Threats real and imagined
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ANTHONY B. ROBINSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
Thursday, September 11, 2003
seattlepi.nwsource.com
It's now two years since the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001. Having focused almost entirely on external threats -- wars against Afghanistan, Iraq and terrorism for these two years -- has an opportunity been missed? Have we avoided deeper questions?
Remember the first days and weeks after 9/11? There was a time amid the shock and grief of profound reflection and self-examination. Our foundations had been shaken. We asked about our values and questioned the central concerns of our lives and of our society. Some reported awakening to a new sense of priorities, realizing that relationships are more important than profits or possessions. Many spoke of turning back to faith, to prayer and to their families. There was a sense of vulnerability that, spiritually speaking, is often the beginning of wisdom.
Moreover, there was a born-again search to understand the world beyond our borders. Bookstore and library shelves were swept clean of books on Islam, U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. Searching discussions took place not only in the media but also on street corners, in churches and at town meetings.
Too soon such attempts at self-examination came to an end. Or as Robert Bellah put it in "The Christian Century," "The discussion got short-circuited." "I have my own memory," writes Bellah, "of when the discussion shifted: the Fox network began an incessant campaign against those seeking to 'understand' those who had attacked us. According to the Fox commentators, pure evil is beyond understanding -- it can only be opposed. 'Moral clarity' became the watchword: any effort to understand the enemy, above all any attempt to show that the U.S. might bear some responsibility for conditions leading up to the attacks, was denounced as showing a lack of moral clarity, as moral relativism, postmodernism or worse."
Partly, it was the predictable return to normality that happens in the wake of any great loss or shocking event. You cannot live in the mode of "fruit-basket-upset" indefinitely. Life must go on and inevitably returns to some sort of normality. But it was not only that. Within a short time our focus shifted almost entirely to external threats. To ask questions about our own society was unpatriotic. Our job was to shop. But in focusing entirely only "out there" we missed an opportunity for deeper understanding "in here."
This is not to say there is no genuine external threat or challenge. My summer reading included the latest work of Bernard Lewis, the foremost scholar of Islam and of the history of the Middle East. In his book, "The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror," Lewis does what any good scholar does -- he deprives his readers of the answers that are altogether too simple.
In particular, he challenges two too-simple answers to the question of the meaning and implications of 9/11. One of these is the notion that with the Soviet Union and communism over, Islam and Islamic fundamentalism now constitute the major threat to the West and to the Western way of life. "Islam," Lewis writes, "is not an enemy of the West. There are growing numbers of Muslims who desire nothing better than a closer and more friendly relationship with the West and the development of democratic institutions in their own countries."
An equally misleading, too-simple answer, however, is one that says, "Muslims, including radical fundamentalists, are basically decent, peace-loving, pious people, some of whom have been driven beyond endurance by all the dreadful things that we of the West have done to them." "No," says Lewis, "there are a significant number of Muslims who are hostile and dangerous, not because we need an enemy, but because they do." The crisis of Islam requires us, in some of Jesus' most challenging words, "To be wise as serpents and gentle as doves," a subtlety that seems to have eluded our nation's present leaders.
Since 9/11 our focus has fallen almost entirely on external threats, both real, as indicated above, and imagined, as in Iraq's links to al-Qaida or its imminent threat to our national security. In many ways, we have projected our fears outward and onto others. Sept. 11 revealed not only genuine external threats and challenges, but also inner threats and challenges we must seek to name and to address.
One we might ask about is our own democracy, where fewer than half the registered voters took part in the last presidential election. Ask too about what really is a good life when the good life is so often materially defined. Inquire about our understanding of the world and in particular our historic role in Iraq and the Middle East. Ask about the hidden despair that darkens lives in a society where too many feel superfluous, where lives lack meaning. As we, today, remember those who died on 9/11, remember too the questions we asked then. May we find the courage to let those questions live on to disturb us.
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Anthony B. Robinson is senior minister at Plymouth Congregational Church: United Church of Christ in Seattle. E-mail: trobinson@plymouthchurchseattle.org |
