Social Matter

Terrorism is not a terribly useful term to describe what the media often calls ‘terrorist attacks.’

What they are is some combination of hostage-taking, raiding, and sabotage, usually for religious and political purposes. When an actual Muslim cleric holds up a Lindt cafe in Sydney, it requires some impressive contortions to deny that the attacks had a religious motivation, that it was not a self-styled martyrdom cloaked in the symbols of the religion.

The West has come to have a lot of trouble acknowledging the religious impulse as a source of deep motivation for people. Part of this may be due to the materialist view of history taken by intellectuals influenced by Marx. The tendency is to ascribe religious motivations as actually having occult materialistic motivations.

But it’s difficult to describe a suicide bomber as motivated by materialism. There is no material reward to being a suicide bomber, unless you count the bounties paid out to surviving family members. The individuals who conduct these attacks, usually called martyrdom operations, do it for the martyrdom, and obviously not for pay. If they expect to be paid, it’s in the afterlife, rather than in this world.

Even the materialists tend to be motivated by non-material goods. The materialists who say that people are only motivated by materialism tend to decry materialism and greed in the same breath. This shouldn’t be too shocking, because Marxism has never been terribly concerned about employing self-imploding logical reasoning, has never considered contradictions to be something worth being concerned about.

The dominant strain of thought in Western government tends to not about the effects of diversity per se (it’s simply stated as dogma that diversity yields benefits, without ever providing corroborating data), but about the idea that people are empty vessels that can be reshaped at will. To acknowledge that religious belief actually does motivate behavior is to acknowledge a competitor to high modernism. It isn’t just that people respond to incentives, but that people respond to all kinds of incentives, including those that involve their beliefs in intangible things.

The state is itself one of those intangible abstractions, a thing that exists on paper, and to acknowledge that for many, God might be more real than the spreadsheets of the state, and a higher source of authority, is to risk the keystone of modernism.

To acknowledge that Muslim raiders are just doing their duty to their god and their prophet, indeed emulating the prophet, is to acknowledge that the state has failed to achieve its stated aim of domesticating Muslims to high modernist standards. And we have seen this failure throughout the Middle East: the last real modernist in the Middle East is Syria’s Assad, and bizarrely, Americans ally themselves with Muslim zealots rather than the modernist most similar to themselves in terms of ruling philosophy.

Just as God was the keystone of government before the emergence of the nation-state, the idea of the godlike order created by human reason is the keystone of the new system. To acknowledge the real diversity — that people have indelible natures that can’t be altered easily by human design — is to abolish the possibility of realizing the sham-dream of diversity that involves people of all hues and ways giving up their traditions and worshiping Mount Rushmore instead.