Subversion/insecurity

The basic logic of harm through transgression consists in the betraying of shared expectations. The next mode of harm – subversion – consists in the perception that the sustainability of one's way of life is undermined by a source outside or alien to one's self. Both types of threat to normative order (transgression and subversion) trigger emotions of fear and anger or outrage, but the emotional content of each is shadowed by other sensations as well, as we discussed in the case of grievance. While the experience of ‘insecurity’ may apply to all forms of threat,27 I take it as most tightly linked to subversion. Insecurity is a pallid word for the sense of falling apart that perception of subversion brings about, yet it captures the core of emotional response to subversion. Experiences of subversion will arise from a variety of encounters. An ostensible material or physical endangerment may actually point to a normative insecurity. A prominent line of argument holds that the provocation to anti-US sentiment among radicalized fundamentalist Islamists grew out of the presence of US military bases within the sacred lands of Islam.28 Here the concrete presence of an alien Other leads to the perception of being overtaken or infiltrated, even though the US government has no intention of literally occupying and making impossible the realm of Islam. A milder version of infiltration through material means can be found in the French sensation of cultural insecurity through the prevalence of American films from Hollywood. Both examples show how normative threats can be triggered when a customary space or stage of one's action has been metaphorically invaded by an alien order.

A perception of normative threat as subversion comes not only via physical carriers of a foreign force, but also from a sensation of internal vulnerability. Thus, the Other appears powerful because the structure of one's inner commitments opens up specific weak spots. The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union exemplified to some degree a mutual perception of threat due to their offering contrary conceptions of normative order, each of which held up an inverse mirror to the other, accentuating the weakest parts of the other in the reflection. The United States portrayed the Soviets as tyrannical and destructive of freedom and individualism. The Soviets portrayed the United States as selfish, inegalitarian, individualistic, and destructive of collective goods. These inverse depictions rendered each vulnerable to the critique of the other's normative ordering, and made the other to some extent a subversive threat. Liberalism and communism stood for contrasting explanations and prescriptions about sources of equality, freedom and well-being. The threat they posed to one another should be viewed as powerful because of the profound claims about the best and right human order each maintained.29

A susceptibility to sensations of subversion is built in to some groups’ normative identities, e.g., societies conceptualizing their political identities such that proselytizing for their ideals is intrinsic to who they are. Part of their DNA seeks to judge and transform the world, therefore to tolerate and live among alien Others signals a weakness in one's mission. Social orders built upon ‘truth’ render themselves continually open to subversion. When Aquinas sought to enforce uniformity of belief, his fear was not of simple otherness of belief. Indeed, the Church allowed for a notable plurality in its orthodoxy, so long as its authority determined the domain of acceptable belief. But the unorthodoxy of heretics would have an enormously destabilizing effect on the order of believers, because differences of religious belief posed a threat to the social order premised upon the Church's sacred and singular authority at the apex of ideological hierarchy. The following passage provides an especially forceful example of the connection between claims about collective truth and anxieties about the destruction of order as found within the Islamic notion of apostasy:

Apostasy is a means by which cracks enter the ranks of the Muslims and their internal front is fractured. This is a great evil and corruption because the most dangerous thing for a community is chaos, disruption in its [common] beliefs, intellectual disarray and a lack of trust in what preserves its order. The apostasy of a Muslim is much more dangerous than mere unbelief because the apostate has had the full opportunity to be exposed to the proof and evidence which made him believe in Islam by free choice alone and thus there is no excuse for him as there is for the unbeliever by birth who has not had this opportunity. We thus view atheist ideas circulating in Muslim lands as much more dangerous than mere transparent unbelief in Islam [on the part of non-Muslims] because doubt in one's system and the fragmentation of the internal ranks is one of the primary reasons for the victory of the enemy. It is for this reason that Islam does not leave the apostate freedom to apostatize in contrast to its firm respect for the freedom of conscience of the unbeliever by birth. (March 2009; emphasis added).

This explanation of the purpose of one of Islam's core tenets – apostasy as the crime of disaffiliation from one's religion faith – makes rejection of one's Muslim faith a threat to the sanctity of the larger Islamic community. The ambivalence of the nature of disorder is also displayed here: the apostate's rethinking of his religious beliefs might be taken as an opening to broader social chaos or to the infiltration of an alien-order (‘victory of the enemy’).

Examples of alarm from destabilization and subversion of one's inherited order are numerous. Antipathy toward immigrants reflects a type of fear of being socially overrun. Samuel Huntington's warning about the coming destruction of Anglo-American culture through the influx of Mexicans has been presented in this way. Sayyid Qutb's dawning hatred of the United States after his stay as a graduate student in Colorado, might also be viewed in this light. Would Qutb have devoted his life to fighting a libertine modernity if it had not threatened the chances of his own preferred orthodox commitments? The perception of this type of harm to order acts as a powerful background orientation for many political bodies, and operates more consistently in some cases than others.30 Otherness itself does not frighten if it is not taken as portentously on the verge of destroying one's particular normative and cultural order.