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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
Hello, my name is Quassim Cassam. I'm a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. I work on a range of topics, including the topic of today's talk, which is extremism.
So Martin Luther King Jr. famously said in a letter that the question is not ‘will we be extremists’, but ‘will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?’. And later on, he describes Christ as an extremist – an extremist for truth, goodness, and love. And by implication, an extremist for justice. So what Dr. King is suggesting there is that there's nothing wrong with extremism per se. There's good extremism – extremism for good ends – and bad extremism – extremism for bad ends.
Now that's a view of extremism, which perhaps isn't very popular nowadays. Today, I think many people who think about this at all take it for granted that extremism is a bad thing. It's something that needs to be counted. So the question that one might ask is: ‘was King right?’ – was he right to say that there isn't anything necessarily wrong with extremism? Now, in order to answer that question, we need to answer a prior question, which is what exactly is extremism anyway?
So what I'm going to do is to distinguish between different conceptions of what extremism is and then return at the end to the suggestion that there might be a good form of extremism.
So I think a lot of confusion in this area is caused by the fact that extremism is not just one thing. There are many different varieties of extremism, and we need to be clear what we're talking about when we talk about the merits or otherwise of extremism. So the simplest form of extremism, perhaps the most familiar is what I call ‘ideological extremism’. So an ideological extremist is simply someone who subscribes to, who supports, who defends, an extremist ideology. So the question there is what counts as an extremist ideology? Now, one problem that one runs into straight away in answering that question is the following: surely there are ideologies that at one time would've been regarded as extremist ideologies that today would not be so regarded.
So for example, the ideology of the suffragettes might've been regarded as an extremist ideology a hundred years ago. The ideology of people who were opposed to slavery might've been regarded as an extremist ideology back then, but surely wouldn't be so regarded today. So that brings into focus something quite important about ideological extremism: the fact that there is an element of relativity when one talks about it. But the basic idea isn't particularly complicated. The basic idea is that you can think of ideologies as organised along a spectrum ranging from, let's say, left to right, and an extremist ideology is just an ideology that's at one or other end of the spectrum.
There's more than one way of classifying ideologies. We might talk about ideologies as left wing or right wing, but there are some ideologies that are actually quite hard to classify either as extreme left or extreme right. Think about the ideology of a group like ISIS. Is its ideology left wing? Is it right wing? Or do we just need some completely different way of classifying its ideology?
Well, one way to deal with this would be to say, well, not only is there the left or right spectrum, but there are other spectra that are relevant. So for example, you might classify ideologies according to their attitude to violence. So you might have ideologies that are highly pro-violence at one end and ideologies that are completely pacifist at the other end. So on that dimension, ISIS would come out as an extremist ideology at the pro-violence end. Or you might classify ideologies according to how authoritarian they are. So if you think about fascism and communism as ideologies, they would be at opposite ends of the left to right spectrum, but maybe at the same end of the authoritarianism spectrum. So that's ideological extremism. And the whole issue of what counts as an ideology is complicated enough. And there are also complicated questions about what counts as an extremist ideology.
Second type of extremism is ‘methods extremism’. So methods extremism just means, a methods extremist is just someone who uses or endorses the use of extreme methods in pursuit of political objectives – classically violence. So terrorists on this view are going to count as extremists in so far as they use acts of perhaps extreme violence in support of their political objectives. Now again, you have the issue of what counts as an extreme method – is violence necessarily an extreme method? These are all very complicated and difficult questions. But certainly if you think about, for example, a terrorist group that uses rape or mutilation or beheadings as a method, they're going to come out on my view as methods extremists. Whatever one's theoretical story, it does seem that the use of those sorts of methods would, for most people, count as highly extremist or extreme. So that's methods extremism.
The third variety of extremism is what I think of as ‘psychological extremism’. So this is the idea that being an extremist isn't just a matter of what your political doctrines are. Being an extremist is also a matter of having a certain kind of mindset. So when I talk about the extremist mindset, I'm talking about, for example, the fact that extremists tend to be extremely hostile to compromise. So, a hostility to compromise is part of the extremist mindset. Extremists also tend to engage in certain kinds of thinking. So very much black and white thinking. Us and them thinking, they tend to engage in conspiracy thinking. Extremists, in the psychological sense, also have certain characteristic preoccupations, it seems to me. So extremists are very much preoccupied with purity. They're preoccupied with ideological purity or religious purity, for example. So to have the extremist mindset is to have these preoccupations: a preoccupation with purity, to have certain attitudes – hostility to compromise, perhaps pro violence – and to engage in certain types of thinking, black and white thinking, for example. So that's extremism in a psychological sense.
So there are going to be all sorts of interesting questions about the relationship between these three types of extremism. And no doubt they very often go together. So I would say that a group like ISIS is extremist both in the ideological sense, in the method sense and in the psychological sense.
Alright, so that is my story about extremism, and it's a story that obviously would need to be spelled out in considerable detail. So the next question, or the last question I guess is, well, what about this idea of Dr. King's? Was he right to say that extremism is not necessarily a bad thing?
Well, let's look at extreme methods. Is the use of extreme methods necessarily a bad thing? Well, if by extreme methods you mean extreme violence, then I would want to argue that it is a bad thing and indeed, King himself would've acknowledged that. It's a bad thing, both morally, but also it's not in most cases politically effective. The historical evidence suggests that nonviolent methods, including the methods used by King himself, are far more politically effective than violent methods. The record of terrorist groups achieving their political objectives through the use of violence is not impressive. So, I don't think there's much of a case to be made for methods extremism.
What about psychological extremism? Should we admire people who are preoccupied with ideological or religious purity? Should we admire people who are hostile to compromise? Well, I think not. Far from being admirable, those aspects of an individual's psychology, I think, are both politically and morally problematic. Purity – what I call the purity preoccupation – is one that has caused immense trouble throughout human history. If you think about the Nazis with their preoccupation with racial purity, think about the problems that that caused. A preoccupation with purity goes with a hostility to compromise, and neither is admirable.
What about ideological extremism? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Now there, I think you do see perhaps part of the force of Dr. King's views, given that what counts as ideologically extremist at one time may be quite different from what counts as ideologically extremist at a different time. He was indeed right that views that are regarded today as ideologically extremist might turn out in the fullness of time to be virtuous or admirable. And that would certainly be true of the two examples I gave – the suffragettes and the radical abolitionists against slavery. But there's no guarantee that that's how things will turn out. There are many ideologies that are extremist that are not constructive, that are not admirable, and which I think even in the fullness of time will not be seen as having been right.
So I think we should look for a better way of capturing King's point. And I want to end just by suggesting that perhaps we should think about the distinction between extremism and radicalism. I think what King was really saying was that there's nothing wrong with being politically radical, particularly there's nothing wrong with being politically radical in pursuit of just causes. Perhaps when it comes to causes like that, it is important that one is prepared to be radical, both ideologically and in terms of the methods that one uses. But radicalism, as I understand it, does not involve any commitment to violence, and it certainly does not involve or does not entail extremism in any of the three senses that I've been talking about today.
So was he right? Was he right? Well, at best, I think he was partially right, but it seems to me there's a much better way of expressing King's fundamental insight, which is that there are times, as the suffragettes saw and as radical abolitionists saw, there are times when we need to be radical in pursuit of worthy objectives such as social justice. But it is rarely, if ever the case that we need to be extremists in any of the senses that I have distinguished.