Terrorism: Thinking Beyond Modernity

The analysis of terrorism in this thesis is based on an assumption that terrorism is a kind of violent practice with clear motivation and thinking logic. It originates from competition of interests among human being. Therefore, wisdom of humankind will be necessary to restrain and weaken the influence and destructive power of terrorism. Most of human activities could hardly achieve this, but to escalate the destructiveness of the violence, worsening the relationship among humans, and, between human and natural environment. Terrorism phenomenon does not necessarily lead to terrorism problem. The rise of modern terrorism as a problem is basically the outcome of exclusiveness of the society, superstitious belief of rational thinking, and monopoly of rights of violence by states. Although terrorism is an evil phenomenon of human society, war and other forms of violence, including systematic and structural violence, shall also receive critique of the history. Terrorism is a form of struggle that was constructed by various social forces, rather than a priori evil. The attitude of all actors in the society toward terrorism is mainly determined by their status and requirements in the power structure instead of morality and norm. Modernity creates not only means of anti-terrorism, but the base of which terrorism relies at the same. The participation of those actors in the contemporary international anti-terrorism campaign pursues or maintains primarily their power and status, but not truly due to the great objective of eradicating terrorism that humankind is facing. To weaken the threat of terrorism, to eliminate the cause of terrorism, human beings need to utilize products of modern civilization. More importantly, they shall change thinking manner fundamentally, finding out tools of thoughts from oriental philosophy, especially, from Chinese classic philosophy, rather than some technical measures of anti-terrorism.