An heroic urge is combined, by Islamist extremists, with a vision of end times, a culmination to history brought about by a climactic battle and the purification of the earth.

The struggle against Islamic extremism has been crippled by a failure of historical awareness and cultural understanding. From the very beginning, we have treated the problem of terrorism through the prism of our own assumptions and our own values. We have solipsistically assumed that people turn to extremism because they can't get what we want, and fail to realise that they don't want what we want but want something they think is higher.

The latest example of this is the speech President Barack Obama gave at this week's Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. It was a bad speech but its badness is no reflection on Obama, for it was the same sort of bad speech that all US presidents have been giving for the past generation.

There will always be alienated young men fuelled by spiritual ardour. Terrorism will be defeated only when they find a different fulfilment, even more bold and self-transcending.

Religious extremism exists on three levels. It grows out of economic and political dysfunction. It is fuelled by perverted spiritual ardour. It is organised by theological conviction. Western leaders focus almost exclusively on the economic and political level because that's what polite people in Western capitals are comfortable talking about.

At the summit meeting, Obama gave the conventional materialistic explanation for what turns people into terrorists. Terrorism spreads, he argued, where people lack economic opportunity and good schools. The way to fight terror, he concluded, is with better job-training programs, more shared wealth, more open political regimes and a general message of tolerance and pluralism.

Advertisement

In short, the President took his secular domestic agenda and projected it as a way to prevent young men from joining the Islamic State and chopping off heads.

But people don't join the Islamic State because they want better jobs with more benefits. The Islamic State is one of a long line of anti-Enlightenment movements, led by people who have contempt for the sort of materialistic, bourgeois goals that dominate our politics. These people don't care if their earthly standard of living improves by a few per cent a year. They're disgusted by the pleasures we value, the pluralism we prize and the emphasis on happiness in this world, which we take as public life's ultimate end.

They're not doing it because they are sexually repressed. They are doing it because they think it will ennoble their souls and purify creation.

Read the original here:

Obama was wrong: IS extremists seek glory, not better jobs