Behind ISIS Attacks, a Hatred of Urbanism

The car-through-a-crowd mode of terrorist attack, used to such monstrous effect in Nice, Berlin, Brussels and now London, seems chillingly appropriate to the Islamist agenda and worldview.

Far-right, ultraconservative groups like ISIS have a particular hatred of cities, those wicked seats of diversity, cosmopolitanism and tolerance. Even worse is what is symbolized by the promenade, the public gathering space, long a symbol of openness and urban comity. Here people come to relax, to mix and mingle, to revel in the beauty of nature, architecture, and each other; to see and be seen.

Ultraconservatives hate all of this. Theirs is a world of enforced modesty, rigid social conduct and single-minded attendance to a particular religious and cultural view. Diversity, whether of thought, dress or manner, is to be condemned, even attacked.

So to be able to drive a truck into the heart of a public gathering area—a plaza, a promenade, a busy pedestrian walkway—especially one where people are enjoying all the best of what urban life has to offer—must be especially satisfying to them

I see the same sentiments at work in the minds of some on the far right in America. When Adam Purinton shot two Indian immigrants in a bar in Olathe, KS last month, he was probably angry about more than just immigration policy. He felt a visceral hatred of the whole scene, so much so that his bigotry erupted into murderous anger; a loathing of the very idea that foreign men could be relaxing and enjoying themselves on the patio of a bar on a warm evening.

There’s a fear operating of a type similar to the deep-seated loathing of integration in the Old South, the idea of men and women of different races simply enjoying each other’s company. What else could account for the segregation of parks, movie theaters, restaurants, pools? Downtowns, especially, needed to be strictly controlled. Civil rights activists knew what they were doing when they infiltrated lunch counters and public plazas, popular stages of civic engagement. (That these downtowns were subsequently abandoned by the middle class for suburban strip malls, bereft of public space, accessible only by car and isolated by acres of asphalt, is no accident.)

Hatred of cities as dens of vice and loose morals is as old as cities themselves. Of course, plenty of vice and loose morals can be found in the hinterlands as well. The very existence of a stable, functional multicultural city represents, for some, cognitive dissonance they can’t easily tolerate, a living breathing affront to notions of what constitutes “proper” society, and what their ideology teaches them ought to succeed. No wonder they lash out.