David Brooks discusses how ISIS makes radicals without mentioning religion once

December 9, 2015 • 11:00 am

While I’m bashing the New York Times today, let me add this beef.

It amazes me how people can discuss the origins of ISIS-like brutality, and even allude to the influence of the “potent doctrine” that fuels and channels it, without mentioning religion itself. It’s part of the same mentality that makes Obama shy away from mentioning Islam as an influence on terrorism, or grudgingly recognize it by saying that ISIS is a “perversion of Islam.” The whole object is to avoid saying anything bad about any religion. To that my response is this: “If you say that religion can inspire good acts, why are you so reluctant to say that it can inspire bad ones?”

David Brooks is one of the stable of New York Times op-ed writers who refuses to mention the I- and M-words when discussing ISIS. In his new column “How ISIS makes radicals” (curiously, the original title was “How radicals are made”), Brooks manages to discuss the origins of violent Islamism while alluding to religion as a contributing factor, but avoiding all mention of religion except for one sentence in his thesis:

But the crucial issue, it seems to me, is what you might call the technology of persuasion — how is it that the Islamic State is able to radicalize a couple living in Redlands, Calif.?

Yes, the only mention of religion is the name “Islamic State.”

Brooks’s analysis of its origins draws heavily on Eric Hoffer’s famous book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, which I read in college. Brooks’s response is in fact Hoffer’s thesis: that mass movements are often a response to a dysfunctional society that impels disaffected youth to turn to a greater cause. But at least Brooks recognizes that ISIS and similar movements aren’t just the result of Western oppression, and in general what he says is sensible. Here are some excerpts (my emphasis):

. . . The purpose of an organization like ISIS is to get people to negate themselves for a larger cause.

Mass movements, [Hoffer] argues, only arise in certain conditions, when a once sturdy social structure is in a state of decay or disintegration. This is a pretty good description of parts of the Arab world. To a lesser degree it is a good description of isolated pockets of our own segmenting, individualized society, where some people find themselves totally cut off. [JAC: note that, as I’ve discussed often, increased religiosity is recognized by sociologists as a ubiquitous response to social dysfunction.]

The people who serve mass movements are not revolting against oppression. They are driven primarily by frustration. Their personal ambitions are unfulfilled. They have lost faith in their own abilities to realize their dreams. They sometimes live with an unrelieved boredom. Freedom aggravates their sense of frustration because they have no one to blame but themselves for their perceived mediocrity. Fanatics, the French philosopher Ernest Renan argued, fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

And here’s where religion begins to creep in, at least as I see it:

The successful mass movement tells such people that the cause of their frustration is outside themselves, and that the only way to alter their personal situation is to transform the world in some radical way.

To nurture this self-sacrificing attitude, the successful mass movement first denigrates the present. Its doctrine celebrates a glorious past and describes a utopian future, but the present is just an uninspiring pit. The golden future begins to seem more vivid and real than the present, and in this way the true believer begins to dissociate herself from the everyday facts of her life. . .

. . . Next mass movements denigrate the individual self. Everything that is unique about an individual is either criticized, forbidden or diminished. The individual’s identity is defined by the collective group identity, and fortified by a cultivated hatred for other groups.

What better way to take advantage of these disaffected youth than to lure them with the golden promise of religion, perhaps even a Caliphate? That is a cause far beyond oneself.  And here Brooks ventures solidly onto religious ground, but still refuses to recognize the territory:

These movements generate a lot of hatred. But ultimately, Hoffer argues, they are driven by a wild hope. They believe an imminent perfect future can be realized if they proceed recklessly to destroy the present. The glorious end times are just around the corner.

Glorious end times? Could that possibly be the Final Showdown Against Unbelievers that, says ISIS, will occur in the Middle East when the expanding Caliphate provokes the West?

And then Brooks quotes Hoffer in service of this thesis:

Hoffer summarizes his thought this way, “For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”

Well, what is that “potent doctrine” but Islam? Who is the “infallible leader “but Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (channeling Muhammed)? What is the “prospect of the future” except the Caliphate?

At the end Brooks suggests the way to get rid of ISIS is to ameliorate the social dysfunction of its adherents, defeat them militarily, and “offer positive inspiring causes to replace the suicidal ones.” That sounds good, though it’s a long row to hoe. But how can we replace the “suicidal cause” unless we recognize what it is? Surely the prospect of Paradise is in there somewhere.

I’m not sure any of the NYT op-ed writers, including conservatives like Douthat, have ever explicitly mentioned that Islamic doctrine is a prime motivating force for ISIS. What a breath of fresh air it would be to see that said out loud!

62 thoughts on “David Brooks discusses how ISIS makes radicals without mentioning religion once”

  2. Violence is a communicable disease and it can be dealt with in the same way we’ve broken infectious diseases from AIDS to Ebola:

    “Cure Violence stops the spread of violence in communities by using the methods and strategies associated with disease control – detecting and interrupting conflicts, identifying and treating the highest risk individuals, and changing social norms.”
    http://cureviolence.org/

    Motive, Means, and Opportunity. Brooks, with his endlessly smarming appeal to some “objective” morality, doesn’t get this, but I hope others will.

  3. There is a political reason as to why members of the so-called intellectual elite (such as Brooks) and many politicians refuse to explicitly name Islam as a source of terrorism. These people, of course, are opposed by people generally on the far right, such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who will say anything, no matter how incendiary. People such as Brooks and Obama do not explicitly name Islam as one important ingredient in the mix that results in the creation of terrorists is that they fear that by naming the religion, thereby criticizing it, the effect will be to create more terrorists than otherwise. They operate on the theory that when a person’s core beliefs are criticized that person will become more defensive and hate the people who make such observations,thus creating the groundwork for that person to be radicalized. Thus, the elite believe not naming Islam will reduce the creation of terrorists, in the United States and abroad. This policy is intellectually dishonest, but it may be effective. I don’t think anyone can know for sure.

    2. It’s a “little people” argument. It insults the audience because it assumes they cannot distinguish the meaning of “radical Islam” from “Muslims.”

      1. Be that as it may, sometimes the little people argument holds true for large swaths of the population.

    3. I don’t think it is effective. Whoever thinks it is, I’d suggest him to check it by applying it to other extremists such as neo-Nazi groups and the KKK. Don’t ever criticize their core beliefs! Good luck!

    4. I’ll bet it’s effective and think it does more than prevent the creation of more terrorists; it prevents a religious war from starting, what the terrorists want. I’d like to see the blame placed on Religion generally (instead of Islam specifically), but think even that may be too inflammatory.

      It is frustrating to see liberals not getting that Islam is a big factor, but I suspect that some people, like President Obama, understand it but carefully avoid blaming Islam because it would be tactically foolish.

  4. At the end Brooks suggests the way to get rid of ISIS is to ameliorate the social dysfunction of its adherents, defeat them militarily, and “offer positive inspiring causes to replace the suicidal ones.” That sounds good, though it’s a long row to hoe.

    I am somewhat cynical about this working. The less vocal majority of the population might be very happy to get a functional market economy, civil rights and personal liberties, reduced corruption, representative government, and so on. But Brooks is talking specifically about the young men who make up the backbone of ISIS’ fighting forces, the ‘disillusioned youth’ who join the movement. And I don’t think the issue with that group is necessarily that they just want a fair shake to get a job and make their own success. In some cases I think they choose dysfunctional societal structures over functional ones…so long as the dysfunctions favor angry young men and give them power over others.

    1. I’m not sure the patented liberal stance of always looking for “root causes” and trying to ameliorate them has shown much success over the years. (Though I guess I still hold a certain amount of belief in that stance myself…)

      1. I would agree. It smells vaguely like the whole domino or silver bullet idea – look hard enough for this one important factor, and you can fix some enormous problem with a small, precise, effort.

        In reality most fights – physical, ideological, etc. – are fights of attrition. They are long, they are arduous, they are expensive, and there is simply no magic bullet solution that will allow a quick and decisive win. Humans are not bees or a Star Wars droid army, where you find and destroy the queen/control ship and the entire enemy force stops fighting. Eliminate some force’s important person or resource, we individually just keep fighting. IMO there’s no magic bullet solution to ISIS’s ground control, it’s going to be a fight of attrition. And there’s no magic bullet solution to their ideology, or its attractiveness to some portion of the population, either.

    1. Certainly so. Saudi has financed the sunni in the wars while Iran has done the same for the shia since way before any of this. One would think that it might be clear that sunni/shea religious differences are a main component of everything going on.

      When the Shea took control in Iraq they immediately began to suppress the Sunni. We saw this happening but we were just packing up and getting out. Just pretend it isn’t happening and maybe it will go away. That was our strategy there. Not a good one.

    2. Scary stuff. But it would be awfully difficult for Brooks to mention that while still desperately avoiding the words “Islam” and “Muslim.”

  6. It would be interesting to know if Brooks, who often works on public TV, would watch a show such as Frontline that happened to air a show last night called the Rise of ISIS. It did not look extremely complicated to me and it was very much about religion as well as our own ignorant involvement in Iraq.

    One additional thing is very clear and that would be that defeat militarily might be possible, although extremely costly, it does not fix anything and yet another version of the same will continue.

    It just might be possible that the two main divisions of Islam cannot live together and therefore, only separation holds any hope for them in the future. I am not an expert in this but just smart enough to know it was never our fight to begin with until we jumped in.

    1. From watching the documentary I have the feeling that the divide between sunni and shia will be a source of violence forever.

      It will be so hard if not impossible to restore order in the region.

      2. Unless the calls of Hirsi Ali and others for an Islamic Reformation somehow gain traction.

  7. Of course, any comprehensive analysis of unmitigated faith opens the door for exposing the stentorian bravado inherent in all manifestations of faith. It’s a necessary global conversation that can only lead to one intellectually honest conclusion, but one that humanity is not mature enough to handle.

  8. This ‘disaffected youth’ argument is pretty annoying, though it’s apparently part of the official administration narrative (I kind of feel sorry for Marie Harf, who actually had to suggest on national television that ‘lack of jobs’ was part of what was driving ISIS)

    With the failure of Marxism as the revolutionary cause celebre, Islam (which has ALWAYS been violent) has moved in to the spotlight. And they offer more, because when you’re on a mission from God, you can do no wrong.

  10. Well, we can see some progress here. At least Brooks isn’t blaming the West. Social dysfunction is his new culprit and while the West undoubtedly had a hand in that regrettable history, the dysfunction we see today is caused by a lot more than arbitrary borders.
    At some point then, he might begin to summon the courage to mention the “I” word. That would pave the way for a clear statement of what the West is unwilling to part with to affect assimilation of immigrants.

  11. “It just might be possible that the two main divisions of Islam cannot live together and therefore, only separation holds any hope for them in the future.”

    I often hear people on the left blaming Western powers for having drawn the borders in the Middle East with little to no regard for ethnic and cultural divides of the people inhabiting the lands, but the argument strikes me as hypocritical in the mouths of supposed champions of multiculturalism.

    Are they implying that people in the Middle East can’t live in multi-cultural societies?

      1. I would agree. And why if it looked so clearly that way with the break up of Yugoslavia, could they not accept it with Iraq.

        We have the Palestinian and Jewish problem. The North Ireland and we can go on. I don’t care about hypocrisy, only reality. The Sunni, Shia and Kurds do not appear to like being next to each other…I just want to move on.

      2. I just find it strange that the advocates of multiculturalism can still blame the West for creating multiculti countries in the Middle East.

  12. Who was it who said -‘people lead lives of quiet desperation’?
    Saw a movie once where a young woman orphaned and put in a nunnery-emerged from the nunnery fell in love and then asked her lover ‘what happens next?’ He said ‘we get married, have kids, maybe a dog’ She went back to the nunnery. I think impressionable people buy into the sense of absolute meaning or truth conveyed by jihad or other movements and by contrast making a decent/or not so decent living in maybe not so friendly a society seems empty and pointless. Plus the sense that one’s own culture is despised, invaded and taken over can give rise to a lot of anger.

    1. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’–Thoreau. But just how he knew this I’ve never understood, since he mostly went on long walks where no other humans were or sat on his ass in his hut at Walden and didn’t welcome visitors.

    2. He said ‘we get married, have kids, maybe a dog’ She went back to the nunnery.

      Was it the dog thing that did it?

      1. Hah, possibly.Tho’ to me the dog thing is possibly the most attractive. Not to belabour the point too much.maybe, well she had gone thru a lot of nasty stuff and kind of the sense that the only alternative to nastiness was dumb conventionality. So she did not have a footing properly in the society-being an immigrant myself I understand that feeling of groundlessness. Which of course can be a source of freedom and creativity-but if the culture you land in is prejudiced against you can, alternatively,be turned into a lot of anger. She was very young and maybe she found a broader viewpoint later.The movie was a little grim and preachy.

  13. Used to be I had a high toleration, even a flicker of affection, for David Brooks, what with his self-styled “center-right” politics being so much more center than right. Plus, what a nebbish — the grown-up version of the kid who brings the bats and balls and gloves to the playground, but still gets picked last for the team. The milquetoast you couldn’t imagine ever getting pissed enough to curse up a blue streak. (I’ve heard that Brooks really does get angry — but that the only way to tell is he blinks even more than usual).

    That worm turned for me with Brooks a while ago. But what really sealed the deal were his godawful, flat-out dumb and narrow-minded “I’m not Charlie Hebdo” pieces. That, and the way he constantly blinks reality by pretending the GOP hasn’t gone bat-shit crazy, that it’s only wandered a bit off course to starboard, that (even now as he’s writing this insipid column) the party is finding its way home to its in situ roots on the center-right of the political spectrum — that, when you get right down to it, the whole goddamned menagerie of Republican kooks, once you get ’em cleaned up and quieted down, looks and sounds just like him, Mr. David Brooks.

    Screw him and his namby-pamby, excuse-making, solipsistic bullshit.

    1. I share your evaluation. I find him very annoying for those very reasons. I do, however, look forward to his appearances with Mark Shields on the Newshour. He is a good foil for Shields and brings out the arguments rather well sometimes.

      1. He is one of those guys who looks and sounds like he knows what it’s about but please go back and look at his cheer leading articles on the Bush War in Iraq back in the beginning. He was 100 percent behind it and simply could not say enough about how right it was. Then, as things started to go south he began slowly changing his tune and pretty soon it was just embarrassing.

        History professor and X Military man from the Vietnam days (Andrew Bacevich) has made dog meat out of Brooks.

          1. Yes, I’m pretty sure that Brooks is a catholic but oddly enough so is Bacevich. Brooks is the Pundit and that means, an expert on whatever he is talking about. Trouble is, his stock and trade is politics and Bacevich is anything but. War is Bacevich’s specialty. He will never reach the bottom of pundit land where the William Kristols live but bad enough.

          2. Brooks is ethnically Jewish. I don’t know what religion he practices (if any). But you’re right, he does feel vaguely Christian (possibly even Catholic, but — like everything else about him — of a watered-down, tepid sort).

  14. If people are routinely told that the material world is inadequate, that anything other than what is perfect and/or eternal is meaningless, and that the only true measurement of what is worthwhile involves rejecting all that’s not ‘spiritual,’ then the resulting internal angst and dissatisfaction with life has been created. It’s not an inherent aspect of human nature.

    I am sick and tired of hearing people decrying “fanaticism” out of one side of their mouth while promoting faith out of the other side. God and Spirituality are the deeper answers to the Big Questions. Those who fail to perceive that, or agree with it, are supposed to be shallow, truncated individuals with shriveled souls which miss the entire point of existence — and who wants that? Religion thus cuts you and then gives you the band-aid — creates a problem to provide the solution: live for God, not yourself.

    But living for God isn’t that far away from dying for God, and dying for God isn’t that far away from killing for God. It all hinges on the dangerous idea that the world is well lost for the ultimate cause. Not a flimsy utopia on earth put together by flawed human beings, but taking part in that which was Meant to Be from the beginning, guided by a Higher Power which humbles you — and then conquers death and sets everything the way it ought to be. Have faith;believe; ignore the reasons of those who have not cowed themselves before the Mighty Ideal.

    I don’t know what to do about ISIS, religious fanaticism, and violence. But I really do think that the common warm acceptance of creating a “place for God” by denigrating both the rational mind and the way we live here on earth is contributing to the problem. Whenever they trot out all the reasons it’s a bad thing to be an atheist, they’re justifying more than the existence of God. They’re creating a different standard of good and evil — one which bypasses humanism and philosophical ethics and goes right into a narrative of war.

    1. A resounding post, Sastra, and I thank you for it (and for many, many others–for which I should have thanked you earlier). This one put me in mind of a line from Steely Dan’s ‘Only a Fool Would Say That’: ‘If he’s holding it high/ He’s telling a lie.’

  15. Brooks has the mindset of a 4.5 year old. Trapped in a world constructed by himself to serve some purpose that somehow maintains validity for himself.

    The virtue he is following is some fairytale: “Let’s all sing along the praises of harmony.” I am against discord as much as he is, but Brooks is deluded and blind.

    There are many things that need fixing, but religion is the most important.

  17. “For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”

    Sounds like the Trump playbook to me.

      1. Sounds like Mark quoting Coyne quoting Brooks quoting Hoffer, about those who sound like they could be part of Trump’s electoral base. 🙂

  18. I’ve been participating in a book discussion club at the Episcopal church a few blocks from me discussing David Brooks’ “The Road to Character” which I find a remarkable combination of some good material and some platitudinous silliness.

    Brooks’ sections an Bayard Rustin and George Eliot are fairly good (but not great) but in the chapter on Saint Augustine, Brooks has just drunk the conservative Christian Kool-Aid. Augustine IMO brought out the worst in Western Christianity and imposed his hangups and neuroses on much of the Middle Ages.

    (I’ve been the only non-believer in the group and have been biting my tongue.)

  19. Prof Coyne wrote: “It’s part of the same mentality that makes Obama shy away from mentioning Islam as an influence on terrorism, or grudgingly recognize it by saying that ISIS is a “perversion of Islam.”

    I don’t have a particular problem with Obama publicly referring to ISIS as using a “perversion of Islam.”

    I mean, it’s easy for us here on web sites, bl#gs, comments sections etc to just let it rip, say exactly what we think. It’s entirely another when you are in a position like the US President, balancing various interests, with any misstep potentially causing huge repercussions.

    Obama has to balance the fact that there is a dangerous faction of Muslims, while recognizing, protecting (from bigotry etc) the HUGE proportion that are peaceful.We can see from the example of Trump just how readily many people are ready to fall into bigoted intuitions about Muslims, so ready to take comments about the behavior of a subset of Muslims and assume the motivations of most or all Muslims.

    Saying ISIS is a perversion of Islam simultaneously acknowledges the religious motivations of ISIS, while nodding some solidarity to peaceful Muslims. It’s not like he is in the position to offer a dissertation on the Koran and Islam to the American Public. And, yes, we here tend to take the position that there remain troubling aspects of Islam even throughout the broad range of Muslim belief. But the President isn’t going to reform Islam. The best he can do is encourage the peaceful version. Which is generally what he’s doing in supporting the Muslims who take a peaceful interpretation.

    After all, isn’t that what many of us atheists are already doing as well? We acknowledge that in a perfect world, Islam would be devoid of any dubious beliefs. But in the real world, it’s reasonable to encourage the reformers within Islam. Just as Sam Harris concedes in his partnership with Maajid Nawaz and other reformers.

    So, again, given the interests Obama has to balance, and the cohesion he wants to ensure (that is, not help inflame the problem of bigotry towards Muslims at this delicate time), I can sympathize with his choice of words.

    1. If you want to give the pres. a pass on the wording, so be it. But I suspect his tip-toe dance around the proper wording, Islamic Terrorists is also due to not fulling understanding the problems he, as commander, faced over there.

      In fact, he wanted out of the Iraq thing and his getting out became a big part of the problem. Yet, at the same time he wanted all in Afghanistan. Both of these decisions were his to make and they turned out bad. I do have the luxury of hindsight on both of these but the surge in Afghanistan looked wrong at the time and letting the Shia government ignore and go after the Sunni was very bad and we can’t hang that on Bush.

    2. David Cameron certainly is not unwilling to name names. In a recent speech he called Briton a liberal society (even though he’s not of the liberal party) which needs to defend its way of life. I grabbed a few juicy lines from the speech linked by Bill Maher on FB:

      “[S]imply denying any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremists doesn’t work, because these extremists are self-identifying as Muslims. The fact is from Woolwich to Tunisia, from Ottawa to Bali, these murderers all spout the same twisted narrative, one that claims to be based on a particular faith.
      Now it is an exercise in futility to deny that. And more than that, it can be dangerous. To deny it has anything to do with Islam means you disempower the critical reforming voices; the voices that are challenging the fusing of religion and politics; the voices that want to challenge the scriptural basis which extremists claim to be acting on; the voices that are crucial in providing an alternative worldview that could stop a teenager’s slide along the spectrum of extremism.”

      1. A serious error Cameron makes, however, is where he says: “voices that want to challenge the scriptural basis which extremists claim to be acting on”
        This is a bit ambiguous and is not acknowledging that the extremists use of scripture is strictly correct. I would have preferred different wording.

    3. Well said, Vaal, that’s just how I see it too.

      And certainly there are American voices (such as ours here!) taking a stronger stance on the matter by calling out Islamic fundamentalism and bringing forward the violent heart of Islamic scripture as it’s being interpreted by many Muslims now.

    4. It’s not like he is in the position to offer a dissertation on the Koran and Islam to the American Public.

      But that’s exactly why he shouldn’t be saying things like “perversion of Islam” or “nothing to do with Islam” (which, to his credit, he didn’t say in his speech). Those kinds of statements imply that he’s informed enough to be taking a theological position on the matter–or that it’s relevant for him, as President of the United States, to be taking a position in the first place about what is or isn’t true Islam.

      What he has to do is make clear that most Muslims don’t support ISIS, that Muslims are ISIS’s primary victims, that Muslims are essential allies in the fight against ISIS, that bigotry and discrimination against Muslims is unacceptable, and that we have to do everything we can to not alienate those Muslims who share our values. He can say all of those things without having to comment about what is or isn’t “true” Islam. “Perversion of Islam” -type comments are superfluous and just make him come across like someone who’s laying it on a little too thick. He can say all the things he has to say to help rally American Muslims to his side without having to try to be Theologian in Chief.

    5. Agree with Vaal too. And early in his speech after San Bernardino, Obama said something along the lines that change was going to have to come from within. To me, the clear implication was change in Islam.

  20. I think you are being rather unfair to the sense of the article which takes a generic tone, attempting to explain the underlying causes of all similar movements. It can apply just as well to any revolutionary or millennial movements, from the Crusade of the Poor, the rise of Christianity itself, to Marxism to John Frum or the disciples of T rump for that matter.

    The reference to “true believers” indicates that these are frequently, but not always, religious or quasi religious movements. The point of the article is to draw the parallels and show that ISIS is not some kind of unique evil, bred of the essence of Islam, even though it is expressed in that cultural setting.

    The article is short, at least the online version, and I cannot be too sanguine about the recommended solutions, but it is an attempt to contextualise the problem. A context which is spectacularly absent in most current comment.

  21. Mass movements, [Hoffer] argues, only arise in certain conditions, when a once sturdy social structure is in a state of decay or disintegration. This is a pretty good description of parts of the Arab world.

    Apparently singling out a race is preferable to daring to implicate a multi-racial religion. Even tho ISIS is active far beyond just the Arab world.

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