What can be done about fundamentalism and terrorism?

Fighting against fundamentalism and terrorism is not only the wrong approach; it is even counterproductive. (For example, it would aid rather than deter recruitment.) The question we need to be asking instead is what we can do to take the wind out of their sails.

One of the main factors in the growth of fundamentalism and terrorism is a crisis (either acute or chronic) of meaning in the lives of those who flock to the sense of certainty that fundamentalist belief and some of the ideologies behind terrorism provide. I differentiate fundamentalism from religious beliefs that are conservative but not reactionary. Fundamentalism has always been more about rejecting modern secularist values than it has been an affirmation of anything positive.

If my diagnosis is apt, part of the cure might be to look for ways to enrich secularist culture. Secularism is known mostly in terms of what it is against rather than what it is for. Secularism is clearly an essential ingredient in modern democracies, but if the only thing people ever see is its rejection of the establishment of religion by the government, secularism is only present in a most people's awareness when it is fighting religion.

We sell ourselves short. Embodying the ideals of true secularism is actually a quite lofty goal. Imagine a society that would embrace the idea of people being able to work together toward deeply meaningful common goals in spite of differences that are deep, but not as deep as the human identity that would unite the common effort. I would gladly join forces with holders any religious belief to strengthen and deepen the connection that each of us could have with a larger version of humanity than our separate views can sustain.

breaking out of the cocoon

Anxiety and depression are common maladies these days, which is not surprising, given what it's like to live in the contemporary world. Perceptive, sensible, and sensitive people find it difficult to block out the awareness that we live in an uneasy present and face a perilous future. Some of us might be able to retreat into our respective cocoons. We might pursue resource-intensive diversions and max out our landfills with yesterday’s must-have consumer items, but in the end, not only is avoidance not the solution; it exacerbates the problem.

Our lives are not defined by baseline functionality. There’s more to being alive than breathing, meeting obligations, drawing a paycheck, and not dying, and there is more to enjoying life than avoiding unpleasantness and discomfort.

Avoidance is an obstacle to personal as well as collective wellbeing. Some of what is most biologically vital, psychologically compelling, and emotionally enriching in us goes to sleep. When we attempt to block out what we find to be unpleasant, we lose the ability to experience joy, delight, sublime beauty, and love. Life without a deeply humanizing dimension is flat.

We all crave deeper satisfactions. We can no more go without emotional sustenance  than we can go without food. A not insignificant percentage of infants deprived of physical affection literally die of neglect. Children who are not nurtured miss out on crucial developmental thresholds and suffer permanent deficits, sometimes even to the point of acquiring personality disorders.

Being resigned to just accepting what feels unacceptable leads to learned helplessness. Participating in solutions to social problems, by creating experiences of efficacy, contributes to a sense of empowerment and personal wellbeing.

picking our battles

We need to ask not only how to make things better but also:

• how to avoid making things worse by our well-meaning efforts
• how to not be driven crazy by frustration, impatience, and setbacks
• how to deal with disappointment and anger
• how to not descend into learned helplessness and/or cynicism
• how to tell the difference between important and unimportant
• when to compromise

It is at least as important to accept what cannot, will not, and/or ought not be changed as it is to work toward changing what seems to need changing. Accepting what I can't change is a process. It starts with the recognition that beating my head against the wall doesn't help anyone, that it usually makes things worse, and that it disables me.

Unfortunately, there is no switch with which I can turn off the compulsive rumination, agitation, and restlessness that won't leave me alone when I feel like I'm not doing enough. Letting go of the need to keep trying to do what can't be done or ought not be done is deeply and perplexingly challenging. The need to abandon futile pursuits is not always apparent and is often unpalatable or even painful. It can feel like being defeated.

There is a paradox involved in letting go. Something is required besides simple resignation.  There has to be a positive choice that offers an alternative to just dancing around the void created by the avoidance of choices that I don’t want to make, but what that positive choice is and how to get there are typically neither obvious nor readily attainable.

It's complicated.

When I recognize that the way I’m approaching things is flawed, there is also an inconvenient, and perhaps painful awareness that new and different choices have to come from somewhere besides the template within which I have always made choices and which is the only way of looking at life that I know. I can’t undo the old by means of the same thinking that produced it in the first place.

My habitual emotional, mental, and behavioral patterns may have been natural responses to what I perceived was going on at the time I adopted them, but I will inevitably encounter situations where they don’t work. Undoing them is not so easy though. It's far easier to avoid, deny, pretend, and forget.

Letting go of what I'm used to creates a terrible sense of vulnerability. That can be compounded by defensive reactions. However, if I allow myself to just feel the feelings, I can begin making peace with the stubborn realities that resist my willpower.

If I can disengage the grueling exercises in futility, the frenetically reactive spinning of my wheels, I can become fully present in the moment, remove energy from whatever it is that drives my fearful reactions, and direct that energy more constructively.

I will eventually sense some part my self that is free to make different choices.   

One of the hardest challenges in this process has to do with the fact that the emotional habits I have adopted are inseparable from my core beliefs about who I am and what my role in the world is. There is no way to change emotional habits without changing the beliefs that create them and no way to change my beliefs without changing myself from the inside out.  

But I  continue feeling the feelings. I begin recognizing my feelings for what they are, conditioned responses. I can choose to respond differently. Having the world be the way I want it to be or having it yield to my efforts to change it is a childish fantasy. Letting go of that fantasy is part of growing up. And I have to keep doing it over and over again.

Can we blame social problems on moral decay?

Moral decay is commonly blamed for all manner of real and imagined problems. It’s a convenient explanation, but even if there is something to it, what does that mean? Does everyone have to convert to evangelical Christianity?

Moral decay is in the eye of the beholder. Since there is no universally agreed on measure of moral wholesomeness, it is impossible to gauge whether moral decay is actually a problem. We can argue either side of the question, but there is no impartial referee to decide who wins.

So let’s look instead at some of the reasons people believe that the morality of our society is decaying: 

• They’ve been convinced of it by a preacher or a politician who has a stake in their believing it.
• They see the presence of different values in their midst (due to the increase of cultural and religious diversity in Western societies) through ethnocentric (or even blatantly racist) eyes.
• They don’t recognize that there are other moral philosophies that are at least as productive of true good as their own.
• They have a very backward understanding of morality.
• Their authoritarian personality can’t accept the fact that freedom from authoritarianism is something to be celebrated.
• They are homophobic and/or misogynistic and can’t handle the clear fact that liberation from certain traditional moral strictures is an unqualified good thing.
• They hate it when other people seem to be enjoying things that they needlessly deny themselves.
• They have forgotten the meaning of love.
• They are rigid and can’t deal with the moral ambiguities of their own choices, so they project their sense of guilt onto other people. 
• They equate the secularization of public institutions (which is not only necessary, given the fact that even theists can’t agree with each other about what values to follow; it is required by the US constitution) with an erosion of morality.
• They suffer from confirmation bias. (They don’t even notice the existence of disconfirming evidence.)
• The people they hang out with relay anecdotal evidence that supports their shared beliefs.
• They only watch, listen to, or read content they agree with. 

facing reality

Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living." Happiness that is not accompanied by self-awareness is fragile, empty, and often short-lived. Some people seem to go through life obliviously happy, but when a crisis comes up, if they have all their eggs in the basket of blissful ignorance, they will not know what to do. Or they will be trapped in their happy bubble and totally unavailable to the people around them. But it goes beyond that. People whose pursuits of happiness are based on avoidance of the truth are dangerous. They are some of the biggest supporters of fascism and the like.

Modernity as an experiment

We easily forget that democracy, religious freedom, and the commitment to being guided by reason and scientific evidence were uncertain experiments in the beginning. Our pioneering forebears recognized that there were no guarantees, no solid assurance that the whole project would be successful. It’s clear from the iconoclastic spirit of their innovations that they hardly viewed all the details of the social and cultural reforms they were undertaking as sacred, infallible, and final. The baton has been passed down from generation to generation, and it has been up to each generation to continue the ongoing work, accumulate new lessons, dig deeper, distill, refine, reframe the task, and eliminate what no longer works.

Sí, se puede

Gathering an unruly group of ordinary mortals and setting our sights on solving some of the most challenging problems humanity has ever faced sounds ridiculously grandiose and has about as much chance of success as an attempt to herd cats, but if we can break it down into modular micro tasks, we can seed a self-organizing benevolent storm to be reckoned with.

Because of the complexity of the problems, information overload, backlash, polarization, and gridlock, there has to be a division of labor that distributes the actual responsibilities involved in deliberative, forward-moving, democratic decision-making and in execution of the decisions.

It’s about being able to more broadly distribute the responsibility for facing difficult truths and coming up with creative solutions. An engaged citizenry could transform the entire political climate if we were able to break the effort down into intrinsically rewarding tasks that ordinary human beings could eagerly embrace.

If each of us can find ways to translate our own hopes and dreams of a more compassionate and just society into language, imagery, and action, we can create a contagious movement that others will want to be a part of.