The Nationalist Solution - NYTimes.com

In considering how to confront religious extremism and the terror it manifests, David Brooks has posed the problem intelligently in his column in today's NYT, The Nationalist Solution - NYTimes.com:

Extremism is a spiritual phenomenon, a desire for loftiness of spirit gone perverse. 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.

I think this is true and important. However Brooks' proposed solution for some of those alienated young men is unconvincing: "a revived Egyptian nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, Syrian nationalism, some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime."

Yes indeed, revived nationalism may fulfill their need for a bold and self-transcending heroic vision. Revived nationalism is what is fueling the reciprocal slaughter in eastern Ukraine, and fueled the 1990s wars in the Balkans. And rather than an antidote to religious extremism, it may be a facilitator. In the chaotic violence in Libya, Syria and other places, nationalist and religious fanaticism tend to be mutually reinforcing. The decapitators of ISIS are fanatics of that new self-proclaimed "state", whether or not they have any clear notion of Islam.

In his The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James gathered evidence from many cultures that a spiritual crisis in mid- to late-adolescence is almost universal, and can be resolved only by what he calls "conversion":  a turning away from the chaotic and contradictory messages that assail every young person to find some "process of unification of the self" which always brings "a characteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift." (p. 163)

Note, "only one of the ways."  James continues: "The new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic demotion." (163-164)

The histories of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran — and almost every other country — offer examples of other sorts of passions, other visions that united people in heroic struggles to construct something rather than destroy it. Mosadegh in Iran led one such movement. And in the Arab countries, Nasser in Egypt another, and the early Ba'ath in Syria, in those years when "Arab nationalism" aimed at modernization and national development, not religious intolerance. If that is the kind of "revived nationalism" Brooks was referring to, I'm afraid it's too late. Those movements were killed by pressure from more powerful nations in the 1950s (Britain principally, in the case of Iran, with more complicated frustrations in the other cases) which is one reason why they have not been repeated.

In any case, a new inspiring vision is not something outsiders can hope to inject. It can only emerge from within the alienated youth's own ideological and social environment, in the languages and symbols most familiar to them. The most we can do, and this is a lot, is rein in the racism and intolerance that beset those youth resident in Europe and widen opportunities — educational and occupational — for them to resolve their struggles of identity, so that fewer of them turn to destruction. And try not to frustrate so blatantly their new projects of construction, which will almost inevitably be opposed to vested economic interests. 

And don't miss this report by Mona el-Naggar, on how a young well-educated Egyptian from a supportive family became an ISIS terrorist — and his friends' thinking that the same could have happened to them. From a Private School in Cairo to ISIS Killing Fields in Syria (With Video) - NYTimes.com