Using Lifton’s “Symbolic Immortality” to Predict Arab Violence

By and large, the social sciences fail to predict the future. August Comte’s ideal of “savoir (to know social behavior) pour prevoir (to predict), prevoir pour pouvoir (to influence)” has not materialized. It seems that the social sciences and history, while good at “predicting” the past, find it too difficult to predict the future. A noteworthy excep-

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tion is Robert Jay Lifton’s paradigm of symbolic immortality, which I have found to possess strong predictive power. Moreover, it can be used for the sake of pouvoir: to affect the course of future events. This article is devoted to illustrating that point.

On the assumption that most readers are acquainted with Lifton’s paradigm, I will only restate the central point of his psychohistorical approach, a sequence of: desymbolization — impairment of individuals’ sense of immortality — agonizing death-in-life existence — possible adoption of totalistic ideologies to relieve the suffering — and victimization of an “other” defined as a devil by the totalistic ideology. (Lifton, The Broken Connection, 1979)

In 1993 I maintained that the final link stems from self-destructive wishes: underneath the totalistic wish to victimize the external devil there lurk suicidal impulses. (“Sacrificial Immortality: Toward a Theory of Suicidal Terrorism,” L. Bryce Boyer, Ruth M Boyer, and Stephen M. Sonnenberg, eds., The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, 1993, pp. 415-442) This explains not only the extra-destructiveness of totalistic ideologies, but also their intra-destructiveness and their fascination with what Gregory Zilboorg calls “undifferentiated death.” (“Suicide Among Civilized and Primitive Races,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1936:92, pp. 1347-1369)

Inspired by Lifton’s insights, as early as 1984, three years before the outbreak in late 1987 of the first Palestinian Intifada, I wrote in a Hebrew-language daily about “Two Trains on a Collision Course” (Yedioth Ahronoth, June 24, 1984, sec. 2, p. 3), noting that there is a “Jewish terrorist organization” and the emergence of terrorist organizations of newly religious Muslims. What the latter, mostly “educated young adults, students or recent graduates of Arab universities,” all have “in common is their quest for a meaning in their lives in the aftermath of the disintegration of traditional Arab society.” They were looking to gain meaning to their life from “a war against ‘non-Muslims,’ in the spirit of Muslim holy war.” They opposed the “impious behavior” of other Muslims who did not share their devout religion and killed a Jew just because he was an Israeli. The murder seemed “to be the most brazen action against Jews taken to date by Muslim penitents, verging on the suicidal.”

I also saw this as an important turning point in Palestinian Arab society that was not then at its base militant. There was no great willingness to die for abstract values among those Sunni Muslims, making it difficult to organize a fighting force. In that period they were still calling on Shiite or Japanese terrorists to carry out suicide missions. But all of this was beginning to change then as “The newly religious Sunni Muslims are introducing a militant and suicidal dimension to local Arab society. They are prepared to die for absolute values; for these same values they are also willing, of course, to kill.” Many of them, being hoodlums and petty criminals — even murderers — had little to lose as their “deeds now achieve legitimacy as they assume the halo of sacred warriors.” These proliferating penitents raised the profile of terrorists as self-sacrificing and it is no coincidence that the number of suicide attacks increased in that period. I predicted that the terrorism was a local harvest that would spread to Israeli Arabs as has since happened.

The self-sacrificing profile of Arabs was raised, paradoxically, by the provocative behavior of some newly religious Jews. For example, attempts to take control of the Temple Mount incited Islamic fury and aroused “sympathy in the Arab street for its own penitents.” The Jewish and Muslims fundamentalists strike me as rather similar. It was clear to me that the two sides were “racing toward a collision, which will produce the spark that ignites the powder keg on which all of us are standing.” The keg exploded long ago.

The 1984 article presents a simplified version of Robert Jay Lifton’s sequence, along with its probable outcome (the simplification is due to the fact that it was published in a mass-circulation daily and was meant to be understood by the average reader). The key expressions are: “disintegration of traditional Arab society” — “quest for a meaning” — [totalistic fundamentalism] attacks on other Muslims’ “impious behavior” — “life gains meaning from … war” — raised “self-sacrifice profile” — and willingness “to die … [and] of course, to kill.” The article also mentions Jewish fundamentalists, which, while a significant topic, is not our concern here.

As attested by this instance, Lifton’s paradigm indeed possesses a predictive power; that is, it realizes Comte’s dream of a predictive capacity. Moreover, it can be used to influence (pouvoir), to shape the direction of future events. For instance, one can expect modernization, which undermines traditional Arab society and its most hallowed symbols system, Islam, to start the sequence we are discussing. (Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Me-

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dieval Theology and Modern Politics, 1985)

This is happening now all over the Islamic world, from Algeria to Iran to Indonesia: in every case the breakdown of traditional symbols preceded the bloodshed. Some of the bloodshed could have been prevented had the decision-makers read Lifton and learned that modernization has its toll — the totalistic destructiveness of those whose culture and society are undergoing transformation.

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