We should all like to know why some people become terrorists, other than for the most obvious reason: that to kill, maim, and destroy, supposedly for a good cause or some allegedly higher purpose, is a delight to a certain kind of person, worth even dying for. In addition, I doubt that there are much more self-important people than terrorists.
You might think that psychiatry and psychiatrists would be able to shed some light on the matter, but this is itself a manifestation of a modern superstition, namely that human self-understanding has made great strides pari passu with technical advances such as brain scans and a knowledge of neurochemistry. In fact, we have not advanced beyond Alexander Pope’s description of Man as “the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.” I suspect that we never shall get much further, and in my heart, I hope so, too. For how boring it would be if we could understand ourselves! Fortunately, we don’t even really understand what self-understanding would be.
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In the latest edition of The British Journal of Psychiatry, there are two papers about sympathy for terrorism and the relationship between extremism, religion, and psychiatric morbidity. We all know what kind of terrorism and extremism the authors are thinking of, but the title of neither paper mentions it. We now walk permanently on eggshells.
One cannot help but admire the industry of the researchers: full marks for effort, as my teachers used to say before they derided the results of that effort. Intuition probably gives a better insight into reality than research like this.
The authors of the two papers conducted surveys of young people, trying to correlate various demographic characteristics with symptoms of depression and sympathy for terrorism and extremist views. There are, of course, intrinsic problems with such research. As recent pre-election polls have demonstrated, people may not reveal their true feelings or intentions to those who ask them questions. In this instance, it is intuitively more likely that respondents disguised the strength of their sympathies for terrorism than that they exaggerated them; but of course, sympathies or opinions do not automatically translate into actions. I sympathize strongly with the victims of crime and feel that our present system of punishment is too lax, but I do nothing about it except grumble at dinner parties.
