Global Warming

Christopher Hitchens pines for the good old days, when all the men were strong, all the women good looking, and all the terrorists above average.

I have trouble reading Christopher Hitchens, mainly because I so often agree with him. Hitchens is a man unafraid to say what he believes, though I suspect sometimes (and it's rich coming from me, I know) that he speaks with a hot head. I often wish that he would think more coolly, and perhaps by extension believe more carefully, on what he ends up saying.

Is it really plausible to say, for instance, that all members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Black Panthers were enlightened freedom fighters prone to lofty thoughts about the future and the sanctity of innocent life? Of course not. Those organisations contained members as fanatical and fascistic as those of the worst Islamic fundamentalist movement, though I will grant Hitchens that religion slightly outpaces ethnicity or nationalism as the ideological form most congenial to fanaticism.

Why though does Hitchens consistently draw a line in the sand around Islamic fundamentalism and its crop of associated terrorists? Because, it seems, suicide bombers "long for death," foolishly ignoring the pleasures of this life in favor of those of the next.

It might be argued that many of the young men inclined to blow up airplanes and destroy buses in the name of Islamist terror have no reason to eschew the material world, growing up as they often do in suburban and thoroughly middle class splendour. Yet here lies a clue to the root of the question. What is it about our modern world that causes citizens to radicalize themselves? Is it that modern iterations of society hold such conflicting and sometimes hypocritical accounts of truth and justice within themselves - say for instance, arguing that all humans are created equal, but implicitly condoning the death of ten Lebanese civilians for every Israeli soldier - that those held deeply within the physical cocoon of western modernity throw over its trappings and apparently empty promises and go for the big prize: heaven, with virgins or no.

Hitchens would decry this view as being "soft on terrorists," and insofar as I try to make it a habit to seek to understand the core motivations of all human actions, he would be right. Hitchens might also claim that Islamist terror has a higher degree of truly pathological - that is, insane - devotees as opposed to other terrorist groups. Here I am not sure I agree. There are no doubt a number of quite certifiable Islamist terrorists at the moment, but surely there are an equal number of certifiable Tamil Tigers, American Christian nationalists, or chihuahua collectors. My point of course is that ideologies (the chihuahuas aside) attract pathologies, and the more ideological one gets, the more likely one is to exhibit the signs of a mental illness.

All this being said, I suppose my opposition to Hitchens on all this comes down to the following: Hitchens claims that some things (namely people and their motivations) have fundamentally changed in the Age of Terror, when they haven't; and he implies that society and its trappings (culture and technology) have not changed, when they have.

To say that people and their psychology, instincts and capacities have fundamentally changed since, thanks to and as the cause of September 11th is both untrue, presumptuous, and astonishingly dangerous: it implies that humans are now more bloodthirsty or more saintly than they were ten, a hundred or a thousand years, which is hogwash of the first order. This kind of thinking sets one on the slippery slope of defining the idea of "human" as a temporal phenomenon, a trend unhelpful in any field other than perhaos evolutionary anthropology. People evolve biologically, but not, sadly, so quickly as all that - to imply otherwise passes the street sign pointing towards horrors with which the world, unfortunately, is all too familiar.

On the other hand, to ignore the evolution of global society and its role as a motivating factor over the past 100, 50 or even 10 years is equally dangerous. It's clear that societies are in some ways greater (or less) than the sum of their parts - so to ignore the fact that a Brazilian fighting against a corrupt dictatorship and a Islamist terrorist acting against the United States are not in entirely analogous situations is, of course, foolish and criminally irresponsible. But there must be an understanding and acceptance of the weight of history when crafting political policy: if this anchor is absent, politics risks floating off into the same ideological hot air that sometimes motivates the Islamists, capitalists, fascists and other ideologues of the world. The Internet has profound social and cultural implications, the threat of terrorist dialogue being one, in my view, of the more prosaic ones - but only a fool, and an ahistorical fool at that, would decide to deal with this problem by invading a tin pot Middle Eastern dictatorship.

If terrorists are motivated these days by some of the same old concerns about nationalisms, lands, freedoms etc (Lebanon? Palestine? Sri Lanka? Aceh?) how then are they (or some of them, at least) fundamentally different from Christopher Hitchens' friends from the good old days, and who is to say that we should not deal with them (some of them, at least) in a similar way? And if terrorists do seem different in their motivations and tactics, what explains it? Surely not biology (though if this really is the explanation, it's another barrel of monkeys entirely). And if not biology, what?

I suspect that our Age of Terror, as William Saletan intelligently noted the other day, is all about a dissolution of boundaries, mental and physical. A young man in Manchester not even of Arab or Muslim heritage can feel as if "his" people are being oppressed on the sands of Iraq, and connect that oppression, however tenuously, with blowing up an American airliner. This brave new world is indeed terrifying - this latest iteration of Marx's assertion that in the modern world "all that is solid melts into air" is destabilizing and upsetting for us, generations brought up in the reasonably stable political chill of the Cold War.

But thawing out doesn't mean we need despair. Because people can still be good like they always could be bad - it's only our technology that sometimes clouds the issue and makes it hard for us to see. Call it condensation, if you like. So I do wish that Christopher Hitchens would nostalge a little less for the good old days, and turn his considerable intellect and formidable talents to bear on the present and its exigencies. Because we're all getting a little hot under the collar, and it will take all honest people, with sharp minds and good hearts, to clear the air.