Interesting question. Out of curiosity I tried googling to see if anyone has done an analysis of historical cycles of religious extremism and didn’t find any hits; if you find anything I’d be interested.
Do we need a standardized unit of religious extremism to calculate this? If so, I propose the Khomeini.
We probably do if there is no precedent. What does one standardized Khomeini unit represent? The number of extremists generated in a given amount of time compared to the non-extremist population? I don’t know if I have the knowledge to begin that conversation.
1 Khomeini = creation of 40 million religious extremists? (The approximate population of Iran just after the Islamic revolution there.)
Although, it can be a difficult problem for people quantizing such things to even classify what counts as extremism.
We’d probably have to offer how we interpret extremism. For the purpose of this excersize I would define extremism as an Individual’s willingness to commit to a doctrine without compromise. Since, most of the fighting we see across the globe today is due to some fully binding ideology that specific populations will not compromise on. With that definition set, we need to look at some average population numbers to make a value of 1 Khomeini meaningful at a glance.
I’d imagine that you would have a hard time isolating cases of rising religious extremism from the rising social/political/economic upheavals that occur at the same time. These things tend to all go hand in hand, and which one is cause vs which one is symptom is not always obvious.
Is there a way to calculate the velocity of the vicious cycles we have encapsulated ourselves in?
Interesting question. Out of curiosity I tried googling to see if anyone has done an analysis of historical cycles of religious extremism and didn’t find any hits; if you find anything I’d be interested.
Do we need a standardized unit of religious extremism to calculate this? If so, I propose the Khomeini.
We probably do if there is no precedent. What does one standardized Khomeini unit represent? The number of extremists generated in a given amount of time compared to the non-extremist population? I don’t know if I have the knowledge to begin that conversation.
1 Khomeini = creation of 40 million religious extremists? (The approximate population of Iran just after the Islamic revolution there.)
Although, it can be a difficult problem for people quantizing such things to even classify what counts as extremism.
We’d probably have to offer how we interpret extremism. For the purpose of this excersize I would define extremism as an Individual’s willingness to commit to a doctrine without compromise. Since, most of the fighting we see across the globe today is due to some fully binding ideology that specific populations will not compromise on. With that definition set, we need to look at some average population numbers to make a value of 1 Khomeini meaningful at a glance.
I’d imagine that you would have a hard time isolating cases of rising religious extremism from the rising social/political/economic upheavals that occur at the same time. These things tend to all go hand in hand, and which one is cause vs which one is symptom is not always obvious.