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July 25, 2007

How poverty does cause terrorism

I guess I'm in a blogging mood tonight, but this next post actually connects with the earlier one on the problem of evil. Rob Tarr points to an interesting study showing little correlation between a person's economic status and his chances of being a terrorist, and wisely concludes:

This is of course ludicrous. It doesn't require statistical studies to dispel the myth that "poverty causes terrorism". Krueger's counter-hypothesis, that political oppression breeds terrorism, is equally wrong-headed. Over the past three centuries, poverty and oppression have led millions to seek to immigrate to America -- not blow up its buildings.

The notion that a person's beliefs and actions are determined by his material conditions (e.g. poverty) is simply stale left-over Marxism. In reality, it is the fundamental ideas that a person accepts which determine how he will evaluate the world, and how he will act.

I agree with this. But I also think that there is a sense in which poverty causes terrorism, in an indirect way. And I think this is still consistent with the idea that terrorists (like all men) act on their fundamental ideas.

Suppose that the demographers did a study showing that, while terrorists weren't especially likely to be poor, they were likely to have more poor neighbors than the average Westerner. The conventional liberal might embrace this as evidence that poverty is still the "root cause" of terrorism, because well-to-do but altruistic terrorists are consciously fighting on behalf of their downtrodden brethren. It doesn't need to be a blind reaction to economic conditions. After all, there is stunning poverty in the Middle East.

I think that many terrorists probably do think they are fighting on behalf of downtrodden brethren, but why? Because of their fundamental ideals, and I'm not just talking about altruism. I mean the fundamental ideal that Islam is the one true religion, that God brings glory to Muslims, and that God punishes unbelievers. Muslims terrorists look at the world, and see that the West has the power and glory—and the material prosperity—and it humiliates them.

This, you may recognize, is one of the theses of Bernard Lewis' book What Went Wrong?: Muslim civilization once thrived, having conquered most of the known world. But with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire came deep humiliation, the division of Muslim lands, colonization by the West, and, most humiliating of all, the establishment of the state of Israel. Not only were Muslims being deprived of the glory they "deserved," but their most hated ancient rivals were being rewarded.

So there is a sense in which Muslim terrorists attack the West because of Muslim poverty, but it is only because they believe that the West doesn't deserve its prosperity. The West serves as a reminder of Islam's own "problem of evil." And note that they don't respond to it as the Western reporter did, by becoming atheists. They have a different subjective response: to punish the evil world for not conforming to God's will. Other impoverished peoples, whose religions give them a different sense of their place (like poor Catholics in Latin America), do not respond this way. So the response to economic conditions is, of course, a function of fundamental ideals.

Posted by admin at July 25, 2007 02:09 AM

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Posted by: robt0536 at July 25, 2007 09:03 PM

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