Anyone who paid attention to news coverage during the last months of 2015 will remember that Europe’s immigration crisis was (and will almost certainly continue to be) a major topic. The massive influx of refugees from the Middle East is wearing down European willingness and capacity to receive more asylum seekers. However, much less attention was given to the reverse process — the thousands of young people leaving the (relative) comfort and safety of the West to jump headlong into the Syrian bloodbath.
Desperate civilians caught in a brutal, multisided war must view the West as a paradise of safety, law and order, social services and opportunity for economic mobility. And they are for the most part not wrong to think this, quasi-segregation, social inequality and mounting xenophobia notwithstanding. Compared to the expanding political quagmire of the conflict in the Middle East, the West is a veritable heaven on earth. But why would young Muslims, having attained this sanctuary, forsake it to go to their probable deaths in Syria and Iraq?
I believe that much of the IS’s success in recruiting Westerners stems from their perception that the West’s promises of fulfillment and the good life are empty. Secularizing trends in Western countries have increasingly displaced religion in informing the worldview of the populace, replacing the old notions of duty to one’s god and country with a focus on the self and personal fulfillment.
If God is dead, as the secular prophets have thundered, then there is no inherent meaning in life — you have to come up with your own. In a chat with a materialist friend last semester, he used the term "synthetic happiness," or happiness resulting from one’s decision to be happy. This philosophy of life is summed up well by Joseph Campbell: “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” The logic, at least, of the materialists is sound. If there is not a higher power to bestow meaning on us, we must come up with it on our own or impose it on other things.
The phenomenon of young Westerners being radicalized can be attributed to the fact that we just aren’t very good at supplying our own happiness and meaning. We humans have always looked outside ourselves for inspiration, guidance and purpose, whether that be through formal religions, preoccupation with material things or government. But by now, formal religion in the West has weakened its outreach through self-righteousness and snobbery on the one hand and trying to be culturally relevant to the point of becoming virtually indistinguishable from the culture on the other. Those distancing themselves from organized religion are swept up in the mindsets that define our generation, which place emphasis on the self, personal gratification, materialism and increased expectations of what government can and should do.
Most young people in Western countries have been steeped in this intellectual framework permeating our culture long enough that they don’t know of any other way to live. But immigrants, especially Muslims, are often enough removed from this cultural zeitgeist to perceive its futility. They are disenchanted and repulsed by the West’s freedom so often turned to licentiousness, and in their search for alternatives, some have embraced violent strains of radical Islam like the IS.
According to The Atlantic, “ISIS's caliphate project, because it offers a bracing utopian alternative to Western secular society, speaks directly to those who feel their lives are worthless, spiritually corrupted, empty, boring, or devoid of purpose and significance and who see no value in their own societies. It promises, in short, salvation and ultimate meaning through total commitment to a sacred cause.”
That so many young people in the U.S. and Europe have fallen under the spell of the IS’s hateful ideology, whether or not they are successful in reaching the IS's "caliphate" or launching domestic attacks, should serve as a wake-up call to us. Until the West can again offer a reason for living more compelling than pleasure or self-actualization, its young people will continue to flock to the ranks of an organization dedicated to our destruction.