Pamela Bone: The folly of blaming ourselves
What is needed to fight this war on the Islamists and the ideas behind this war is moral clarity - not moral relativism and a widespread cynicism about political motives
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September 11, 2006
WE'VE been watching again, these past days, those images from the day the world changed. We've seen again the towers crumbling, the people running, the ash raining, the bodies falling.
We've watched the people standing in the streets, staring in horrified fascination, their hands over their mouths. And we realise that while we are watching them watching, our hands are covering our mouths, too. What is this hand-over-mouth thing humans do?
The reason we feel this horror watching is that as human beings we empathise with the suffering of other human beings. Nearly all people have this empathetic response, according to psychologists. Those who don't are psychopaths, and they make up only one or two per cent of the population.
Yet we know there are many people who, on seeing these scenes, cheered. Are they all psychopaths? No, they can't be, there are too many of them. So we try to find other reasons for why they would enjoy seeing innocent people die.
For five years now we've been searching for reasons. Are we any wiser? It's Iraq, many will chorus, wanting ever more vindication. But the first Islamist attack on American soil was way back in 1993, when the World Trade Centre was bombed. The invasion of Iraq has added to Islamist anger, but it didn't cause it. They were angry long before then.
Israel, then. Our support for Israel is the reason they hate us. And this very likely is true. But more than Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, it is the very existence of Israel, as a prosperous, modern state in the Middle East, that is the biggest insult to the Islamists. Are we really going to call for the Israelis to pack up and go, in order to placate would-be terrorists?
They're poor, that's why they're angry; poor, uneducated, brainwashed, loser men. I used to think that. But we now know the men who carried out the September 11 attacks, or the London Underground attacks last year, or those who most recently plotted to blow up airlines over the Atlantic, were neither poor nor uneducated. They had jobs and families. To slightly alter John Maynard Keynes' famous retort: "When the evidence changes, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
For every attack on innocent civilians since September 11 dozens of planned attacks have been thwarted. Whether we like it or not, there's a war on. What is needed to fight this war, and most of all, to fight the ideas behind it, is moral clarity.
Yet instead of moral clarity, there exists a pervasive moral relativism and a widespread cynicism about political motives; a conviction that the American government, which the Howard Government is unfortunately in league with, is most at fault in this war.
These attitudes exist more in some sectors of society than others. Where are they most to be found? Well, for want of a better term, they are to be found among "people like us". "People like us" is the term ABC Radio National's Julie Copeland used to describe the panel she was chairing at the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, during a discussion of what makes a good society.
Copeland early asserted that "political morality is a contradiction in terms". It was a throwaway line to be sure, but one that demonstrates a mindset, and an expectation that others will agree.
Strangely, neither of the other panellists - Geoffrey Robertson, author of Crimes against Humanity, and former Boyer lecturer Martin Krygier - agreed with her.
Indeed, Robertson said that Osama bin Laden (not George W. Bush) is the most dangerous criminal in the world. Later, while strongly criticising the US abuses of human rights at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, Robertson observed that one good thing about America is that "it usually gets it right in the end".
Krygier went so far as to say that terrorism is "directly, deliberately and really" a threat to the virtues, such as tolerance, that we hold precious. And even to say that with its flaws, "Australia is one of the gentlest, fairest, most decent societies in the world". Perhaps they are not, after all, "people like us".
How do you argue with those who see no moral distinction between bin Laden and Bush? In his book The End of Faith, Stanford University's Sam Harris asks us to consider the test of the "perfect weapon". A perfect weapon would be one that that could kill only its target without causing any collateral damage. If such a weapon existed, who would be more likely to use it?
If for no other reason than that he is accountable to his own people and ultimately to world opinion, Bush would probably choose to use the perfect weapon. Terrorists, whose aim is not to target individuals but to kill the maximum number of people, would not use it. Terrible as civilian deaths are, going to war in the knowledge that civilian deaths will inevitably occur is not morally equivalent to the deliberate targeting of civilians.
This is what moral relativism fails to see: in democratic, rule-of-law countries, human-rights abuses will be exposed, investigated and punished, and bad governments will be thrown out. The US is not a perfect society by any means, and neither is Australia, but they are both infinitely better than anything the Islamists would impose.
Yes, we do need a healthy degree of cynicism about political motives. Civil libertarians are right to warn of the danger that in prosecuting the war on terrorism we risk compromising the legal protections we've long taken for granted. But if we really believe "political morality is a contradiction in terms" then we might as well give up on trying to make a good society. And a person in Copeland's position who makes such public statements is giving ammunition to those who want to attack the ABC; and I am not one of them.
We should be clear. It's vital that the strongest efforts are made for a Palestinian state, because the suffering of the Palestinians is intolerable. The whole world should be pulling out all stops to end the appalling poverty in which so many of the world's people still live (strange how "people like us" never take to the streets to protest about starving Africans). But we should be doing these things because they are right, not in the hope it will placate the terrorists. Because it probably won't.
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