A MESSAGE FROM PARIS
by Ian McEwan [11.14.15]
ED. NOTE: Ian McEwan, who is living in France this month, sent the following email this afternoon from Paris which he asked us to share with the Edgecommunity. And the community is responding - we are pleased to include a Reality Club discussion with contributions from: Scott Atran, Daniel L. Everett, Dan Sperber, James J. O'Donnell, Lawrence B. Brilliant, Lisa Randall, Lee Smolin, John Tooby. More to come....
JBIAN MCEWAN, the award-winning British novelist, is the author of The Child in Time (winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, 1987), Amsterdam (winner of the Booker Prize, 1998), Atonement, Sweet Tooth, and The Children Act. He lives in London. Ian McEwan's Edge Bio Page.
The death cult chose its city well—Paris, secular capital of the world, as hospitable, diverse and charming a metropolis as was ever devised. And the death cult chose its targets in the city with ghoulish, self-damning accuracy—everything they loathed stood plainly before them on a happy Friday evening: men and women in easy association, wine, free-thinking, laughter, tolerance, music—wild and satirical rock and blues. The cultists came armed with savage nihilism and a hatred that lies beyond our understanding. Their protective armour was the suicide belt, their idea of the ultimate hiding place was the virtuous after-life, where the police cannot go. (The jihadist paradise is turning out to be one of humanity's worst ever ideas; slash and burn in this life, eternal rest among kitsch in the next).
Paris, dazed and subdued, woke this morning to reflect on its new circumstances. Those of us who were out on the town last night can only wonder at the vagaries of chance that lets us live and others die. As the slaughter began, my wife and I were in a venerable Paris institution, a cliché of the modest good life since 1845. In this charming restaurant in the sixieme, one shares crowded tables with good-willed strangers, visitors and locals in a friendly crush. With our Pouilly Fume and filets d'hareng, we were as good a target as any. The cult chose the onzieme, the dixieme, barely a mile away and we didn't know a thing.
Now we do. What are those changed circumstances? Security will tighten and Paris must become a little less charming. The necessary tension between security and freedom will remain a challenge. The death-cult's bullets and bombs will come again, here or somewhere else, we can be sure. The citizens of London, New York, Berlin are paying close and nervous attention. In January we were all CharlieHebdo. Now, we are all Parisians and that at least, in a dark time, is a matter of pride.REALITY CLUB DISCUSSION
Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, Language: The Cultural ToolAfter the news of the Paris shootings and bombings, I was wondering how I could explain terrorism to the Amazonian people, the Pirahãs, with whom I spent a great deal of my life. At first I thought I would not be able to explain such a thing. Then I remembered acts of terrorism that these people had suffered in their history, where men calling themselves "traders" raped and murdered women of the village. That much could be recounted. Sadly, all cultures have suffered. So I could tell the people that many such men arrived and killed many women, children, and other men. But then I realized that the Pirahãs would ask the question I was unable to answer, "Why?" They would never do this. Why do others do it?
Culture is that abstract network of values, structured knowledge, and social roles that shapes the dark matter of our minds, as we accumulate apperceptions and unify those by the unspoken narrative of our episodic memory. In other words, we become who we are by the confluence of individual experience and cultural interpretation of that experience. We talk to those with whom we believe we share values and experiences in order to bring sense to and give direction to ourselves as we navigate through the difficult world that has nurtured our genus since it emerged from the plains of Africa more than two million years ago.Social media helps in this sense. In the past couple of days I have seen many attempts to answer the question — "Why did these men kill those people?" It is only natural that we, children of the Enlightenment, itself partially a gift of Paris, should try to answer this question. And over the coming weeks and months the governments of the western world will try to answer this question, as well as "How were they able to do this?" "What is our proper response?" "What aspect of world politics is most responsible for the cultivation of terrorism?" And so on.
Indeed, there are many lessons to draw from the tragedy in France. For example, do we get more upset when white Christians are murdered than brown Muslims? Shouldn't we feel compassion for all who suffer, not merely those who look like us? It is right and proper that we should think about the complex issues surrounding terror. And I do think about these things.But not today.
Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and RelevanceWhen you grow up and live in Paris, you are very aware that, throughout its history, it has been the scene of great violence: the St Barthélemy massacre of Protestants 1572, to the Bloody Week of the Commune de Paris in 1871, and the 17 October 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators, among many others. Some of these episodes evoke only shame, others pride also. Relatively rare, but more frequent recently, have been indiscriminate terrorist acts aimed at whoever happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment. What do you feel then?
This Friday's series of massacres is the worst of its kind. It breaks the heart. It evokes in us Parisians such sadness, such revulsion, and also this sense of solidarity with people of all backgrounds who live here and together make our city, solidarity also with visitors who, like Ian McEwan, rightly feel they belong.For me, Friday's events also evoke two quite different feelings of pity. Breath-taking pity for the victims, their friends, lovers, family. Pity for all of us who could have met them, become friends or lovers, or might have just exchanged a smile in the street—those frequent, ephemeral micro-rapprochements between two strangers that are a great part of the joy of living here.
And then I think of the killers. How sad to have grown up and lived in such a way that doing what they did would, at some point, seem a most glorious achievement! What senseless, pitiable lives! How much happier are we all, even the victims of the killers, who have been humans among humans enough to be able to enjoy our diverse company, to share with one another, for instance, our old, loving, lovable Paris! 
Terrorist acts are, till yet, trivial events. 9/11 caused the death rate in the United States that year to tick up by 1/10 of one percent. Paris on Friday will raise the rate in that country 2/100 of one percent. These are cold numbers to recite, and doing so just now probably repels most readers.
But we should not ignore them. A few million years after the first hominids began to explore their remarkable abilities, we have built societies incapable of looking away from carnage, even when the whole purpose of the carnage is to make us look and to cringe. The multiplier effect for what these few killers have done is provided by...us.In a world of spectacles and science and ordinary human existence, what we pay attention to defines our experience. My spouse merits my attention, attends to me in return, and that is love. Terrorist acts and internet clickbait and vulgar politicians and telemarketers all profit when I pay attention to them instead. Why should I? Should we not school ourselves to attend to diseases, not symptoms?
Paris, and we, could all use Camus at this point, in the famous conclusion to his 1951 L'Homme Révolté (The Rebel):At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing. Not even that phantom Nietzsche, who for twelve years after his downfall was continually invoked by the West as the blasted image of its loftiest knowledge and nihilism; nor the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbelievers' plot at Highgate Cemetery; nor the deified mummy of the man of action in his glass coffin; nor any part of what intelligence and energy of Europe have ceaselessly furnished to the pride of a contemptible period. All may indeed live again, side by side with the martyrs of 1905, but on condition that it is understood that they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.
President of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund and Senior Adviser to Jeff SkollSigh. A really rough one. This does not end well. The attacks in Paris will be to ISIS camps in Syria what 9/11 was to Al-Qaida terrorist camps in Afghanistan, and so it will go.
Anthropologist, Directeur de recherche, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford. Author of Talking to the Enemy Some principal axioms:"Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the Crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible."
So, hit soft targets that cannot possibly be defended to any appreciable degree:"Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach 'moderation' (wasatiyyah) and avoidance of risk:
"[The] media plan… its specific target [is] to motivate crowds drawn from the masses to fly to the regions which we manage, particularly the youth… [For] the youth of the nation are closer to the innate nature [of humans] on account of the rebelliousness within them, which… the inert Islamic groups [only try to suppress]."And draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire:
"Work to expose the weakness of America's centralized power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly."Ditto for France, the UK and other allies.
In "The Gray Zone," a 10 page editorial in ISIS's online magazine Dabiq, in early 2015, the anonymous author describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil, the Caliphate and the Infidel, which the "blessed operations of September 11" brought into relief. Quoting Bin Laden: "The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, 'Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,' with the actual 'terrorist' being the Western Crusaders." Now, "the time had come for another event to . . . bring division to the world and destroy the Gray Zone," of which the Paris attacks are in reality just the latest, ever more effective, installment.Simply treating the Islamic State as a form of "terrorism" or "violent extremism" masks the menace. Merely dismissing it as "nihilistic" reflects a willful and dangerous avoidance of trying to comprehend, and deal with, its profoundly alluring moral mission to change and save the world. And the constant refrain that the Islamic State seeks to turn back history to the Middle Ages is no more compelling than a claim that the Tea Party wants everything the way it was in 1776. As Abu Mousa, the Islamic State's press officer in Raqqa put it: "We are not sending people back to the time of the carrier pigeon. On the contrary, we will benefit from development."
Meanwhile, the Islamic State is reaching out wherever a state of "chaos" or "savagery" exists, to fill the void (over 700 hundred Saudi fighters alone in recent months according to evidence Saudi leaders presented to me in August). Where there is insufficient chaos it seeks to create it, as in Europe. It conscientiously exploits the disheartening dynamic between the rise of radical Islamism and the revival of the xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that are beginning to seriously undermine the middle class—the mainstay of stability and democracy—in Europe in ways reminiscent of the hatchet job that the communists and fascists did on European democracy in the 1920s and 30s. The fact that Europe's reproductive rate is 1.4 children per couple and so needs considerable immigration to maintain a productive workforce that can sustain the middle class standard of living—at a time where there has never been less tolerance for immigration, and which is another situation of chaos that the Islamic State is well-positioned to exploit—is a godsend for the movement.In our preferred world of liberal democracy, tolerance of diversity and distributive justice, violence—especially extreme forms of mass bloodshed—are generally considered pathological or evil expressions of human nature gone awry, or collateral damage as the unintended consequence of righteous intentions. But across most human history and cultures violence against other groups is universally claimed by the perpetrators to be a sublime matter of moral virtue. For without a claim to virtue, it is difficult to endeavor to kill large numbers of people innocent of direct harm to others.
Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Warped Passages, Knocking on Heaven's Door, and Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the UniverseMcEwan's words are powerful and a good start to a difficult conversation that indeed requires "deep, serious thinking and ideas based on empirical evidence", as Brockman rightly points out. This is too difficult a problem to solve with one magic hit but we can at least try to benefit from empirical evidence. Let's go back to 9/11/01 and ask which aspects of our response made the world better or even simply safer? I am not yet advocating any particular point of view but before deciding what to do next we can at least ask any hypothetical—from what if we had done nothing to what if we did any specific subset of our actions? Though it's hard to imagine a good response, we can at least learn from past mistakes.
Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Time RebornAs Popper taught us, there are open societies and closed societies. The latter seek to impose a vision of the future, for what they perceive is the betterment of all. Open societies understand we can neither control nor foresee the future. We have diverse visions of the future that we passionately dispute, through elections and other means short of violence. On the other hand, all who resist a closed societies vision of the future are its enemies, which include us in the open societies. Because they are sure of the truth, they have little hesitation in using violence to attempt to impose their story of the future. Thus, closed societies produce refugees, whom open societies welcome as people who will invigorate and enrich them.
Sadly, this is an old story. At one time, Islamic societies were open and Christian societies were closed. Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition found hospitality in the Islamic centers of Morocco, Istanbul and Damascus. Within living memory, fascists, Nazis, communists, military dictatorships, as well as religious extremists of several kinds have imposed closed societies. Paris has suffered violence from several of these. The stories of these conflicts show open societies lose only when we are intimidated into closing our own minds and borders. For example, in the short history of Canada, refuge has been offered to people fleeing the violence of the American Revolution, the slavery practiced by Christians in the Southern states, Nazism, Communism, Chinese expansionism in Tibet, and religious extremism of several varieties. The current policy of accepting 25,000 refugees from Syria is an expression of this lasting tradition.So if there is a message from Paris, it is that what just occurred there is the same violence, by the same people, that is impelling so many to leave Syria. Part of the answer to this barbarity must be not to let up our efforts to rescue people from the horrors of that war.
Founder of field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa BarbaraHow are we to understand minds that take joy in slaughtering the innocent? To oversimply stupefyingly, our minds evolved to operate in one of three modes: with cooperative rationality, predatory rationality, or subordinate rationality. These modes were tailored by selection to identify best bet behaviors given one's social ecology and individual situation. Each mode equips us with goals, appetites, and strategic sensibilities appropriate to its corresponding situation; each makes particular interpretations of others' intentions (cooperative, malign) self-evident; each makes consonant cultural elements appealing. To one mode, the Falangist cry "¡Viva la Muerte!" sounds repulsive; to another exalting. To one mode, slaughtering people is horrifying; to another, a triumph. Most importantly, we do not intuitively see the modern world as it is, but instead in terms of simplifying interpretations supplied by these modes of rationality, forged in a small-scale social world.
Over evolution, humans have greatly expanded the range and importance of positive-sum, win-win interactions so that we evolved a cooperative rationality as a basic part of our nature. Because win-win interactions are highly productive, and fighting is self-defeating among the equally powerful, cultures of cooperative rationality can emerge. The core orientation is positive-sum; the default setting is to put some weight on others, and the expectation is that others will prefer to cooperate. (Of course, we are notoriously capable of being cooperative at home, and predatory with outgroups.)However, aggression as exploitation of the weak by the strong has been with animals almost since multicellularity, and so our minds come equipped with a predatory rationality: If the individual or group is stronger, and the social ecology does not suppress it, then minds activate this mode. This rationality is self and group supremacist; is attracted to war and power; focuses on subordinating others; places little weight on others, or even revels in inflicting suffering as a display of power. History is full of predatory rationalists, most recently Young Turk supremacists, National Socialist German supremacists, white supremacists, fascists, Japanese militarists, Communist supremacists, and lately Islamist supremacists. The core world-view is zero-sum, and the goal is to win power over others and the benefits that go with it. As cooperators, we see Hitler or Stalin or Saddam Hussein as "insane"; we see terrorists' violence as "senseless,"— rather than seeing them as operating rationally but in a different mode with different values.
The third mode is subordinate rationality, activated by nonconscious recognition that if there were fighting, the adversary (the predator) would win. This rationality makes decisions according to an evolved logic of managing one's subordination so it is less bad—predators are to be deferred to, excused, propitiated, identified with and above all not provoked.The Enlightenment, human rights, markets, the printing press, science, the dismantling of force-based privilege—all led to cultural regions of relative internal peace and remarkable prosperity. Born into a world that has been internally pacified for so long, it is easy (and convenient) to mistake this for the state of nature, and not something maintained by the costly self-sacrifice of some. People raised in cultures that are predominantly organized around cooperative rationality cannot imagine any other rationality: So when people use violence it must be that they are driven to it by desperation or searing injustice, and they will stop when given justice. No one, we think, could possibly prefer war. (They must be poor, because why would a wealthy, well-educated Muslim doctor or engineer or billionaire fight?) A cooperator wants to arrive at a win-win covenant among equals. But predators envision instead an I-win-you-lose domination.
Another side-effect of an enduringly cooperative society is a loss of confidence in the efficacy of defense. Humans are designed to cultivate costly aggressive skills to the extent it would pay off in their world; cooperative environments incline us to invest instead in positive-sum skills. It follows that when cooperators are challenged by serious predatory threats, we implicitly assess ourselves as weak, and move into a subordinate rationality: Don't provoke them! It is our fault! We intuitively feel that if we conciliate, threats will disappear. In contrast, predatory rationalists see concessions like the Sudetenland or Crimea or withdrawal from Gaza as evidence that extortion is working, and should be intensified.It is immensely difficult to understand our world of billions, with millions of fractally overlapping identities, and new media rapidly shifting rationalities. In such a world, knowing what to do is hard: Retaliation can turn nonbelligerents into enemies, yet a failure to respond also intoxicates predators. Still, to have a scientific understanding of the complex anthropology of modernization, it will not do to simply view others through the lens of our own cooperative and subordinate rationalities—our hopes and our fears.
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