Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

In chapter 10, I argued that researchers don’t have to be believers to be understanders, and we had better hope I was right, since we want our researchers to understand Islamic terrorism from the inside without having to become Muslims—and certainly not terrorists—in the process.¹³ But we also won’t understand Islamic terrorism unless we can see how it is like and unlike other brands of terrorism, including Hindu and Christian terrorism, ecoterrorism, and antiglobalist terrorism, to round up the usual suspects. And we won’t understand Islamic and Hindu and Christian terrorism without understanding the dynamics of the transitions that lead from benign sect to cult to the sort of disastrous phenomenon we witnessed in Jonestown, Guyana, in Waco, Texas, and in the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan.

One of the most tempting hypotheses is that these particularly toxic mutations tend to arise when charismatic leaders miscalculate in their attempts to be memetic engineers, unleashing memetic adaptations that they find, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, they can no longer control. They then become somewhat desperate, and keep reinventing the same bad wheels to carry them over their excesses. The anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse (1995) offers an account of the debacle that overtook the leaders of Pomio Kivung, the new religion in Papua New Guinea mentioned at the outset of chapter 4, that suggests (to me) that something like runaway sexual selection took over. The leaders responded to the pressure from the people—Prove that you mean it!—with ever-inflated versions of the claims and promises that had brought them to power, leading inevitably to a crash. It’s reminiscent of the accelerated burst of creativity you see in pathological liars when they can sense that their exposure is imminent. Once you’ve talked the people into killing all the pigs in anticipation of the great Period of the Companies, you have nowhere to go but down. Or out: It’s them—the infidels—who are the cause of all our misery!

There are so many complexities, so many variables—can we ever hope to make predictions that we can act on? Yes, in fact, we can. Here is just one: in every place where terrorism has blossomed, those it has attracted are almost all young men who have learned enough about the world to see that their futures look otherwise bleak and uninspiring (like the futures of those who were preyed upon by Marjoe Gortner).

What seems to be most appealing about militant religious groups—whatever combination of reasons an individual may cite for joining—is the way life is simplified. Good and evil are brought out in stark relief. Life is transformed through action. Martyrdom—the supreme act of heroism and worship—provides the ultimate escape from life’s dilemmas, especially for individuals who feel deeply alienated and confused, humiliated or desperate. [Stern, 2003, pp. 5–6]

Where are we going to find an overabundance of such young men in the very near future? In many countries, but especially in China, where the draconian one-child-per-family measures that have slowed the population explosion so dramatically (and turned China into a blooming economic force of unsettling magnitude) have had the side effect of creating a massive imbalance between male and female children. Everybody wanted to have a son (a superannuated meme that had evolved to thrive in an earlier economic environment), so daughters have been aborted (or killed at birth) in huge numbers, so now there are not going to be anywhere near enough wives to go around. What are all those young men going to do with themselves? We have a few years to figure out benign channels into which their hormone-soaked energies can be directed.

5 Patience and politics

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

—First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

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Traditions deserve to be respected only insofar as they are respectable—that is, exactly insofar as they themselves respect the fundamental rights of men and women.

—Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong

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