Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust. The cost of these three substitutes for religion was in excess of a hundred million lives. After that, no one who argues that abolishing religion will lead to peace can be taken seriously.
The first two attempts were universalist: a universal religion or a universal culture. The third attempt, the one we have been living through for the past half-century, is the opposite. It is theeffort to eliminate identity by abolishing groups altogether and instead enthroning the individual. The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, postmodernism; and in religion, ‘spirituality’. Its idol is the self, its icon the ‘selfie’, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state. In place of national identities we have global cosmopolitanism. In place of communities we have flash-mobs. We are no longer pilgrims but tourists. We no longer know who we are or why.
No civilisational order like this has ever appeared before, and we can only understand it in the light of the traumatic failure of the three substitutes for religion: nationalism, communism and race. We are now living through the discontents of individualism and have been since the 1970s. Identity has returned. The tribes are back and fighting more fiercely than ever. The old sources of conflict, religion and ethnicity, are claiming new victims. The anti-modern radicals have learned that you can use the products of modernity without going through the process that produced them, namely Westernisation. Meanwhile the energy of the West has been sapped by the decay of the very things religion once energised: marriage, families, communities, a shared moral code, the ability to defer the gratification of instinct, the covenant that linked rich and poor in a bond of mutual responsibility, and a vision of the universe that gave rise to the social virtue of hope.
The tendency of humans to form groups, of which religion is the most effective agent, is a source of violence and war. But the alternative – humanity without groups or identities – is impossible because unbearable. The thinker who saw this most clearly was French sociologist Émile Durkheim. In 1897 he published a remarkable book entitled
Suicide
. Intuitively we think that the choice of ‘to be or not to be’ is the most intensely personal decision of all. It has everything to do with mind and mood, and little to do with the world outside.
Durkheim argued otherwise. He said that in a society undergoing
anomie –
the loss of a shared moral code – more people will commit suicide. We cannot bear the absence of public meanings and collective moral identity. Faced with the prospect, vulnerable individuals will choose death rather than life. Though Durkheim could not have foreseen it, a variant of this is happening in our time. It is the reason why seemingly normal, well-educated and adjusted people with careers and families ahead of them become jihadists and suicide bombers, choosing death rather than life.
Vast research since the events of 11 September 2001 has shown that jihadists and suicide bombers are not for the most part people driven by poverty or social exclusion. They have no recognisable psychological profile. They are not psychopathic, nor are they driven by religious extremism as such. Many of them did not have a religious education. As children, they did not attend madrassahs. Some of them know very little about Islam.
If they are suffering from anything, it is from what they see as the emptiness, meaninglessness, materialism and narcissism of the contemporary West and the corruption of secular regimes in the Islamic world. As Eric Hoffer noted in
The True Believer
(1951) and as Scott Atran has shown in his study of suicide bombers,
Talking to the Enemy
, individuals join radical movements to
The first two attempts were universalist: a universal religion or a universal culture. The third attempt, the one we have been living through for the past half-century, is the opposite. It is theeffort to eliminate identity by abolishing groups altogether and instead enthroning the individual. The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, postmodernism; and in religion, ‘spirituality’. Its idol is the self, its icon the ‘selfie’, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state. In place of national identities we have global cosmopolitanism. In place of communities we have flash-mobs. We are no longer pilgrims but tourists. We no longer know who we are or why.
No civilisational order like this has ever appeared before, and we can only understand it in the light of the traumatic failure of the three substitutes for religion: nationalism, communism and race. We are now living through the discontents of individualism and have been since the 1970s. Identity has returned. The tribes are back and fighting more fiercely than ever. The old sources of conflict, religion and ethnicity, are claiming new victims. The anti-modern radicals have learned that you can use the products of modernity without going through the process that produced them, namely Westernisation. Meanwhile the energy of the West has been sapped by the decay of the very things religion once energised: marriage, families, communities, a shared moral code, the ability to defer the gratification of instinct, the covenant that linked rich and poor in a bond of mutual responsibility, and a vision of the universe that gave rise to the social virtue of hope.
The tendency of humans to form groups, of which religion is the most effective agent, is a source of violence and war. But the alternative – humanity without groups or identities – is impossible because unbearable. The thinker who saw this most clearly was French sociologist Émile Durkheim. In 1897 he published a remarkable book entitled
Suicide
. Intuitively we think that the choice of ‘to be or not to be’ is the most intensely personal decision of all. It has everything to do with mind and mood, and little to do with the world outside.
Durkheim argued otherwise. He said that in a society undergoing
anomie –
the loss of a shared moral code – more people will commit suicide. We cannot bear the absence of public meanings and collective moral identity. Faced with the prospect, vulnerable individuals will choose death rather than life. Though Durkheim could not have foreseen it, a variant of this is happening in our time. It is the reason why seemingly normal, well-educated and adjusted people with careers and families ahead of them become jihadists and suicide bombers, choosing death rather than life.
Vast research since the events of 11 September 2001 has shown that jihadists and suicide bombers are not for the most part people driven by poverty or social exclusion. They have no recognisable psychological profile. They are not psychopathic, nor are they driven by religious extremism as such. Many of them did not have a religious education. As children, they did not attend madrassahs. Some of them know very little about Islam.
If they are suffering from anything, it is from what they see as the emptiness, meaninglessness, materialism and narcissism of the contemporary West and the corruption of secular regimes in the Islamic world. As Eric Hoffer noted in
The True Believer
(1951) and as Scott Atran has shown in his study of suicide bombers,
Talking to the Enemy
, individuals join radical movements to
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