Dan Minette wrote:
By no stretch of the imagination was Bin Laden opressed.
Certainly not economically. His personal concerns are unknown to me, but I'm certain that he may be reacting to his perception of how "his people," however he might categorize them, are treated. I'm not sure it matters. I suspect that we could find economically oppressed people among those whom are led by him.
I think that if you want to try to understand why humans do things you have to look at how our psychological mechanisms were shaped in the EEA, the environment of evolutionary adaption.
That is to say hunter gatherer tribes. We did this for a million years and like other animals our hominid ancestors over populated their world from time to time. So, once or twice a generation, if something else didn't get them, human groups reduced their populations by violence, i.e., wars. *Chimps* wage something very much like war on neighboring groups, sometimes completely wiping them out (genocide).
What trips off the psychological mechanisms leading to wars is something that has the same effect of looking out over a land where the game had been hunted out and the berry crop eaten up. I have used "looming privation" and "falling income per capita" as descriptive of the trigger for the behavioral switch.
It takes a while for this mechanism to work. It does (I propose) by turning up the gain on the circulation of xenophobic memes among a population facing "looming privation." You can see an echo of this in the well known fact that neo nazi movements do better in hard economic times in the US.
Since income per capita is the proposed trigger, it can be set off by economic disruptions (Nazi Germany) or population that is rising faster than the growth of the economy (Rwanda).
So why now and not 50 years ago for Bin Laden? Simple. High population growth and low economic growth in the Islamic countries has switch a substantial enough number of them into this mode. When this mode was switched on 100k years ago, even up to Biblical times, one tribe would attack another, with the winner killing all of the loser tribe except for the young women who became extra wives for the winners.
In any event, I don't think we are called to figure out the self-justifications of a terrorist, so I'm not sure where you were going with this...?
I think it informative to understand what is going on to drive the social disruptions in the Mid East even if does not lead to obvious ways to fix the situation.
But, I don't see how the West treating the people of the Middle East better will change things all that much.
Are we not called to treat people with justice and mercy -- love -- simply because they are people, rather than to achieve some outcome? Aren't we called to do small things with great love (Mother Theresa's words), rather than trying to focus on the big picture of West v. Middle East?
Is it Christian to measure our morality on outcomes? Where is the faith in that? In my experience, faith (and peace, joy, happiness) has meant doing the next right thing without being attached to the outcome, trusting that the big picture is already covered.
Unfortunately morality seems to be optimized for the other side of the cycle, where the humans are small in numbers compared to the resources available. In such times it makes far more sense for war mode to stay switched off and for the humans to concentrate on hunting and raising kids for the *next* cycle.
There is more of this depressing subject, but unless someone wants more I will cut it off here.
Keith Henson
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