Fighting terrorism

How do we deal with terrorists? After the fact, we find them and disarm or, if necessary, eliminate them. Before the fact, we try to find them and then we do the same. That is, with real terrorists: people who kill, maim and rape unsuspecting, usually unarmed others.
Then we try to contain potential terrorists. We find them among the psychopaths: people without conscience, without remorse, without compassion, without empathy. Most psychopaths are made: by humiliation and torture, that is, by other people who are already psychopaths. And sometimes by extremists: people with lofty goals who consider everything acceptable that will lead to their goals. Extremism is fanaticism turned into action. More often than not, fanaticism is religious. What is wrong with religion?
There is not necessarily anything wrong with religion. We could state, more fundamentally, that out there is no such thing as religion, only religious people, people with certain convictions.
The most practical way is to look at religion as a booster. It makes broad-minded people more broad-minded, even incredibly so. And it makes narrow-minded people more narrow-minded, even incredibly so. It makes humane people more humane, and inhumane people more inhumane. It makes the wise wiser and the fools more foolish.
The problem of the superhuman is that it has so much to offer to the inhuman. The inhuman feels at home in the superhuman. And so the strongest light attracts also the strongest darkness. The most peaceful religions, like Buddhism, are more mental hygiene than religion. Confucianism is even more so. Though it can be stifling, it is rarely violent.
Religions that touch our soul the deepest, evoke the most enthusiasm, have the darkest fringes. Christianity and Islam come to mind. Fortunately, Christianity seems on the whole to have passed its psychopathic excrescences, Islam still has it. But when Christianity was as old as Islam is today, the religious wars were still in the future. An the first centuries of Christianity after it came into the open, where more violent and mad and cruel than Islam was in its first centuries. During the Crusades, the Europeans were much more primitive and cruel butchers and the Saracens were relatively enlightened, cultured and mild-mannered.
It is not religion that is decisive, but the mind-set of the believers.
Suppression of women in many non-Christian cultures is unbelievable to modern Europeans. When did we start to appreciate and value women? Around 1200 the Church began to teach that women should not be forced to be married against their will. That enlightened view started in the South of France and became part of chivalry, later of the cult of the gentilhomme, the gentleman. And where did the troubadours get it? From the highly cultured Moors in Spain. The people that were later, together withe Jews, wholesale murdered and subjugated by the barbaric Spanish Christians. The Spanish Inquisition and its auto-de-fés made even Rome look tame.

How many psychopaths are there? A reasonable estimate is around 2% of the population. Some may be born that way, others become psychopaths by growing up with psychopaths, or mixing with psychopaths in war, guerrilla, revolution or organized crime. The nazis emptied the prisons and offered the inmates work in the concentration camps. A few psychopaths in positions of power may unleash the others on the population at large.

Terrorists as we know them the last decades are small fry. The big thing is when regimes are run by psychopaths. Usually they remain at the intermediate level: warlords and crime bosses in failed states. Sometimes they come to the top and unleash a reign of terror. Not all dictators are psychopaths, but many fill the description, most, I suspect.

When, around 1980, I tried to identify the main international challenges, the first was cruelty, torture and terror, especially terrorist regimes. If you are interested in the history, the psychology and the sociology of terror, you may read the third chapter of  How People Make the World.* It includes what we should do about it.

The debate if Islam is a violent or a peaceful religion, is besides the point. It is both, of course. It is a source of inspiration for peaceful people. And also for violent people. For a full appreciation of women. And for a rampant suppression of women. As is true for all religions. Also the Bible is full of texts supporting one point of view as well as the other.

By the way, what is the easiest and the fastest way to grow and promote psychopaths? Consistent, mean, immense humiliation. We may have to confront terrorists and to isolate potential terrorists, but on the long run we have to eradicate humiliation - of any kind, in any shape.
To solve terrorism, fear doesn’t help, anger doesn’t help, prayer doesn’t help. A modicum of respect does. Also for the unwashed, the unkempt, the backward, the angry. If necessary, we should even kill respectfully.

Weird? Read Big Six Henderson by Jules Loh.* This feature ends: He was a legend in his time, all right, and not just because of his uncanny skill and his zealotry. He also had e reputation for fair play and decent treatment of the moonshiners he caught. ‘I never regarded them as doing something evil, just illegal,’ Big Six Henderson said, ‘and I never abused them.’ The big man thumbed through a sheaf of his faded daily reports, looking wistfully at the names. ‘Killed a few, but never abused them.’


*Hans TenDam - How People Make the World: The Ten Global Challenges, an Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity.   http://www.lulu.com      http://www.onlineoriginals.com
* Rene J. Cappon - The Associated Press Guide to News Writing

The 'Confucian Model' of Developing Society

The third type of a moral or civilizational strategy I call the Confucian model. This Confucian model is not a dual model, as is the Brahman model. The Confucian model calls for only one elite, and an informal one at that. This elite is one of gentlemen, and what makes a gentleman is a state of mind, a noble state of mind. In the Brahmanic model, people who have clean hands absolve and guide those who have dirtier hands. A Confucian model places both ruler and ruled in civilized roles.

Confucius tried to improve society by developing and codifying civilized roles and role patterns. The main role is that of the gentleman, Khun-Tzu, the noble man, at home in the world, although he knows that the world is quite barbaric. He is a good host to his fellow humans. His main virtue is Jen: gentleness, humanity. A ‘nobleman’ is someone who cares, someone of ‘good will’, someone who thinks that trying to lead a good life makes a difference. A ‘common man’ in this sense is someone who lacks this conviction or this feeling, even without being of ill will. A ‘common man’ regards all this attention to gentleness and humanity as unimportant or even an illusion.

Confucius suggests to us how we may become noble. He gives precepts for how to behave like a noble person. Some precepts, such as the principle of the golden mean, are similar to the precepts of Aristotle. A noble person is neither cowardly nor rash, neither avaricious nor wasteful. A noble person strikes a balance between two extremes. A Confucian strategy gives responsible people a feasible model that fosters the ennoblement of the community and its citizens.

An excellent introduction to Confucianism is in Huston Smith’s The Religions of Man. One quotation:

‘Goodness, the gentleman, propriety, government by virtue, and the arts of peace - such were the values to which Confucius had given his heart. His entire life was lived under their spell. They then, together, were to comprise the content of deliberate tradition. Held before the individual from birth to death, they would furnish that ‘habitual vision of greatness’ which Whitehead has called the essence of all true education.’

Confucius formulated doctrines about right relationships between people, e.g., the right relationship between man and woman. His ideas on this subject are nearer to those of St. Paul than to those of modern feminists, but of course the content of such precepts is bound by time and culture. When Mohammed prescribed four wives as the maximum, he was only improving dramatically on existing conditions. For us here, the content of Confucius’ precepts is not important. Today he might have formulated the right behavior for people ‘living apart together’, the right relations between a homosexual minority and a heterosexual majority, the right approach to illegal immigrants, and so on.

Confucius showed the possibility of practical and efficient social systems and government, systems not based on egotism and exploitation, and being neither crude nor cruel. Aristotle held similar ideas. He compared a statesman who produces an orderly society to a potter who produces a good pot.

A basic consideration of Confucius, again as with Aristotle, is the relationship between rights and duties, between privileged positions and social responsibilities. Here too, Confucius believed that a balance should exist. Confucius strove for a society that would exist somewhere between tyrannical order and anarchistic chaos or, in Schiller’s terms, between Barbarei and Wildheit. Confucius wanted order, but he wanted it to be a human order. His is the saying: ‘A tyrannical regime is worse than a devouring tiger’. Charles Darwin wrote that the Chinese civilization is more of a model than any of the other world civilizations.

A Confucian strategy designs a social architecture of institutions and role patterns and gives these institutions and role patterns cultural or even spiritual significance. It humanizes by making roles and institutions more humane, and making them vessels of self-respect. The traditional sectors of our own society are already familiar with such ideas as ‘good government’, ‘a good housefather’, ‘good seamanship’ and ‘good business practice’. These ideas are part of the Confucian world of responsible, prudent people who consider one another not as individuals, but as good citizens who care about quality and civilization.

Confucian models imply stable relationships. Predictability is both a benefit and a cost in systems that strive for structural harmony. Because the Chinese state became strongly bureaucratic over the centuries, Confucianism became associated with bureaucracy. But the Confucian model is not bureaucratic.

Dutch sailing regulations include the statement that the captain of a ship has to do everything according to good seamanship, even in unregulated situations, even if good seamanship were to contradict these regulations. In the same sense, it is legitimate in war to do some illegitimate things. According to some, the same holds in love - hardly a Confucian activity since the eighteenth century.

The Confucian approach to good government is also relevant for large organizations: a good employee policy, a good organizational structure, systematic attention to quality, and the fostering of self-respect and mutual respect. We find satisfaction in making things go well, in getting things done well. Everyone is saturated with norms and values. The street cleaner, the film director, and the attendant in the ticket window, all have their codes of honor and self-respect. For small organizations and temporary work settings the Confucian approach is less relevant, because particular circumstances, personal peculiarities and personal relations play a larger role.

A Confucian approach to civilization, of course, is not limited to Confucius. I have already mentioned Aristotle. The classic Romans knew humanitas: tenderness, tact, openness for people and for circumstances, a sense of joy and festivity. The Middle Ages maintained the idea of chivalry. In all these cases male values were tempered by female values, without abandoning the male values. The Provençal troubadours were the priests of this new doctrine of knights: strong, reliable, noble men, ‘leaders of men in war and peace’, courting noble women.

Interestingly, medieval lore acknowledges, be it reluctantly, that even base people and scoundrels may be loftily disposed. So we may include Robin Hood and - never forget - Maid Marian, as our role models.

If ever we forget history, future psychologists will explain Richard Lionheart and Eleanor of Aquitania and their ilk as archetypes within the human soul. These psychologists would be only half wrong. Maybe all that would remain of this lore would then be Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, possibly in the guise of Roger Moore.

The humanists of the early sixteenth century rediscovered not only dusty books, but also the spirit within those books - the classical civilization. From the French humanists came the idea of the honnête homme, the honest man, and then the gentilhomme, the gentleman. This man was strong, decisive, not to be fooled around with, robust, able to stand the barbarians around him, while correct, reasonable, caring, and cultured.

In each case, the essence boils down to the same: a friendly, caring, civilized but strong and competent host to others, in an unfriendly, barbaric and dangerous world. Still, the gentleman feels at home in the world, and makes others feel at home as well. In this sense the Confucian world, with all its deference to religion, is more humanistic than religious. It judges religion for what religion does here, how it makes people at home here. Machiavelli would say that a good religion entails good institutions, good institutions entail good habits, and good habits lead to prosperity and success in all things.

From: The Ten Global Challenges: How People Make the World. An Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity. Ordering the book