Demosophia

If you were to explain to a terrorist why it was philosophically wrong to murder innocents in the name of a cause, and you did not want to use God or religion, what basis for right would you use?

If you were to explain to a terrorist why it was philosophically wrong to murder innocents in the name of a cause, and you did not want to use God or religion, what basis for right would you use?

Well, I wouldn't be very persuasive using religion, because I'm not Muslim and don't even know that much about Islam. So I'd have to leave that aspect of the explanation to his fellow Muslims. But, although I think Islam is more vulnerable to warrior cultism than most other mainstream religions (or at least the reformed versions of those religions) I think the main reason that branch of Islam morphed into a totalitarian movement has as much to do with the counter-enlightenment philosophy that emerged out of Western Europe (often called the Kantian "interpretive turn") as it does with Islam. It was that same philosophical movement that gave rise, in turn, to both Marxism (responsible for 100 million murders in the 20th Century, and 30 million in the USSR alone) and Nazism (6 million). I'm less sure about the relationship to the Phalange in Spain, which was a Christian totalitarian movement, but think that even there the culprit was counter-enlightenment philosophy.

So having said that, and noting that the counter-enlightenment was, by and large, not a "religious" belief system, my first task would be to tackle that nest of philosophical vipers. And I think the primary antidote is the Scottish Enlightenment, which went beyond the Continental Renaissance in the sense that it established the principles behind the institutions of modern civil society.

But just for a reality check, I don't really think you could argue a totalitarian out of his position unless he's prepared to hear. That's because totalitarianism is not really an intellectual position, but a paranoid social pathology. That is, you don't argue a madman out of his madness because from his perspective his world is entirely consistent. It's just that some of the actors in that world are imaginary. You might say that what the counter-enlightenment did was to give permission to unleash the demons that were previously given expression only in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, or the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Another way of looking at it is that by de-legitimating the experience of shame the counter-enlightenment replaced a sense of beauty with aesthetics, and the beautiless void left behind led people unwittingly toward an unrecognized ugliness. I'd say that the answer for these people, the ultimate in cult-busting, lies in reawakening a natural sense of (currently denied) beauty and shame.

I'm surprised, however, at how much that actually sounds like Sayyid Qutb in some respects. The difference, I think, is that what I'm saying is that we have a built in sense of beauty and shame that can adequately deal with most of what we encounter in life. If one believes in God one must approach that God through a human vessel, which has these... innate characteristics. And if one is an Atheist one must also approach the world around you through the same set of innate cognitive abilities. I think one can show, empirically, that what humans tend to regard as beautiful actually conforms to a relatively narrow range within a vastly larger realm of "the possible." The appropriate range is therefore not all that is possible, but all that is true beauty.

I would not attempt to argue a terrorist out of his position. In most cases I'd just kill him, but if I thought reform were a real possibility I'd point out his blindness, and show him what it is that has been missed. I would open the doors of his perception to the full depth of his loss, the distance between where he ought to be as a human being and where he actually is. Which is a lesson that really wouldn't do any of us any harm.