Primal Fear

Since September 11, there has been much talk in the United States of fear — fear of anthrax, of further terrorist attack, of losing “our way of life.” Because fear is an emotion that often swells beyond the warrant of objective facts, there’s always a tendency to think of it as a private hallucination, as a “primal,” in the words of Raymond Aron, “and so to speak, subpolitical emotion.” But how men and women interpret and respond to their fear — these are more than unconscious, personal reactions to imagined or even real dangers. They are also choices made under the influence of belief and ideology, in the shadow of elites and powerful institutions. There is, then, a politics to fear. Since September 11, that politics has followed two distinct tracks: First, state officials and media pundits have defined and interpreted the objects of Americans’ fears — Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism — in anti-political or non-political terms, which has raised the level of popular nervousness; and, second, these same elites have generated a fear of speaking out not only against the war and US foreign policy but also against a whole range of established institutions.

In the wake of September 11, pundits and politicians have offered multiple, often conflicting accounts of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Almost all of these accounts depict fundamentalists and terrorists in non-political terms. By doing so, they heighten, rather than lessen, people’s fears. Leaders and intellectuals claim that the United States is confronting a shadowy, elusive enemy that has no recognizable political grievances. This enemy uses terror not as a political instrument but as an occasion to vent an inexplicable and inhuman hatred. To the extent that terrorism has any intelligible origin, the argument goes, it lies in the insecurity generated by the transition to modernity in the Arab world. The loss of traditional culture has made people in the Middle East allegedly anxious, creating a class of young men without ties to established institutions. Such men are ripe for the totalizing thinking of Islamic fundamentalism, where Allah serves as a substitute for a lost sense of authority, the terrorist cell a replacement for a ruined social solidarity.

I am no expert on terrorism or the Middle East, but I do know something about political demonology, how leaders turn political struggles into psychological melodramas and passion plays in order to avoid thinking politically about international conflicts. For two reasons, I suspect that something like that is going on right now. First, the claims of the pundits and politicians contradict much of what we actually know about the individual nineteen hijackers and their backers. Although many of the hijackers hated the United States, particularly its foreign policy, few of the terrorists expressed any generalized hostility to “the West.” Before he became a fundamentalist, for instance, Mohammed Atta traveled to Germany to pursue a masters’ degree in urban planning; another hijacker had a German girlfriend. Nor do all the supporters of Al Qaida or the Taliban seem particularly ill at ease with modernity; according to one New York Times report, a prominent backer of the Taliban in Pakistan heads a timber importing company and sends his daughter to school, while Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man was once an accomplished surgeon from Cairo whose father was a university professor. The hijackers and their backers, moreover, often mentioned quite specific political incidents — the bombing of Iraq, the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, repressive action by their own governments of religious dissenters — as the moment of their awakening. And if what the hijackers truly hated was liberalism, tolerance, and democracy, why did they choose the Pentagon as one of their targets, and not Sweden, the Netherlands, or Denmark?

Second, for anyone familiar with the history of the Cold War, the conventional line on the hijackers has an eerie resonance. Read Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center or Leslie Fiedler’s scathing attack on the Rosenbergs. Substitute communism for Islam, revolution for terrorism, and their arguments are identical to ones we hear today. Foreshadowing claims that Thomas Friedman now makes virtually every week, Arthur...