Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (9 page)

—IBN KHALDûN,
MUQADDIMAH
(AN INTRODUCTION TO
HISTORY), 1375–1378

In civilized society [man] stands at all times in need of cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.

—ADAM SMITH,
THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
, 1776

Sheik Ibn Taymiah—may Allah have mercy on him—said, “The interests of all Adam’s children would not be realized in the present life, nor in the next, except through assembly, cooperation, and mutual assistance. Cooperation is for achieving their interests and mutual assistance is for overcoming their adversities. That is why it has been said, ‘man is civilized by nature.’”

—AL QAEDA TRAINING MANUAL

CHAPTER 4
CREATION OF THE WESTERN WORLD

E
volution by natural selection has endowed our species with weak bodies, big brains, gregariousness, and greed. These basic facts of our nature have driven the human saga forward toward increasingly global commerce, war, interdependence, and innovation. None of the particulars—personalities, nations, the rise and fall of empires—were predictable or inevitable, but the general trend follows a path that looks as probable in hindsight as a gathering storm in a video run backward. At least this seems to be the case ever since the Upper Paleolithic, when humans sallied forth from their African home and off a hundred thousand years of treadmill existence.

As animals go, we are fragile and we are vulnerable. But we have large appetites, especially for calorie-dense meat and richer protein for our big brains. Yet without weapons or bands of quickwitted and reliable cooperators, we could not bring down large game or ward off stronger rival predators. If our own ancestors had been stronger, they might have survived the competition, though as Darwin surmised in
The Descent of Man
(and Ibn Khaldûn before him), they probably would not have become “the most dominant animal that has ever appeared on this earth … spread more widely than any other … and all others hav[ing] yielded before him”:

[A]n animal possessing great size, strength, and ferocity, and which, like the gorilla, could defend itself from all enemies, would probably … have failed to become social; and this would most effectually have checked the acquirement by man of his higher mental qualities…. Hence it might have been an immense advantage to have sprung from some comparatively weak creature.
¹

In the smaller, more intimate world of early humans, one’s social group was everything, and other groups were often far and few. In the African scrub from which our ancestors evolved, a human without its band was like a baboon without its troop or a chimp without its clan: a dead primate.
²
Among baboons, for example, adult males will rush a predator, and some may sacrifice themselves in defense of the group, where often 80 percent of young males fail to survive to maturity.
³

Hunting game, defending against predators, and maintaining camps for the vulnerable young were the collective’s primary occupations. Defection was probably mostly limited to a person shirking responsibility. But people in a small band, as in a work crew, don’t have to do much to figure out who’s letting them down.

For the first hundred thousand years or so, more than half of human time on the planet,
Homo sapiens
hunted game and gathered grains in small bands scattered across the sparse grasslands of eastern and southern Africa. For the most part, they probably cooperated very strongly with one another against nature, then the chief source of competition. People seem to have spent the millennia pretty monotonously. While their more solidly built Neanderthal cousins wandered the world, humans stuck to a little corner of the planet. Those who ventured to the predator-infested, desert-like fringes of greener woodlands, areas inhabited by species more powerful and agile than they, defended their own big-brained, bipedal bodies and babies against the precariousness of life on the margins.

Our species may have tottered on the verge of extinction less than 100,000 years ago.
⁴
Then, in an almost miraculous change of fortune about 60,000-50,000 years ago, one or a few human bands moved out of Africa for good. This beginning of human wanderlust was likely stirred by global cooling and the attendant parching of the African grasslands, which led to loss of game and grain.
⁵
But there is also the strong possibility, based on circumstantial evidence relating to a “cultural explosion” of human artifacts and technologies, that a mutation rewired the brain for computational efficiency. This rewiring allowed for
recursion
(embedding whole bundles of perceptions and thoughts within other bundles of perceptions and thoughts), which is an essential property of both human language (syntactic structures) and mind-reading skills (or “theory of mind”—the ability to infer other people’s thoughts and perceptions: “I know that she knows that I know that he knows that … etc.”). Language and mind reading, in turn, became critical to development of peculiarly human forms of thinking and communication, including planning and cooperation among strangers, imagining plausible versus fictitious pasts and futures, the counter-factuals of reason, and the supernaturals of religion.

A first wave followed the food along the coast of southwest Asia, managed to cross a few hundred kilometers of open sea, and wound up in Australia 50,000–45,000 years ago. A second wave went up to Central Asia, around present-day Kazakhstan, then spread eastward and westward across the great Eurasian landmass. Humans reached Europe 40,000–35,000 years ago, staying mostly clear of Neanderthals, who were—along with the woolly bison, mammoths, and other behemoths Neanderthals hunted—already a dying breed. About 20,000–15,000 years ago, humans crossed the Bering ice bridge from eastern Siberia into the Americas; others perhaps came hunting along the ice from Western Europe (as French Solutrean-style stone tools recently found on the east coast of America suggest). All of these migrations caused a set of positive feedback loops to begin, leading to increasing sophistication in social and cultural life.

By around 30,000 years ago, humans had a number of important new technologies. Spears, bows, and bolas extended the hunter’s effective range and showed that humans had mastered the principle “the best armor is to keep out of range.” Harpoons, fishhooks, and nets brought in water animals as dietary staples, thus providing a more abundant food supply and a hedge against starvation. Dugout boats and seaworthy rafts enabled waterborne transport, exploration, and trade. Bone needles and buttons permitted the fashioning of clothes and shelter made of hides, which provided protection from the elements and thus wider latitude in movement. Domesticated dogs helped to track game and perhaps also provided an emergency meat supply. Upper Paleolithic cultures were almost surely able to precisely time the migration of game animals and anticipate the moves of dangerous predators, and so they became efficient hunters in a wide array of situations.

Domestication of animals was stimulated by our biosocial addiction to protein products. It enabled the growth of pastoral societies that could take with them their own sources of protein into new environments, but it also helped grow settled societies now free from the need to pursue game and so better able to focus on chosen environments. Animal labor and transportation sped up genetic and cultural exchange between human populations, and an accumulation of knowledge and experiences with plants fostered their domestication.

Plant domestication, in turn, enabled huge increases in human populations: Without it the world’s peoples would probably total only in the hundreds of thousands, assuming our species survived at all. Rising populations led to bigger “social brains”—more varied and productive networks of people and their creations, especially of information (through writing, roads, and trade). But rising populations also led to morally exclusive religion and all-out war, the Mother and Father of civilizations.

As work by evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond suggests,
⁶
the imperative to “cooperate to compete” in ever larger groups was likely kick-started and driven forward by the peculiar climatic and geographical conditions of Eurasia’s vast temperate expanse, which encouraged the spread and increase of populations and the free-flowing exchange of genetic materials, artifacts, ideas, and information among them. Descendants of the humans who remained in Africa, as well as descendants of the first wave out of Africa and into Australia, by and large remained in the Stone Age until modern times, although with some development of long-range trade, technologies for fighting and farming, division of labor, and political hierarchy.

Descendants of the second wave who made it to the Americas also mostly remained in the Stone Age, except in Mesoamerica and South America’s Andean plateau, where multicity states and multiethnic empires began to form. But it was the extensive belt across Eurasia—because of its relatively temperate climate, large variety of animals to domesticate, lack of geographical barriers, and wide-open channels for the lateral flow and exchange of genes and ideas—that became a cradle of civilizations, the center stage for the world’s increasing economic and political interdependence, the main avenue for cultural innovation, and the cauldron of war.

Increased interactions between nomadic and sedentary societies, while stimulating cultural innovation and development, were constantly punctuated by conflict: herders desired to move freely anywhere and take whatever they needed wherever they found it; settlers wanted to protect and grow what they had in one place. Nomads disdained settled life as effete, settlers denounced nomads as barbarian. In fact, as so many historians have pointed out, without “barbarians” to jolt them, civilized societies tended to collapse rather than continue to create. Barbarians invigorated the settler populations, which, in turn, civilized the rude invaders.
⁷

In war, nomads innovated on the offense, with short and powerful composite bows, light infantry, and horse cavalry.
⁸
They culled their flocks with quick and lethal blows, so through butchery they knew best how to kill and cut flesh. Settled societies innovated with defensive fortifications and mass armies to resist onslaught, and to gather in sufficient strength to go out to conquer.

War, or at least the threat of war, is perhaps the chief source of the historical spread and advance of social cooperation among human populations. “I couldn’t help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev],” mused Ronald Reagan in 1985 when the Cold War threatened humankind with nuclear annihilation, “just think how easy his task and mine might be … if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We would] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.” This modern expression of an age-old sentiment echoes an old proverb, common to ancient Hebrews, Arabs, and Chinese: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But it was the advent of the written word that tipped human history into its next phase.

FAST FORWARD

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

—JOHN 1:1

Human societies, the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, divide into “cold” and “hot” cultures.
⁹
During most of the time when humans have walked the earth, there were only preliterate “cold” societies, whose people conceived of nature and social time as eternally static or entirely cyclical. The present order was conceived as a projection of an order that has existed since mythical times. The interpretation of the origins of the world and the development of society was rendered in mythological terms. Every element of the knowable universe would be connected in kaleidoscopic fashion to every other element in memorable stories, however arbitrary or fantastic, that could be passed down orally from generation to generation. A typical mythic account of the world might “explain” how nomadic patterns of residence and seasonal movement emanated from patterns perceived in the stars; how star patterns, in turn, got their shapes from the wild animals around; and how men were made to organize themselves into larger totemic societies, dividing tasks and duties according to the “natural order.”

From its beginnings among the cuneiform tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, history flamed forward across the breadth of Eurasia into civilizations and universal religions, world commerce and world war. Writing, transported on roads and imprinted on money, contracts, and laws, opened the channels of communication and exchange that make state-level societies viable.

Mutually beneficial trade and the promise of profit could foster cooperation even among former enemies and in the long run make large-scale cooperation more sustainable. But widening the scope of war greatly quickened the pace of cooperation through the strong and narrow focus of competition: Survive, and if possible, vanquish the enemy. Thus the Greek city-states, which had been constantly warring upon one another, came together for the first time as one people to fight the common Persian foe. Aeschylus’s poem, “The Battle of Salamis,” gives a sense of how empires and nations first form in collective imagination through war: