I first read this article by Shelby Steele when it was published as an op-ed piece of the Wall Street Journal in December 2001. I provides Steele’s take on Lindh motivation for joining the Taliban.
Radical Sheik
John Walker was looking for authentic victimhood. He found it in treason.
BY SHELBY STEELE
Monday, December 10, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
At first glance, John Walker Lindh, the young American captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban, might seem like Kurtz–the white man in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” who sheds civilization and goes native in Africa only to finally reemerge uttering “the horror, the horror.”
And surely, in the pit of that Mazar-e-Sharif prison, with flood waters flushing him and his fellow jihadis out into the likelihood of gunfire, young John Walker might have also uttered something like “the horror, the horror.”
But comparisons with Kurtz end there. Kurtz (quite wrongly) took his Western superiority for granted and cast himself as a god to the natives. John Walker seems to have been only a star-crossed follower of the natives, a kind of aspirant in their midst hoping to overcome some inferiority bred into him by Western life.
Still, what a journey for an American boy from Marin County, where all the clich? obsessions of shallow California–wine, therapy and real estate–flourish without irony. How does one get from Marin to the Taliban?
John Walker, named for John Lennon, has thus far only declared his loyalty to the Taliban and his support for the attack on the World Trade Center–as if self-incrimination was yet more proof of true faith. He has shed no light on what really motivated his journey, and his psychology cannot be easily unraveled from a distance.
But there has to be a context to a story like this, and I believe a certain cultural liberalism cleared the way for this strange odyssey of true belief.
John’s parents encouraged him to “choose his own spiritual path.” A neighbor said John grew up “intellectually privileged.” He attended an alternative school for “motivated, self-directed learners” who design their own course of study. His mother said in reference to his conversion to Islam that “it is good for a child to find a passion.”
His father “never had any major misgivings,” even when–after graduating early from high school–he asked to be sent to Yemen at age 16 for further Islamic studies.
This is a world where learning is self-referential, where adults are only broadly tolerant. There are no external yes’s and no’s, or rights and wrongs here, just the fashionable relativism (Islam is as good as the family Catholicism) that makes places like Marin so cool.
But there is another message as well: that traditional American history, culture and religion are without any special authority. Worse, historic racism and sexism may leave these American offerings with less moral authority than foreign options.
In these precincts, a little anti-Americanism becomes a sophistication, a mark of authenticity. And the idea of authenticity is profoundly important to the adolescent who is daily inventing an identity.
But where does one find authenticity inside a discredited culture? So here, for a youth like John Walker, the anomie that easily goes with privilege and family discontent (the parents’ separation) is deepened by an abdication of American cultural authority.
America has done so much wrong, we seem to say to the young–so much oppression and repression–that it would be inauthentic and corrupt for you to embrace your own culture first. This attitude, a kind of white American guilt, has shifted the culture from noblesse oblige to radical chic.
When America believed in her own authority, the noble obligation meant the well-off helped the poor by, among other things, asking them to take on habits and values that would make them also well off. The post-'60s shift to what Tom Wolfe called radical chic was essentially a transfer of authority from traditional American culture to its former victims.
Noblesse oblige became a condescension and a corruption. Authenticity was not in helping the poor; it was in being with the poor, in submitting to their authority. In this era of radical chic, victims have become the emblems of authentic and incorruptible humanity.
As such, they take on a shaman-like superiority, as if victimization in itself bestows knowledge, humanity and truth. And they carry an authority that it is a defamation to question.
John Walker’s father says it was John’s reading of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” at 16 that triggered his conversion to Islam. Only John himself can verify this, but clearly in this book he would have encountered the very legend of the victim-sage.
Malcolm X knew real suffering and dislocation even if some of the events in the book–the lynching of his father by the Klan–are in dispute. The fact that Malcolm came out of a crucible–where the victim’s superiority is thought to be alchemized–only makes his jailhouse conversion to Islam more compelling.
And Malcolm’s conversion–where the new life was granted whole and the old life (and all its despairs) was vanquished–is the adolescent dream of new identity through a willed change of heart. The “Autobiography” is a self-help book burnished with the authority of victimization. And maybe, after Walker’s conversion, there was a happy subjugation of the old troubling Marin County self.
But he could have achieved this by joining the Hare Krishnas and annoying people at airports. Why the Malcolm-style conversion into a politicized, anti-American Islam that culminated in treason?
I think Walker came out of a self-hating stream of American life. Yes, alone in Yemen and later in Pakistan, he may have been seduced by charismatic people. But he was prepared for this seduction not just by the wispy relativism of Marin County, but also by a much broader post-'60s cultural liberalism (more than political liberalism) that gave his every step toward treason a feel of authenticity and authority.
This liberalism thrives as a subversive, winking, countercultural hipness. We saw it in the stream of “hip” academics and intellectuals who–no sooner than the planes had struck–began to slash at their own country as if to keep it from gaining any victim’s authority of its own. Noam Chomsky: “The guns were finally pointed back at us.” Cornel West: White Americans have been “niggerized.”
Invocations of American imperialism and racism no doubt intended to return these gentlemen to the comfort zone of American self-hate.
Cultural liberalism serves up American self-hate to the young as idealism. And this idealism, along with the myth of the victim-sage, was the context of Walker’s young life. It’s too much to say that treason is a rite of passage in this context.
But that is exactly how it turned out for Walker. In radical Islam he found both the victim’s authority and the hatred of America that had been held out to him as marks of authenticity. He liked what he found. And when he turned on his country to be secure in his new faith, he followed a logic that was a part of his country’s culture.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author of “A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America” (HaperCollins, 1998).