Is the war currently waged between the West and ISIS a war of civilizations or not? Is it a war of religions? Ethinicities? The diverse opinions on this have been fueling spats between journalists and thinkers for some time now (most recently the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/clash-civilizations-isnt who took on the NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/opinion/roger-cohen-islam-and-the-west-at-war.html and the Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/)
Yet all this theoretical rumination it is, I believe, deflecting our attention from a less theoretical approach to the vital question: how to stop the wildfire effect ISIS is, mainly through the Internet, generating in young people the world over?
Hearts and minds. It's what always works, historically. Once the problem of survival has been solved (and it has, for the young, Western-born recruits of the terrorist organization that is actually fast becoming a new and expanding territory), people have proven to subsist on only material goods. We need food for the mind, ideas, a vision which imbues our life with meaning, and for which we would (even) die. Poignantly if ironically, the more we have (freedom, democracy, products) and the more stable our lives become, the more elusive the pursuit of this vision becomes.
"Peaceful times are rarely interesting, yet I would not wish interesting times on any man" the great British thinker and historian, Eric Hobsbawm was fond of saying. Having experienced most of the twentieth century within a Jewish family with a penchant for picking wrong countries as refuge at the wrongest possible times (until they managed to escape to Britain) he had possibly one of the most extensive experiences of what it means to live in a time inflamed by passionate, absolute adherence to various, usually conflicting, ideologies.
Wars are uniquely endowed for igniting passions and solving existential problems. You pick sides and fight. When there is a dearth of wars, they are supplicated by cold wars, movements over matters directly impacting peoples' lives.
The hippie movement changed the world and the way we live, not just in the US, its place of origin, but throughout the world. It stopped wars, liberated women, empowered artists, embraced-no, celebrated-LGBTs–as well as all those millions of people who were considered "misfits" and were summarily cast out of society and discriminated against in a vile manner because "they did not follow the rules." Once it succeeded in changing society, the movement became redundant
The same happened when The Free World won the Cold War over The Evil Empire. Although now the grandiose terms imposed by the victors–America–when the win was still fresh, now sound funny, they were quite accurate. For many of us Europeans, especially from the Second World War onwards, our being able to live and live freely were incumbent on America beating Russia.
Of course for those who did not get a first (or even second) hand experience of what it meant to be strangled within the Soviet Union's iron fist, in time things became rather tepid. Especially once America had its first African-American President, gay marriage became legal, and 9/11 started ebbing, most remaining passions involve marathon running, paleodiets and ice-bucket challenges. Tepid stuff, indeed.
It is a fact: world orders, ideologies, and systems which define how we live (and die) are like marriages. They need date-nights and revamping from time to time. All the more so when based on democracy, freedom and all the values America stands for. In the land of Lady Liberty where the pursuit of "more and more" meets the pursuit of happiness, sometimes it is easy to forget that the most elementary happiness most people here already possess as an unalienable right, is more than most people in the world can even aspire to.
Reiterating the "values and ideals and freedoms we stand for" can appear vapid rhetoric to teenagers who have never had these freedoms questioned. They may also appear false to people who have become isolated and feel discriminated against (that may or may not be the actual case.)
Things have reached the point where "capitalism", especially the US garden variety, has become a rather arcane, if not dirty, word. Piketty http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/31/forces-of-divergence merely enhanced and put into numbers what the Europeans have accusing the US of, and quite openly since the 2008 financial crisis: inequality is at an almost feudal high, the walls of privilege are hard (if not impossible) to scale for most people, the impermeable arrogance of the entitled has turned more than just New York into "A tale of two cities" as NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio poignantly iterates. The depth and nuanced quality of this inequality is only highlighted by the fact that Rep Scott Walker, a possible Presidential contender, stands for everything regressive yet is supported by large swathes of the population who perceive of him as a maverick, a kind of anachic wild card who will challenge the status quo of the rich getting richer, the poor and middle class, poorer, and politics, a game between dynasties.
People need to be reminded that this is the downside, and that, more than any other time in recent decades, measures are being taken to address these problems and solve them.
From the Presidential to the federal and municipal level, even the private sector, there are efforts to make all our lives better, safer, fairer, more enriched, happier. Obamacare, more affordable housing, the FCC enforcing net neutrality, and two women, Mary Jo White http://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-head-seeks-uniformity-in-fiduciary-duties-among-brokers-advisers-1426607955 (chairwoman of the SEC) clamping down on corrupt practices in the financial world, and FED chairwoman, Janet Yellen, practicing cautious middle class-onomics to keep America safe and more equal (http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/03/09/janet-who-most-americans-have-never-heard-of-fed-chairwoman-janet-yellen/) all these people and institutions are daily making an increasing if not ostentatious difference in bettering our lives. For the first time in human history private companies and individuals invested with a great deal of power are using it not to make money but make a difference the world over. Google is trying to make all the universe and its knowledge free and accessible to all; it is also safeguarding our privacy as the NSA snooping debacle revealed. It is also disrupting Big Telecom's arbitrary autocratic rule over the Internet by making wifi cheap if not free. In its free time it is pioneering in the domains of health gene-tech research, artificial life, and space–all advances meant to be released to the world, free of charge or any discrimination. Facebook is bent on changing the world through enabling every single person to become connected–on a more concrete level, the plan is to provide free wifi to third world countries where there is no network. Why even more traditionally market-based companies such as Apple and Tesla are deeply involved with fostering values and ideals that are emblematic of America. All, regardless of whether they are more profit-based than others, are making the world more accessible (in terms of connectivity, access, knowlege, as well as travel and transport) to…the world, saving us all time, money, life, and enriching our lives in every way we did not until recently even dream of desiring. The Hyperloop, Uber, AirBnb, why even Tinder!
This growing trend challenges the "Wold of Wall Street" and "Flashboys" crass, profligate, cynical, often offensive paradigm of life and action that has for the past thirty years or so defined the financial industry, as well (to a less insalubrious degree) as much of the corporate world. Yet it is not mirrored in popular culture (which to a large degree concentrates on the malcontent, "ironic" subversive cynicism adopted, ironically, by mostly the children of the entitled and liberal!)
I don't believe most young recruits, start out wanting to become the assasins we see on the Internt, slaughtering innocent Westerners they abduct. According to most psychiatrists, we–even the evildoers–do not aspire to be evil. With the sole exception of the clinically insane (the verdict is still out on sociopaths) even the most consistently evil of us need to justify our behavior to ourselves as stemming either from injustice we have suffered, or from a passionate adherence to some kind of -ism (an ideologically based vision like all religions, as well as socio-economic orders such as communism, fascism, marxism, why even capitalism.)
Why does ISIS's recruitment find fertile ground epecially in young Westerners who come from immigrant Moslem families who espouse or eschew Islamism to varying degrees? For much of the same reasons most of us spend half our lives rebelling against our parents and the other half trying to civilizedly distance ourselves from them while at the same moment we are obsessively retracing our origins and ancestry (on a personal as well as DNA-based level) on the constantly multiplying sites that do so for most affordable rates. If Freud were alive today he might put it this way: we want to become our parents–not as they are but as they "should've/could've been". The beta version. In order to become our parents we need to kill our parents much as Zeus took on his father Cronus. In the case of ISIS "killing" becomes less of a metaphor. For these young Muslim recruits, the pursuit of this utopia becomes feasible in a dystopian world only a plane-ride away. There, they believe, they can be permeated with the culture and convictions their parents lost or were taken from them in order to assimilate into the Western world they emigrated to. That they are choosing to regress to the worst version of the conditions their parents sought egress from, making great sacrifices in order to do so (especially in the case of immigration to the US) recedes so far into smallprint it is forgotten. (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120144/trauma-genetic-scientists-say-parents-are-passing-ptsd-kids)
The US needs to amp up its soft power: movies, TV, internet, music, books, everything. Engage with Internet leaders like Google, Facebook( https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101322049893211), Twitter (http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/17/8226173/rhapsody-twitter-music-integration), 23andme.com, Apple, Amazon; get the movie and music industries on board; everyone from bad-ass rappers, Justin Timberlake and Beyonce (please though, not Taylor Swift); get all the other industries on board too ("ISIS kills pistachios") from ad men to cheese-makers. We need to remind people of the good that America, like no other country and society, abundantly offers its people, because otherwise it will all go bad. We need to remind them we were all strangers here once. And that we (all of us, despite inequalities and problems) have it better today than at any other time in the past. Blame our all-too-human human nature (focusing on what we still don't have and forgetting how much we have gained and progressed, as the rockstar scientist and thinker Steve Pinker (http://stevenpinker.com/pages/frequently-asked-questions-about-better-angels-our-nature-why-violence-has-declined") often points out.
It is up to America to take lead and start taking action in this marketing war before we are forced to take action militarily. The only country in the world that elevated the pursuit of happiness to a constitutional right, has to stand for it. We also seem to be the only ones who still believe too! An example of this was the British Spectator's kvetching about the pursuit of happiness (http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/happiness-conspiracy-against-optimism-and-cult-positive-thinking) as a way to unleash its endless resentment over its former colony, America, becoming world leader! It is also up to American Muslim families to really talk to their kids. To voice their emotions and experiences instead of repressing them. To explain why exactly they left their countries to seek–and find refuge in the US. To confess that, even though they would do it again, leaving your homeland and life and trying to anew in a new one is traumatic. An irreparable loss (http://www.sjsu.edu/people/edward.cohen/courses/c3/s1/immigration_trauma.pdf) And then these parents, the first-generation immigrants, need to explain to their children how much they have gained. And that this is nearest we can ever get to happiness: when the only reason to risk your life is not for death but for a better life, a life in the here and now. This is the value at the heart of freedom and democracy, at the heart of America.
