Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

David Ignatius - The Dignity Agenda - washingtonpost.com, October 14, 2007

After I mentioned Brzezinski’s ideas about dignity in a previous column, a reader sent me a 1961 essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, which made essentially the same point. A deeply skeptical man who resisted the “isms” of partisan thought, Berlin was trying to understand the surge of nationalism despite two world wars. “Nationalism springs, as often as not, from a wounded or outraged sense of human dignity, the desire for recognition,” he wrote.

“The craving for recognition has grown to be more powerful than any other force abroad today,” Berlin continued. “It is no longer economic insecurity or political impotence that oppresses the imaginations of many young people in the West today, but a sense of the ambivalence of their social status — doubts about where they belong, and where they wish or deserve to belong.”

A final item on my dignity reading list is “Violent Politics,” a new book by the iconoclastic historian William R. Polk. He examines 10 insurgencies through history — from the American Revolution to the Irish struggle for independence to the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation — to make a stunningly simple point, which we managed to forget in Iraq: People don’t like to be told what to do by outsiders. “The very presence of foreigners, indeed, stimulates the sense first of apartness and ultimately of group cohesion.” Foreign intervention offends people’s dignity, Polk reminds us. That’s why insurgencies are so hard to defeat.