From: Charles Johnston cj@creativesystems.org
We are in a time of mourning. Ahead, and just as appropriately, will come a time when what is called for is
action.
But this call to
action presents a complex and hugely demanding
question, a question that will stretch everyone regardless of political
or philosophical persuasion. What kind
of response will best serve us in the only way that ultimately matters, by
making the world a safer place? Wise
leadership will require a breadth and
maturity of perspective we are only learning how to muster.
Our question requires a new kind of answer. After
Pearl Harbor we faced a clear enemy. The
only question was whether we had the might and the fortitude to prevail. Part of our shocked response to watching the
suicide attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon came from the immense
carnage and the terrible loss of life. As
much came from a realization, conscious or not, that the world would never be
quite the same.
It is important to appreciate that while the attack
was startling, it was not wholly a surprise.
Indeed, if anything was surprising it was that something like this had
not happen sooner. A lot is new
today. Most important, we live now in a
global world. Animosities between
neighbors are certainly not new. But
the way a global world makes all neighbors is.
This combined with huge global inequities made it only a matter of time
before terrorism's ugliness, common to other places, arrived on our doorstep.
That we live in such a technological world is another
contributor. We have greater means to
effect destruction. And, paradoxically,
our technologies make us more vulnerable to destruction. What could be a more perfect target than a
towering skyscraper holding thousands
of people?
Just as important for making mature decisions as
recognizing what is new, will be recognizing what is not new. Such historical perspective in no way
excuses such horrific acts. But it does
help us get past framing what has taken place solely in the language of good
and evil (and have our actions in the end only create more evil).
Terrorism is not new.
And it has not at all been limited to people who look different from
ourselves. The colonial soldiers in the
Revolutionary War were in an important sense terrorists. Their most important weapon against the
British was often their invisibility. One
might counter that ours was terrorism for the purpose of good. But
these modern terrorists regarded their actions,
however misguided, similarly.
Even suicide attacks are not new. Throughout history religious and political
fervencies have inspired the ultimate sacrifice. The most familiar example is the Kamikaze pilots of W.W.II Japan. But equally good examples can be drawn from
Western European history. The
"onward Christian soldiers" of the medieval Crusades come most
immediately to
mind. While
their actions were rarely so explicitly suicidal, they similarly regarded death
in battle as divine sacrifice.
Given all of this, what do we do? To start we need to confront that we lack
adequate language for the tasks ahead. The
terrorist assault has been labeled an act of war, and I think
appropriately. More American lives were
lost than on any other single day in history.
But while the war metaphor helps galvanize resolve,
the complexities of today's world make it in many ways less than helpful. If we use it, the best parallel is with
today's "war" on drugs. Like
drugs, terrorism cannot be once and for all eliminated. Hopefully we will get better at countering
terrorism, but there will be no end to this war. And might
alone can combat neither drugs nor terrorism. Each requires sensitive attention to
underlying causes and to the personal and cultural contexts in which they take
place.
Our response must have three parts. Each effort, to be effective, will stretch
us in ways we may not at first find pleasant.
Each confronts us with how very real limits exist to what can be
done. And each, at least if adequately
conceived, requires us to step outside the comfort of traditional political
allegiances. Conventional liberal or
conservative perspectives can help illuminate parts of the picture, but
neither, alone or even together, can get us where we need to go.
First: The
world needs to hold those responsible accountable, send a clear message that
terrorist activities will not go unpunished.
In some form that means a military response. But for such response to serve us, we must understand how limits
exist to what military action can accomplish.
We face confounding questions:
Exactly who should be held
responsible, the direct perpetrators, those
immediately supporting them, countries that gave them refuge? And in other than the most extreme
situations exactly what should holding responsible mean. Define who is responsible too narrowly and
actions taken will be symbolic at best. Define it too broadly and innocent
people, perhaps large numbers of
innocent people, will die. Such would be morally unacceptable and in
the end lead to greater carnage. However successful such efforts, our actions
will be necessarily imperfect and incomplete.
Second: We
need to commit ourselves to stopping terrorist actions before they start. This means spending more on
intelligence. Too it means greater
security, and not just at airports. But
again we face limits, both to what is desirable and to what is possible. Many have pointed out correctly that
imperfect security is part of the price we pay for a free society. But even if we turned our country into a
police state, we would not be safe from terrorism. Indeed the effect might again be the opposite. Timothy McVeigh attacked the Oklahoma City
Federal Building in large part because he saw the US as already a police state.
Third: We need
to establish deeper and more supportive relationships with peoples throughout
the Middle East. The sophistication of intelligence needed to
effectively safeguard against terrorism will require the active cooperation of
the countries where terrorism originates.
And we face the simple fact that just being more powerful is no longer
enough to guarantee safety. In a fully global world, no one can feel safe
unless everyone feels safe.
We need to reach out politically and economically to
the Middle-East. We need to establish more balanced Middle-East policies. And
we need, individually and collectively, to do everything we can to counter
attitudes that confuse whole populations with specific perpetrators of
violence. Even in the most extreme of
situations, we accomplish nothing by viewing people who may see us as "the
great Satan" as Satans in return.
And limits exists to what even the best efforts at
friendship and alliance can accomplish.
Inequities are real. The modern
Western values are a threat to almost medieval fundamentalist beliefs from
which terrorism arises. (And who is right is not as clear as we might
think. Grains of truth exist in even
the narrowest of Islamic fundamentalist critiques. I too, for example, have deep concerns for what one cleric called
the "McDonald's-ization" of global culture. In addition, even if the
East-West divide was not religious, but simply one of West would still be Goliath to the Middle-East's David.
No one leg of this three legged stool can stand by
itself. But what these actions ask can
easily seem contradictory. On one hand
we need to be hard and unforgiving, on the other open and embracing. A chance exists that disagreements about
which hand should prevail may become as divisive as those we saw during the
Vietnam War.
The necessary decisiveness, the hardness, of the first
response may be more than many of liberal persuasion can stomach. And the degree of acceptance, and even
forgiveness, the softness, demanded by the third response may only look like
weakness to those of more conservative bent.
But both are needed, and not diluted by mushy compromise.
The more mature leadership on which the future depends
must successfully get its arms around such contradiction. While what happened
in New York and Washington was horrendous, the carnage we might see in the
future, for example, with the use of
chemical or biological weaponry, could be much worse.
And more broadly, such maturity of leadership will be
essential if we are to effectively address any of a growing array of challenges
presented by life in a global world. It
is important that we respond effectively to the specific events of September
eleventh. But even more important will be what the task of choosing how to
respond will teach us
for the future.
Charles M. Johnston, MD, is a psychiatrist, author and
futurist. He has written Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenge of a
New Cultural Maturity and The
Creative Imperative: Human Growth and Planetary Evolution. He directs the
Institute for Creative Development, a think-tank and training center in
Seattle, Washington.