I went to a matinee of The Book of Mormon over the weekend, and — I promise these things are connected, read on — when I came back from the city, late in the evening, I found just about everyone I follow on Twitter making sport of this foray from Joyce Carol Oates:

All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive?

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) November 22, 2015

Now I get where the snark was coming from, I really do. (Especially given Oates’s rather, ah, entertaining Twitter history.) “All we hear about the Khmer Rouge is the massacres, the re-education camps, the piles of skulls; was there nothing celebratory in beginning society anew, with fewer intellectuals and bespectacled people?” “All anyone talks about with the Salem Witch Trials is the paranoia and fear and killing; was there nothing joyous about gathering as a community for a hanging?” You can play this game all day.

And yet: If you don’t recognize that for at least some of the Islamic State’s young volunteers there is a feeling of joy and celebration involved in joining up, then you’re a very long way from understanding the caliphate’s remarkable appeal. And Oates, in a daffy-seeming way, has put her finger on one of the West’s weaknesses in this conflict: Our widespread inability (concentrated in particular among our leadership class) to imagine or understand what else, beyond the pull of sadism and thuggery, our fellow human beings (including quite a few young, Western-raised people) seem to find intoxicating about the Daesh experiment.

Via Rod Dreher, who’s been writing a great deal on this theme, here’s an excerpt from a New York Review of Books piece by Scott Atran and Nafees Hamid, discussing the, yes, joyous and celebratory feelings that the Islamic state’s religious utopianism instills in people cut adrift by secular modernity:

Read the article “The Joy of ISIS” on douthat.blogs.nytimes.com.