Valdai Club

The most important thing is to understand why ISIS is so strong and is growing so fast, rather than focus on what is evil about it.

It is usual to discuss the sins and crimes of totalitarian regimes but sometimes it is even more important to analyze why these regimes attract people. This means thinking about alternative development paths.

We at the Valdai Club decided to write or create, if you will, a book about ISIS (an organization banned in many countries, including Russia). I hope you will read it soon. It isn’t the most original idea, to be honest. After all, everyone wants to say something about a subject recognized as one of the most topical issues in the modern world. Nevertheless, as I said, we’ve decided to have a go as well. Therefore, let me offer a few ideas of my own as regards the gist of the matter.

First of all, ISIS is a most important and most dangerous temptation of the modern times. George Orwell wrote about what he called a monstrous charm of Nazism in his time. Not so long ago, Umberto Eco remarked that Nazism was an everyday and, in a way, natural thing.

ISIS, in fact, is a socio-political entity quite comparable with a Nazi organization. But this is not because the Islamists and all sorts of Salafis have invented anything new since ancient Sparta, but precisely because humankind is highly prone to relapse into something like Nazism and create a system that makes it possible to utterly simplify the understanding of human nature and the nature of social relations. This system enables and urges one to renounce individual responsibility for one’s fate and yield to the sweet submission to one’s higher-ups and the burning hatred towards all who are different. Erich Fromm wrote an undeservedly forgotten book entitled Escape from Freedom, in which he made an attempt to explain why the success of Nazism proved feasible.

This is why it is so important to give a description of the so-called Islamic State. We should understand why a seemingly archaic, totalitarian entity has surged into prominence and why it has proved attractive for tens of millions of people, many of whom are educated people from advanced countries rather than illiterate Bedouins.

One would like to understand, for example, its origins and how it developed.

In effect, ISIS was brought into being by a combination of several factors: First, a transformation of the Islamic world itself; second, the onset of a postindustrial and postmodern era; and, third, the invention of information technologies that have engulfed the world.

The Islamic world’s transformation has been analyzed at length and doesn’t require a long exposé. The most important thing here is the dissolution of the region’s traditional and until quite recently patriarchal society. It was repeatedly indicated that the Islamic community in its broadest sense underwent changes quite similar to what had happened in Russia (and not only in Russia) at the turn of the 20th century. Jose Ortega y Gasset clearly discerned them in contemporary Spain. Basically, there were several factors fuelling the transformation. The traditional society’s dissolution made it no longer capable of socializing the rising generations. As a result, millions of young people lacking any identity were pushed into the little-known and hostile world of modern urban civilization. In an uncomfortable and unfamiliar world, these young (and not very young) people became ready-made cannon fodder for radical and extremist movements intent on destroying the existing world and building an alternative and, to use the modern political idiom, ultimately fair world. It is in this way that the Red Guards were formed in Russia, or the hongweibing in China, or ISIS squads in the Middle East.

Totalitarianism seems to arise from things other than direct suppression and fear. It is generated by voluntary cohesion – a democracy of sorts – in a situation where millions of confused people who have difficulty finding their bearings in the surrounding social reality become involved in politics. This is a moment when the fiery masses that feel sincere adoration for their leaders and are ready to die for them become a historical force. Therein lies the root of a very real and even durable totalitarianism which, judging by all appearances, ISIS exemplifies.

It’s patently clear that the movement’s success cannot be ensured by the ignorant, if fearless, fanatics alone. There is a need for rather a large number of intellectuals burning with desire to create something eternally and definitively fair. Today the Islamic world does have an intellectual stratum of this sort, some of whose members went to study at the Sorbonne or other Western universities only to find upon return to the Middle East that their countries don’t offer them much in the way of vertical mobility and that the local hierarchy is strong and rigid. Thus they come to feel that their only chance is to build a world of their own. Others stay home hoping to exploit family ties but soon come to realize that opportunities for their creative growth are very restricted. If you are an artist, for instance, you are not allowed to depict people, nor can you make a career as a molecular biologist, and so on.

In pre-1917 Russia, there was also a social group of this kind – the so-called raznochintsi, narodniki (populists), and their ilk – mostly university dropouts with a self-fulfillment problem and scarcely any chance to make a career. Naturally, they easily succumbed to the thrilling, albeit fantastic, world reformation theories.

Finally, every undertaking is fuelled by money and money there was galore. By virtue of their origin, quite a few capital owners proved highly amenable to persuasion and willingly chipped in for a “noble cause” or a “just struggle.”

In Russia, too, a number of rich merchants like the Mamontovs and the Morozovs, for all their commitment to market freedom, played a highly ambiguous role in the Bolshevik victory. But then Osama bin Laden was also a scion of a very successful and highly-placed family.

All the three elements – the human mass, the nervous mental reflection, and money – have combined to form a grim cocktail that is blowing up the Islamic world socially, intellectually and financially, creating the horrid chimera of a global Islamic State. By the way, the same elements eventually destroyed not only Russia but also Spain, Austria-Hungary and even the German Empire. What sprung up on their ruins were socio-political monsters like Hitler’s Nazism, Stalin’s Bolshevism, Franco’s dictatorship, and so on. The question for now is whether the civilized mankind will manage to crush ISIS before it is too late?

But why were these factors highly effective in Russia and not quite so effective in Spain? In all evidence, the key element here was the depth or, if you wish, the multi-layered structure of self-identification characterizing those involved in societal transformations.

Nazism is a totalitarian and hierarchical system based on people’s deep-down desire to avoid responsibility for oneself and shift the burden of social rivalry and cooperation (which form the basis of social life) to a leader, “one of us,” a political party, a religious community, and so on. Properly speaking, there would have been no mankind at all were it not for this socio-psychological trait manifested as the desire to avoid responsibility. Social life per se is the consequence of readiness for cooperation, mutual harmony, and submission to someone who is more experienced, powerful and skilled. If people lacked these qualities, they would never have survived in the world, let alone created a civilization capable of adapting to changes, accumulating experience, and evolving an increasingly sophisticated education and knowledge system.

It is another matter that the system whereby knowledge was passed on and conserved was always at odds with another survival-related institutional task, to wit, the production of new knowledge, transformation of the world, and discovery of its hidden laws. A most successful and exceptional civilization in this sense is what we know as the West, or the Judeo-Christian civilization. But I will address this topic somewhat later.

To reiterate: the traditional Islamic world with all its socialization mechanisms has collapsed. At the same time, it has brought forth many intellectuals, to whom it fell to explain why for all their resources and money the Middle East Muslims lacked both prestige and world power. What is to be done? There were many replies, but the most tempting one was, like in early 20th-century Russia, a call for a radical (and seemingly fair) transformation of the world. Needless to say, this transformation is based on an extremely one-dimensional understanding of Islam.

However, it would be a simplification to interpret the developments in this traditional way. The general elements of a social revolution aimed at a radical renovation of the elites do work, but the environment is somewhat different, or perhaps even dramatically different.

There are two new elements in addition to the one mentioned above: the post-industrial format and IT technologies. The former means that the arrangement for achieving success in socio-economic life is much different from what was the case at least 50 years ago. This played a bad turn to societies with no experience of industrialization based on a comparatively low rate of profit, an experience characteristic of Western Europe, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. The rest of the world lacked this record and it is surprising how successfully some Asian nations – primarily the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Koreans – are coping with the challenge.

Not so nations in the Middle East and Central Asia. Knowing how to manage productive work and create businesses based on mutual benefit of fellow countrymen and even foreigners proved insufficient for a comparatively smooth transformation.

Perhaps it is largely for these reasons that ISIS is such an archaic (at first sight) organization. Its rejection of the modern age with all its successes proved so deep that ideologically it is not seeking to capture modern technological knowledge (as were the Bolsheviks or the Nazis). ISIS is ruthlessly leveling the world to fit rigorous Islamic canons implying that the world is facing an inevitable and final ruin. But I will address this later, too.

And, finally, new communications are a novel and independent factor in the post-industrial epoch, which is likely to have played a fatal role. Here I am not referring to the intoxicating ease with which practically any kind of content is diffused in the modern world.

The new communications, primarily Internet, have generated an unprecedented mass-scale cognitive dissonance. An abundance of information makes an ordinary person (with his or her, as a rule, scanty knowledge) look almost a nonentity in his own eyes and has definitively ruined all chances of a positive self-identification for a vast number of people on this planet. The communicative cornucopia is so immense that everyone who hasn’t been given at least an initial drill in handling information feels lost in the modern world. Ordinary people today don’t speak foreign languages, make do with a scanty vocabulary, and have received only primitive schooling. These tiny assets are dwarfed by the boundless sea of versatile knowledge rolling around the Internet.

The above refers not only and not so much to those in the new caliphate. The loss of interest in politics in the West is also a consequence of the same mass-scale cognitive dissonance. Of course, in the Middle Ages, people were much less educated, but they lacked such an abundance of information. On the other hand, poverty and strict social norms dampened their reformative zeal. Having said that, their age also saw some horrific events: riots and brutal mass mutual destruction, compared to which St. Bartholomew Night Massacre pales into insignificance.

Today’s threat is much more serious. Speculating about totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt claimed that its success was dependent on the existence of the steam engine, machine gun, and radio. Today we have fast-flying aircraft and much more sophisticated weaponry. But what is more important, radio has been replaced with totally new communications.

These communications, in all evidence, are leading to the following. The abundance of knowledge makes many individuals regress. They have to deny knowledge because of inability to absorb it. Consciously or unconsciously they fall back on simpler truths and teachings they can understand. This means that the communicative abundance, far from helping to cognize the world, makes it impossible to perceive more complex aspects of reality. Again, the abundance of communication only intensifies the unthinking multitude’s yen for submission and uncritical acceptance of what is preached by the hierarchs.

One more consequence is over-simplified self-identification or, if you wish, malignant infantilism. People find it hard to get their bearings amid numerous identification markers scattered around the information space and many consciously choose the simplest models, which are something they cling to desperately, for the alternative is final self-oblivion. Hence the striving for a dangerous simplicity: a primitively understood religion, an aggressive renunciation of any doubt, etc. They avoid anything that can call into question the flimsy wholeness of their personality.

Added to the fear of losing oneself is a media-generated anticipation of immediacy and movie-like speed of events. What isn’t happening right now either doesn’t exist in consciousness or is perceived as a deception and manipulation. If the enemy isn’t defeated after the first ten combat sorties, there are no sorties at all. In effect, this is a mental problem, the annihilation of patience skills by modern communications. Someone who doesn’t respond to an SMS within five minutes ignores the sender. This is how everything is perceived, in politics as well.

Strange though it may seem, the educated world lives in a realm of illusion as well. It is hard to learn what ISIS is all about from countless press articles dedicated to this new caliphate.

In the meantime, there is much of what is surprising in it. Headed by the eighth caliph, Al-Baghdadi, the new caliphate is a real state with provinces, police, healthcare, and education. What is even more important, it is said to be formed on the basis of the Prophet’s dicta. For example, theft is punished by cutting off the thief’s hand. Something less grave may carry a fine. Muslims can live side by side with Christians, if, of course, they recognize Muslim dominance and pay special duties. All Muslims of the world must take an oath of allegiance to the caliph: being faithful to the caliph is the only way of life for the Muslims. Christians are not the main enemy: they can be tolerated as long as they obey the rules. The current struggle is for creating a caliphate. Its theorists say that true Islam is being revived along with a new caliphate after one thousand years of distortions. They claim that even the Ottoman Empire had no true caliphs. It is Al-Baghdadi who is the only true caliph, according to their interpretation of Islam. It is easy to understand, therefore, why the current Islamic states are the most important adversaries of ISIS, the new caliphate seeking to impose the true Islamic authority.

The main challenge is that ISIS is an alternative to the existing Islamic state and public order. For now, the main battle is raging within the Islamic world. But when it is over (provided ISIS wins, of course), the question will arise as to whether ISIS or a similar totalitarian entity is the main alternative to the existing world order in general.

There have been many discussions in recent years on possible alternative development options for mankind and new forms of international life. It is a pity, therefore, that so little attention is paid to ISIS, its essence and structure. We are witnessing a successful and dangerous alternative. It wouldn’t be irrelevant to analyze why it is liked by so many people who are ready to die for it. And in general, the Last Judgment is round the corner, if we believe the ISIS interpretation of the Quran. But prior to that, a frightful battle with Rome will be fought in Syria at a place called Dabiq not far from the Turkish border. If memory serves me, Dabiq is also the title of the monthly online magazine used by ISIS for propaganda and recruitment.

Everyone must understand that ISIS is an astonishing planetary phenomenon based on millennium ideas, extreme rigor, and cruelty. But it is attractive and develops rapidly. We can even trace the dynamics of the Muslim movement.

Today the fate of the world is largely dependent on whether Al-Qaeda comes to terms with ISIS (they have some differences) or the idea of the one and only caliphate with a foothold on the ground will prevail over all other considerations.

The horrible thing is that for a huge number of people (not necessarily Muslims) ISIS is the biggest 21st-century temptation. They are pining for a totalitarian paradise (or hell), where you don’t need to think and must only obey and fight heroically alongside the likes of you, your brothers and sisters, who believe in the same things as you. This amounts to an alternative world which will admit only like-minded people.

In short, we should know more about ISIS to understand whether we’ll be able to cope with it.