The most important sentence in Jessica Stern's Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (Ecco, 2003) appears quite near the end of the book, on page 282 to be exact: "More broadly, it is not just the accomplishment of their goals that terrorists seek; it is also the act of pursuing them." Ordinarily, I'd have omitted the first two words from that quotation, but I've left them in as a hint. Does this statement, about looking forward to doing something as much as doing it, remind you of something? That would be something to do with broads. I'm surprised that Ms Stern doesn't make the connection, which, in retrospect, saturates every page. Terrorists have found a substitute for sex. Maybe something better than sex: self-righteous triumph is very different from the consequences of carnality so eloquently catalogued by Shakespeare in Sonnet 139.
Terror in the Name of God is a puzzling book. There are no puzzles in the text - that's one puzzle. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I can't recall reading a book that had so little to tell me. To be sure, whenever Ms Stern describes her actual encounters with terrorists - the hustled visits to dingy offices and luxurious mansions, the fear that her costume might be immodest, her reactions to her interlocutors' boasts - her book becomes fresh and interesting, and it reads like a good travel book. Sadly, however, Ms Stern appears to have felt constrained by the demands of the scholarly community to which she belongs - she is a Harvard Fellow on the Kennedy School faculty - and this sense of obligations generates no end of repetitions, statements of the (fairly) obvious, and earnest but tentative conclusions that laymen are likely to find wanting in backbone.
More puzzling is the organization. I was unable to correlate chapter titles with chapter contents. Anything might be said anywhere, and the sense of shapelessness became oppressive. The only coherence that I could detect was provided by the organizations that she studied. Thus the first chapter, 'Alienation,' holds together only because of its discussion of an American cult, the Covenant, Sword, and the Arms of the Lord. There didn't seem to be anything uniquely alienated about Kerry Noble, the former member of this cult who served as Ms Stern's source, unless it was the odd little detail that, as a child, Mr Noble was so sickly that he was made to play sports with the girls. Had the chapter been headed with the name of the cult itself, it would have made more sense and done so immediately. The same is true of Ms Stern's treatment of groups in the Middle East, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Terror in the Name God draws what strength it has from the interest of the characters whom Ms Stern met in the course of her research, not from the Cartesian array of concepts into which her coverage is crammed. This flaw is a further sign that Ms Stern did not write the book that she wanted to write.
But to miss the big point, which the author circumnavigates assiduously, can only be explained by an instinctive determination to avoid the sensational. Here are all these boys at loose ends, too poor to marry, too unskilled to get what little meaningful work is on offer, and convinced, as boys always are, that fathers are either heroes to be emulated or worthless compromisers. They live in a world in which segregation of the sexes is so rigidly enforced that unauthorized contact is simply impossible, and, it must be said, they are too young to have a taste for pederasty. Expose them to the rhetoric of humiliation and revenge preached in the madrassas, and terrorism begins to look like a good thing, at least to them. This I can understand! It has all the excitement of sex, and, in societies where it is easier to get hold of explosives than to sleep with a girl, better than sex. Forget trying to understand terrorism in terms of religion, which is only a pretext. Consider hormones instead, raging in a thoroughly thwarted environment. And don't forget all the virgins promised by the Koran to martyred jihadis.
One point that Ms Stern notes but does not sufficiently develop is the role of exportation in terrorism. Aside from Israel and the Occupied Territories, terrorists do not as a rule practice their deadly arts at home. They're shipped off, rather, to distant points - Kashmir, Kenya, or even the United States. The class inequities of terrorism - rich people making donations to groups that send poor youths off to be shot - are noted here as they have been elsewhere, but again more, I think, ought to have been made of the hypocrisy that lubricates much of the terrorist world. I do applaud Ms Stern's final chapter, in which she offers sane and sensible suggestions for making the world into a place less favorable to the spread of terrorism. And she does make one rather remarkable connection that I've wondered about but never heard mentioned: there are, apparently, fundamentalist groups in the United States - composed of white Christian men - that sympathize with Islamist extremists, and are prepared to act as 'outriders' on their behalf. There is even a group of ultra-conservative Israelis who might do the same! In light of this, we can only be grateful that the more bellicose members of the current Administration, whose loathing for Saddam Hussein is shared by most Muslim fanatics, still think that they're fighting for a pluralistic democracy. They may be mistaken, but I'd hate to disillusion them. (January 2004)
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And I quote: "Modern Library Chronicles is a series of small-format hardcover originals, featuring the world's great historians on the world's great subjects. These authoritative, lively, brief (most under 150 pages), and accessible books that bring history within the reach of the nonspecialist, the general reader." I must say, I'm crazy about small-format clothbound books. Piled near the cash register at Lenox Hill Books, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, simply demanded to be purchased. The company in question is indeed a revolutionary idea, not a particular firm. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, both writers for The Economist, have put together a handy little history of the joint-stock company, without which the gigantic industries of the high industrial revolution would have been inconceivable.
The institution of the corporation goes back to antique times. The middle ages was a great age of corporations. Colleges, churches, and other municipal and ecclesiastical bodies were organized as corporations. The business corporation, however, is much more recent, and in its modern form dates from the Companies Act of 1862, a piece of British legislation that was immediately imitated, with local variations, throughout the Western world. (Adam Smith, therefore, wrote The Wealth of Nations without knowing much - there wasn't much to know - about 'big business.') The principal traits of the modern company would henceforth be (a) limited liability for investors, meaning that no investor could be sued for a sum greater than his investment, (b) corporate identity (conferring all the rights a natural person might have, plus immortality), and (c) management elected by the investors. These three elements together made it possible to raise the huge sums of capital that the railroads and heavy industries of the time required. The authors of The Company do a nice job of laying out the checkered history of business entities over the preceding ages, and the considerable objections to the idea of the limited-liability company that postponed their development beyond the middle of the nineteenth century.
Where The Company falls short is in the treatment of that most problematic of contemporary issues, business regulation. As one might expect of Economist staffers, Micklethwait and Wooldridge regard regulation as essentially onerous, not constructive, but this doesn't excuse their failure to examine regulation in even cursory detail. While they're eager to point out that "the cost of meeting social regulations to American firms was $289 billion a year" at the end of the twentieth century, they don't assess the effectiveness of such regulation or condescend to suggest improvements. (Their treatment of the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 (creating the Securities and Exchange Commission) could have been made much more illuminating by the addition of one or two paragraphs about this country's singular approach to the matter.) It seems to be justification enough that corporations create jobs. But there is a big difference between 'jobs' considered as a statistic and the individual jobs that people depend on for their livelihood. The authors are similarly dismissive of stakeholder capitalism, the European alternative to America's shareholder capitalism - and similarly unenlightening about its advantages and drawbacks.
But this very short book is designed to introduce the idea that the business corporation, one of modern life's most ubiquitous and vital structures, has a history that does not go very far back in time. This will be news to most people, for the simple reason that big business is generally viewed as a development of the industrial revolution (if it is viewed historically at all). In fact, the industrial revolution, in its later, larger phase, would simply not have occurred without the joint-stock company. Understanding something of the history of this truly 'revolutionary idea' is a necessary first step in evaluating the corporation's role in society, and society's role in managing corporations. (April 2003)
Copyright (c) 2004 Pourover Press