Denying the Political Dimensions of Fear (Book Notes: Fear)

That fear is used for political purposes is undeniable - throughout history political and religious leaders have encouraged fear in people in order to garner their support for particular agendas. More interesting, though, is how fear can be used for political ends while denying that the causes of fear are themselves political in nature.

In Fear: The History of a Political Idea, Corey Robin writes:

At the same time that many writers and leaders see opportunity in the fear of political dangers, they insist upon viewing those dangers as not political, as having little to do with the issues and controversies that animate political discussion and action. Consider again the response of American commentators to 9/11. While many embraced the day’s politically galvanizing fear, they argued that the terrorism that aroused it did not arise from political concerns. It was not the hijackers’ hostility to U.S. power, for instance, that piloted three planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Nor was it anger at America’s patronage of Israel or sponsorship of despotic regimes in the Middle East.

The 9/11 terrorists, many claimed, were simply not interested in politics. “Their grievance,” explained Thomas Friedman, “is rooted in psychology, not politics.” For some commentators, terrorism was fueled by an anxiety over modernity, by the march of secularism and other Western values, which threatened the Muslim world’s fragile sense of identity. This anxiety had nothing to do with power, resources, or policy. It had everything to do with cultural uneasiness. People in the grip of such anxiety, the argument goes, are ripe for the totalizing thinking of Islamic radicalism, where Allah serves as a substitute for a lost sense of authority, the terrorist cell a replacement for a ruined solidarity.

For other observers, the psychology of terrorism was less cultural than personal. To understand what drove Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, analysts recommended that we look to “the raw ingredients of his personality.” Much was made of the fact that Atta sat on his mother’s lap until well after he had begun college. Atta’s father complained that his wife raised their only son as a girl, and frequently told young Mohamed, “Toughen up, boy.” Atta stayed away from women — right unto his death. (His will left strict instructions that none should attend his funeral.) He lived in a pink house. Though Atta’s friends claimed he was incensed by U.S. support for Egypt’s repressive government, the Gulf War, and the Oslo peace accords, the implication of these press reports was clear: Atta and his co-conspirators suffered from a troubled masculinity; 9/11 was the action of sexually ambiguous boys trying to prove that they were men.

It is implausible that none of these factors have played any role in the ideology of Islamic extremists; it is just as implausible, however, that they alone are sufficient to explain that ideology. Pretending that they do serves the political purposes of their opponents, though. Encouraging fear of Islamic extremists and Islamic terrorists helps increase support for the political and military actions taken against them; denying that the extremists’ ideology has a political dimension, though, allows their opponents to avoid engaging in political debates over what to do about them.

You see, if a group has a political grievance and a political agenda, then it is possible — at least in theory — to arrive at a political solution. That’s why politics has been called the “art of the possible.” Political solutions and compromises are often unpleasant, but they are what politics is all about. If some sort of political accommodation is possible with the Islamists, then more radical measures (like war) must be justified — and the standards for such a justification will likely be strict.

If, however, the cause of Islamic extremism are not political and if the motives of Islamic extremists are not political, then there is little or no reason to think that any sort of political solution is possible. At this point, extreme measures like war hardly need to be justified because an “us vs. them,” all-or-nothing perspective is adopted almost by default. In this way, the fear of extremists is used for political ends without permitting political debate about the nature of the supposed threat or the responses being employed.

By insisting that Islamic fundamentalism was the existential anxiety of modernity, writers ensured that, intellectually speaking, no political or diplomatic response would be envisioned to it. According to them, modernity was an irreversible process, and anxiety its inevitable result. The best way to subdue modernity’s discontent, especially its murderous veins, was to kill it.

A permanent war against terror would thus convert domestic anxiety into bracing fear; remake liberalism, which had seen such hard times since the 1960s, as a fighting faith; restore to a fraying society its sense of collective and individual purpose; unite conservatives and liberals behind a worldwide crusade for the Enlightenment.

It’s ironic that the reaction to discontent over modernity should adopt such violent measures because America itself is host to such discontent in the form of the Christian Right. Almost every point of critique which Islamic extremists make about the “godless West” are also made by the Christian Right about “godless liberalism.”

The Christian Right isn’t as violent as Islamic extremists, it is true, but that’s not the point here. The point is, if the modernity’s discontent is psychological rather than political, and thus no political compromise is conceivable, then this must be true if the “discontent” comes from Christian sources as well as from Islamic sources. Thus, no political compromise is possible with the Christian Right — it’s inconceivable to that America should give in to the demands on matters of liberty, equality, and personal autonomy. More than that, the only possible response is to kill this discontent — eliminate the Christian Right so that it never has the chance to become a violent threat like the Islamic Right has become.

You won’t see such suggestions from the American government, though, and it’s not just because that government is beholden to the Christian Right. No, it’s also because the American government doesn’t truly believe all of this rhetoric in the first place. The rhetoric of fear is used to justify military action against Islamists while fending off political debates about wisdom of such actions. Liberals and conservatives, members of the Christian Right as well as the Christian Left, all came behind this ideology because it promised to help unite them all against a common, outside enemy. The fact that the ideology was false and not adhered to consistently by anyone never mattered — all that mattered was its domestic effect of superficial unity.

 

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