The End of Anomie

I just posted over at Open Left:

Then End of Anomie

Between roughly 1968 and 2004, United States (and its politics) has been dominated by a form of social relations that is defined, paradoxically, by a lack of social relations: Anomie. It is that feeling that comes about when one feels that the anchors of one's life have been cut, when traditional values such as family, friends, community, church and work seems to be evaporating. In anomie, family, neighborhood, community and church become, as often as not, institutions in transition that subsequently raise as many questions as they answer.

This has been as true for our urban areas as for our rural ones. The exodus to the suburbs brought on increased feelings of separation from our friends and neighbors and family. Our suburbs, while offering some benefits like front yards to play in and spacious living quarters for our smaller families, conversely brought us increased busing and commutes, and fewer family dinners. Our countryside was nearly fully transformed into a large factory that produced for the our cities. Our rural areas became not autonomous regions of self-sustenance but places where people worked for low wages to produce materials for the city based the economics of the city. Diversity of crops and of labor was sacrificed to the predictable (but meager) world of monocrop production where local supermarkets imported carrots, salads, beets, and sweet corn so that the surrounding acreage can produce soybeans or cattle feed. Like their urban counterparts, the rural folk no longer felt in control of their own destiny. They were strangers in the small towns... [click here to keep reading]

Anomia

Anomia: a disentegration of social bonds.


From Wired:

People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.
The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.
For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya, but they didn't have the right paperwork so they attacked America instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attack after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up with a new enemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to another terrorist group with a totally different political platform. Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to become a jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after converting to Islam, sometimes just a few weeks before. These people know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don't even seem to care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don't have a lot of substance in these areas, even though more informative blogs do exist.
All of this explains the seven habits. It's not that they're ineffective; it's that they have a different goal. They might not be effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help preserve the group's existence and cohesion.
This kind of analysis isn't just theoretical; it has practical implications for counterterrorism. Not only can we now better understand who is likely to become a terrorist, we can engage in strategies specifically designed to weaken the social bonds within terrorist organizations. Driving a wedge between group members -- commuting prison sentences in exchange for actionable intelligence, planting more double agents within terrorist groups -- will go a long way to weakening the social bonds within those groups.
We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.