Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists Read Online Free PDF

think, feel, and behave. These are tales and studies in the wild about how and why people come naturally to die and kill for the Cause—people almost never kill and die just for the Cause, but also for each other: for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers—their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland, totem, or tribe.

A SOCIAL CREATURE, EVEN “I”
     
It’s only in the last few years that my thinking has deeply changed on what drives major differences, such as willingness to die and kill for a cause, between animal and human behavior. I once thought that individual cognition and personal aptitudes, together with the influence of broad socioeconomic factors like markets, media, and means of production, determined most human behavior. Now I see that friendship and other aspects of small-group dynamics, such as raising families or playing on a team together, trump most everything else in moving people through life. But I also see religion, and quasi-religious nationalist or internationalist devotion such as patriotism and love of humanity, as framing and mobilizing that movement with purpose and direction.
This change of mind was a long time coming. American culture, as most people who travel know, is exceptionally individualistic in one sense, but also inordinately fond of groups, at least in competition: in sports, in business, and even in the scholarly academy. Personally, I’m not comfortable with collective movements or fashions of any sort. I don’t like crowds, parades, political rallies, or spectator sports (except when my children are involved), and I’m even uncomfortable when people talk about winning or working as a team. Maybe that part of my social brain is just missing, like my memory for lyrics.
Whenever I would see military marches, I’d think that members of our species didn’t deserve their big brains, which waste so much cognitive power on the mindless refinement of swarming and herding. “Is that what it is to be human?” I’d wonder. “Regimented apes with guns?” At Columbia College in New York City at the end of the 1960s, the campus and the society around were feverish with social movement. I was keen on revolution then—we had a committee with professors, students, and cafeteria workers all set to change the world, Mao-style—and I was more than happy to raise my hand in favor of banning fraternities and ROTC (a college elective that focuses on military knowledge and preparation and that is unfortunately still banned at Columbia). 9 But I couldn’t get into the shrill swing of demonstrations against capitalists (mostly parents and other people with money) and pigs (police), or any of the crazy collective actions to promote “worker-student solidarity.” It wasn’t that I realized that skill with a skillet didn’t qualify someone to pass judgment on how quantum mechanics or the Iliad should be taught. I just didn’t like being a groupie.
But I think I’ve come to understand that without groups, and without sincere love of them by some, our species probably wouldn’t have survived. Neither would civilizations and their achievements have come about, for better or worse. A person alone can analyze history but can’t make it without others.
Two lines of evidence, which converge in this book, convinced me of the importance of group dynamics in determining personal identity and behavior. The first comes from my own fieldwork and psychological studies with a certain sector of mujahedin, or Muslim holy warriors, and their supporters—particularly suicide bombers, their friends and families. The second line of evidence that people are preeminently social actors rather than individual performers comes from my reading of evolutionary biology and human history.
Where do these two lines of evidence come together? In the fact that jihad fights with the most primitive and elementary forms of human cooperation, tribal kinship and friendship, in the