By Tony Curzon Price
Roger Scruton- always lucid and challenging - argues that radical Islam has a special predisposition to the "transferable grievance" - a resentful hatred aimed at some general complex, rather than at a specific solution. Roger goes on to argue that the best response to the behaviour that comes out of the transferrable grievance is to confront Islamists themselves with the fact that "their grievances are illusory, and their goals unobtainable."
Roger believes that in the past, the Christian world "said no" to Islam, and our current policy of tolerance appears to the aggrieved as evasion. This evasion, he argues, encourages the Islamic radicals in their destruction, since it encourages the belief that they are opposing nothing.
All this amounts to a recommendation of a tough, direct, principled, (Christian?) stance towards the transferrably aggrieved - made all the more salient after the Pope's highly argued and principled denial of any theologically acceptable basis for Jihad.
Roger's argument relies on the notion that transfered grievance is different in nature from the sorts of grievances that have arisen between peoples in the past, and that it is intrinsically Islamic. But I wonder. Here are a few cases to consider:
- Witch Hunts. Roger suggests that post-reformation Christendom has been free of policy based on transferable grievance. But the witch hunts of the 17th century (brilliantly described in this book) - show extensive use of the "transferable grievance". A neighbor was denounced as a witch because you thought she had cast an evil eye on your hog, who died. We know today that this was clearly a scape-goated, transferable, grievance.
- The revolutionary logic of collective guilt seems to be a clear case of transferable grievance. For example Latsis, Chekist official during the civil war, described the Cheka's approach: "We are not looking for evidence [of activity against the Soviets] ... we ask to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing? These questions define the fate of the accused." There have been countless exercises of such collective punishment, endorsed by some revolutionary logic, since. This does not seem to be specially Islamic, even if it is specifically revolutionary.
- But if transferable grievance is a close relative of collective punishment, is there not a sense in which the entire doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, the regulator of the cold, nuclear war, legitimised the method. After all, the doctrine rested on the existence of a credible threat to destroy innocent civilians in huge numbers just because of the accident of their nationality. If an important defining factor of a transferable grievance is the targeting of innocent groups, MAD made us accustomed to the logic of doing this.
Finally is the notion particulalry modern? Samson seems to be the archetype of the transferably aggrieved: he brought the roof of the temple down, killing men, women and children, because of his - literally - blind fury and not out of a sense that every Philistine there was guilty. Indeed, Milton's glorification of Samson in this moment can be read as a glorification of precisely the emotions of the transfered grievance that Roger examines:
Come, come, no time for lamentation now,
Nor much more cause, Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroicly hath finish'd
A life Heroic, on his Enemies
Fully reveng'd, hath left them years of mourning,
And lamentation.
It seems hard not to look at our past and avoid the frequent traces of the transferable grievance. This doesn't excuse it, but it does somewhat normalise it. When we look hard at the concept itself, it becomes clearly tied-up in our definitions of responsibility: a grievance has been transfered when those who are not responsible for the tort are punished. But responsibility is horribly slippery to pin down. We may not be able to do any less circular than say that you are responsible if you are punished, and punished if you are responsible. The grievance is transfered if you are innocent, and you are innocent if you should not have been punished.
