Is There Anything More to Think About Terror?

I wrote last week of terrorism, but just a little thinking can lead to a lot of reading, which then can lead to a lot more thinking, on this topic. Last week, for example, Time magazine put out a list of the greatest recent ideas in various areas. At #4 on this list of so-called revolutionary ideas was the research of a fellow named John Horgan, who has been studying why some terrorists stop performing acts of terrorism in order to cook up new ways to get people to stop committing acts of terror. Sounds like a sensibly promising avenue of study. But the very short article on Horgan’s study of former terrorists didn’t say that Horgan has yet concocted any practical actions or programs for turning terrorists into happy suburbanites. In fact, the article was a bit disheartening because Horgan has discovered that most ex-terrorists haven’t actually come to be any less radical in their thinking. They’ve just given up acting on their radicalism. To me, that finding suggests that when conditions become ripe, these ex-terrorists might see the “good” sense in terrorizing once again. Radicalism doesn’t end; it just goes dormant, or so it seems. Still, I hope Horgan’s study leads to success in ending terror.

And then this week Time had a review of yet another book on how people become terrorists (there have been dozens of such books published before and since 9/11). This one is by a criminal forensic psychiatrist named Marc Sageman (good nickname for a thinker, don’t you think?). The book is entitled Leaderless Jihad. Sageman thinks that terrorists are, generally speaking, not exactly “arseholes,” the view of that British historian I discussed last week, but rather scrupulously morally outraged. To put it bluntly, people who commit acts of terror are pissed off, and justly so, to some extent -- at least in Sageman’s eyes. They’re pissed off about America’s policies toward the various Islamic countries of the Middle East and Africa, before and after 9/11, and before and after the current five-year-long Iraq War. (My accompanying photo is a shot of a display area in the Chicago Merchandise Mart, a cathedral of American consumerism. A teeny part of the society those bomb-happy radicals are so justifiably pissed off about, no doubt.) Sageman thinks America should, as a first step, get EVERY last American soldier out of every Islamic country. He seems to think this would make for a big first step toward the end of radical Islamic terror. Well, there’s another idea to think about.

But then I have started to get more than a little dizzy as I have been uncovering all the discussion and diversity of opinion about terrorism, its causes and its cures. How diverse is it? Well, here’s an indication. I quickly hunted down on the web a massive summary report on the causes of terrorism entitled The Psychology of Terrorism. The report is a straightforward, numbered list of books, essays, research studies, and other reports on the causes and cures of terrorism. It’s just one big long list. One study after another. The report offers a narrative description of each document, most of which were written in the last 20 years. Now, here’s the rub: there are 324 items on the list. 324 separate and detailed and lengthy writings from all sorts of thinkers and researchers about terrorism’s causes and cures. This report can be found at:

http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/208551.pdf

You can draw a rather sobering conclusion about stopping terrorism just by looking at the size and extent of this report: none of these 324 studies, written by thoughtful, earnest, caring men and women of all sorts, has done a damn thing to stop terrorism. Why even bother thinking about it? And yet, I do keep thinking about it. Maybe I will be the hero who will synthesize all this knowledge and hit upon the one cogent and effective social policy that brings an end to terror.

I’m kidding. I’m not that stupid. Or am I? I do keep thinking about this, don’t I?, as though my thinking actually meant something.

Finally, soon to lecture here at MSU is Fawaz A. Gerges, an Oxford University scholar who holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. This learned fellow spent a whole year in 2007 as a Carnegie Scholar living in the Middle East, where he interviewed activists, civic leaders, and mainstream and radical Islamists to figure out what to do about terror. Gerges is writing two books on Arab and Muslim politics, Islamists and the so-called Jihadists. He has written a bunch of books on this subject, such as Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (2007); The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (2005); and America and Political Islam: Clash of Interests or Clash of Cultures? (1999). This learned, brilliant, caring man (presumably) hasn’t yet done a damn thing to stop terrorism that I can see. Boy oh boy, that’s discouraging.

You, my readers -- few, though loyal, as you are -- you know, when you give it just a moment’s thought, that my excogitating will contribute nothing to the understanding of this subject. But such is a life of reflection. Who knows why I feel this mysterious need to write on topics that are so large and complex. But it’s what I’ve been thinking about. And write I must.

If You Miss the Train I'm on

The boys and I took a walk along the Grand River in Lansing a week or so ago. The River Walk is a nice way to move across town on a sunny day. This is a shot of Andrew, who is 12, standing on a bridge above Pennsylavnia Ave. in Lansing as a train passes on the rail bridge to the north. Drew always has a stick with him, to bust up anything wolrth busting up (as Dad allows). Ice on the Grand is excellent for bashing and breaking. The weather has been cold in mid-Michigan this late winter. We have had only one day in the 50s. That's pretty unusual. I haven't even been golfing yet. This weekend we are supposed to be in the 30s and have considerable snow. Things could be worse, though. Just south of us the floods have been terrible, through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. We just missed out on three powerful storm systems that brought tremendous rains to the Midwest. Some cities got socked with a foot of rainfall, which is, what?, the equivalent of about 72 inches of snow, I think. We avoided the trouble because of a high pressure dome that kept Michigan cold and pushed those storm systems south.

By the way, my Dad, Don, is in a hospital in Lake Worth, Florida, today. He was there last night with a urinary problem. He is in good spirits and doing fine. They were just keeping him to make sure on a couple of tests. His sister Eunice and her hubby Harry are visiting today. They were supposed to go to see the Tigers play in Lakeland, but it looks like that's off for now.

Why Don't You Make That Rage a Double

I post another shot of Ground Zero from Marsha. The steel post in the foreground is a scaffold support attached to the building she was standing inside of. Her visit to the place have given rise to some reflections on terrorism, which was also sparked by a recent and very widely publicized book on the matter, Blood and Rage, by the British historian Michael Burleigh. Burleigh’s book has been the subject of a number of essays and reviews around the web. It’s an odd one for an academic historian. This history of terrorism, mostly in modern times, describes, of course, the blood (the deeds of the terrorists), but the rage is Burleigh’s own, a rage that he wants all of us to share. He thinks we should all start getting a bit more enraged about terrorism. That’s quite an unusual kind of thesis for a work of academic history.

I have done a lot of thinking about terrorism over the years. Mostly I tend to explore its causes and its justifications. The fine foreign film Paradise Now has been on mind for a couple years. It was about two Palestinian terrorists on the West Bank. It’s implied thesis was that some terrorists, suicide bombers in the case of this film, get in the business (short-term, by definition) because of past personal injustices. But in Burleigh’s opinion nothing quite so high-minded is on the alleged minds of most terrorists. Almost all terrorists are, to Burleigh, to sum it up baldly, assholes. One reviewer describes Burleigh’s conception of these people as:

... the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists -- the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of civilisation"...

Happy to spread his scorn to all deserving recipients, Burleigh doesn’t hold back from letting himself feel rage for Westerners who have been terrorists or have sympathized with them, such people as Jean-Paul Sartre and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang. For this guy, terrorists -- whether secular, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise -- they’re all just scumbags. I don’t know. I’ll have to ponder that simple thesis a little more, even though Burleigh tries to drive it home with a sledgehammer.

All that rage that Michael Burleigh wants us to get in touch with reminded me of a book by Bernard Lewis, that famous scholar of Islam who has written dozens of books and hundreds of essays on the West’s relations with Islam in its many manifestations. A recent collection of Lewis’s essays concerned the hate of the terrorists and the rage that that hate fuels. Lewis’s theory is that Islam’s rivalry with the West, which Westerners mostly don’t even pay attention to, has bred this hate. A hate that won’t soon expend the energy with which it produces rage, Lewis believes. And so it goes. Give in to Burleigh’s call for rage, add it to Muslim rage, and we’ll all wind up with a volatile mixture of rages facing off against each other.

It is at this point that I, an ex-Christian, wonder if maybe only some supernatural power, be it Jesus the Christ -- or whatever supernatural power actually exists and can be tapped into -- can rescue us from the armed conflict that this great big ball of tangled rages will almost surely aggravate and escalate. This is the point at which I still see the sense in turning to God or the Gods, the point when neither the scholarly tomes of human beings nor our war-making seem to be getting us anywhere in ending this conflict. Helpless, I feel drawn to prayer, to the hope that “Something More” is listening, cares for us all, and will DO something to stop us before we carry ourselves away in rages from a hundred competing sources.

Slightly Above Ground Zero

Marsha, my wife, and three of her seven sisters gathered in New York City last weekend to celebrate her sister Patty's 50th birthday and to see Patty perform a requiem as part of a Houston-area choir at New York's Carnegie Hall. Here is a shot of (l to r) Marsha, Patty from Houston), and Laurie (from Dallas) at their hotel restaurant in southern Manhattan.

In fact, three of the sisters stayed at a hotel just a block away from Ground Zero, the site of the former World Trade Center, which was bombed by jetplane in 2001, as probably just about everyone knows. The ladies visited Ground Zero, but there were no good viewing areas of the construction activity along street level. But they found a spot on the mezzanine in a financial center next door to their hotel. This spot has a viewing area from which people can watch what's going on at Ground Zero from a little higher up. Marsh took a number of photos for me, and here is one, probably her most artistic shot (she liked the marble floor shown in the foreground). The steel support in the foreground is part of a scaffold on the side of the financial center. I will pst another shot of Ground Zero in a day or two.

Probably, the End Is Not Near

The first sentence of a recent Scientific American article “The End of Cosmology?” which was publish in February, deeply caught my attention. It concerns a topic I have been pondering for decades:

One hundred years ago a Scientific American article about the history and large-scale structure of the universe would have been almost completely wrong.

The central question is, Will that continue to be the case, or are we reaching the end of knowledge, at least in cosmology, which concerns the physical properties of the universe? This has been a chief interest of mine. My idea, influenced, it appears, by William James’s ideas on similar matters, has been that the probabilities are against the end of knowing. Everything has kept changing right up to the moment when that SA article was published. Knowledge has kept increasing, sometimes in huge bounds forward or upward or some-ward. The big theories have kept changing in one theoretic revolution after another. Probability suggests that change in fact and theory will continue, since up to this moment fact and theory have kept changing. Further out or up or somewhere out there, there also stands the question of super-nature, super-cosmology -- that is, God or the Gods and his or their dominions. Ideas about that big topic keep changing, too.Should we not expect, on the probabilities, that ideas of nature and super-nature will keep on changing, even that some day people will look back on the ideas that thinkers entertained or adopted in our lifetimes as silly? The probabilities seem strong. Back in 1908 scientists thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy, a lone island in the universe. They thought a void surrounded us. Now we know that this galaxy is one of more than 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe. (400 billion?! That’s a fact so hard to get my own mind around, the idea of 400 billion vastly complex objects, that I personally have to take it on faith [which could be the subject of another excogitation].) In 1908, the article says, scientists agreed that the universe was static and eternal. There was no theory of a big bang. They didn’t understand the origin of elements in the first nanoseconds of that humongous blast (not that I understand that; again, I accept such a theory on faith -- and provisionally at that). That space is expanding and curved (I can’t even understand either of those purportedly interlocked ideas, much as I once tried) and that it is buzzing with radiation (evidence of the bang itself) also were not known. That's hardly a knock on the scientists of old. No one had yet designed the modern technologies that would reveal these facts -- which are truly known as facts to only a very small group of people who can understand and demonstrate them. So, big changes have occurred in the last 100 years in how we conceive (most of us by faith) of this now finite universe. The photo, by the way, is a shot of my daughter Miranda and her cat, who has gone to her great reward. Misty was always watching life from the top of those steps in Miranda and Art's Copper Harbor cabin.

My questions are, Will those conceptions change? Will the facts change or be added to? Will the big, overarching theories change? Scientific American thinks that future thinkers might not produce all that much more empirical knowledge or radically different interpretations of it. One of the reasons, the article says, is that the universe might be wiping out the evidence it has left behind of its origins. The recent work of cosmologists suggests, to the writers and editors of Scientific American, that the end of knowledge could very well at hand. Can it be? I wonder. The probabilities are against it, as I say. But probabilities have failed. Exceptions keep occurring. Sometimes the end of some inquiry comes. Perhaps next, we will also meet God or experience super-nature -- or maybe that event will wait for thousands of years if it comes at all. Or maybe it will take place tomorrow, if I die, if God or Gods exist, and if there is an life to come in which human beings encounter God or Gods. All that keeps a fellow excogitating, no?

Yeah, yeah, I know. The scientists at Scientific American don’t mix considerations of nature and super-nature. So what? I’m doing the excogitating here.

God Said Something to Me

A: You mean to tell me that he doesn’t believe in the Bible?

B: It’s slightly different and worse. He doesn’t believe the Bible is the Word of God. It isn’t a revelation from God. So what he’s saying is not that he doesn’t believe IN the Bible, but that he doesn’t believe the Bible has any special status, any special authority to tell us who or what God is or even what the truth is. The Bible isn’t sacred, set apart, or holy, perfectly pure. It has no more sacredness than the letters of any Joe Schmoe.

A: That’s weird -- really, really weird.

B: Not really. It’s “God without revelation.” That’s the title of an article I was reading about this guy’s latest book. And that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking is closer to what I think is the truth about the Bible. What this Brit means is that there is no way for us to determine to a reasonable level of confidence that the Bible is the one, sole Word of God. It might be, I guess you could say. But we can’t prove it, and, more to the point, it isn’t very likely that it is.

A: “God without revelation.” Fancy words for atheist, if you ask me.

B: No, no. This guy believes in God. Or so he says. But he just doesn’t believe that he or we can know what or who God is, for sure. The Bible gives a bunch of old guesses, inklings, about God. Ancient guesses, actually, thousands of years old. But there is no -- there CAN be no -- final answer. Those old guesses are no better than the guesses of today.

A: Kind of like he’s throwing out the whole Bible, seems to me. But wait. What the heck is up with that photo you put up with this post?

B: It’s a scene from the U.P., a lawn scene. An inflatable Easter Bunny on a lawn as winter finally begins to let go up there. From a couple years back.

A: That got something to do with this topic?

B: Well, I guess it could be some kind of a revelation, in a sense. In the gray drabness of the world of a late U.P. winter comes a sign in the form of a plastic bubble of pink shaped as a bunny.
A: Very funny. So you and this joker want to throw out the Bible?

B: That’s right, in a way. Actually, what we’re doing is lowering its status.

A: To say the least.

B: But the guessing about God that the Bible’s authors did might still have some use, might still be valuable -- as valuable as anything else, I suppose. Their writings just aren’t authoritative revelations from God himself. They can be as useful as theories about God that anybody else has offered then or now or all the thousands of years in between, at any time in human history.

A: O.K., so who is this guy?

B: His name is John Caputo. But he’s not so unusual. I’m making it sound like he’s the first one to come up with this idea. It’s actually old hat. But he’s written a lot about this kind of thing. It all comes down to the belief that we just can’t determine whether God has spoken definitively, unquestionably, once and for all. Which is what so many people believe about the Bible, like you, I’m assuming?

A: You’re right about that. But how does this weirdo think he knows anything about God?

B: Well, it’s guesswork, I guess you could say. But tat’s just like the writers of the Bible. They were guessing, too. The main point is that the Bible is a collection of the guesswork of 66 authors of the ancient past. Though there might have been many more than 66.

A: I’m not into guesswork when it comes to God.

B: But you don’t have any choice in the matter. That’s one of Caputo’s points. Whether the Bible is the one definitive Word of God cannot be rationally demonstrated.

A: So he says. I believe the Bible is God’s Word.

B: There’s no rational reason to believe that. That’s really Caputo’s main point on the Bible. That’s what I started believing some years back.

A: No reason? Come on. That’s what this nut believes?

B: He’s not so unlike lots of folks. They don’t -- we don’t -- see any good reason, really, really good reasons, strongly convincing reasons, to believe that the 66 separate books that make up the collection we call the Bible, which are thousands of years old, are the Word of God, God’s speaking to humankind, once for all.

A: That’s ridiculous. How can you know anything about God without the Bible?

B: Well, Caputo believes we do the best we can. What I think is that there might be a God -- there might even be a pretty good chance that there is a God. The problem is that none of the current candidates for revelation can be shown, rationally, to really be God’s Word, a revelation from on high.

A: What the heck does this joker believe about God, then?

B: You know, that’s where he’s a little thin. It’s mostly love and justice, as I understand him from the bits and pieces I’ve read.

A: Not much different from what the Bible wants people to do.

B: But without all the doctrines.

A: Where’s all this garbage come from?

B: Caputo’s latest book is On Religion. He’s interesting. He writes like a liberal Christian but he doesn’t have ANY doctrinal beliefs. He talks in Christianish God-lingo, but "God" doesn’t signify anything firm or fixed, because nothing really is firm or fixed. He writes a lot about justice and love and being good in this world, that that’s what God wants people to try to do.

A: So what about heaven and hell and all that?

B: He thinks the idea of God has a function: to keep open the future. He even thinks that the idea of God leaves hope for the impossible: "The name of God is the name of the ever open question." That can mean just about anything, obviously. But I think Caputo is saying that there might be an afterlife where justice is served and mercy given. His main point is that we face what he calls “undecidability.” What kind of being or ground of being "God" is no one can rationally decide. He says that, "No one really knows what they love when they love their God."

A: You actually believe crap like that? You got to know that there are hundreds of Christian thinkers who could answer his every objection.

B: Yeah, I know. I read them, too. It’s a never-ending debate. But it’s been on my mind a lot lately because I saw the title of that article on Caputo’s latest book. My big conclusion, for a while, has been that it’s clear -- to me -- that there is no good rationale for believing that the 66 books we call the Bible are God’s Word, hardly any reason at all. Well, not enough of good reasons to think it’s so. So I think it’s unlikely --

A: I really don’t have time for this stuff. It’s just plain weird.

B: I thought so, too, once. But I changed my mind.

A: You should think about changing it back.

B: You know, I do that, too.

A: But you think there’s a chance there might be a God. You just said that.

B: Yeah.

A: You seem to think there might be a small chance that the Bible is His Word, right?

B: Very small, but yeah.

A: Then... should you take the risk that the Bible isn’t His word?

B: Oh, here we go! Off into Pascal’s Wager, into wagering on God in general. That’s a popular defense of belief. But I don’t want to get into that. It’s a subject for another conversation some time. I’ve given betting on God a lot of thought, too, from time to time. We’ll come back to that one.

A Husky Coat

O.K. Let's go back north to Miranda's hike last week out to the Copper Harbor Lighthouse. My brother Don tells me that conditions have changed substantially from last week, but I'll tell you about that in a moment. First, this photo is of Miranda's husky-shepherd Capone working his way down a rock-cut on Hays Point, right in front of the lighthouse. Capone is made for winter. He loves the snow and the cold. He even seeks out the drafts in the Davis's Copper Harbor log cabin to get every bit of chill that he can. I believe he could simply curl up in a drift and live for days without any trouble. But he has trouble in summer, when the weather is too warm for his thick coat. Now, what about this week. Don tells me that a hard east wind shifted the ice off CH loose. But that wind was quickly followed by a hard west wind. The ice on the open lake simply loosened more and blew east. It's nearly all gone. Don says that the ice limit is no more than a quarter-mile off shore today. That's not far for Lake Superior. It hasn't gotten cold enough to make enough ice on to stop the ice from shifting around on the winds. That's the way it goes some winters. And it's those winters that you get a lot of snow, when the lake is open and its water evaporate into clouds that drop snow. And that's just what they're getting this winter, a lot of snow.

80 Years of Snowshoeing

Much time has passed since I took Logan snowshoeing a second time in one weekend some weeks back. Here's a shot from that second expedition in the Michigan woods. This is a photo of (l to r) my brother-in-law Tom Valli and his son Anthony (from Okemos) and me. We are standing on a bluff above the Flat River in the Lowell State Game Area. This park in located east of Grand Rapids about 25 miles and north of the city of Lowell, which is west of Okemos some 50 miles. In the photo, I'm giving you a good view of my old-school snowshoes. I bought these snowshoes when I was in college some 30 years ago. Actually, it was my former father-in-law Stan Van Antwerp, who passed away recently, who bought them for me at a garage sale for $5. They are probably a good 80 years old now. They're made of wood and varnished gut with leather bindings. I've been using them all my adult life. They've been excellent tools, and I expect that they will serve me well for the rest of my life, perhaps another 30 years. The modern aluminum-and-plastic snowshoes are certainly very functional, but I love my old-school shoes.