'Puny' Apocalypticism

Martin Amis writes in the Wall Street Journal of what it would take to cause the seismic shift from the (present) "puny apocalypse" of international terrorism to something worse, and the role of religion:

Was Sept. 11 about religion? This is still controversial. Both President Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are religious, were very quick to say that Sept. 11 was "not about religion" ("religion," hereabouts, being a euphemism for Islam). It then subsequently emerged that Sept. 11 was about religion -- or, at least, was not not about religion. But in the last year or two, it seems, we have gone back to saying that Sept. 11, and March 11 Madrid (2004), and July 7 London (2005), and all the rest, are not about religion.

The two most stimulating international terrorism-watchers known to me are John Gray and Philip Bobbitt. Professor Gray ("Straw Dogs," "Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern" and "Black Mass") and Professor Bobbitt ("The Shield of Achilles" and the masterly "Terror and Consent") are utterly unalike, except in brainpower and literary panache. Mr. Bobbitt is a proactive and muscular Atlanticist, whereas Mr. Gray is almost Taoist in his skepticism and his luminous passivity. Mr. Bobbitt is religious, and Mr. Gray is philo-religious (or, rather, wholly reconciled to the inexorability of religious belief); but neither man is an exponent of relativist politesse. And they assert, respectively, that international terrorism is "not about Islam" and has "no close connection to religion."

Al Qaedaism, for them, is an epiphenomenon -- a secondary effect. It is the dark child of globalization. It is the mimic of modernity: devolved, decentralized, privatized, outsourced and networked. According to Mr. Bobbitt, rather more doubtfully, Al Qaeda not only reflects the market state: it is a market state ("a virtual market state"). Globalization created great wealth and also great vulnerability; it created a space, or a dimension. Thus the epiphenomenon is not about religion; it is about human opportunism and the will to power. (My emphases) Real all …

One sees how Mr. Amis begins to "get it" and yet doesn't get it after all, from a Girardian point of view. Even the title of his essay, "Terrorism's New Structure" leans in the direction of grasping the events of the mimetic swirl of destruction and violence structurally. But he veers away from it finally, apparently for the ideological reason of remaining loyal to academic social science's nostalgic reductionism. It reminds one of the same way Freud veered away from the truth of his observations of mimesis in favor of his pet sexual theory.

What Mr. Amis misses is that the apocalyptic predilections of present "puny" apocalyptic efforts of terrorists is indeed part and parcel with the anthropological phenomenon of religion; the "primitive sacred" so well delineated structurally by René Girard's mimetic theory. Amis wishes once again to define "religion" in the Procrustean bed of conventional academic social sciences instead of seeing the attempts of "terrorists" as the actions of ad hoc "priests" of humanity's oldest culture-creating, culture-sustaining mechanisms: those of religion itself.