Why do wealthy Muslims Radicalize and Attack? 

“Giving Excuses The Terrorists haven’t asked for”

But “they hate our way of life” doesn’t answer the “why” question.

“Excuses” makes it sound like identifying reasons for radicalization excuses the violence. I don’t hear anyone saying that. Looking for causes is reasonable, prudent and wise.

The Guardian makes some assertions

Today, French jihadis heading to Syria are emerging from varied, often middle-class backgrounds, sometimes with a good education and prospects. In contrast, those aspiring to fight in Iraq 10 years ago were seen as psychologically fragile, poor and with no perspectives.

The Buttes-Chaumont group’s jihadi aspirations were directly linked to the second Iraq war in 2003. They would sit in apartments watching footage of the US-led invasion. “Everything I saw on TV, the torture in Abu Ghraib prison, all that, that’s what motivated me,” one of Kouachi’s friends told their trial.

So then we turn to the sources where we look within our cultural frame of reference. If we discard the economic question “they are poor, disenfranchised because of European racism and face a bleak marginalized future so therefore they turn to radical Islam” we find other reasons at hand.

• Sociology: They were dispossessed, derived identity against a narrative of western, colonial racism
• Psychology: their family life was chaotic
• Political: this is a response to Western military action in their Holy Land (Bin Laden against US troops in Saudi Arabia) or against their kin (US invasion of Iraq).

The Dish today has links to lots of ideas.

NY Times Profile of Charlie Hebdo Attackers

These don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Confirmation bias suggests that if we find ourselves pointing in a direction we will find lots of evidence supporting and justifying the direction we’ve already decided to head into. Individuals always have their own unique mix even if we can identify broader trends.

I’d like to also suggest that there is a problem with the Western Secular formula that is illuminated by these killers.

There’s push and pull there too. Why radical Islam? 

Bringing Order to our Personal and Public Worlds

“What happened that this guy who plays around with sex and drugs radicalizes?”

The subtext is of course “it’s OK to have people mess with that because they’ll be politically innocuous or grow out of it.”

No, they will look for a worldview that brings order to their personal life and order to their public world.

Here’s where we see the vacuum of the secular world.

There is a “get a good education, get a good job, take care of your family…” type of implicit order but can secularism attach that private order to a larger public order?

Secular skepticism says “you don’t need to connect your private and public worlds.”

Jonathan Haidt’s Meaning For Life vs. Meaning Within Life

Haidt concludes his earlier “self-help” book by telling his story of being an adolescent caught in an existential crisis after it dawns on him what it means that there is no God in the world.

But nestled among these affirmations of life’s limitless possibilities is one with a darker tone: “Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence so why bother shaving?” (WOODY ALLEN).6 Above those words is a photograph of me.

I was only partly kidding. During the previous year, I had written a paper examining the play Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s existentialist meditation on the absurdity of life in a world with no God, and it got me thinking. I was already an atheist, and by my senior year I had became obsessed with the question “What is the meaning of life?” I wrote my personal statement for college admissions on the meaninglessness of life. I spent the winter of my senior year in a kind of philosophical depression—not a clinical depression, just a pervasive sense that everything was pointless. In the grand scheme of things, I thought, it really didn’t matter whether I got into college, or whether the Earth was destroyed by an asteroid or by nuclear war.

Haidt, Jonathan (2006-12-26). The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (p. 214). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

His solution was to split the “holy question”. As a Western skeptic he determined  that we cannot know what the meaning of life is, but we find meaning within life, which is what his book is about.

The second sub-question is the question of purpose within life: “How ought I to live? What should I do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life?” When people ask the Holy Question, one of the things they are hoping for is a set of principles or goals that can guide their actions and give their choices meaning or value.

Haidt, Jonathan (2006-12-26). The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (p. 218). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Western Secularism is premised on the assertion that you can split the questions happily. It is a bold assertion given the fact that almost all of humanity keeps the questions together.

It may well be that these youth Islamic cultures are finding the Western solution wanting. Skye Jethani makes the point in the Phil Vischer video piece that this has been an ongoing source of Christian evangelism and conversion as well (minute mark 38 to 40).

Secularism’s Existential Poverty Produces Fundamentalists

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Christian Fundamentalism sprung out of the confrontation with modernism. The fact that young men of Muslim ancestry turn to Islamic fundamentalism as a way to confront modern skeptical secularism shouldn’t be a surprise. The violence is a subset and a radical application of the broader movement.

We have a deep need to live in a coherent world. It is the religious impulse that believers say was created in us by God, that atheists will claim is a bi-product of our large brains and social evolution. Secularisms will produce fundamentalisms.