Let's Hear It For The "Underlying Causes."

Here's the answer. What was the question again?

In any discussion of the problems of the world, from local to regional to international, someone will inevitably wag their finger and say (or write) sternly that “we mustn’t neglect the underlying causes.” What these causes are alleged to be depends on the person, the institution, and where the money is coming from. This discourse is part of our old friend the struggle for dominance between different factions of the international Professional and Managerial Caste. Here’s how it works.

The whole issue of causes and connections is one I addressed a few weeks ago, and everyone since Aristotle has accepted that identifying the “cause” of something is problematic at best. It would be a reductive reading of history indeed to suggest that the “cause” of the First World War was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, but of course the practical question that results is: once you go further, where do you stop? If you go back far enough, then the “cause” of anything and everything can be Original Sin, Capitalism, Human Nature or indeed virtually anything else. Here, I want to look systematically at the nature and results of this discourse at three levels: the everyday (crime, at least in part), the more complex (the attraction of Islamic political violence), and high-level (conflict and war in certain areas of the world.) My fundamental point is that attempts to impose an “underlying causes” explanation are never politically neutral, and they are intended to change our perception of what an event or a problem is, and make some groups more powerful and others less so. I suggest at the end what is, in my view, a better way of looking at things.

Let’s start, though, with some very broad and general types of explanation. Original Sin, for all its universal explanatory power since Saint Augustine, is a poor basis for policy-making today. But it does remind us that many underlying cause explanations are in fact secularised versions of theological arguments of the past. The classic, of course, is the idea of Hidden Causes, of an unseen but universal (or at least very powerful) conspiracy which is the ultimate cause of all of the evil and all the problems in the world. The great advantage of such explanations is that they are infinitely adaptable and infinitely malleable: apparent contradictions are simply resolved at a higher level of subtlety and evilness. Thus when I was young, the underlying cause of everything bad was the International Communist Conspiracy, which explained everything from student rebellions to the violence in Norther Ireland to resistance to apartheid in South Africa to the Vietnam War. For some, it even explained modern cultural products they found incomprehensible. The Hidden Causes hypothesis is fairly clearly the secularisation of the omnipotent and omniscient God of Christianity: God’s purpose was nothing if not hidden, after all, and incomprehensible to mere mortals.

As with all underlying cause explanations, these have political uses. If you believe that ultimately human beings are wicked and wars happen because humanity is basically sinful, then there’s no point in social reform or economic progress, because it won’t make things any better. If you believe in Hidden Causes, this proves you are more intelligent and perceptive than human beings generally, and, if you are in a position of power, you can use and manipulate such theories (whether you believe them or not) for your political advantage. Those who do not share your Hidden Causes analysis are either stupid or (more likely) in the pay of hidden forces themselves.  It can also, paradoxically, be a powerful quietist argument. If Marcuse is right, for example, and Capitalism dominates our every act and every thought, then there’s no point in resisting. Let’s all get well-paying jobs and have nice houses, and arrange agreeable dinner parties where we lament the fact that there’s nothing we can do to make the world better.

More commonly, the alleged underlying causes are in the plural: albeit closely related. It’s common to read, for example, that the “underlying causes” of crime are poverty, inequality and social deprivation. This is a useful example of the difficulty of the concept of “cause.” For social reformers of the nineteenth century and after, crime was, at least in part, “caused” by social and economic conditions, in a fairly mechanistic and deterministic way. Violent  criminals, at least, are seen as “produced” by society, in the novels of Jack London, for example. Accordingly, social and economic reforms could essentially abolish crime altogether: thus Victor Hugo’s famous argument that “every time you open a school you can close a prison.” Hugo was right in the sense that almost all criminals of his days were illiterate, and that, for that matter, criminals are far more likely to be illiterate on average, even today.

Nobody would put the argument in such terms today, though, for two main reasons. The first is that “crime” is not an existential concept: it is the relationship between certain types of human behaviour and certain legal texts, which can and does change over time. Banally, crime is caused by laws, since laws establish permitted and forbidden behaviour, and often for reasons that differ wildly from place to place (think of alcohol smuggling in Iran, as opposed to in Norway.) Thus “crime” can increase or decrease for purely technical reasons, irrespective of how humans are actually behaving. Likewise, “crime” is largely a matter of statistics, including what is reported, what is investigated and what is prosecuted. Many people do not bother to report minor thefts except for insurance reasons, judging that they have no realistic chance of ever seeing their property again. So does a crime exist if it isn’t reported?

Secondly, when people talk of “crime” in this context, they almost always mean violent crime, or more precisely violent behaviour that can lead to the commission of crimes. It’s incontestable that violent people often have violent childhoods themselves, but equally not all those with violent childhoods go on to commit violent crimes. Moreover, there are many kinds of violent crimes which are evidentially not linked with poverty, deprivation etc.: rape, for example, infanticide, murder by a family member (by far the most common in many societies), or violence by the mentally troubled, are examples. It does seem to be the case that violence within families increased during the Covid lockdowns, but that’s a rather different issue. This is all generally skated over in arguments about the underlying causes of crime, where the concentration is on very broadl trends in (uniquely) violent crime.

Now it is fairly clear that, at a very high level of generalisation, there is a correlation between levels of violent crime in a society, and the Gini coefficient, which measures economic inequality. But this is a correlation, not causation, and there are many different theories about what the causal mechanisms may be, since there’s obviously more than one of them. We know that changes in unemployment levels affect crime rates, but not all criminals are unemployed. We know that crime tends to be higher in poorer areas, but the victims are likely to be poor themselves, rather than people with more money. And so on. Much depends on what you include in your understanding of crime anyway: by definition, fraud and tax evasion are crimes of the less poor, just as motorists who drive carelessly or under the influence of drink or drugs and kill people are more likely to be middle-class.

An alternative way of looking at crime levels is purely statistical. For example, is one of the underlying causes of crime the opportunity to commit it? What is known as Situational Crime Prevention takes this approach, by simply making it harder for crimes to be committed. Banal measures such as fitting proper locks on doors and windows, immobilising cars or using CCTV (highly effective for all the negative publicity it gets) can sharply reduce crime rates in areas where they are used. Probably the most successful anti-crime measure ever taken was the widespread introduction of street-lighting in cities in the nineteenth century. To say that making the streets safe in that way for ordinary people didn’t deal with the “underlying causes” of crime may be true at some abstract level, but it hardly seems relevant.

Likewise, decriminalisation of some offences can reduce “crime” and also possibly crime in the short term, but much depends on what that crime is part of. For example, decriminalisation of the possession of soft drugs can reduce crime in the short term, but, as the Dutch have found, increasing consumption in that fashion increases the profits and interests of wholesale providers (whose trade is still illegal) and critically, expands the market to the point where bribery, corruption and violence increase substantially. The streets of many cities in Europe today are graced by pitched battles with automatic weapons between rival gangs trying to control the trade. Sometimes, you just can’t win.

An alternative model of underlying causes, less in fashion today, held that crime was a purely economic choice. In this way of thinking, criminals made cost-benefit analyses in which they evaluated the likely gains from crime against the possibility and severity of punishment. Crime, like everything else in a Liberal society, is thus the result of a rational economic choice. But there’s no actual evidence that criminals think this way outside certain narrow areas, which is another reason for confining economists within a safe intellectual perimeter to stop them doing harm. There is some evidence that the perceived likelihood of detection and prosecution makes a difference in some cases: the move to end prosecutions for shoplifting in some parts of the United States has led to an explosion of such crimes, for example. But that’s about it.

So if the “underlying causes” of crime are many and various, hard to define, and harder or impossible to prove, why is there so much debate and acrimony over them? In essence, we are dealing with a classic rule of politics: whether the problem has a solution is not really important, what matters is who controls the discussion. From that control, flow increased possibilities for influence, power and money. On the other hand, resolution of the problem (in this case crime) would threaten that power and cut off that money, so it’s not really in anyone’s interest that the problem should be definitively resolved. Which explains the apparent paradox that there is often a bitter contest to control the discourse and management of a problem, even though there’s nothing that can be done about it, and that attempts to resolve it will certainly fail.

Consider: if you believe that crime is the result of human wickedness or Original Sin, you will call for more police with stronger powers, more laws and stricter enforcement with longer prison sentences. If you believe crime is an economic choice you will support all measures that might seem to make it less cost-effective to an alert and informed rational economic actor. If, on the other hand, you have a background in, say, civil rights law or community organising, you may know nothing about criminology, but you will argue that the “underlying causes” are things that you do know about, like poverty and deprivation. And in practice the importance of these different perspectives is not to identify genuine solutions, but to control the way the problem is seen, and where the money to tackle it is spent. So in France today prisons are in crisis, overcrowded and understaffed and largely outside the control of the authorities.  But proposals to build more prisons and recruit more staff are opposed by those who argue that such measures don’t address the “underlying problems” of poverty, deprivation etc, and that money should be spent on, for example, teaching Arabic to pupils from the Maghreb, or a better system for complaints against the police, which are things they understand. In one way or another, of course, all of these examples are competing elite discourses, promoted by a class that itself suffers little from crime, but which is primarily interested in the control of the discourse about it, and the advantages that flow from that.

The mechanisms involved are not very different at other levels, and I’ll briefly run through a couple of examples before finishing with some general conclusions. As a general, rule, whenever a new problem arises, or a problem that had been ignored suddenly forces itself into the popular mind, there is a competition to define that problem as something that interest groups understand and can do, and should therefore have control and influence over. There is seldom a determined effort to understand it for what it is.

A useful case is Islamic extremist terrorism, which arrived en masse, suddenly and violently, in Europe in 2015, and has since claimed hundreds of lives, and thousands of people injured. Although there had been a foretaste of what might happen after the Islamic State took over Raqqa in 2014, the extreme violence and the indiscriminate nature of these attacks, together with the fact that many of the perpetrators were born in Europe, and some were converts to Islam, left pundits for the most part temporarily unable to pundit. Likewise, when youngsters from Europe, sometimes converts, often from comfortable backgrounds, frequently well-educated and often female, went to join the Islamic State and to fight in Syria, the result was a period of stunned silence.

Pundits could only begin from discourses that already existed. But in the case of the minority Muslim populations in Europe there were only two. The first, dominant among the PMC, gave all such immigrants and their families the status of victims, oppressed by individual and collective racism and suffering racist attacks and police brutality. The second was the right-wing view of Muslims as agents of social change and the replacement of the white working class. Neither, clearly, could begin to explain what had had happened, and the result was a confused silence, which has lasted ever since. In France, in the immediate aftermath of the terrible attacks of November 2015, the main fear of the PMC media seemed to be to avoid “stigmatising” the Muslim community for fear of revenge attacks (there never were any) even to the extent of suppressing the statements made by the perpetrators themselves, clearly setting out their motives.

This is a case where the “underlying causes” were obvious, and where the perpetrators themselves actually spelt them out. The attacks in France were ordered by the military directorate of ISIS (made up of former Iraqi Baathist commanders) in revenge for French military action in Syria. But why were the perpetrators ready, and even eager, to die in this cause? Why, for that matter, had many of them previously travelled to Syria to fight and die there? Well, the perpetrators themselves explained that they were adherents of a form of radical Salafist Islam, with its roots in the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood a century ago, and which preached the creation of a worldwide virtuous Islamic State where the Koran would replace secular laws, together with a never-ending combat against all those—men, women and children—who refused to accept its extreme brand of Islam. Muslims who lived in secular societies and obeyed secular laws were apostates deserving death, and France, as an explicitly secular state, was their primary target.

None of this would have been unfamiliar to those who were paying attention, but hardly anybody was, except a few specialists. Nowhere in the dominant discourse, across the entire political spectrum, was it understood that people could believe their religion actually to be true, and be prepared to kill and die for it. The signs had been evident for some time; the growth of extreme Islamic influence in the poorer areas of cities, threats and violence against “secular” Muslims in positions of authority, the arrival of radical Imams from countries like Qatar and Turkey, verbal and physical intimidation of school teachers who continued to teach Republican principles, the Theory of Evolution and so forth …. And the list goes on and on. The astonishment when young Europeans started travelling to Syria, and embracing the most extreme and austere forms of Islam was never really integrated into the popular debate, obsessed as it was with the idea of Muslims as victims. The threat of the same people coming back to launch attacks in Europe, familiar to anti-terrorism specialists, was simply not allowed into public discourse. In a famous incident, the Franco-American journalist David Thomson was literally howled down during a TV programme in April 2014 for daring to suggest that attacks could be expected in France, because jihadists he had interviewed told him they were intending to carry them out.

I have laboured this point a little because it is a very good example of what happens when an incident occurs to which the standard list of “underlying causes” promoted by different interest groups clearly does not apply. Unable to categorise, and thus understand, what it is seeing, the political system chokes, and tries to find ways of ignoring it. It is striking that at the inauguration of the memorial to the victims of the November 2015 attacks in Paris in 2022, no mention of the identity or motives of the attackers was made, and the anodyne remarks of the Mayor of Paris, about “tragedies” and “sympathy” could have led the unwary to believe that they were victims of a natural disaster. Partly, this was for reasons of internal PMC politics—fear of being thought to “stigmatise” Muslims—but mainly it was simple incomprehension of an event outside their frame of reference. The PMC was largely concerned with virtue signalling: a tee-shirt imprinted with “You Will Not Have My Hatred” was marketed, as though the attackers gave a ****** **** about any such thing. As the philosopher Michel Onfray remarked acidly: “we have candles, they have Kalashnikovs.”  Quite quickly it was decided that the attackers must have been mentally disturbed and led astray by “extremists” who “radicalised” them (thus restoring their victim status) and enterprising individuals began to offer “de-radicalisation” training, including persuading aspirant jihadists to meet “moderate” Imams. A small fortune was disbursed before governments realised that this was a waste of time, and had nothing to do with any “underlying causes.”

To actually understand the underlying causes in such a situation, you have to do a bit of work. You have to know about the history of Political Islam, and the history of the region, you have to speak and write Arabic, you have to be familiar with apocalyptic literature and meet and interview people who quite likely would be happy to kill you, and most of all you have to understand how apparently ordinary young people, some from middle-class homes, some converts, can prefer a glorious death in a battle at the End of the World to an uneventful existence as a consumer in a Liberal society. This isn’t only an intellectual challenge, it’s a moral one: how to understand the moral wasteland that Liberalism has left, and the extreme lengths that some people will go to find a purpose—any purpose—in life. But some underlying causes are simply too awkward to be accepted as such.

Of course, Political Islam has been exported to the West, but it began elsewhere, and has taken power in countries as far apart as Tunisia and Afghanistan, and is a major security threat throughout large parts of North Africa and the Middle East. It is the major force behind the fighting and suffering in the Sahel at the moment. Yet outside specialist publications this is not acknowledged, because it does not fit into the “underlying causes” discourse. That discourse prefers to identify weaknesses (bad governance, corruption, lack of accountability, security force brutality etc. etc.) which, happily, can be cured by white westerners arriving with the right tools and implementing their remedies. Now of course the rise and popularity of Political Islam is clearly not the whole cause of any of these wars, just as they are exacerbated by many of the factors identified as “underlying.” It’s true, for example, that human rights violations by security forces make the task of fighting militants more difficult, but there’s a lot of evidence that people don’t always care greatly about such things. In Syria local people actually moved into areas controlled by the Islamic State because they thought they would be safer there, even though the IS spat on the very idea of human rights. As I’ve said before, the central question of politics is, Who Will Protect Me? And a state that cannot protect its citizens will have little credibility with them, whatever its other virtues may be, which means they will seek protection elsewhere.

To  large extent it's a question of supply and demand. PMC Liberal ideology, and western ideology more generally, has a limited list of “underlying causes” of conflict, crime, insecurity etc. which it is prepared to recognise. It has money and resources available to apply to such problems, but only if they can be accommodated within its conceptual framework, which is essentially the creation of a Liberal state and society as the resolution to all problems, domestic and international. But of course problems of insecurity of all kinds demand remedies of many different sorts, including those that may contradict Liberal notions of underlying causes, or simply have nothing to do with them. This is one of many reasons why genuinely local solutions often work, even if we do not necessarily find them attractive.

In many ways the ideology of “underlying causes” is at once the expression of perfection and of despair. Consciously, the belief that there are underlying causes that can be identified and worked on is drawn from traditional Liberal beliefs in human perfectibility, or at least in the creation of a utopian society. The problems of crime, conflict, etc. are therefore largely technical, and can be solved by technical remedies. If people no longer argue in as many words that crime would disappear if poverty were abolished, or that there would be no wars if armaments manufacture were under state control, nonetheless the search for the quick gimmick, for the easy solution, is still very much part of Liberal thinking. In particular, the belief in the magical transformative power of the written word—from commercial contracts to peace treaties—remains very strong. This kind of thinking is attractive to donors, to governments and to the parliaments and media to whom they have to explain themselves. Thus, donor states might well supply funds for work by their own psychologists and trauma experts with victims of terrorism in the Sahel, but they will shy away from providing, say, training in effective counter-terrorism measures, even though the locals may be demanding it, because the “underlying causes”, as identified by donors, are not being “addressed.”

But it is also the rhetoric of despair, even if some of those who use it don’t recognise the fact. It is the rhetoric of endless trying, endless funding, endless disappointment, new programmes, programme reviews, more consultants, slightly adapted programmes, more programme reviews and finally the move to a different set of programmes where the same process begins again. It is the rhetoric of endless changes of Country Directors, of desk officers, of two-year deployments. It can continue until the sun goes cold or the money runs out, whichever happens first. It is above all the discourse of impossible solutions. Let’s say, for example, that a new antiterrorism strategy in the Sahel involving training and equipment is rejected by donors, essentially for aesthetic reasons, on the basis that the “underlying causes” are not being addressed. Very well, what are the underlying causes? There will be the usual list: poverty, bad governance, human rights abuses etc. etc. Very well, let’s take just one, maybe bad governance. Can you cure the bad governance problem in six months? A year? Two years? Five years? Ever? And how? In reality, the “underlying causes” can never be satisfactorily addressed, and everyone knows that. But as long as the problem continues, there will be jobs, consultancies, funding, programmes and other agreeable ways of not addressing the real problems.

I wonder if we are not looking at all this from the wrong end. In reality, many of the problems actually have no “solution” and the best we can do is manage them, and deal with the symptoms and consequences. It would be better if we realised this, rather than continued chasing around after nebulous “causes,” which implies that something has gone wrong and, if it could be put right, then all would be well. For example, everyone knows the differences in the characteristics of low-crime and high-crime societies. Low-crime societies have a lot of social capital, small, homogeneous communities where everyone knows each other, strong informal social controls, mothers or grandmothers at home every day seeing everything, strong family systems, the capability for informal resolution of conflicts … the list goes on. But a Liberal society destroys all these things. Fractured communities and families, increasing personal stress, large, anonymous communities, rampant consumerism, isolation and loneliness and the reduction of all human life to buying and selling … we recognise the destructive nature of these changes, but perhaps we also welcome the increased personal freedom and independence that we believe has come with them. But we can’t put the cork back in the bottle now: the abolition of society by neoliberalism has happened, and we have to deal with the results as best we can.

Likewise, until about 1960, the vast majority of the world lived, and had always lived, in empires, the direct or indirect possessions of some ruler, or in patchworks of ethnic communities. The nation-state with fixed boundaries was a recent invention, and had just distinguished itself as a concept through a war of unprecedented violence and destruction in Europe. And the decision was made to create a whole new series of nation-states, not from the bottom up, as had been the practice, but from the top down. Yet in spite of the catastrophes which have multiplied since, what was the alternative? Until about a century ago, Empires swapped possessions with each other after wars, and life went on essentially as it had before. We can’t put the genie of the nation-state back in the bottle: the Ottoman Empire can’t be re-created, whatever Mr Erdogan seems to think. We’re stuck with the nation-state model, and its fatal confusion between nations and national boundaries, and we have to deal with the results as best we can.

We also have to recognise that there are situations which are just inherently unstable. Using, once more, my comparison of politics to engineering, imagine a structural engineer inspecting a bridge, and saying, Look, it’s so badly made, so poorly designed, the materials are crap, it’s going to fall down at some point, for some reason. Whatever the reason proves to be—weather, strong winds, unaccustomed loads, components rusting— there is little point in seeking an “underlying cause” for the eventual failure. This situation is found very frequently in politics: a regime, a country or a political system falls apart, not because of an “underlying cause” but because it was never going to survive in the first place.

As it happens, while writing this I’ve been reading a good recent book on the terrible Lebanese Civil War of 1975-90, whose authors conscientiously devote a long chapter to discussion of the “causes.” There are many, and it’s certainly true that, for example, the mass arrival of Palestinian refugees in the country was a very destabilising factor. But the reality is that the system was so fragile that almost any major stress would have brought it down. A confessional system of politics inherited from the Ottoman Empire, seventeen communities whose major players could paralyse the system, political party militias, a deliberately weak central state providing few services, an extreme liberal economy with massive disparities of wealth and power, all this in a tiny country sandwiched between Syria and Israel and dominated by the interests of foreign powers. Talking of “causes” in such a situation is to miss the point: almost anything could have been a “cause.” And now, more than  thirty years after the end of the war, we see that the system actually hasn’t changed that much, and indeed can’t. Poor little Lebanon.

In the last analysis, the identification of “causes” doesn’t tell us very much, or help us very much, either. It is useful for feeling superior and sitting in judgement (the lip-smacking relish with which the Islamist attacks on the West are claimed to be  our “own fault,” for example) or tired old tropes about Africans or Arabs not being able to run their own affairs. But there surely has to be a better way of tackling problems than just a sordid competition within the PMC to see who will make off with the power and the money this time.