The Surprises of Suicide Terrorism

Discover Magazine ^ | 1/8/04 | Scott Atran

[tpaine]

http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-03/departments/featdialogue/

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[m1911]

So what's your strategy for combating suicide terrorism?
A: I think it has to be a multilayered strategy. You've got to be able to--and this I'm all for--go after the guys who operate the cells. Take them out. Get rid of them. Jail them or kill them, because they are not willing to compromise. What do you do with somebody who says, "All Americans and Jews have got to die"? The point of talking to such people has passed. Whatever the grievances were that caused such people to have such ideas, if they show that they're willing to implement them, then you've just got to make a decision whether you want to see this guy survive or you and your people survive.

[tpaine]

bump

[doug from upland]

Thanks for posting this.

[tpaine]

Exactly.. We have to go after the terrorist leaders.. People like the Saudi heads of state.

Unfortunately, our own 'leaders' don't think highly of such simple solutions..
Because they are afraid of "tit for tat", imo.

[tpaine]

Excerpt continued:



Have you ever met a potential or surviving suicide terrorist?

A: Yes. It's someone whose father was humiliated in front of him when he was sixteen. He was kicked and spit on by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. In an Arab family, the father is a figure of respect and even awe. That was a big factor in this guy's decision. And a cousin was killed. He also had a number of brothers and sisters, so he knew that by going he wouldn't cause the family any great sacrifice. So he decided to be a suicide bomber.

And did he?
A: No. In the end he didn't, because he was sent on a mission to Syria, a political mission, and decided to devote himself to political activity. But I'm sure he would have if he had been asked to. Smart guy. Not many friends, but a few friends. Got along well with his family as far as I could see. I knew him for a number of years.

In your book In Gods We Trust, you call religion an evolutionary riddle. Why?
A: Think about it. All religions require costly sacrifices that have no material rewards. Look at the Egyptian pyramids. Millions of man-hours. For what? To house dead bones? Or the Cambodian pyramids. Or the Mayan pyramids. Or cathedrals. Or just going to church every Sunday and gesticulating. Or saying a Latin or Hebrew prayer, mumbling what are to many people incoherent words. Stopping whatever you're doing to bow and scrape. Then think about the cognitive aspects of it. For example, to take alive for dead and weak for strong. I mean, what creature could possibly survive if it did these kinds of things systematically?

Look at the things that religion is said to do. It is said to relieve people's anxieties, but it's also said to increase their anxieties so that elites can use them for political purposes.
It's supposed to be liberating.
It's supposed to encourage creativity. It's supposed to stop creativity.
It's supposed to explain events that can't be explained.
It's supposed to prevent people from explaining them.
You can find functional explanations, and their contraries, and they're all true.


Why then has religion survived in so many cultures?

A: Because humans are faced with problems they can't solve. Think about death. Because we have these cognitive abilities to travel in time and to track memory, we are automatically aware of death everywhere. That is a cognitive problem. Death is something that our organism tells us to avoid. So now we seek some kind of a long-term solution. And there is none. Lucretius and Epicurus thought they could solve this through reason. They said, "Look, what does it matter? We weren't alive for infinite generations before we were born. It doesn't bother us. Why should we be worried about the infinite generations that will be after us when we're gone?"
Well, nobody bought that. The reason that line of reasoning didn't work is because once you're alive, you've got something that you're going to lose.
Another problem is deception. Look at society. If you've got rocks and stones and pieces of glass and metal before you, and you say, "Oh, that doesn't exist," or "That's not really a piece of metal," or "That's not really a tree," someone will come along and say, "Look, you're crazy; I can touch it; there's a piece of metal there; I can show you it's a piece of metal." For commonsense physical events, we have ways of verifying what's real or not.
For moral judgments, we have nothing. If someone says, "Oh, he should be a beggar and he should be a king," what is there in the world that's going to convince me this is true? There is nothing. If there is nothing, how are people ever going to get on with one another?
Especially non-kin. How are they ever going to build societies, and how are they ever going to trust one another so they won't defect? One way that humans seem to have come up with is to invent this minimally counterintuitive world developed by these deities, who are like big brothers who watch over and make sure that there will be no defectors.


Do you think science will ever replace religion?

A: Never. Because it doesn't solve any of the problems that religion solves, like death or deception. There is no society that survives more than a generation or two that isn't religiously based--even the Soviet Union, where half the people were religious.
Thomas Jefferson's unitarian God fell by the wayside. The French Revolution's neutral deity also fell by the wayside. People want a personal God, for obvious reasons, to solve personal problems.


What have you learned about conservation from studying the Maya people of the Petén?

A: We took three groups that live in the same place--native lowland Maya, the Itza'; highland Maya, the Q'eqchi' that are forced down into the lowlands; and ladino immigrants that come up from all over Guatemala. We found that the group that actually preserves the forest, the Itza', is the one that has no institutions to speak of. The people don't monitor anything. They fight with one another constantly. They're extremely individualistic.
And yet they protect the forest. The people with the strongest communal institutions, the Q'eqchi', who monitor one another in the forest and punish violators, they're destroying it at five times the rate of the others.
They see the forest as a commodity, and they think it's open-ended. They don't think it needs protection. They don't see it as a threatened system. For them, it's relatively open jungle.

What do the Itza' do differently?

A: They don't treat the forest as a commodity. They treat it as a relational item, like a friend or an enemy.
There is no objective utility metric, like money value, that can be attached to it. We also found that the men who go out into the forest have this notion of what the spirits are doing, and they are scared to death of violating the spirit preference. They're real believers. Then we found that what the spirits prefer--not what the people think is important but what they think the spirits think is important--actually predicts species distributions.


What do you mean?

A: Those trees most valued by the spirits--the Brosimum alicastrum, or "breadnut," and the chicazapote, the tree that yields the resin that is the natural base for chewing gum--are actually those trees with the widest distribution, which produce fruit all year round and which have the largest number of ecological relations with other animals. We're able to predict, just on the basis of the Itza' spirit preferences, all sorts of ecological things happening on the ground. What I think is going on is that these spirits represent human preferences built up over generations.


What lessons can we take away from this?

A: Don't treat everything in the world like an item in a shopping mall—which is what we do.



Atran, Scott. "Genesis of Suicide Terrorism." Science 299 (March 7, 2003): 1534-1539.

Supporting online material is at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/299/5612/1534/DC

[tpaine]

My pleasure..
I'm surprised you liked it.. We seemed to have been in separate camps lately on most issues..

Perhaps the K Curry syndrome is infectious?

[jolie560]

..."It's supposed to explain events that can't be explained. It's supposed to prevent people from explaining them."...

That's the best description of Religion that I have ever read.

[tpaine]

In your book In Gods We Trust, you call religion an evolutionary riddle. Why?

A: Think about it. All religions require costly sacrifices that have no material rewards.

Look at the Egyptian pyramids. Millions of man-hours. For what? To house dead bones? Or the Cambodian pyramids. Or the Mayan pyramids. Or cathedrals.
Or just going to church every Sunday and gesticulating. Or saying a Latin or Hebrew prayer, mumbling what are to many people incoherent words. Stopping whatever you're doing to bow and scrape.


Then think about the cognitive aspects of it. For example, to take alive for dead and weak for strong. I mean, what creature could possibly survive if it did these kinds of things systematically?


Look at the things that religion is said to do.
It is said to relieve people's anxieties, but it's also said to increase their anxieties so that elites can use them for political purposes.
It's supposed to be liberating.
It's supposed to encourage creativity. It's supposed to stop creativity.
It's supposed to explain events that can't be explained.
It's supposed to prevent people from explaining them.

You can find functional explanations, and their contraries, and they're all true.


Why then has religion survived in so many cultures?
A: Because humans are faced with problems they can't solve.

---

The man sure has a way with words, and a keen insight..

Anyone read his book, - "In Gods We Trust'- ?

[citizenK]

Good article. Atran throws criticism at the Bush administration (perhaps justifiably), but does not appear to take aim at the promoters of the "root cause" discourse that dominate the academic world.

I agree with Atran that the terrorist leaders need to be disposed of - either in jail or at the point of the knife as it were. I also agree that the masses of discontented people who tacitly support terrorism in the Mideast need to have a venue and means of exercising their political will. However, while I can see how the Arabs would come to hate the Israelis, there is a disconnect where the US is implicated in the plight of the unwashed masses in the Middle East. We don't prevent people in these countries from expressing or exercising their political will - that suppression comes from within their own societies. The problem is that addressing their grievances will not work so long as terrorist enablers like the Wahhabbis continue to use xenophobic propaganda to further their agendas. Atran doesn't explicitly address what we should do with the terrorist enablers - but I reckon they deserve the same as the terrorist leaders.

[doug from upland]

This is my business so I try to read everything I can.

[jolie560]

In my college years, in 1964-1968, "Anthropology" was a subject taken by sports-jocks who needed to keep up a "C" average so they could remain eligible to play.

[doug from upland]

President Bush understands. I liked this the best ---

So what's your strategy for combating suicide terrorism?
A: I think it has to be a multilayered strategy. You've got to be able to--and this I'm all for--go after the guys who operate the cells. Take them out. Get rid of them. Jail them or kill them, because they are not willing to compromise. What do you do with somebody who says, "All Americans and Jews have got to die"? The point of talking to such people has passed. Whatever the grievances were that caused such people to have such ideas, if they show that they're willing to implement them, then you've just got to make a decision whether you want to see this guy survive or you and your people survive.

[tpaine]

Atran doesn't explicitly address what we should do with the terrorist enablers - but I reckon they deserve the same as the terrorist leaders.
11 -citizenK-

______________________________________

doug from upland wrote: President Bush understands. I liked this the best ---

"So what's your strategy for combating suicide terrorism?"

A: "I think it has to be a multilayered strategy. You've got to be able to--and this I'm all for--go after the guys who operate the cells. Take them out. Get rid of them. Jail them or kill them, because they are not willing to compromise."

---

I think we could safely assume Atran would include 'enablers' in his kill em all scenario..
And to my way of thinking the bigger the enabler, the faster we end this overhyped war on terror BS..

Kill all the radical muslim big shots, and their followers hearts & minds will suddenly learn to like peace.

[doug from upland]

Sorry, we disagree on the War on Terror. It is not overhyped. Look around the world and see what radical Islamists are doing.

[YankeeinOkieville]

thought provoking article. thank you for posting it. gonna go think now.

[Straight Vermonter]

Bump for home bookmarking

[tpaine]

doug from upland wrote: Sorry, we disagree on the War on Terror. It is not overhyped. Look around the world and see what radical Islamists are doing.

---

What the radicals are doing deserves death.
Our leaders homeland security measures are being overhyped [by both parties] for political advantage, imo.
The socialistic state is winning.

[doug from upland]

Security is our business. The head of our company has 32 years of experience dealing with terrorists around the world. He is very worrie that going to a lower alert will lower our guard. It is the perfect time for the terrorists to strike.