The country is in shock and utterly mystified: everybody says so. Well, I suppose I am shocked, too. But I am not surprised. Britain has bred its own enemy within and we feel the need to search for “reasons” as if there were a rational chain of political and economic causes that could be scrutinised and addressed.
In truth, we have always known about the seductive power of death cults on the young: bizarrely those who have, it is always said, all of life to look forward to are the most likely to be spellbound by the mystical summons to end it. Young men, particularly, are prey to this madness: they have so much life before them and so little understanding of what makes it precious.
These particular young were especially susceptible. It is not, contrary to popular belief, immigrants themselves who have the greatest difficulty coping with a new land. Being the product of an immigrant family myself, I am sharply aware of this. The migrants arrive fully aware of having made a conscious decision to take on a different life. Many of them never truly leave the home country in their hearts.
They cling together in communities that resemble as closely as possible the old world and the old ties. They learn the new language as minimally as survival requires and adapt to the strange customs with reluctance. They are aware that their closed introverted culture incurs resentment but this is a necessary insulation: it is how they maintain their sanity. Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side in old New York were as cohesive and self-absorbed as the Bangladeshi quarters of Tower Hamlets are.
So the immigrants know why they have come and who they still are. It is their children who are the truly displaced people. These children have no actual recollection of the old country but, having been raised in insular communities whose only cultural references were to the lost home, they do not feel a part of the new place either.
It is essential that we understand the relationship between these two things — the estrangement and disorientation of the first-born generation and the (easily perverted) longing to give up one’s life to a cause. If we do not, we will make the mistake of thinking that we are up against something that is beyond understanding — and that is the real territory of nightmares.
Coming back from holiday (in Yorkshire, as it happens) last week, we stopped at services on the M1. Sitting at a table by the window were a clutch of young Geordie men in the traditional lout uniform of trainer pants and sleeveless vests that displayed their florid collection of tattoos. Their shouted obscenities could be heard from one end of the cafeteria to the other. Whenever a female under 30 walked past outside, the baying would increase and they would hammer on the window like children banging the side of an aquarium at the zoo. Occasionally a female equivalent of themselves would acknowledge this attention and wave or stick her tongue out obscenely.
Then, while we sat there, a Muslim family (perhaps they were from Leeds) came past dressed for some family celebration. There were three generations among them: the elderly were treated as protectively as the small children, the women behaved decorously and the men spoke quietly among themselves. How difficult must it be for a power-mad imam to persuade a disoriented young Muslim man that his alienation from inner-city British culture is soundly based? He can be told that his vocation, and his salvation, lies in the ultimate repudiation of the decadence and depravity of this place that he himself did not choose.
I am certainly not saying that because I believe this event — or this behaviour — to be somehow comprehensible, it is therefore excusable. This is categorically not an apologia. There is a campaign of mass murder that is clearly being incited by external forces and that must be dealt with in the most relentless and unforgiving way. What I am saying is that neither of the two options that seem to be being offered up in public discourse to explain this phenomenon is going to be much use in coming to terms with our problem.
The first — that Islam has produced a generation of demons whose evil actions are outside all known human experience — is confounded by the banality of the young men themselves. Their apparent normality is not so different, after all, from the otherwise normal lives of the SS guards who enthusiastically participated in genocide in Nazi extermination camps. We know about the power of demagoguery to hypnotise ordinary men. It’s not as if we have never been here before or that such things are unprecedented in western culture.
The second futile argument is a version of the great British masochism game: this is all our fault. It is a response to racism, poverty, deprivation, our foreign policy, blah blah. This argument is so annoyingly wrong that it has instantly spawned its own rebuttal: Islamist terrorism is being most vigorously propagated by wealthy and privileged Saudis; it produced its most spectacular effort before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; it grows in power despite the almost comical eagerness of British government and security forces to exculpate the wider Muslim community.
It is the tragedy of human intelligence that when actions are most irrational, we feel most need to give reasons for them. But if this is a pathological event — a fatal meeting of perverted “idealism” and the particular deranged condition of a generation of young men born among us — what is the solution? Only to rely on what is being described as our common humanity.
What I mean by that is that human beings are mostly not deranged, mostly not self-destructive, mostly not homicidal or even inhumane. Freedom and the promise of life itself are, in the end, the great seducers of the young. Of course, all the sensible steps must be followed: deliberate incitement must be extirpated, the grotesquely irresponsible laxness of asylum rules must be halted, active support must be given to Muslim agencies who are sincerely committed to fighting extremism.
But the risk is great of creating a myth of uniqueness here that will make us feel helpless. What happened in London on July 7 was hideous and unforgiveable but it was not as extraordinary — or as fathomless — as all that.
Minette Marrin is away
