Extremism

A Philosophical Analysis

Quassim Cassam

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429404
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Extremism is one of the most charged and controversial issues of the twenty-first century. Despite myriad programs of deradicalization and prevention around the world, it remains an intractable and poorly understood problem. Yet it is also sometimes regarded as a positive force – according to Martin Luther King Jr., 'the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be'.

In this much-needed and lucid book, Quassim Cassam identifies three types of extremism – ideological; methods; and psychological extremism – and discusses the following fundamental topics and issues: What is extremism? What are the methods adopted by extremists? Is there an extremist 'mindset' and if so, what is it? What role do ideas of purity, victimhood and humiliation play in understanding extremism? How does extremism differ from fanaticism and fundamentalism? How does one become an extremist and how should we understand deradicalization?

Throughout the book, Quassim Cassam uses many compelling examples, ranging from the Khmer Rouge, the IRA, Al-Qaeda and Timothy McVeigh to Philip Roth's novel American Pastoral and counter-extremism programmes, including the UK's Prevent strategy.

Clear-headed and engaging, Extremism: A Philosophical Analysis is essential reading for anyone interested in this important topic, not only in Philosophy but related disciplines such as Politics and International Relations, Conflict and Terrorism Studies, Law, Education and Religion. It will also be of great interest to policy-makers and those engaged in understanding extremism at any level.

1 How to think about extremism

DOI: 10.4324/9780429325472-1

Methods extremism

The 3rd of January 2015 was the last day of Muad al-Kasasbeh’s life. A mechanical fault had forced the 26-year-old Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot to eject from his F-16 during a bombing raid against ISIS.¹ He was captured near Raqqa in Syria and held for a short time before being executed by an extraordinarily cruel and sadistic method. A video showed him locked in a cage, doused with petrol and burned alive.² ISIS was well known for beheading its prisoners, but this method of execution took its moral depravity down to a whole new level.

It is worth remembering al-Kasasbeh’s dreadful fate if it is ever suggested that it is a purely subjective matter whether a person or organization is ‘extremist’, or that this category owes its existence to a politically motivated decision to apply the label to some organizations but not others. This is not to deny that this label, like the label ‘terrorist’, is often applied for political reasons, as a way to delegitimize opposition to the established order. It is instructive that the African National Congress (ANC) was labelled a terrorist organization for its armed struggle against apartheid, and it is often said in response to this and other such examples that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. If this is true, then is it not also true that one person’s extremist is another person’s moderate? Doesn’t it all depend on one’s point of view? After all, the ANC was fighting for democracy in South Africa. In the apartheid era, were they the extremists or the South African government?

These concerns about the use of the label ‘extremist’ certainly need to be addressed.³ Yet, when one thinks about Lieutenant al-Kasasbeh, it is difficult to believe that extremism is relative or that it is a matter of subjective judgement rather than objective fact that ISIS is an extremist organization. One sense in which this is so is that it uses methods that are extreme by any reasonable standard. Indeed, they are extreme even by Jihadi standards. Some years before al-Kasasbeh’s murder, Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote to the founder of ISIS urging him to avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve of.⁴ The reality of ISIS’s extremism is inescapable when its methods are judged too extreme even by Al-Qaeda, with its own record of wanton killing and destruction.

Some might object to the idea that ISIS had a method. Would it not be more accurate to classify what was done to al-Kasasbeh as a random act of extreme cruelty, the kind of thing that only a psychopath would do? In a scene in the film Apocalypse Now, the unhinged Kurtz asks Captain Willard if he thinks that his brutal methods are unsound. Willard replies: ‘I don’t see any method at all, sir.’⁵ With ISIS, however, there is a method. Savagery is the method, albeit an extreme one. Its use is explained in a document called The Management of Savagery, whose recommendations include terrorizing the enemy by liquidating hostages in a ‘terrifying manner’.⁶ The use of this and other similar methods is part of a strategy to create conditions in which people will eventually turn to ISIS in desperation to restore order and provide basic services.

Extreme or extremist methods do not have to be as extreme, as intentionally savage, as the ones employed by ISIS. A list of other such methods might include: car bombing, hostage taking, and assassination. These examples all involve the use or threat of physical violence. Some might regard violence against civilians as more extreme than violence against military targets. A different view is that whether a method is extreme or not depends on the nature of the method itself and not the status of the individuals targeted. It is also debatable whether only violent methods are extreme. Some forms of cyber-terrorism might deserve to be labelled as extreme even if no physical violence is involved. There is more to be said about all this but not until later in this book. There is also the issue of whether the use of extreme methods can ever be morally justified. This is another important issue that can be put to one side for the moment.

A methods extremist is an individual or group that uses extreme methods (however exactly these are defined) in pursuit of its objectives. Where these are political objectives, the use of extreme methods makes one a political extremist. It remains to be seen whether there are forms of extremism that are not political. For the moment, our focus is political extremism. The question now arises: why would anybody use, or want to use, extreme methods in pursuit of political objectives? Many different answers to this question are possible. One might be: because they are the most effective. This is the explanation given in The Management of Savagery. Another is: because there is no viable alternative. These answers, which tend to be the ones given by methods extremists themselves, are controversial, to say the least. A less controversial answer is that people use extremist methods because they have an extremist ideology.

The following chapters are organized around a distinction between three basic forms of extremism:

1. Methods extremism.
2. Ideological extremism.
3. Psychological extremism.

Each of these types of extremism will be discussed in greater detail below. The aim of this chapter is to give a brief explanation of the three-way distinction and provide an introduction to each of the three types of extremism. The methods used by ISIS justify its classification as extremist in the first of the three senses and make it vivid what methods extremism amounts to in a specific case. The fact that one is an extremist in the methods sense does not mean that one cannot also be an extremist in the other two senses. Indeed, the leaders of ISIS are plainly extremist in all three senses.

An ideological extremist is an individual or group with an extremist ideology. What is an ideology, and what makes an ideology extremist? Here is one way to think about ideology:

Ideology is an interrelated set of beliefs that provide a way for people to understand the world. Ideologies tell people what is important, who the good guys and bad guys are, what their goals are, and how those goals should be reached. Without ideologies to help categorize and interpret information, the world would be meaningless.

(Uscinski and Parent 2014: 12)

This definition brings out the extent to which ideologies are a framework for making sense of the world. A person watching the news will interpret and respond to the presented stories in a particular way but these interpretations and responses do not come out of the blue; they are grounded in the viewer’s ideological framework. Ideologies aren’t just sets of beliefs, and they influence our behaviour as well as our understanding of the world. Apart from beliefs, a person or group’s ideology will also include, in Raymond Geuss’s formulation, ‘the concepts they use, the attitudes and psychological dispositions they exhibit, their motives, desires, values, predilections, works of art, religious rituals, gestures’ (1981: 5). An ideology in this broad sense is something that everyone has, and ideologies are guides to action as well as frameworks of understanding. One’s ideology tells one what to do as well as what to think.

There is much more to be said about the nature of ideology, but the immediate issue is: what makes an ideology extremist? The most straightforward answer to this question sees ideologies as arranged on a left-right spectrum.⁷ Every ideology is located somewhere on the spectrum, and an extremist ideology is one that is either on the extreme left or the extreme right. This is a positional conception of ideological extremism. For example, if fascism is on the extreme right of the left-right spectrum, then it is an extremist ideology; it is a form of ideological extremism. Ideological extremists are more likely to be methods extremists, but the two types of extremism are nevertheless conceptually distinct. However, before taking a closer look at the relationship between them, there some other aspects of ideological extremism that need to be clarified.

Ideological extremism

The idea that ideological extremism is a position on an ideological spectrum has the virtue of simplicity. Positions in the literal sense are positions in physical space. Ideological extremism is a position in ideological space, one that in Nozick’s words, ‘falls somewhere near the end or fringe of something close to a normal distribution’ (1997: 296) along a salient dimension. One is the left-right dimension. Moving from left to right, there is communism, socialism, social democracy, liberalism, conservatism and fascism. A fascist is an ideological extremist, and becoming an extremist is a matter of moving in the political sense from the centre to the far left or right. It follows on this definition that social democrats and liberals are not ideological extremists. Because they are in the middle of the left-right dimension, they are centrists.

The positional approach to ideological extremism raises a number of questions. Does the spectrum have to be understood in such a way that social democracy and liberalism are in the middle? Are there other equally legitimate projections of ideological space? How fine-grained is the spectrum? Which ideologies should be lumped together, and which ones distinguished on the spectrum? Is ‘neo-liberalism’ a form of liberalism or an ideology in its own right? Is it to the left or to the right of conservatism? Whichever dimension one chooses, there is bound to be an element of arbitrariness in the placing of ideologies. Furthermore, the left-right spectrum is not the only dimension of ideological space. Ideological space is multi-dimensional.

Consider ISIS once again. It is extremist not just in the sense that it uses extreme methods but also in the sense that it has an extremist ideology. However, if an extremist ideology is one that is located on the extreme left or the extreme right of the left-right spectrum, then we will be forced to classify ISIS in terms of this spectrum. Yet ISIS is neither on the extreme left nor the extreme right. It is a mistake, some might argue, to think of ISIS in left-right terms, since its extremism is religious rather than political. If its extremism is ideological, it is not so in the sense in which the extremism of revolutionary communists or fascists is ideological. Furthermore, the initial thought was that groups like ISIS use extreme methods because they have extremist ideologies, but the ideological conception of extremism does not explain the link between ideological and methods extremism.

The first thing to say is that the contrast between political and religious extremism is a false one because the contrast between politics and religion is a false one. As Richard English observes, ‘any religion of significance necessarily involves vital relations to politics, society, culture, identity, power, economics, and other potentially secular aspects of human life’ (2009: 39). To put it another way, the ideological extremism of groups like ISIS is political as well as religious. In fact, it is political because it is religious. And this takes us back to the challenge of locating their political ideology on the left-right scale. If ISIS has an extremist political ideology, is it on the extreme left or the extreme right? If the answer is ‘neither’, then where in ideological space should it be located?

There is a case for classifying the ideology of ISIS as fascist. This would make its ideological extremism ‘positional’ in a standard sense. The case for classifying ISIS as fascist or ‘Islamofascist’ has been made by those who point to its rejection of Enlightenment values, its extreme authoritarianism, virulent anti-Semitism, and conspiratorial world-view.⁸ These are recognizably fascist elements of ISIS ideology, although the notion that there is such a thing as ‘Islamofascism’ is controversial. It is worth noting, however, that the ideology of ISIS can be viewed as extremist in an ideological sense even if one hesitates to classify it as right-wing. As Nozick observes, ‘there can be many different salient political dimensions’ (1997: 296). This opens up the possibility that ISIS is on the extreme end of some other dimension, that is, one that does not run from left to right.

What might this other dimension be? Consider what is called the Pro- Violence spectrum.⁹ Political ideologies can be classified based on their views about the legitimacy, or otherwise, of using violence to achieve their political objectives. Advocating or otherwise supporting the use of violence for political ends places an ideology at the extreme end of the Pro-Violence spectrum. The stronger its advocacy of violence, the more extremist the ideology. This cuts across the left-right spectrum since ideologies at opposite ends of that spectrum – say, revolutionary communism and militant fascism – are in the same place on the Pro-Violence spectrum: they both advocate violence as a legitimate means of achieving their (very different) political objectives. On the same basis, ISIS will come out as ideologically extremist regardless of whether its ideology is a form of fascism.

One attraction of this approach is that it makes the classification of groups like ISIS as ideologically extremist completely straightforward. Furthermore, there is less arbitrariness in locating an ideology on the Pro-Violence spectrum than on the left-right spectrum. There are arguments about ...