, 1899.