Moral vs Physical Threat in Group Conflict

Scott Atran

I've been thinking about perceived moral vs physical threat. It seems the former drives the latter and not so much the reverse, in the material world as well as in social media. if so, then recognizing the initiating and instigating role of the moral threat should provide leverage over physical threats.  Here are 4 examples of the primacy of moral threat parlayed into perceived physical threat and support for mass violence:

1. Perhaps never in history has the threat to the territorial (Physical) integrity of the great powers (USA, China, Russia) been LESS. Nevertheless, these same powers routinely cite threats to territorial integrity when, in fact, the threat is to the extraterritorial geopolitical situation, based on differing political (moral) worldviews. For example, Russia makes the nonsensical claim that Ukraine threatens Russia with invasion and nuclear destruction, but the background argument is that the Satanic Western LGBTQ ideology is perverting what is sacred and holy to the Russian body politic and the international order it claims to represent. 

2. Prior to WWII, Jews comprised substantially less than 1% of Germany's population. Yet the Nazi argument was that Jews represented a moral perversion that physically threatened the entire body politic with death, not just like a physical disease but an actual one (hence the Nuremberg laws). As Rudolph Hess said: "National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology" (to stem the infection).

3. 9/11 cost Al Qaeda $400,000 to $500,000. The USA alone has spent $10-$12 trillion in response in the "war or terror," or 10,000,000 times more than it cost al Qaeda. Never before in history have so few people with so few actual material means caused such fear and cost to so many. Yet, today far-right terrorism exceeds Islamist terrorism in number of attacks and victims, although the media still devotes about 350% more coverage to actual and possible Islamist attacks (controlling for frequency, intensity, casualties, etc.). The reason is that Islamist ideology is consider a greater, alien (moral) threat, whereas America and Europe are more familiar with, and tolerant of (including domestic legal protections) far-right ethno-nationalist and supremacist ideologies.

4. In the USA, the increasing political polarization is accompanied by a sharp rise in the belief that violence may be necessary against the other side. And actual political violence is increasing. Yet, the impetus and driver of this increasing rhetoric and use of violence is moral (socio-political). The focus is in how the other side's moral perversion threatens actual bodies as well as the body politic (gender altering surgery/ preferred gender suppression, killing babies/controlling women's bodies, etc.). 

In each case, the moral threat to the body politic is translated into an actual physical/bodily threat to individuals, families, and society at large, and then ramped up into a physical threat on the entire body politic and the physical domains it purports to occupy.

Scott Atran