These Days of Rage

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/opinion/these-days-of-rage.html

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LONDON — On July 14, Bastille Day, in Nice, France, 85 people died after being mowed down on the promenade by a man driving a truck. Four days later, a 17-year-old man attacked passengers with an ax on a train near Würzburg, Germany. Four days after that, an 18-year-old man shot dead nine people in a Munich shopping mall.

Two days later, a 27-year-old man blew himself up outside a music festival in Ansbach, in southern Germany. That same day, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee hacked a woman to death in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, also in Germany.

Two days after that, two young men stormed a church in St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, in northern France, and slit a priest’s throat. Last week, one person was killed when a man with a knife went on the rampage in Central London.

Little wonder that an article last month in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel asked “Has the world gone mad?” We seem to be living in an age of psychopathic violence and political rage. “Many of us,” the article concluded, “simply don’t understand the world anymore.”

It is not that Europe has suddenly become susceptible to terrorist attacks. The Global Terrorism Database shows that in Western Europe, deaths from terrorism have decreased since the early 1990s. What’s changed is the character of terrorism.

In the past, groups employing terrorism, such as the Irish Republican Army or the Palestine Liberation Organization, were driven by specific political aims: a united Ireland or an independent Palestine. There was generally a relationship between the organization’s political cause and its violent activities.

Jihadists are different. They have little or no explicit political aim but are driven by a visceral hatred of the West. Some commentators claim that an attack like the one in Nice is “blowback” from Western foreign policy, but it’s difficult to discern any rational relationship between Western policy in Iraq or Libya and the murder of revelers on a promenade.

Of course, in the mind of the perpetrators, there is always a relationship; they are waging a righteous war against the West, which they see as an almost mythical, all-encompassing monster. That is why a jihadist act is rarely linked to a political demand but is seen rather as an existential struggle to cut the monster down, in which almost any act becomes acceptable.

Whatever one thinks of the activities of groups like the I.R.A. or the P.L.O., those activities were governed by certain norms and contained a rational kernel. It is the arbitrariness of jihadist violence and its disregard for moral bounds that make it terrifying.

What defines jihadist violence today is not righteous anger or political fury but a sense of inchoate, often personal, rage. Such rage is not uniquely Islamist.

When a gunman of Iranian origin went berserk in a Munich shopping mall last month, it was immediately assumed that he was an Islamist terrorist. The man, Ali David Sonboly, might have been a terrorist, but he was no Islamist. He was apparently a mentally disturbed young man proud of sharing his birthday with Hitler and obsessed with mass shootings and in particular with Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in 2011.

Mr. Sonboly is not unique in being a non-Islamist killer driven by rage. In June, a British member of Parliament, Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed to death in the Yorkshire town of Birstall while campaigning ahead of the referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. When asked his name in court, the man accused of killing her, Thomas Mair, responded, “My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

A year earlier, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old American obsessed with white supremacist ideas, shot dead nine African-American worshipers in a church in Charleston, S.C. Last month, Micah Xavier Johnson, an African-American Army veteran, fatally shot five police officers in Dallas, apparently in revenge for police shootings of black people.

Neither the attack in London nor the one near Stuttgart was politically driven; both seem rather the actions of mentally disturbed individuals. Some people, however, refused to believe that they were not jihadist attacks, warning darkly of a conspiracy to hide the truth. This may be irrational, but it also reflects the shifting character of public violence.

In the past, the distinction between political violence and sociopathic rage was relatively clear. No longer. There seems today almost a continuum between ideological violence, disjointed fury and some degree of sociopathy or mental illness. What constitutes ideological violence has decayed; instead, amorphous rage has become a persistent feature of public life.

One reason is the breakdown of social and moral boundaries that once acted as firewalls against such behavior. Western societies have become more socially atomized and more riven by identity politics. The influence of institutions from the church to labor unions that once helped socialize individuals and inculcate them with a sense of obligation to others has declined.

As broader identities have eroded, and traditional social networks and sources of authority have weakened, people’s sense of belonging has become more parochial. Progressive movements that gave social grievance a political form have faded. Instead, the new oppositional movements are often rooted in religious or ethnic identity and take sectarian or separatist forms.

There is a growing disaffection with anything “mainstream,” and a perception of the world as out of control and driven by malign forces. All this has helped incubate a sense of rage without an outlet, undermined people’s ties to others as human beings, and weakened the distinction between sociopathy and political violence.

It is a world in which, as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany observed last week, the “taboos of civilization” are too easily broken. It is not so much the acts of violence themselves as the seeming fragility of our social and moral orders that makes contemporary terrorism so threatening.