“For many who join extremist organizations, it is not the cause that looks for them. Instead, they are looking for a cause.”
The Children’s Commissioner for England recently released a report on the July, 2024 riots that followed the horrific murders of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. The riots, which lasted almost a week and included racially-motivated attacks, arson, and looting were the largest incident of social unrest in England since 2011. In a series of interviews, the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, found that children who took part in the riots were primarily driven by curiosity and the “thrill of the moment” rather than far-right ideology and social media misinformation, the initial culprits blamed by the authorities.
De Souza’s report noted that poverty and a lack of opportunity in their communities also contributed to the rioters’ involvement. Human beings need more than the satisfaction of their base desires. They strive for status, belonging, and meaning. They can find these in the service of political parties, religious creeds, non-nation-state groups; in the pursuit of wealth and possessions; in the creation of art, music, and objects of value; in building a family or a network of friends; and in adventure and thrill-seeking. When other opportunities to achieve status, belonging, and meaning are limited, the risk that increasing numbers will turn to the thrill of violence and law breaking will increase. A 2018 study led by psychologist Birga Schumpe supports the report’s insights. While previous research linked people’s search for meaning with their willingness to use violence for a cause, Schumpe’s research suggests that the search for meaning is strongly associated with a need for excitement, which, in turn, was associated with greater support for violence.
The Torment of an “Everlasting Itch for Things Remote”: Moby Dick on Extremism
I first read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick while working in counterterrorism for the British government. The story of how the narrator Ishmael becomes part of the vengeful hunt for the titular white whale onboard a New England whaling ship, provided more of a window into the minds and motivations of modern-day extremists than any contemporary book I could find. The findings of the Children’s Commissioner’s Report took me back to the opening pages of Moby Dick which find Ishmael, a sailor stuck on land, being overcome by a desire to go to sea. He cannot bear the dull, confined existence that his society offers him. He tells the reader:
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
He signs up to serve on The Pequod and falls under the influence of the ship’s captain, Ahab, a victim of an attack by a white whale that severed his leg. When Ishmael sets off, he is no believer in the need to hunt the whale. He is not a believer in very much at all. He is there to fulfill his own needs, running from the damp, drizzly ennui in his soul. Journalist and Marxist historian C. L. R. James claims Ismael, “wants to go whaling because he wants adventure and peril in far places. And (which sends shivers down our spines today) he loves the horrible, although he is neither pervert or degenerate.”
For many who join extremist organizations, it is not the cause that looks for them. Instead, they are looking for a cause. It provides a justification for them to embark on adventure and an excuse for the violence they commit. As Joseph Conrad claimed in his 1907 novel The Secret Agent, a work about anarchist terrorists: “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.” As an intelligence officer, I encountered terrorist suspects with records of having submitted application forms for joining the police and military or who had previously been members of violent gangs. It was not that they wanted to infiltrate the security services but, rather, they wanted something that working for those organizations offered. But this desire for adventure, for the thrill of the moment, is symptomatic of deeper needs that we all possess.
In Melville’s novel, we see how Ishmael’s search for excitement eventually led him to follow Ahab’s hunt for a whale that had become a “monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them.” Ahab manipulates the crew’s grievances, elevating common discontentment to the uncommon status of hero. Ishmael becomes swept up to the point where he tells us “Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.” At the same time, Ismael finds belonging as part of the crew. The experience of comradeship and fraternity he has when the crew are squeezing spermaceti together makes him wish they could continue the task forever.
As a counter-terrorism officer looking at how disillusioned and isolated young men were being recruited into extremism, I came to see a novel ostensibly about a whaling voyage to the Pacific, in the same way that Professor Andrew Delbanco saw it: a book of “universal reach about the neediness of men when they are denied the props of rank and custom; a book about what can happen to men in conditions of radical exposure.”
“To Produce a Mighty Book, You Must Choose a Mighty Theme”: Moby Dick’s Multiple Readings
When Moby Dick was first published in 1851, it did not make much of a splash. It was not until it was rediscovered by the Lost Generation in the 1920s that the tidal wave of praise for the book lifted it to the exalted status it now holds. Since then, whenever a new crisis emerges, Moby Dick finds itself being invoked.
Subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Adolf Hitler during the Second World War. James, who was writing in 1952 on Ellis Island awaiting a decision on his immigration status, saw an analogy between Ahab and the Chief Executive Officer, the ship’s officers representing technocratic managers and the crew representing the rest of humankind seeking to avoid pain and struggling for happiness (he mailed his essay, along with a plea for citizenship, to every member of Congress. It had no effect, and he was deported). Others, like me, have seen Ahab as a terrorist or as someone pursuing terrorists during the “war on terror” and, more recently, as an analogy for the environmental dangers of industrialization.
It is likely Melville wrote Moby Dick as a commentary on the America of his time, one of increasing social and political tensions that would eventually culminate in the outbreak of the American Civil War, nine years after its publication. Delbanco sees it as a disorderly elegy to democracy, which Melville saw as under threat. Other readers, now and at other times, will have gleaned much else from their readings.
“Book!…Give Us the Bare Words and Facts, but We Come in to Supply the Thoughts”: Re-reading Moby Dick Today
Re-reading Moby Dick in 2025, Ahab morphed from the terrorist leader I first saw him as, though the book’s vivid demonstration of the power of demagoguery, to a populist politician. In chapter 36, Ahab paces the deck, seething before giving his version of a rally speech. Melville shows us how one man’s confident bluster convinces people to blame an “other” for their woes and believe that leader’s promises of retribution. Melville shows us how susceptible we are to the seductive power of the rhetoric of a great but egotistical man, and like many autocrats who wreak violence on their own people, how such a leader feels he is the victim and is haunted by paranoia, seeing slights wherever he looks (“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me”).
As the novel progresses, Ahab descends deeper into his mania. He is so focused on his hunt that anything that does not fit his revenge narrative is excluded, dismissed as fake news. Later, after having taken the daily reckoning from the sun with his quadrant, he throws it down on the deck in a rage and stamps on it shouting, “‘Science! I curse thee.'” He will destroy anything—tools, people, reality—if it no longer serves his cause. James saw this as one of Melville’s profoundest penetrations into the nature of totalitarianism. The quadrant can tell where the sun is. But it cannot tell man what he wants to know. Our uses of science and knowledge are as shifting and crooked as humans are themselves. Science can lift man’s eyes up to the sun, but humans will use what they know to satisfy their most pressing needs and desires—even if the result is ruin. Melville provides a lesson to today’s techno-optimists who want us to escape to Mars (likely as part of a techno-totalitarian colony). Their technology may eventually get us there, but it will not give us the belonging and meaning we crave on this planet or any other.
No matter how deep Ahab descends, the strength of his belief in his destiny and the fear of his rage continue to convince his crew. On the night of a great typhoon, Starbuck implores Ahab to turn homeward. He points to Ahab’s harpoon, burning with magnetic fire which has spread from the mast, claiming it is a portent of disaster. For a moment, it seems like the panic-stricken crew are wavering. Ahab seizes the harpoon and, threatening to strike anyone who moves, extinguishes the flame and potential mutiny with one breath. Starbuck considers grabbing a musket but does not act, claiming it would be unlawful. Ahab believes in a way that Starbuck does not. While intellectually it may be wise to hold views lightly and consider alternative views, it is those who believe passionately that move the world. Explaining complexity does not win one votes. Simplistic narratives told passionately do. D. H. Lawrence summarized Starbuck as “a good responsible man of reason…a dependable man,” but he is “At the bottom, afraid.” This could equally be applied to those in our technocratic classes who see themselves as liberals but have prostrated themselves at the feet of 21st century autocrats, their fear of punishment stronger than their moral courage.
Yet, whether they be extremists or autocrats, no matter the strength of the hold that men like Ahab have over others, they are ultimately undone by their own infatuations. Those whose search becomes an obsession will never be sated. Melville asks:
“Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”
Melville’s book about a voyage to unchartered waters in search of a mythical creature is ultimately a warning about what one is set to lose if he fixates on far horizons and strives to answer what the human condition makes unknowable. It shows us timeless human desires and needs so we can recognize their pull on us and find ways in which to satisfy or let go of them that minimize the damage we can do to others.
“There Is No Steady Unretracing Progress in This Life”: The Consolation and Reassurance of Great Literature
The list of analogies should provide us reassurance. Whether it is new types of extremism or unprecedented levels of division, we have been there before. There is little new in human nature. Specific ideologies and individual leaders come to pass. The human being remains driven and limited by the same desires and fears. Consolation can be found in the simple act of reading a great novel. It is a meditative experience, taking time to savor the language, ideas, diversions, and expressions of timeless common humanity and going deep into a world, appreciating its details and acquiring in-depth knowledge for knowledge’s sake (Moby Dick contains more information on whales and whaling than any encyclopedia).
After the final confrontation between Moby Dick and Ahab, Ishmael is the only survivor. As he floats to safety on his shipmate Queequeg’s coffin, Melville puts all of Ahab’s words and deeds in context when he then tells us that “great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” A great novel can, for a time, take us out of the everyday and give us that perspective of the infinite seas. The contemplation a great novel provokes can be an antidote to our ceaseless striving and to the vertiginous news cycles and the flood of social media outrages. So, call him Ishmael, cast off, and set sail. It is all there in Melville’s great epic, whatever one is looking for.
Andy Owen is a former soldier who writes about the philosophy and ethics of war, as well as geopolitics. He has been published in TIME, Aeon, The Spectator, The New European, and The Critic. His fictionalized memoir, Land of the Blind, which tells the story of the intelligence war in Afghanistan, was released in 2024.
