Freedom under threat: social and psychological processes (Sacks #2) |

We are discussing Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ 1995 book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. Read yesterday’s Post #1 and catch up on the entire “Freedom under threat” series starting here.

Each day this week, we are tackling one of the topics below. All bold and underlining is mine. All of Rabbi Sacks’ words are in italics.

Altruistic evil is evil committed for a sacred cause:

in the name of high ideals
to avenge past wrongs
to correct perceived injustice
to institute a new social order
to restore a romanticized golden age

It is the greatest threat to freedom in the postmodern world.

The relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam has been historically a poisoned one, Rabbi Sacks explores why. He starts by exploring three phenomena: mindset, myth and sibling rivalry.

First, there is a specific mindset that makes altruistic evil possible: dualism. This is incompatible with monotheism, but it has nonetheless from time to time found a home there.
Second, there are myths that feed this mindset, and they are surprisingly durable and adaptable, moving from one religion to another and even to secular cultures.
Third, there is the unique relationship between the three Abrahamic faiths that has set them in tension with one another.

“The violence that leads to war and terror is between groups, and it is precisely this that leads to in-group solidarity and cohesion; and fear, suspicion, and aggression towards out-groups. It is neither secularism nor religious belief that makes us what we are, the curious mixture of good and bad that can lead us to the moral heights or the savage depths. It is our groupishness.

“Religion performed, and continues to perform, a task fundamental to large groups. It links people, emotionally, behaviorally, intellectually, and spiritually, into communion and thus community.“

If not religion, then what???

“In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust.

“The first two attempts were universalist: a universal religion or a universal culture. The third attempt, the one we have been living through for the past half-century, is the opposite. It is the effort to eliminate identity by abolishing groups altogether and instead enthroning the individual.

“The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, postmodernism; and in religion, ‘spirituality’. Its idol is the self, its icon the ‘selfie’, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state. In place of national identities we have global cosmopolitanism. In place of communities we have flash-mobs. We are no longer pilgrims but tourists. We no longer know who we are or why.“

He is spot on, right? Sacks says that no civilization has ever had this type of order system.

“We are now living through the discontents of individualism and have been since the 1970s. Identity has returned. The tribes are back and fighting more fiercely than ever. The old sources of conflict, religion and ethnicity, are claiming new victims. The anti-modern radicals have learned that you can use the products of modernity without going through the process that produced them, namely Westernisation. Meanwhile the energy of the West has been sapped by the decay of the very things religion once energised: marriage, families, communities, a shared moral code, the ability to defer the gratification of instinct, the covenant that linked rich and poor in a bond of mutual responsibility, and a vision of the universe that gave rise to the social virtue of hope.“

Why do seemingly normal, well-educated and adjusted people with careers and families ahead of them become jihadists and suicide bombers?

People join radical movements to alleviate isolation and become part of a community engaged in the pursuit of something bigger than themselves. They have genuine ideals. They feel the suffering and humiliation of their fellow believers. They wish to dedicate their life to ending injustice.

“War is normal. Altruistic evil is not normal. Suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians and the murder of schoolchildren are not normal. Violence may be possible wherever there is an Us and a Them. But radical violence emerges only when we see the Us as all-good and the Them as all-evil, heralding a war between the children of light and the forces of darkness. That is when altruistic evil is born.“

Pathological dualism is a virus that attacks the moral sense.

It does three things.

It makes you dehumanize and demonize your enemies. (Dehumanization destroys empathy and sympathy. It shuts down the emotions that prevent us from doing harm.)
It leads you to see yourself as a victim. (Victimhood deflects moral responsibility. It leads people to say: It wasn’t our fault, it was theirs.)

Defining yourself as a victim is a denial of what makes us human. We see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap.

3. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil, killing in the name of the God of life, hating in the name of the God of love and practicing cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. (Altruistic evil recruits good people to a bad cause. It turns ordinary human beings into murderers in the name of high ideals.)

“When dehumanization and demonization are combined with a sense of victimhood, the third stage becomes possible: the commission of evil in an altruistic cause. Nazism presented itself as a profoundly moral movement, designed to purify the nation from alien elements poisoning its bloodstream, restore the greatness of the Aryan race, rid the world of false doctrines like capitalism and communism, and rescue the Volk from degeneracy. From the beginning, Hitler defined his task in moral and aesthetic terms.“

Pathological dualism creates a self-contained world which becomes self-confirming.

“It divides humanity into absolute categories of good and evil, in which all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other, and you will see your own side as good, the other as evil. Evil seeks to destroy the good. Therefore your enemies are trying to destroy you. If there is no obvious evidence that they are, this is a sign that they are working in secret. If they deny it, this is proof that the accusation is true, else why would they bother to deny it? And since they are evil and we are good, they are the cause of our present misfortunes and we must eliminate them so that the good to which we are entitled, the honor we once had and the superiority that is our right can be ours again.“

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You can read from the beginning of this “Freedom under threat” series here.