Abstract
Many people have a fascination with ‘senseless violence’ and are concerned about its rise in our society. In the real world, however, violence is rarely senseless. It is not random and haphazard but driven by rational motives and justifications and governed by its own internal logic. The myth of ‘senseless violence’ taps into certain moral intuitions, but it has little or nothing to do with reality. If we want to prevent violent acts, we need to understand the motivations of the perpetrators rather than portraying their violence as random, mysterious, devoid of reason. I apply these insights to the extreme atrocities committed by the group known as the Islamic State (IS) and show how the myth of senseless violence has led many policymakers and commentators astray.
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Notes
- 1.
There is another, weaker sense of ‘senseless’, which points to the futility of violent conflict, or its failure accomplish some larger goal. An example is the following claim: ‘The trench warfare during the First World War was a senseless waste of human life’. Even so, both parties in the conflict had their reasons to continue the violence, once it had started. Game theory describes the strategic logic of these situations as ‘wars of attrition’.
- 2.
Willem Schinkel (2010). Aspects of Violence. A Critical Theory.
- 3.
Jan Verplaetse (2008). Het morele instinct. Over de natuurlijke oorsprong van onze moraal: Uitgeverij Nieuwezijds BV, p. 72. (my translation)
- 4.
Thanks to Neil Van Leeuwen for making this point about rationalization.
- 5.
Shelley E. Taylor (1989). Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind: Basic Books
- 6.
Steven Pinker (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes: Viking Penguin, p. 488–495.
- 7.
On the remarkable similarity between psychoanalysis and medieval demonology, see Richard Webster (1995). Why Freud Was Wrong. Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis, Chapter 15.
- 8.
Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson (2008). Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), pp. 25–28.
- 9.
Sam Harris (2004). The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton & Compa, p. 106.
- 10.
Pinker, ibid., p. 328.
- 11.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn described this mechanism very well in his famous testimony The Gulag Archipelago (1974).
- 12.
Christopher Browning (1992/2017). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Harper Perennial.
- 13.
Tavris & Aronson, ibid., p. 195.
- 14.
Konrad Lorenz (1963) Das sogenannte Böse zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression.
- 15.
Clinton originally used the phrase during a 1996 speech in New Hampshire. https://youtu.be/j0uCrA7ePno
- 16.
Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, ii. V.4, ‘Rebellion’.
- 17.
The website TVtropes.org offers a treasure trove of such clichés. For example, an ‘Omnicidal Maniac’ is villain who, for reasons that are invariably hard to fathom, wants to destroy the whole world or even reality itself. The trope ‘Obviously Evil’ refers to villains who glorify and revel in their own fiendishness, and ‘The Dark Side’ to the recurring cliché of a morally corrupt counterpart of the Force of Good.
- 18.
In Harris’s later novels, however, the origins of Lecter’s evil are traced down do a childhood trauma in Lithuania in 1944, when he witnessed the murder and cannibalism of his little sister.
- 19.
This applies even to those human beings who approximate the myth of pure evil most closely: psychopathic serial killers. Hard though it may be to believe, serial killers often see themselves as victims, not as perpetrators. They point to an unhappy childhood, the humiliations they have suffered from others, or the injustice done to them by society. They also invariably minimize and downplay their deeds. Baumeister, ibid., pp. 47–52.
- 20.
Paul Crook (1994). Darwinism, War and History.
- 21.
Pinker, pp. 547–556, Baumeister, Chapter 7.
- 22.
References to Clinton, Obama and Kerry’s statements can be found in this effective rebuttal of the claim that IS represents ‘nihilism’: Marty Kaplan, ‘Jihadism Isn’t Nihilism. What Everyone Gets Wrong About ISIS’, Alternet November 22, 2015.
- 23.
A very insightful essay on the ideology of IS : Graeme Wood, ‘What ISIS Really Wants’, The Atlantic, March 2015. A more scholarly study on religious terrorism: Mark Juergensmeyer (2005). Terror in the Mind of God. Taylor & Francis.
- 24.
Andrew Dickson White (1896) A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Chapter XI.
- 25.
The dogmas about heaven and hell offer a direct justification for sadism, the same one that was used by the Inquisitors and witch hunters in the Christian middle ages. If the ‘merciful’ God himself will torture the infidels for all eternity in the hereafter, why not give them a foretaste? This may explain why IS openly flaunts its atrocities. Executions of gays, apostates, and ‘crusaders’ are captured with professional HD cameras, down to the last obscene detail, and subsequently distributed through the official press agency of IS. Manuals for terrorists contain instructions for adding shrapnel such as nails to bombs in order to cause a maximum of gruesome injuries to the targeted enemy. An informative discussion of apocalyptic strands in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can be found in Gershom Gorenberg (2002). The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount: Oxford University Press.
- 26.
Maarten Boudry & Jerry Coyne (2016). Disbelief in belief: On the cognitive status of supernatural beliefs. Philosophical Psychology, 29(4), 601–615. See also my piece for 3 Quarks Daily, ‘Disbelief in belief’, April 18, 2016.
- 27.
‘Gauging the Jihadist Movement, Part 1: The Goals of the Jihadists’, Stratfor Dec 19, 2013. Graeme Wood, ‘What ISIS Really Wants’, The Atlantic, March 2015.
- 28.
‘Les autorités ne voulaient pas croire ce qu’il se passait à Molenbeek’, Le Monde, March 25, 2016.
- 29.
See the work of Quilliam, the anti-radicalization think tank of Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim reformer and former Islamist. Maajid Nawaz (2012). Radical: My journey from Islamist extremism to a democratic awakening: Random House. For an example of a counter-narrative addressed to jihadists, using reasonable arguments, see Nawaz’s letter: ‘An Ex-Radical’s Open Letter to ISIS Fighters: Quit Now While You Can!’ Daily Beast, November 9, 2014.
Acknowledgments
I wish you thank Neil Van Leeuwen for his critical comments, and Nick Brown for carefully proofreading this chapter.
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Boudry, M. (2018). The Myth of Senseless Violence and the Problem of Terrorism. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_12
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