Where’s the beard? And the headscarf? In this photo
from the 1980s, the Tsarnaevs look secular and modern (Source: Paris Match)
Much has been made of radical Islam and its role in
shaping the mental makeup of the Tsarnaev brothers. During their formative
years, however, they were scarcely even nominal Muslims. Although their father
was Chechen and their mother Avar (another Caucasus nationality), the language
spoken at home was Russian, and their culture was the secular and increasingly
Westernized one of late Soviet society. At that time, the cultural referents
were largely those of the 1980s: heavy metal, New Wave, and Michael Jackson.
Religious radicalization would not begin until much
later, after their family had emigrated to the U.S. and specifically in 2008
when the older brother, Tamerlan, stopped drinking and smoking and started
attending a local mosque (Wikipedia, 2013).
Already, however, Tamerlan was having problems with
anger control. In 2007, he confronted a Brazilian youth who had dated his
younger sister and punched him in the face. In May 2008, his other sister said
her husband was cheating on her and beating her up. Tamerlan flew across the
country to "straighten up the brains" of his brother-in-law. Although
his future American wife converted to Islam and started wearing a hijab in 2008,
her conversion did not prevent domestic fights in which he would "fly into
rages and sometimes throw furniture or throw things." In 2009, he got
involved with another woman, allegedly assaulted her, and was arrested for
aggravated domestic assault and battery (Wikipedia, 2013). In 2010, as an aspiring boxer, he
entered his opponent’s locker room before the fight to taunt him and the man’s
trainer (Sontag et al., 2013). In addition to his bad temper, Tamerlan had other
behavioral problems. After his marriage, he stopped working and lived off his
wife (who had to put in 70-80 hour weeks as a home health aide) and
Massachusetts welfare services (to the tune of over $100,000). “He wasn’t
really willing to work. That in my mind made him an unsuitable husband. She
worked like crazy for him” (Fisher, 2013).
Failed
assimilation?
The Boston bombers are often presented as a case of
failed assimilation. In reality, they and their family had already been assimilated
into modern secular culture. This was, of course, the authoritarian modernity
of the Soviet Union, which severely repressed premodern patterns of behavior,
i.e., religion, vendettas, child marriage, seclusion of women, etc. The Soviet
Union also dealt harshly with what results when premodern impulses are
expressed in a modern social setting, namely “hooliganism” and “parasitism.” By
emigrating to the U.S., the Tsarnaevs entered a much freer environment that
would eventually enable them—first Tamerlan and then other family members—to
return to a cultural system that could bring some control back into their lives.
This phenomenon has been observed not only in immigrant
communities of the U.S., but also in those of Western Europe. Islamism has
arisen primarily in the relatively free environments of the West, and not in the
more authoritarian ones of the Middle East. In many cases, the West has helped
radicalize individuals who initially come as students or immigrants and later
return to promote Islamism back home. Furthermore, when we in the West
intervene to overthrow secular dictatorships in that region—Hussein in Iraq,
Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria—we unwittingly create
optimal conditions for the emergence of radical Islam. We refuse to countenance
the possibility that some kind of authoritarianism is necessary to make those
societies work. The choice is really whether it will be secular authoritarianism
or the ultra-religious kind.
The other
Chechen revolution
Another example is Chechnya itself. The first and
second Chechen wars (1994-1996, 1999-2000) are usually seen in the West as a
reaction to political circumstances, specifically the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and the inability of its successor state, the Russian Federation, to
maintain political control. The Chechen people thus saw an opportunity to reclaim
their independence and took it.
There was also, however, a prior weakening of
cultural control that can be traced farther back to the late Soviet period.
This was a time when official Communist ideology had become little more than an
empty shell and when people began to emulate Western ways. School and parental
discipline slowly became more relaxed, under the influence of beliefs that
children start off good and are made bad by excessive control.
With the collapse of Communism in 1991, the way was
clear for this new vision:
Education reform in the Russia
Federation after 1991 was an orchestrated attack on what was now perceived as
the ideologically impure Soviet system of education, with its ubiquitous
administrative centralization, a bankrupt communist ideology and bureaucratic
inefficiency. Hurried attempts were made to Westernize Russian education. […]
In Russia, these education reforms represented a radical shift in ideology,
knowledge and values and appropriately typified the inevitable outcome of the
global Weltanschauung of modernity.
Curriculum reforms and
implementation of change in Russia during the early 1990s have been “almost
completely permissive” […] The ideas of democracy, humanisation and
individuation — the three popular slogans of post-Soviet education reforms,
which almost echoed the spirit of the French Revolution — liberty, equality,
and fraternity, have successfully challenged the hegemony of Marxism-Leninism
in schooling, authority, and curricular control in the teaching/learning
process. In subjects’ content and teaching methodology considerably more power
at the school-level decision-making has been given to teachers, parents and
students. (Zajda, 2005, p. 405)
This was a real cultural revolution, particularly in
the Caucasus where “in Chechen families there are very strict rules of behavior
with a stern social control” (Mikus Kos, 2009, p. 144). By the 1990s, most
teachers had been won over to “modern” notions of child discipline:
I had an interesting experience
working with Chechen and Ingush teachers during the first Chechen war. The
prevailing belief was (which was some decades ago the belief in Europe and the
USA as well) that all emotional and behavioural problems in children, and even
many learning problems, stem from harming influences of the family and that the
unique way to cure them was to provide love and understanding to the child. So
there was quite a lot of blaming on parents and teachers and feelings of guilt
in parents and in teachers who did not succeed in helping children with
difficulties and children in distress. When starting to run seminars for
teachers from North Caucasus, I was very eager, guided by the best intention to
explain that there are biologically “difficult children”, children with
temperamental traits which affect the process of socialisation, and that the
problems in normal life circumstances are most often the result of interaction
between the difficult child and his/her environment, and not only the fault of
parents and teachers. (Mikus Kos, 2009, p. 143)
Since the 2000s, discipline has made a comeback
under the growing influence of both Islamism and “Putinism.” There is of course
the continuing influence of well-meaning Westerners who come to the Caucasus
and try to market their own notions of child development, without considering
local conditions:
Instead of using existing local
knowledge, values and experience, and synthesising them with the new ones, some
international trainers bring a well wrapped package of modern concepts and
guidelines […] The value of local explanatory models and old practices should
be recognised and respected. Radical
changes of paradigm are not working, at least not in practice (Mikus Kos, 2009,
p. 144)
A rendez-vous
with disaster …
Recent decades have brought a relaxation of external
controls over behavior. On the one hand, people from the rest of the world have
been emigrating in growing numbers to the West, where behavioral norms are more
relaxed. On the other hand, the West has been exporting these same norms to the
rest of the world. The situation wouldn’t be so serious if everyone everywhere
had the same internal controls over their behavior. But they don’t.
Some societies have gone farther than others along the
trajectory that leads to cultural modernity and, in time, behavioral modernity.
Wherever strong States have imposed a monopoly on the use of violence, there
has been a consequent pacification of social relations, the result being increased
trust in strangers and a freer, more open society. This transition also affects
the way societies are organized. In premodern societies, the market economy is
secondary, being limited to special places at special times, i.e., marketplaces.
In modern societies, the market economy is primary and encompasses almost all
possible transactions. In premodern societies, kinship is primary, being the
main organizing principle of social relations. In modern societies, kinship has
little importance beyond the bounds of each nuclear family. The transition from
premodernity to modernity in turn leads to a suite of behavioral changes:
higher anger thresholds, a more future-oriented time orientation, and a
stronger work ethic.
Wherever the social environment has long been
pacified, these internal behavioral controls have largely taken over from external
cultural controls. Where pacification has been more recent, “correct behavior”
is enforced largely through external controls. Not enough time has elapsed to
bring behavioral predispositions into line with cultural modernity.
The above analysis may seem unacceptable to most of
us. Current discourse allows only two possible causes for the Boston bombings:
social exclusion or radical Islam. The “social exclusion” explanation is the
weirdest. The Tsarnaevs were accepted as Chechen refugee claimants even though
they had spent almost their whole lives outside Chechnya and were in no danger.
Tamerlan himself was welcomed with open arms into an American household despite
his uncontrollable temper and unwillingness to work. Such indulgence is
unusual, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Tamerlan benefited from an
almost pathological fear of seeming to be xenophobic.
The other possible cause, radical Islam, has become
the leading explanation, largely by default. But what if Tamerlan had not been
radicalized? There would have been no Boston bombings, yes, but sooner or later
he would have committed an act of murder or attempted murder (assuming he had not already done so before the bombings) and he would have almost certainly
remained a tax consumer, and not a tax payer.
In this latter respect, Tamerlan was not unusual. If
we examine immigrant communities of similar backgrounds, their work ethic tends
to weaken as they become more and more assimilated. In the 1960s and 1970s, the
Turkish population in Germany had a labor-force participation rate higher than
that of native Germans. Now, as we enter the 2nd and 3rd
generations, the picture has completely reversed: 40% unemployment in Berlin
and other cities; welfare dependency three times the national rate; and an
average retirement age of 50 (Caldwell, 2009, p. 36). This is the paradox we
see with many non-European immigrants: the more they become assimilated, the
more different they become. They shed the cultural controls that formerly kept
their behavior in line.
What, then, will be done? Nothing, probably, other
than that the U.S. will become more and more a society under surveillance. One
thing that used to make American society so exceptional was its high level of
personal security and personal responsibility. Americans didn’t have to fear
being sucker-punched by some guy with a problem. They didn’t have to closely
monitor the body language and facial expressions of anyone they happened to
meet. And they didn’t have to worry about other people abusing their trust and
generosity. In other countries, people do. And that’s a big reason why those
countries are less productive and, hence, less wealthy.
References
Caldwell, C. (2009). Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. Immigration, Islam and the
West, Doubleday.
Fisher, M. (2013). The Tsarnaev family: A faded
portrait of an immigrant’s American dream, April 27, The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/feature/wp/2013/04/27/the-tsarnaev-family-a-faded-portrait-of-an-immigrants-american-dream/?hpid=z1
Mikus Kos, A. (2009). Psychosocial programmes can
also diminish or destroy local resources, in E. Baloch-Kaloianov and A. Mikus
Kos (eds). Activating Psychosocial Local
Resources in Territories Affected by War
and Terrorism, IOS Press.
Sontag, D., D.M. Herszenhorn, and S.F. Kovaleski.
(2013). A battered dream, then a violent path, April 28, The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/us/shot-at-boxing-title-denied-tamerlan-tsarnaev-reeled.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Wikipedia. (2013). Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_and_Tamerlan_Tsarnaev
Zajda, J. (2005). “The educational reform and
transformation in Russia,” in J. Zajda (ed). International Handbook on
Globalization, Education and Policy Research, Springer.
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/1-4020-2960-8_26#
