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Behind every religious war is a political cause. That's what gives an organization like al-Qaeda its support and that's where new recruits come from. The modern jihad movement really got off the ground when the mujahideen fought the Soviets in Afghanistan (guess who provided money and training). Once you have a group that successfully uses the banner of radical Islam to fight off one foreign invader, it makes sense to use that same approach to tackle other problems--Israel and American influence. The event that sparked the enmity between al-Qaeda and the USA was actually the Persian Gulf War, when bin Laden objected to the presence of foreign troops in Saudi Arabia.
Sure, propaganda materials are going to paint the USA as a wretched hive of scum and villainy trying to turn the world into a giant cesspit of debauchery. It's the role of propaganda to rally your side and the easiest way to do that is to make the enemy out to be evil.
Asserting that al-Qaeda is motivated by hatred of freedom has a jingoistic tinge that tends to cloud deeper analysis. We can likewise paint Neo-Nazis as people motivated by hatred of Jews, but that draws a line in the sand and prevents one from seeking a better explanation for why people join hate groups. Delving into the root causes of another's actions paints a different picture from looking just at the superficial causes.
Can you simply not conceive of people having a religious motivation for war?
Simply not conceive of people just believing that others can believe that the Jihadists have that motivation, without a motivation based in racial hatred against the Jihadists?
You have modeled other people so that what they say they believe, and say that their motivations are, are not their beliefs and motivations, which you think you have accurately identified.
But why would religious propaganda work on people whose true motivations are political?
I used to identify very strongly with right-wing Christianity. I can conceive of religious motivations for just about anything because I used to possess them myself. Name your favorite country and I can still crack open a Bible and make a theological case for starting a crusade. Deus vult!
The point I've been trying to make is that the causes that drive a nation to actually commit to a war are almost always the mundane political ones, while religion is used to drum up support and provide legitimacy to the cause.
It may just be my own cynicism. When I see people giving all kinds of arguments about rights and morals in support of actions that coincidentally increase their personal wealth or power, I do question their motives. Quote Matthew 19:21 to a wealthy religious person sometime and the reaction will either be anger or an explanation of what Jesus really meant. By far the least common reaction is to actually renounce worldly possessions.
But those are the leaders. Followers of cults or extremist groups generally feel some cocktail of insecurity, depression, and maladjustment in their personal lives and come to like the sense of community offered. If they spend long enough in the group they will internalize the rhetoric and eventually escalate their beliefs to the point where they are willing to perpetrate violence in their name. Their scope, however, is often limited. You don't see any such organizations muster enough power to wage war unless there's enough animosity to swell the ranks or they can find a patron who uses their rhetoric for his own purposes.
Religion is strongly tied to community and culture. Even level-headed believers can get defensive when they feel their faith is attacked. It's an appeal to emotion and group dynamics that is common to every sort of demagoguery.
Religious propaganda is there to drum up support, but there already has to be some animosity towards the object in question. Let's take rock and roll. We've all heard the allegations that it's satanic, immoral, etc. The thing is, plenty of people were already averse to it because they didn't like it and objected to their children listening to "black" music. In a word, they wanted to hear about how bad it was. It's a running theme that disagreeable things are branded immoral or heretical. It reinforces prior perceptions and makes those things anathema to the group.
If you have a grievance against a group, rumors inevitably pop up. We like to believe them, even if they're ridiculous, because they reinforce our view that the group is evil. Start telling stories about their immoral sexual practices, child sacrifice, and devil worship and you can fan the religious flames. They're not just jerks, but abominations keen on uprooting everything your group holds dear. Game, set, match.
May I make an assumption? I'm guessing you're American - it's that phrase about "right wing Christianity". The problem is that America doesn't have anything like real Christian fanaticism. It has some people who are upset about gay marriage and evolution and that's it.
Europeans, on the other hand, have had the real thing in living memory. We're not talking about "the Moral Majority" here, but the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or the Falange. This is the real thing, real fanaticism, and what you learn is that true faith, true belief does indeed inspire war.
This is what I mean when I say you cannot assume that other people think the way you do.
You're proving what I see as the point of the grandparent. This hasn't happened in America - unless you count the KKK, starting during the occupation of the South - because the actual causes were absent.
And then you get Nazis in World War II, and everyone says "I remember all that World War I propaganda. All the bad stuff I hear about what the Nazis did has got to be more such propaganda, because no human being could really be sucn an abomination." Of course, the Nazis were.