When it’s rational to kill yourself
On Friday, Chris Dillow asked: are suicide bombers rational? It’s a fine question, which he partly answers with reference to this new paper by Eli Berman and David Laitin (pdf):
Suicide terrorism, they [Berman and Laitin] say, is rational if you believe terrorism will be rewarded in the hereafter, or if you are altruisitic and believe your death will benefit you family and compatriots.
But there are (at least) two questions of rationality here. Who exactly are we asking if suicide terrorism is rational for? For groups that carry out and organize suicide terrorism, it’s rational on several levels, among them some or all of these:
1. Suicide bombs are pinpoint-accurate weapons. During the Iraq War of 1991, a soothing BBC voice told us not to worry about collateral damage, because cruise missiles could reliably hit your front door from 1000 miles. It was bull, of course. But a suicide bomb can get close enough to give you a fatal bear-hug, as Ahmed Shah Masood discovered just before 9/11, in what was (probably) the first intentional Sunni-on-Sunni suicide attack.
2. Suicide bombs sap your opponent’s morale. They show an unnerving disregard for self-preservation. It’s commitment, basic signalling theory. It’s Paris sending Menelaus explicit Polaroids starring him and Helen, in the full knowledge that 1000 ships were heading his way. It shows you’re not scared.
3. Suicide terrorism is currency in the internal politics of Islamism and recruitment on the West Bank. In economic terms, they’re huge sunk costs that erect barriers to entering the Palestinian power game. A desperate, debased currency, sure, but one that’s proven very effective. Fatah was originally a secular organization. Though it remains so in name, it’s ‘suicide wing’, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, certainly isn’t. It can’t afford to be. The success of Hamas and PIJ raised the stakes and sealed the duopoly.
4. Suicide terror is a logical weapon of asymmetric warfare. It’s the best a weak opponent can muster. The Kamikaze, the Black Tigers, the SSNP, al-Qaeda, and so on  all weaker or losing or both. As Jim explains in the Palestinian context:
Palestinians don’t have the tanks or bulldozers that would allow them to adopt the Israeli tactics of destroying the homes of the families of enemy combatants. They don’t have jet fighters… And they don’t have helicopter gunships to hunt down and kill enemy combatants
5. Suicide terrorism goes straight for the weak point of liberal societies: their relative freedom, especially freedom of the press. To a degree, suicide terrorism is an artifice of the free society. Small insurgent groups can’t win by picking us off one at a time  people have to hear about terrorism for it to work. And the more people hear, the better for the terrorists. The 8-page commemorative pullout is as valuable as acetone peroxide. All three recent attacks in the West  New York, Madrid, London  happened in the morning rush-hour, to give maximum rolling news coverage.
So, for some terrorist groups, suicide attacks are rational strategies. So rational, in fact, that perhaps we should ask why there aren’t more of them. But for the individual it’s trickier to marry martyrdom and rationality. Extreme altruism must exist (think Pietro Micca at the siege of Turin), and in the context of nationalist struggles “ultimate team-players” are probably more pervasive. But there’s no analogy here with self-sacrifice in the heat of battle. The suicide bomber has plenty of time to weigh the options. Death is a prerequisite for success  not likely or possible. For the suicide bomber, in what sense is killing himself (rarer, herself) rational? Two options seem possible.
Either,
1. It isn’t. Suicide terrorism is pure programmatic irrationality. These are acts of individual and group self-delusion, and so beyond useful theorizing: rational choice theory, especially, has nothing to say when the agent is irrational. A suicide bomber mixes paranoid inferiority with the divorce from any concept of moral agency, though specifically is not suicidal in the “normal” sense. In Palestine, it’s a national-territorial struggle, but the delusional ideology is there, too. From Article 22 of the Charter of Hamas, entitled “The Powers which Support the Enemy”:
The enemies have been scheming for a long time… They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations. They also used the money to take over control of the Imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein. As regards local and world wars, it has come to pass and no one objects, that they stood behind World War I, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate. They collected material gains and took control of many sources of wealth. They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that organization. They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state. They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary. There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it…
Or,
2. Symbolic rationality is at work, of the kind offered by Chris here to explain why people bother to vote:
People vote not out of cost-benefit considerations but to symbolize who they are.
The bomber plugs himself straight into a tradition with huge symbolic value. Particularly for the Shia, who incubated modern suicide terrorism in Iran and Lebanon, the defeat of Imam Hussein at Karbala, 13-year-old Hossein Fahmideh, the Hizbollah attack in Tyre in November 1982 by Ahmed Qassir (pdf), the American Embassy in Beirut six months later, the first attack on Israeli civilians the following year, and so on. (For Black Tigers, the symbolism includes Captain Miller and Hinduism’s iconography and self-immolation traditions.) The royal lineage of martyrdom, with added Me. But suicide bombers never work alone. This symbolism needs to be bolstered by external effects. Real and imagined injustice. Occupation. Religion as ex post compensation and sectarian motivator: suicide attacks against co-religionists (Iraq aside) are rare. Add in the carefully planned actions of those rational groups: the social capital of the small cell, the multiple commitment points (the will, the self-justificatory farewell video, etc.), and so on.
Of course, it’s probably a bit of both. Somewhere in between. But is it really possible for an act to be rational and irrational at the same time?
Hmmm.
See I reckon that 99% of human activity is not “rational”. I’d certainly exclude your “symbolic rationality”.
I guess it depends on your starting point. You say that “for some terrorist groups, suicide attacks are rational strategies”. By “rational strategy”, here you mean “good strategy”. You don’t ask whether the organisation’s aims are themselves rational.
So looking narrowly, if our guy’s aim is to kill himself and take down as many others as he can along the way, then becoming a suicide bomber is a pretty damn rational strategy. That’s not meant to be a flippant point.
But is that aim a rational one? Well, arguably it is only if itself is the implementation of a rational strategy towards some broader aim e.g the collapse of some particular government.
And repeat – is that aim a rational one?
Unless you can stop this regress at some finite point, at some very basic biology (e.g the survival of the human species), I just don’t see that it’s clear when we should stop playing this game, or how we shuold decide which aims at this level are rational and which are not.
So I guess I just don’t consider it a useful concept.
At the risk of getting caught up in that “moral equivalence” nonsense (or whatever it was) that I still don’t understand, the rationality or otherwise of suicide attacks seems generally to come from a complete lack of understanding/appreciation of the cultural background of those carrying them out.
In the case of the Japanese kamikaze attacks in the latter stages of the Pacific War, on a tactical level you can see some logic as by that stage the US airforce and Pacific fleet was significantly more powerful and technologically advanced than anything the Japanese had. But by 1945 Germany was also vastly outgunned, yet never resported to a policy of suicide attacks (despite some explorations of similar ideas, like the Selbstopfer, but those always offered some possibility of escape for the volunteers).
But you then chuck into the mix (overly simplified this, I know) the extreme nationalism that was carefully cultivated from the Meiji Restoration onwards, the slightly odd, almost herd mentality (more favourably, perhaps, an extreme form of utilitarianism) that is the continuing anti-individualist group mentality of the majority of Japanese, and – especially – the long tradition of seppuku, where honour is more important than life – which puts a vastly different spin on the concept of suicide from anything in the Judeo-Christian tradition of suicide as mortal sin – it all starts to make more sense. There were also, it’s perhaps worth noting, more volunteers for the kamikaze programme than there were planes for them to fly – and most volunteers were middle-class university students, not impoverished, ill-educated dupes – as a lot of the Palestinian lot appear to be.
Is it rational? Dunno. Personally I’d say Japanese Kamikaze pilots were rather more rational than our current batch of suicide bombers. But that’s largely because believing in an all-powerful deity and a virgin-packed afterlife strikes me as highly irrational.
I was a bit worried by the opening paragraph, but by the end, I thought this was a really interesting article. However, I guess I also agree (partly) with Larry. I think Humans *can* be very rational, but of course, it depends what they are being rational *after*. That is, I think we often take decisions for very irrational reasons, but then see through those decisions in a rational away.
I disagree with Larry about “symbolic rationality”. I can very much see that people might put a vast amount of weight in symbolism. It pretty well sums up why I vote, for example. Of course, I think rationally plays pretty much no part at all in the decision (if it’s even a concious decision, and not one dictated by culture) as to which symbols we’ll find important.
In the example at hand, having decided you are willing to do pretty much anything to attack your enemy, and that the attack is best carried out by killing lots of people, then suicide bombing is *very* rational. Of course, it’s rather debatable that those decisions are “rational”, but as Larry says, once you get into such big decisions (e.g. in the Palestinian case, the future of Israel and Palestianian, which leads to geo-political issues etc.) I doubt people are very rational.
I’m also with Larry, in that I doubt it’s useful to consider if suicide bombing is “rational”. I doubt it explains *why* people become bombers (it certainly fails to give a complete account). I doubt it gives us ideas as to how to stop people becoming bombers, short of some basic policing issues, which are pretty obvious (like guarding places where lots of people gather etc.)
Ironically, it’s a topic I find difficult to be rational about. Perhaps this is due to a formative educational experience. It’s one of those one’s that feels like it was yesterday (well, not quite – you know what I mean though) although it was in primary school: our teacher was telling us about the Kamakazie pilots during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. I so clearly remember being astonished and thinking inwardly, “That’s complete insanity”.
Therefore, if anyone should accuse me of being simple-minded or childlike in my attitude to suicide-bombers, I’d have to plead guilty because my attitude really hasn’t changed that much: if you blow both yourself and innocent civilians to smithereens and you imagine that the universe is governed by a deity that will reward you by indulging your frankly juvenille fantasies then you’re fucking mental and desperately wicked – end of story.
Sorry, just noticed nosemonkey discussed Kamakazie pilots above…
Used to love economics at university: “We assume people are rational”, my lecturers told us. “I guess they don’t get out much”, I thought ;-)
Isn’t there a confusion between “rational” and “rational self interest” here?
I mean, if furthering the objectives of your “clan” is more important than furthering your personal objectives then the fact that you are no longer around to enjoy the the results is a fairly peripheral issue.
The thought of dying for clan survival is pretty unintelligible – or just plain stupid – to the egocentric modern western mind. Survival is pretty much identical to personal survival for us. (Mind you, undertaking wartime tasks with minimal survival chances, going down with the ship, etc, are still getting plenty of airplay.) But you only have to look back in history or around at other cultures to realize that this isn’t the only available take on life.
Belief in an afterlife may seem a consoling notion to us, but I doubt it’s really the point for suicide bombers. It’s more of a moral question: You’re going to die anyway, so why live as a weak man in fear of death, choose the courageous and good path and your death will be transcended in life. In Black Robe (I think) one of the Indians says that knowing the exact day of your death would be ideal, because you could then act perfectly fearlessly up to that day.
Notwithstanding the above, I’d rate testosterone as an important factor in terrorism. Unlike the vast majority of people I hear banging on about terrorism these days, I actually know or knew someone who was killed in a terrorist act. She was sitting on our couch one Wednesday night talking about her upcoming Bali holiday, and dead a few days later thanks to testosterone charged young man with a bomb. For most people with a similar story, it is way more likely to involve a testosterone charged young man holding the steering wheel of a car. Indeed, I had an aunt whose life ended in this manner.
Testosterone seems to have away of making us driven by our ideas, careless of our own and others safety. It’s got it’s good side but it’s a mixed bag.
Thanks for your comments. I’m not sure I agree with most of you, though. I do think people generally act rationally, including suicide bombers, in that they are able to explain motivations for action in a rational, coherent manner. It really doesn’t matter if we think their motivations rational  only that they do. So, Larry, I’m not sure we have to consider the political aims of the group to decide whether suicide bombing is a rational strategy or not, which is why I split the question I asked in two parts. I might think it irrational to visit the moon, but I can see that if that’s your bag, it’s completely rational to build something that looks like Apollo 11. So, no, I don’t think it’s true that suicide bombers are irrational lunatics, any more than I think them “cowards”.
Where I do agree, though, is that rational choice has limitations here. It kind of misses out the most interesting part of the question: where people get their motivations from. And that’s where the cultural factors come in. Suiciders in Vietnam in the 1960s set themselves on fire, hurting nobody else. Fast forward 40 years and a different bunch of people, similarly wishing to shock, fly planes into buildings. I’m not sure we can push this too far, though. Part of the cultural background of the London bombers was 1990s Leeds. Many of the earliest suicide bombers in Israel and Lebanon were secular Marxist-atheists from the SSNP and PFLP. (And, weirdly, one of the first modern suicide missions inside Israel was actually carried out by three Japanese red army terrorists.)
Finally, I disagree that seeing suicide bombing as rational has no useful policy implications. If we see these actions as rational rather than the work of madmen, then we can start to drift away from the infantile notion of a Global War On Terrorism, and get back to trying to solve these regional issues one by one, like we used to. Not that we shouldn’t go after terorists  of course we should. But you can’t fight a war on suicide bombing any more than you can un-invent the outflanking manoeuvre. Both are just straightforward tactics of war  with suicide missions just another weapon in the asymmetric armoury.
The New Scientist has some interesting articles on the making of suicide bombers:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18224475.900
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18725095.100
Unfortunately, if you don’t subscribe to the New Scientist back catalogue you can’t see them.
They make the point, roughly, that it is much easier to make a suicide bomber than people would generally think. In much the same way that various experiments have shown how easy it is to make a torturer, we are all much closer to this than we’d like to think.
I might think it irrational to visit the moon, but I can see that if that’s your bag, it’s completely rational to build something that looks like Apollo 11.
I see where you’re coming from – it’s old Weber’s distinction between means and ends, isn’t it? Being a skeptical old bugger, he didn’t think ‘ends’ could ever be determined by reason but that once the end had been chosen, the means by which one gets there can be easily demonstrated to be more or less rational.
In that sense, I suppose you could argue that suicide bombers are rational. But I don’t really buy this. For one thing, we can say the ‘end’ desired by the suicide bombers is less rational than, say, a political solution requiring compromise because, leaving aside all the guff about entering paradise with the virgins etc., the restoration of the caliphate just isn’t going to happen so it’s irrational to pursue it, whatever means they use.
Before I send Larry into his whirling Dervish routine, I would like to demur from our host’s notion that we should “get back to trying to solve these regional issues one by one, like we used to”, as though that were a solution to the problem. Such an idea implies that militant Islam has no further interests other than the myriad, local disputes in the middle-east. Quite apart from the fact that any attempt on our part to be a fair-minded ‘honest broker’ would be seen by them as yet more treachery; and were we to withdraw completely that, too, would be seen as a betrayal and dealt with according to their lights. (I leave aside the proposition that we should sit idly by whilst Israel is exterminated which is the only solution acceptable to militant Islam. I don’t object to it in principle, only that as it will not satisfy them but merely increase their appetite, it seems a better strategy to arm Israel to the teeth so that they may fight our battles for us.) From everything I read of militant Islam’s way of thinking, it seems clear that they hate us for what we *are*, not what we *do* (or don’t *do*). With that in mind we should remind ourselves that the ‘war on terror’ was declared on 10/11 and it followed their declaration of war on us on 9/11. With due respect to our host, there is nothing “infantile” in fighting back against your enemies.
Now, Larry, exactly how does the practice of suicide bombing fit in with neo-Darwinism? NO, NO, don’t retaliate here, it wouldn’t be good manners. You can blow me up over at my place.
Interesting, having not expected to, I almost completely agree with Jarndyce on this one. I think that it is important to understand other people on their own terms, to see how they act rationally within their worldview. This ‘relativistic’ stance is a necessary add-on to the Elightenment, a bolster against totalitarianism.
This, I must say, does not mean that we accept the values of these other people as ‘equal’ to our own, as, given that we do hold our values, we necessarily hold them to be superior. But, in addition to recognising the contigency of our holding these values, recognising that how the actions of other people makes sense in their own terms is a necessity if we are not to simply see other people as unhumans – which they, unfortunately for all those who for simplicities sake would rather see monsters, are not.
Now, the challenge we face is to take the project that we have used to understand the actions of sub(‘deviant’)-groups within our own society (such as drug addicts and criminals) on their own terms (without condoning), and apply this to the perpetrators of the most horrendous acts. This we need to do, not only to find a way of combating these acts that does not involve the (I would argue self-defeating) process of increasing repression, but also to avoid the obscuranticist, acausalist posuring of the decent left that is a betraying of any non-totalitarian extension of the Enlightenment project.
Andrew – I’d be very concerned if the understanding of motivations behind drug use were to be applied to suicide bombing because in the former case, it doesn’t seem to have helped the problem much has it? It’s a rare thing but once I read a line from Irvine Welsh that bears repeating: “People take drugs because they like them – the rest is all sociological window-dressing.” Or is that a totalitarian take on the subject?
All this convoluted reasoning about people being rational and resorting to relativism in order to explain wicked behaviour stems from the delusion that human beings are fundamentally good and only do bad under exceptional circumstances. But if you accept that history is full of bad news about the human condition, which everyone should, there’s no need to try and convince yourself that you need all this relativist nonsense of trying to enter into the value system of people who value death over life in order to avoid seeing people as ‘unhuman’. This is a very ungood argument. These suicide bombers are easily recognisable as fully human agents – that is, capable of delusion, violence, murder, insanity, depravity, extreme stupidity and please don’t forget – of being manipulated.
This notion of asymetrical warfare is attractive to the pseudo-Marxist fraternity because it allows them to see suicide-bombing as a direct response to the iniquities of capitalism: here these acts are a kind of cry of desperation of people who we are repeatedly told by terrorism’s apologists ‘have nothing but their bodies to use as missiles’ or some such other bilge. If that is all one has, it seems to me to be more than a little irrational to say the least to destroy all you have in order to achieve the murder of Jewish children travelling to school.
But in any case, this rather conveniently neat explanation ignores the fact that these ‘martyrdom operations’ require considerable strategic planning and intelligence. They also require a commodity, the presence of which behind the motivations of people you’d think the psuedo-Marxists would grasp, although they haven’t: it’s called money – and it’s pouring in from various regimes in the region. One tyrant who used to offer financial incentives to suicide-bombers in Israel is gone and there’s no way of solving this problem until the rest of them either go or can be pressured into mending their ways.
What’s the alternative? Personally I think David above is morally wrong to rule out in principle the idea that we should just allow the destruction of Israel but absolutely politically correct (if you’ll pardon the expression) in ruling it out as a strategy because even if this happened (thereby fufilling the wet dreams of many a leftist blogger), to imagine that this would eventually slake the thirst of the global jihad and they would all go home is complete and utter fantasy.
“From everything I read of militant Islam’s way of thinking, it seems clear that they hate us for what we *are*, not what we *do* (or don’t *do*)”
This kind of statement seems to me to require a bit of selective quotation. There’s no doubt that the views of extremists are extreme, but it takes a bit more than a few angry extremists to create what’s going on today. You need some real grievances that significant numbers of people identify with to get the level of motivation we are seeing now. We all know what they are.
“resorting to relativism in order to explain wicked behaviour stems from the delusion that human beings are fundamentally good and only do bad under exceptional circumstances.”
I am sorry, but that is absolute nonsense. I have said nothing about people being fundamentally anything. It is important to understand people on their own terms, as that is the only way that we can understand their actions without performing some kind of essentially duplicitous self-projection. It says nothing about good or bad, but is merely a project for understanding human action.
DD: it’s not true that they declared war on 9/11. They in fact did so on 23/2/1998, an act that received the level of publicity (though hopefully not attention in the right places) which it was due, i.e. almost none. The minute we offer them up a branded, Manichean GWOT, a proper clash of civilisations, we’re giving them what they want, not least because it makes recruitment to the enemy side a hell of a lot easier. Round One to them. Militant Islam does have other than local goals, sure, but they are ludicrous fantasies and need to be treated as such.
As for the rest, I’m equally surprised to be agreeing with Andrew. I think suicide terrorists are primarily rational on their own terms, for the reasons I’ve given above, and these are terms we need to understand. Equally, though, I have no problem condemning their actions as evil, wicked, unforgiveable (worse even than sitting idly by whilst Israel is exterminated)  as anyone who has read other stuff I’ve written would know. I have no problem being unequivocal about right and wrong  and, yes, sometimes communicating that in a totalitarian way (hence the usual disagreement with Andrew). I don’t think we should be negotiating with them, for starters.
But don’t confuse structure with agency here. Any “pseudo-Marxist” analysis I’ve used is to get at the former without making any statement about the latter.
“You need some real grievances..”
No, Jim, with respect, any old pretend ones will do, particularly in this age of mass, distorted news management. And if you are the world’s only super-power, as the USA is, then it is impossible, completely impossible, to *not* give some-one offence, somewhere in the world, even if you do nothing. For a very small example, ask yourself what we English would have to do to assuage the inbuilt resentment of the Scots? Stop breathing, might be the only answer!
‘Shuggy’, you are quite right; to contemplate the destruction of Israel with indifference is not a moral position, but as I have pointed out elsewhere, morality is not, or should not, be a concern of statesmen. If I didn’t already have a hundred other reasons why I never want to be a politician, that one would do. Nevertheless, in the same way that we send our diplomats abroad to lie for us, we appoint our statesmen to act only in our *best* interests. I wouldn’t want to work in the sewer system, but I’m glad some-one shifts my shit whilst I look away with a hankie covering my nose!
Jarndyce: I disagree that seeing suicide bombing as rational has no useful policy implications. If we see these actions as rational rather than the work of madmen…
But that’s a false dichotomy, at least given my assumption that 99% of human activity is not “rationalâ€Â.
Look I’m all in favour of trying to understand these people, to see where they get their motivations from, and I’m certainly keen on drifting away from the infantile notion of a Global War On Terrorism. But personally I’d wish to do that without appealing to the concept rationality, which I see as a semantic obstacle rather than anything else.
Duff: “as I have pointed out elsewhere, morality is not, or should not, be a concern of statesmen”
And as I have pointed out elsewhere, that’s a complete load of old cobblers.
So it will be very easy, Larry, for you to produce several examples of statesman acting in a moral manner irrespective of national self interest, enough examples, that is, to prove that it is the norm amongst statesmen.
Good example, David.
Ask yourself why the Scots aren’t running a suicide bombing campaign in London. My answer: A bit of bad history, but no real grievances.
But, if the English started flying zillion dollar high tech gunships over Scottish cities blowing random people to pieces away with 105 mm cannon this might well change. And various old hatreds would be invoked and forgotten historical incidents would develop new life. Hell, they might even say they hate the English for what they are…
Duff: or I could simply say that in a democracy we appoint our statesman to do what we tell them.
So to this: “we appoint our statesmen to act only in our *best* interests” I say: you speak for yourself, I’m free to cast my vote on whatever basis I choose.
And in speaking for yourself, you say that “morality is not, or should not, be a concern of statesmen“, you’re doing nothing more then telling a little bit about yourself – namely your indifference to killing other people when it suits you.
Apologies for going off-topic. I won’t say more on this in this thread.
Even so, Larry, I notice an alarming absence of any examples of statesmen acting other than in national self-interest. Perhaps you might care to fill the gap on your site and give the scatology a rest!
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