[Disclaimer: this post has been written with no academic authority whatsoever and, perhaps more importantly, no real psychological or sociological training or background, so if you really, seriously know about this stuff I would appreciate you enlightening me. This is just a 'best guess as I see it' sort of a post, so please don't think I'm setting myself up as an authority.]
There has been some chat going on in the comments section of the Gaza Appeal post which I thought worth elevating to a post all of its own. When I rant about religions and anti-Darwinism and mysticism and so on one of the things I inevitably end up shouting at everyone is that as a species and as individuals we have a lot of misplaced vanity. We think we are special, and we aren’t. I don’t mean it in a mean, pompous way, but I firmly believe that human beings have no real conception of how mechanical, how average, how just like everyone else we all really are.
One of the key comments on the Gaza post was about fundamentalists and fundamentalism and it betrays an important and very dangerous mistake almost all of us make when faced with this sort of behaviour. It is the ‘they just aren’t like us, they can’t be reasoned with and ‘we’ are nothing like them’ mistake. There are people who are mentally ill, and there are psychopaths and so on, I am not denying that, but for all these people may also be fundamentalists (of whatever stripe), the characteristic of fundamentalism is not an illness. It is simply a human behaviour to which we are all prone and which can be relatively easily induced by certain social conditions. We all like to think that we’re special, that we’re immune, but the vast, vast majority of us would simply be wrong in making that assumption.
Did anyone read about the teen suicide epidemic in the South Pacfic which was described in the Tipping Point? Lots of otherwise normal teenagers started committing suicide for no obvious reason, until the phenomenon reached something akin to epidemic proportions. How about the high school experiment The Third Wave, where the behaviours of Nazi Germany were so easily recreated, in order to demonstrate just how easy it is to get human beings to do insane and awful things.
Given that the whole discussion was brought about by discussion of Israeli and Islamic terrorism, it is interesting to note that MI5 has recently concluded that, in terms of domestic Islamic terrorism, there is no simple ‘they’ category. In fact, the one defining characteristic of domestic Islamic terrorists is that they have no defining characteristics. They are simply normal people, and in fact are often not all that religious. It would appear, then, that we are not discussing a kind of person at all, but more accurately a set of circumstances which would make extraordinary behaviour seem perfectly rational to a normal person.
Apart from simply being wrong, I think this blanket ‘they can’t be reasoned with’ approach is also very dangerous. This is a phenomenon to which we are all prone, and yet is nevertheless reassuringly rare, so to dismiss it in this way is to deny ourselves the opportunity to prevent it. It’s not something that is going to magically go away as a generation of people with a particularly antiquated mindset die out, it is a social phenomenon which is caused by a set of circumstances, and if we want to solve this issue then we have to identify those circumstances. And by that I don’t mean the Easy Liberal Answer of jobs and prosperity, because that ignores the fact that a lot of people who you would consider to be dangerous fundamentalists are prosperous, well-educated and middle class.
But turning fundamentalism of any sort into something ‘they’ do is simply to deny the real problem in order to focus on a patently false caricature, which is dangerous for everyone.
Supergrass – What Went Wrong (In Your Head)
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Day One – Ordinary Man
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