Religious History, And The Solution for Terrorism

The United States is having some ongoing minor problems with terrorism. And I use minor as a relative term, in that the terrorists - notwithstanding having had only limited success in waging any sort of meaningful "war" against the United States - have had some success in inspiring terror among the United States populace. Which is largely irrational, as the average American citizen is statistically much more likely to fall victim to death by carjacking or home-invasion than they are to international (or even domestic) terrorism.

For a variety of reasons, the terrorists attacks are not going to have substantial effect on United States, except for monies spent towards tracking down and killing the terrorists in question and/or those who aid or support them. It is a documented historical fact that when a nation/state intentionally wages war against the civilian populace of the tacit "enemy," they will almost always lose. I could go into great depth if anyone is interested, but to briefly summarize: It didn't work for the Romans in Germania. It didn't work for the English (under Cromwell) in Ireland (and indeed, still doesn't work). It didn't work for the Tamil Separatist Tigers in Sri Lanka (google it: the Tigers - not Muslim arabs - were the true pioneers of suicide bombing). It didn't work for the Americans in Vietnam. It's not going to work for Islamic Fundamentalists in America.

Even setting aside the historical precedent, all you really have to do is consider terrorism rationally. Terrorism is the intentional use of violence against non-combatants with the intention of winning political gain. But regardless of the political ends sought in the latter part of the definition, the former part of the definition precludes any meaningful success. How do you expect to prevail when you act so as to make every single man, woman, and child of a population into an overt and active enemy? How do you expect the fathers, husbands, and sons of such population to react in response to your efforts? When the game plan is to kill a nation's women, children, and non-combatants, why would anyone possibly expect the enemy to cower in submission, rather than to pursue the attackers to the ends of the earth by every means at their disposal? Unless the political end the terrorists seek is to inspire the enemy to kill the terrorists at any cost, the political goal - any political goal - of the terrorists WILL FAIL. For all the occasions that is has been pursued (which are many), the idea of terrorism as a means to an end overlooks critical and obvious aspects of human nature.

That having been said, terrorism is a very real problem, and it would be nice to find some sort of expedient solution. Meaning a solution that doesn't require the expenditure of trillions of dollars, billions of soldier man-hours, and thousands of slain servicemen to implement. It is not practicable to kill every single terrorist who is inclined to air his grievances in public with high explosives, attractive as the option may be to the family members of World Trade Center fatalities.

Generally speaking, and setting aside political correctness in favor of honesty, most terrorist attacks against the United States grow from Islamic Fundamantalism. While Usama Bin Laden is a Saudi Prince, and while many of the upper leadership of al Queda are educated men pursuing socio-political agendas, they are not the ones blowing themselves up. They're too smart for that. The ones who do the killing (including killing themselves) are typically single, lower-middle class, highly religious men. The social structure of the middle-east means that there are an effectively infinite number of such men: they tend to be the younger sons of large families, without substantial economic prospects, and - failing substantial income - lack the ability to afford a wife and family. Their prospects in this world are not glowing or spectacular, and a long, happy life is often a fairy tale. Average life expectancy in Afghanistan, for example, is under 45 years.

Absent substantial prospects in this life, these men are fairly ripe for manipulation, based on the promise of better things in the next life. Enter the whole deal with rivers of honey and 40 virgins for anyone who dies in the service of Allah against the infidel. People want to believe it, so they toe to line. So long as there are people willing to blow themselves up to send the message penned by their socio-political controllers, terrorism is going to continue. The political agendas are ALWAYS going to be there, so the way to combat terrorism is at the grass-roots. Gotta either lessen the power of the Mighty, to ease their control over the masses, or else increase the power of the masses, to reach the same ends.

This is tough, since most Americans have problems even grasping the depth of the religious fervor involved. Notwithstanding our own frustration-based social problems (gangs, drugs, youth violence, etc.), most Americans cannot conceive of a life so frustrating, bleak, and devoid of prospects as to get us to entertain the idea of blowing ourselves up for God. Most citizens of western nations, hearing of frustration and angst as basis for that degree of motivation, will short-circuit to thinking that it's a crock of shit, and that the believers in question are simply nut-jobs. But even as a member of a "modern" society, there's no denying that it's easy to fall under the sway of charismatic people who tell you that everything is going to be all right and things are going to be wonderful, if you just read this book/follow this diet/blow up this Israeli cafe. American devotion to Tony Robins, Oprah, the Church of Scientology, etc., differs from Islamic fundamentalism only in two substantial respects. First, Americans are too comfortable and hedonistic to be in a rush to shuffle off the mortal coil as martyrs. And second, most Americans are educated and cosmopolitan enough to be skeptical about religious figures actually having some sort of hot-line to God, through which they receive holy directives.

But that wasn't always the case among western societies. Google "Crusades." Or "Spanish Inquisition." Or, more recently, "Jonestown." It is human nature to believe the unbelievable, especially where such efforts are required to provide explanation for the unknown and/or ill events. The ancient Greeks/Norse/etc. didn't know that lightning was the equalization exchange of static electrical inequalities between earth and sky. Thus, they needed Zeus/Thor/etc. to provide them with an explanation they could believe in. Likewise (and persisting through the present) there is the question "where do we go when we die," which is hands down, bar none, and without question mankind's greatest and most exploitable philosophical insecurity. It bothers us, so naturally, we enjoy (or at least tolerate) the company of those that tell us that things are going to be all right. Over time, and in an excellent example of human nature, the shamans and priests married their "knowledge" of arcane points to quality ritual showmanship, and gained enough adherents that they no longer needed to serve any actual purpose nor do any actual work.

Built upon the idea that they were closer to God than you were, and on the parallel idea that if you wanted to go to heaven, you'd better toe the line they set, the Roman Catholic Church was the central political force in Europe for about a millennium, holding at least as much sway over the day-to-day lives of the populace as does modern Islamic sects over their adherents. The really interesting part with the Holy Roman Empire was that through most of this period of dominion, people attending church on any given Sunday had only the vaguest idea of what was being said and done in all the elaborate rituals. Those rituals were performed in Latin and/or Greek. When readings were done from the bible, those readings were also in Latin and/or Greek, from books dating back to the early Christian empire in Byzantium, which was an outgrowth of Rome. Suffice to say that up until the 16th Century, the people sitting in the pews and filling the Church of Rome's collections plates generally didn't have a clue what was being said from the pulpit, except for the parts were they were told that they'd better listen up and do as they were told unless they wanted to burn in hell. Must've been believable. The priests clearly knew a lot of things that everyman didn't, and those rituals sure were elaborate. So people toed the line, and besides living their lives how the Church told them to, they also went to war because the Church told them to. Again, google "crusades."

But it didn't last, and the end came surprising quickly. Interestingly, the decline of the Church as the grass-roots power in Europe was not based so much on schisms within the Church as it was based on the removal of the centuries-old mysteries in which the Church had cloaked itself. It is not at all coincidence that the rise of Protestantism (and subsequent civil and holy wars in much of Europe) coincided with the first publications of bibles written in modern languages (notably Martin Luther's German translation in 1522 and William Tyndale's English New Testament Bible in 1525). Prior to this, and as above, substantially all bibles had been in Greek or Latin, including the first book ever to see large-scale mechanical printing, the 1455 Gutenberg Bible, which was in Vulgate Latin.

Availability of scriptures in common tongues led to interesting socio-religious developments, like people standing at the back of 16th Century church proceedings, reading the English translation of scriptures aloud, concurrently with the Preacher's reading in Latin, up in the pulpit. While such things would historically have resulted in the offender being set on fire, political developments outside the cloisters meant that such religious dissidents enjoying protection from On High. Specifically, England's Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and couldn't get the Pope to grant him one. So (in 1534) he told the Roman Catholic Church to fuck off, and founded the Church of England, with Himself at the head. To rally popular support away from the Roman Catholic Establishment, he needed to show the world that the Holy Roman Empire was mostly just a bunch of corrupt political hacks and autocrats hiding under vestments. (Google "Borgia.") Which was not hard. To do so, he supported and sponsored all sorts of covert and overt efforts to turn Christianity from some esoteric thing conducted in dead languages into something understandable and accessible to the masses. Although he is said to have regretted it later, his efforts to get laid with a different woman than his wife resulted in broad and systematic dissemination of the idea that the Roman Catholic Priests and Preachers didn't really have access to God or to the divine workings of the universe. They just knew another language. The subtext was that with the newly published (modern language) versions of the scriptures, people could still have faith, without the oppressive mandates of the Church of Rome. And, of course, Hank the Eighth could have his divorce, Papal approval or no.

As an interesting and relevant footnote, the publication of common-language translations of the bible spurred massive grass-roots intellectualism in Western Europe. Languages were standardized. (Especially in Germany, by the Luther bible; previous to its publication there were multiple German dialects, based on Germany's history as a loose affiliation of principalities, each with its own tongue. After 1522, Germans adopted a common tongue, so they could read the bible.) Literacy rates soared. Whereas only the upper-class could afford a full classical education to read the Bible in Latin or Greek, lots of people - down to artisans and tradesmen - could provide their children with the ability to read a "modern" language. And they did. To the point that a sizable portion of the populace became smart enough to be skeptical about any man claiming to be God's proxy. For people who can't read, books are magical. For people who can, they're just words on a page.

Besides the mean increase in popular intellect and related rise in educated skepticism, literacy would in turn lead to another domino falling: the rise of widespread literature to challenge the bible as humanity's tacit seminal written work. Shakespeare's father was a tradesmen (a glover), who would probably have been unable to send little Billy to Oxford to learn Greek (especially since Billy was the third of eight children). But Billy did learn to read and write at his local grammar school. You might say he put his skills to use.

Thus, in the late 16th century, the bible itself would come under indirect attack, since it was surpassed as the best read available. Historically, christianity was every bit as myopic as Islam in the idea that reading anything other than the scriptures was, at best, a waste of time ("Either it agrees with the bible, in which case it is extraneous, or else it disagrees with the bible, in which case it is blasphemy"). With the rise of literacy and literature (and with further development of the printing press), other stories arose to compete for readers' attention. Shakespeare was doing his best work in the late 16th Century, with the first published editions of Hamlet dating to about 1599. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in the same period, and German literature (somewhat slowed by its still-diverse dialects) was developing as well, highlighted by the Baroque period and the early Faustian tales.

Of course, the Church was not pleased at having lost its veritable monopoly over the actual content of the scriptures, much less with all that pesky free-thinking and intellectual skepticism that came from a literate populace. William Tyndale never lived to see any of these literary developments: he was arrested by Church authorities, strangled, and burned at the stake in 1536. Martin Luther was allowed to live, since he had a big enough following that he would be dangerous as a martyr, and had already been excommunicated (in 1521) prior to publishing his Germanic bible. In any rate, the damage had been done. People under the Church's sway started doing the last thing that the church wanted them to do: they stopped being impressed with the rituals and dogma, and started thinking for themselves. Less than 100 years from the Bible having been illegible to nearly all church-goers, church-goers were themselves creating literary masterpieces of their own.

When that happened, the end was inevitable, since the Church - ever fundamentally traditionalist - dug in its heels rather than bending to fit the times. In 1616 (ironically the year that both Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on the same day) Galileo went to Rome, to try and convince the Church that Copernicus was right about that whole helocentricism thing. He argued to the Pope that the Church should acknowledge such obvious scientific truths, regardless of what might be laid out in Psalms, Chronicles, and/or Ecclesiastes. Alas, alack, the Church didn't want to hear it. They had their hands full with upstart Protestant figures, culminating in Sweden's King Gustav Augustus, whose (Protestant) armies would shortly be rolling through (previously Catholic) central Europe, kicking that collective asses of the Catholic armies that were supposed to have God on their side. Needing to appear strong in the face of attacks on the Church and the Bible, and in the interest of preserving the monolithic image of the Catholic Church as the hand of God on earth, the Pope Decreed accordingly. Galileo spent most the remainder of his life under house arrest, with his published works declared heretic. This notwithstanding that his principles of a heliocentric solar system could be observed and verified by anyone, largely without even use of a telescope.

With the management of the whole Galileo thing, the Church utterly and truly lost the intellectuals of Europe. Turns out that you lose credibility when you demonstrate that you're full of shit. Hell, if the Church can't get a simply orbital ellipse straight, how they hell could they claim understanding of something like the immortal soul? In any rate, the end of the Church as the great power in Europe was fast coming after that, since the professional academics were responsible for providing educations for the upper crusts of society. You can imagine the sort of opinion they had of the Church and its tenets, when the Church Ordered that one plus one does not equal two. Safe to say that the people they were educating might have picked up on the idea that the Church might not actually be the divine conduit it claimed to be. So, while it would remain intact through the present, The Holy Roman Empire was done as the controlling power over people's lives. It yielded substantially all claims of sovereignty over both people and nations in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which treaties also included the western world's first codification of any substantial right to freedom of religion.

Applying these historical precedents to current problems in the Middle East: if you want to reduce religious fervor and fanaticism, the thing to do is teach people to read. Get enough people reading and writing, and the culture is going to wax skeptical about religious mysticism. They're going to create great literary works to surpass the ancient (cryptic and/or outdated) religious texts in the minds of the people. Get the people smart enough to ask pointed questions, to which they will not accept "because the Book says so" as an acceptable answer. However subtly it might be presented, the proposal that turns disaffected Arab men into terrorists is: "If you blow yourself up to kill people you've never met, you will go to heaven. Trust me." Honestly, should it really be difficult to educate people enough for them to be skeptical when presented with that message?

Alas, we don't seem to be making much progress, and might even be going backwards. If you rank the world's 180-some nations in order of their literacy rate, Saudi Arabia is 116th. Iran is 121st. Egypt is 148th. Pakistan, at 163rd, has about the world's lowest literacy rate outside of Africa. No figures are currently available for Iraq or Afghanistan, what with large-scale disruption of their education system from recent wars. But suffice to say that current breakdowns of the education systems and concurrent low literacy rates suggest that the next 20 years (at least) will find no shortage of disaffected Iraqi and/or Afghan males who follow the orders of their church without question.

With regard to dissemination in the Arab world of home-grown literature, the situation is equally bleak. The 20th Century did see a tacit renaissance of Arab literature (the nahda period), but the world's pre-eminent Muslim author is probably Salman Rushdie (google him), who has a death sentence outstanding in Iran, for heresy. For the most part, the Arab world has not had a great storyteller since Scheherazade. With low literacy rates, the likelihood of a transcendental author of the caliber of Shakespeare (or Cervantes, or Hemingway, or Murasaki, or Flaubert, or whoever) appearing is relatively small. Nobody in the past century has come close to challenging the Koran (formalized in 654) as the pre-eminent must-read for Arab citizens and academics alike. Doesn't it seem odd that 1400 years later, nobody has come up with something that people find more captivating? Maybe something can be done about that?

We can kill terrorists to no end. There are plenty of them, and current socio-economic trends - both in the Middle East and in the world as a whole - indicate that there will be a lot more coming. Setting aside individual terrorists, the defeat of Islamic Fundamentalis terrorism will necessarily take a long view, with progress measured in generations, rather than in years. But history shows that as history measures time, religions can fall rather quickly. It only took a few generations for the people of Europe to evolve from illiterate yokels, smiling, nodding, and toeing the line into educated skeptics living their own lives.

The fall of the Church of Rome started with people learning to read, from which grew religious skepticism, literary tradition, and - ultimately - the intellectual discrediting of the Church. Looking at the world today, terrorists tend to come from parts of the world with poor literacy, little or no secular literary tradition, and stunted intellectual communities.

Maybe there's a lesson here? Maybe a solution to terrorism as well?