I'm currently reading New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper, a political philosopher by trade who is looking at a variety of 20th Century violent religio-political cults through the lens of a framework developed primarily by Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt to describe the totalitarian impulse. I think it would be of great interest to anyone who found Lee Harris' essay on fantasy ideology persuasive, because it provides a more precise and consistent conceptual framework for what the true believer is actually doing emotionally and intellectually. It also avoids the main weakness of Harris' argument, the assumption that the political goals of such actors are necessarily fantastic.
Put very crudely, Cooper theorizes movements like Islamism as an effect of a spiritual disorder he calls pneumopathology, a term he borrows from Voegelin. The essence of the disorder is a conscious act of "honest dishonesty," an adoption of a "second reality" independent of commonsense reality (although the second reality is often adopted in response to real grievances). Once the second reality is adopted, the imaginator finds the conflict between commonsense reality and the second reality unbearable; instead of containing this conflict within himself, the imaginator will seek to externalize the second reality, making the conflict the world's problem instead of his own. This sounds kind of airy and Freudian or whatever, but will make immediate sense to anyone who's ever had an "Hello, earth to Joshua/Heather/whoever" moment when talking to a member of, say, the Spartacist Youth League. (My vivid memory of the almost irresistible urge to snap my fingers in front of their eyes to awaken them from what seemed like a hypnotized daze is part of why, I think, I feel that I already kind of know people like al-Zarqawi, and why it makes such sense to me that Islamist terrorist tend to hail from the educated upper crust of their own societies, rather than being the superstitious medieval peasants that the idea of religious fanaticism suggests in the modern West.)
I'm not sure I completely understand the more theoretical part of Cooper's justification for regarding this as an essentially spiritual disorder, but what I do get is the way he explains that fully adopting a second reality involves the destruction of the imaginator's moral self, which was bound by the precepts and limitations of commonsense reality. The act of replacement of commonsense with second reality grants permission to actualize that second reality; methods of attempting to do so are understood as predictions rather statements of intention. For example, Stalin says that the Kulaks are a dying class. In commonsense reality, this means that he is about to have them all killed. But to Stalin this is merely a prediction about the future, which was already true when he made the initial statement. In the same vein, the Aum Shinrikyo cult turned the Buddhist concept of pao, which refers to a course of spiritual reflection undertaken near death, on its head by making it an active verb: they were pao-ing "enemies" of the cult, not murdering them. To cult members, their prediction that the time for the entire world to be paoed had come was being partially fulfilled by their act of planting nerve gas on Tokyo subways, whereas in commonsense reality, they had merely decided they wanted to kill everyone outside the cult, and proceeded to attempt to do so. In this way the essential connection between intention and action is lost, and is instead ascribed to the workings of a fictional reality; commonsense morality is abandoned absolutely.
What Harris' articulation of this phenomenon lacks is Cooper's recognition that sometimes commonsense reality is actually altered by imaginative religious and political movements. Aum Shinrikyo failed to murder the world, but Stalin did do a pretty good job on the Kulaks. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, about Nazi death squads populated by middle-aged non-ideological family men, presents a good account, I think, of how non-cult members will naturally adapt to a consensus reality created by cult members, if the cultists manage to accede to political power and impose it upon everyone. Among the examples of "second reality" movements cited by Cooper--Aum Shinrikyo, bolshevism, Nazism, the Witch Craze in Europe, Christian Identity, Heaven's Gate, Islamism, the revolutionary in general as a type, etc.--are of course many that succeeded in actually altering political reality for long periods of time; arguably in the cases of Nazism and bolshevism the alteration may have been permanent in the absence of powerful external enemies.
Cooper has avoided mentioning the American Revolution so far, but it is interesting to look at it through this framework. The central assertion of the Declaration of Independence amounted to standing the then-governing assumption about the relationship between divine and political authority on its head; the Divine Right of Kings was replaced by God's endowment instead of every man with inalienable political power. Note that we date the birth of the USA from this simple assertion of a new reality; the actual expulsion of the King's authority through the War of Independence and concretization of the new order in the Constitution followed much later. We have been living in this reality for so long that it is as if the previous one never existed; we are nearly incapable of conceptualizing the pre-Revolutionary mindset that accepted monarchy as the natural and divine order of things. The tendency of Westerners today to make movies about the history of Europe like King Arthur and Braveheart that project our current understanding of justice infinitely backwards is I think a consequence of that. In these types of movies, good men and true were always rebelling against authority in the name of "freedom," because that is what good people who have accessed the "real" nature of things always do (in a sense, they can't actually be good unless they are good within our reality). But of course this is revisionist nonsense.
The revolution that replaces existing reality with one that turns out to be actually better on a practical and moral level is a rare bird indeed, as 200 subsequent years of revolutions worldwide have clearly demonstrated. But how do you know your revolution isn't just such a good revolution that will be blessed by history? Apparently, you don't.
I'm skipping over Cooper's discussion of the tendency of religious "second-reality" movements in particular to assume an increasingly annihilatory character over time, because I'm just tucking into the part where he's going to talk about Islamism in particular (and, evidently, some specifics about the Abrahamic tradition in general, beginning with the implications of the Israelites' understanding of their covenant with God as history, which I imagine will connect up with the similar Islamic sense of history in some interesting ways.)
Update:
A reader objected that the idea of the divine right of kings was already pretty much dead by the time of the American Revolution.
C. replied: Predictably, it's even more complex than that. The Divine Right of Kings, formally speaking, is a rather late development of the theory of monarchy, going along with the appearance of absolutism and monarchies that were a great deal more powerful -- both in theory and in practice -- than the prior medieval types. Opposition to it crops up in odd places, like the Spanish political theorist (I'm blanking on the name) who published a justification of tyrannicide (and dedicated it to the newly crowned king, which I believe was Philip II's successor).
This should not denigrate the accomplishment of the Founders. The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance. And it certainly does seem to be true that it's hard for Americans to grasp other political mentalities, now that ours is so firmly established.
One could also look for examples of a revolutionary "replacement of reality" in religious history: the rise of Christianity for sure; possibly the Protestant Reformation.
I replied: The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance.
And indeed I did not mean to suggest that there was anything particularly sudden about the Declaration; obviously it was the outgrowth of a particular line of thought that had been developing for some time. I was noticing instead the fact that real-world actualization of it followed rather than preceded the assertion of its reality in the real world (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, etc. etc.) in precisely the same fashion Cooper finds in the methodology of many other imaginitive political and religious movements.
C. added: ...though of course there are obvious differences between the American Revolution and the Rise of Christianity on the one hand, and Stalin and Aum Shinrikyo on the other, even apart from the level of success. For starters, that business about abandoning commonsense morality and confounding predictions of the future with statements of intent has no obvious parallels.
And: I'll have to look up Cooper: it's a promising line of analysis. I've never read anything by Voegelin, but the strand he pulls out of Arendt is certainly present in The Origins of Totalitarianism (the bit about Stalin and the "dying" kulaks is taken directly) and seems like it might well apply. Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions, I'm not sure that's crucial to her argument.
(If the phrasing is too much in terms of "new realities" and "altering reality" I will have to wince a lot in the process of mental translation. Oh well.)
I replied: Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions,
As it happens, it seems likely to me that Islamism is a response to modern conditions, most specifically the particularly totalitarian and repressive character of movements that managed to acquire and hold on to power in the Middle East. There are antecedents to the basic theology of Islamism going back to the very beginning of Islam--indeed it understands itself as reproducing the original project of Muhammad in the modern era. But as Cooper points out, the most logical and literalist methodology suggested by the Koran for reenacting the early years of Islamic history would be a new hijra, and in fact early versions of Islamist movements did center on withdrawing from society to perfect a "pure" Islam in a committed community, often literally in the desert. But it is impossible to have a wholly separate self-governing society within a totalitarian state, or in any version of a modern nation-state, really, and these communities were uniformly attacked and repressed wherever they arose. Time to cut straight from hijra to jihad!
Of course, there are many other ways of looking at this; objectively the hijra movement was short-lived and pretty spotty, and would have been viewed suspiciously by any type of formal government; the original hijra occurred within the context of warring tribes each controlling their own patch, so all Muhammad had to do was find a host tribe. But it does seem that the justification for jihad, now, rests heavily on the sense of constant and pervasive attack on Islamists by the state, which objectively is very much the case.