Surprise!

Surprise! I'm back. I've decided that months that begin with "A" are the only suitable ones for blogging. Thusly, I make my return. But is it a return at all? As far as the weather in Brooklyn is concerned, it's still April, in which case, that four month hiatus from blogging was entirely illusory. Busted, hiatus.

It's vacation time, so it means I'm reading something pretentious, intellectual, and preferably, French (in English) -- this time, it's Foucault's Madness and Civilization. After 50 pages, I'm really enjoying it, and I wish he were still around because I'd love him to explain what the "terrorist" means to Western civilization. Just as he used Europe's understanding of madness and the insane to explore how society thought of itself, I wish he would do something similar with the modern West's conceptualization of the "terrorist." The terrorist is the bogeyman of our era -- like the madman in the Renaissance, or the Communist of the 1950s, the terrorist is our antagonizer, a mythic adversary and outsider lurking somewhere in the inside.

The image of the generic Islamic terrorist that exists in Bush administration rhetoric and common wisdom is one of a poor, disillusioned young man who decides he hates the West so much, he's willing to sacrifice his life to destroy its property and kill its people. The terrorist is a terrorist in Western eyes because of an intersection of economic reasons (he is poor, so he is unhappy and disaffected) and religious reasons (he is trained by Islamofascists to hate the peaceful, freedom-loving, capitalist, Westerners).

But, surprise!, this image is (at least) half wrong. In the just-published book by Alan B. Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism, the author explains that most terrorists are middle class, not impoverished. Poverty is part of the picture, but it is not their own poverty -- it is the poverty of their countrymen or fellow Muslims. But this evidence-based conclusion flies in the face of most Westerners' now intuitive understanding of what motivates a terrorist -- why a person becomes a terrorist.

Just like Renaissance- and classical-era thinkers misunderstood the source of madness, most Westerners misunderstand the source of terrorism. What's more, the madman and the terrorist are misunderstood in similar ways. The madman, in the classical era, is defined as such because he cannot be made to work -- unlike the other poor people and petty criminals who found themselves in pensioners' prisons during the era. He is an adversary to the economic system, and cannot be made to become part of it. His intractable idleness and madness are closely interrelated. Similarly, the terrorist is a terrorist because of his lack of economic success -- his own inability to find well-paying labor. Thus, in both cases, it is a personal unfitness for economic life that defines the madman and creates the terrorist. This genre of error also applies to the bogeyman of the last era -- the Communist. In Dos Passos' U.S.A, his middle class characters speak about Communists as if they are shiftless failures, who want to remedy their own economic failure with revolution.

So at the birth of capitalism during the classical era, and in the midst of its ascendancy during the Cold War, and, now, at its pinnacle, the popular imagination is fascinated by the dangerous outsider who cannot participate in the system. One might think that this belief about economic losers becoming the era's bogeymen would inspire in the West a desire to make sure more people reap capitalism's rewards -- and some people do come to that conclusion. But those on the right, perhaps the most strident purveyors of capitalism and the West, refuse this course in favor of capture, imprisonment, and constant conflict. No systemic changes are needed; only punishment of the individuals who stray. Pure capitalism rewards individuals without a thought for the externalities that harm the collective. Similarly, those on the right -- the proponents of this pure capitalism -- aim to punish individual transgressors without thinking about how the system could be changed to integrate them.

And so we arrive at the starkest difference between the rightists of the West and real terrorists -- not the bogeymen of Western imagination. Rightists of the West wish to punish individuals who they believe are motivated by individual economic failure. But if Krueger is to be believed, terrorists are not so motivated, but driven instead by the poverty of their fellows. Perhaps it is hard for the Western mind, especially the conservative, Western mind, to conceptualize a terrorist in this way because it is so not Western -- not about individual success and responsibility, but about collective success.

In any case, I wish Foucault were around because, surprise!, he would have much more interesting things to say.