The link between terrorism and ideology

It has suddenly become very difficult to have a conversation about terrorism that isn’t overtly politicised or faintly hysterical. This is because so much of the discussion is dominated by what the late American philosopher Robert Nozick scornfully described as ‘normative sociology’ – the ‘study of what the causes of problems ought to be’.

‘If X is bad’, Nozick wrote, ‘and Y, which also is bad, can be tied to X via a plausible story it is very hard to resist the conclusion that one causes the other.’ Because terrorism is obviously very bad indeed, it is acutely susceptible to being co-opted by cynical observers as a logical outcome of everything they love to hate.

In the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre, in which an Australian white nationalist murdered 50 people in two mosques in New Zealand, Nozick’s normative sociology left the ivory tower of academia and went mainstream. In the New York Times, the Canadian writer Omer Aziz suggested that the Christchurch outrage, just like a string of other far-right atrocities, was rooted in ‘a pathology of hatred’ that ‘has spread around the world’ and ‘put all our lives at risk’.