<<October 1, 2001
Why must evil have a cause?
Andrew Coyne
National Post
A clever thing to say after Sept. 11 was to find fault with the politicians' rote description of the hijackers as "cowards." Say what you will about them, the contrarians said, but they were hardly cowards: To steer a plane into a building without flinching, blowing yourself up along with everyone else, takes "a kind of mad bravery," Mark Steyn wrote. "If these men were cowards, this would be an easier war. Instead, they are not just willing to die for their cause, but anxious to do so."
But that's the point, isn't it? They wanted to die. Courage, properly understood, means a willingness to risk losing something you value -- your life, but also your health, your job, your reputation -- in the service of some higher, or at least larger, cause.
But the person who aims to die is not risking anything. Suicides are not courageous, because the life they lose is not something they value. Indeed, they crave death. For the men who attacked New York and Washington, perishing in the same explosion with their thousands of victims was not a risk they were willing to take; it wasn't even a cost they were willing to bear. It was a bonus. The mission may have been to kill the infidel; but killing themselves at the same time was the route to martyrdom, and thus to everlasting life.
The only "risk" they undertook was the risk of being denied what they craved: of being caught, or killed, before they could achieve their objective, and so being condemned to a life, or worse an afterlife, of shame. Had they confronted an adversary capable of inflicting upon them the shame they dreaded -- the military, or the police -- they might still have acted with something resembling courage. Instead, they preyed upon defenseless civilians, taking advantage not only of their fears but their naԶetȬ lulling them into the belief that they were merely hostages, that if everybody stayed put all would be well. I'd say "cowardly" was a pretty good word for it.
Our confusion on this point is an example of a larger problem, which is our tendency to ascribe to suicidal terrorists the same sorts of motives and feelings as our own, if in a more demented form. We do not wish to die ourselves, and so imagine those who do must be "brave," as a sort of first approximation.
In the same vein, we resist explanations of the killers' actions that use words such as "mad" or "evil." This is too simplistic, we say, but in truth we mean it is too complex. We cannot imagine killing thousands of people ourselves, and so instinctively assume there must be some sort of rational basis for it. If they hate us, they must have a reason: if not an actual grievance, some wrong we have done to them, then at least a "root cause," some state of affairs we ought to correct.
That the motives commonly imputed to the terrorists correspond precisely with the views of those engaged in the imputation may be put down to an amazing coincidence, or to cynical opportunism, or just to intellectual laziness. Thus, if you are a critic of U.S. foreign policy, the temptation is to project this critique on to the mind of the terrorist, albeit in more extreme form.
This is both factually wrong and morally bankrupt. It is factually wrong in that there is no evidence that the terrorists' grievances are rooted in U.S. foreign policy, generally or in the specifics.
It is morally bankrupt in any number of ways. It implies that the mere existence of a grievance is proof of its legitimacy: that because Osama bin Laden is supposed to be angered by this or that aspect of U.S. foreign policy, it must follow that he is right and the U.S. is wrong. Otherwise why bring it up? If the policy is justified, morally and strategically, then it hardly matters what some genocidal madman thinks of it: If anything, his opposition is an advertisement for it. But if it is not justified, then it ought to be possible to show that, without hiring a madman (in effect) to make the argument for you.
Second, it suggests that the existence of a grievance is sufficient to explain, if not to justify, the decision to commit mass murder. The critics are usually careful to stipulate that they do not mean to justify what bin Laden did. But then it's hard to see what they do mean. Lots of people have a grievance with the U.S; few become terrorists. Terrorists are not robots. If they choose to kill thousands of people, they are not only morally responsible for their acts: They are the cause.
I come back to the more general question. Why must we accept -- why do we assume -- that there must be a "cause"? Why must we exclude the possibility that the terrorists might be motivated by blind hatred, irrational prejudice -- that a man who commits an insane act might, after all, be insane? We do not ask Jews to consider what they did to make the Nazis hate them. Why do we ask the same of Americans?>> |
