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9/11 – A Duty to Remember, but What?

Brad Evans & Simon Critchley

Thursday, 31 August 2011

THE VIOLENCE WITNESSED TEN years ago was spectacularly horrify- ing. Mass death quite literally broadcast “live.” Many images of that fateful day linger. We still recoil at the moment the second plane impacted, the point at which we knew this was no accident. Our memories can still recall that frozen transience, the same experienced shared by President George W. Bush, who, in a room full of children, cut a powerless figure. And still, we are traumatized by the thought that any one of us may have faced that terrifying predicament, whether to jump or not as the searing heat became too intense to bear. Such an impossible decision thankfully most of us will never have to face.

Let us be clear from the outset. 9/11 was both unjustifiable and abhorrent. Not only did it defy logical reasoning, completely blurring beyond all intelligible meaning the enemy and the innocent, the target and collateral damage. As an event, it offered no promise that the future could be opened to better ethical relations amongst peoples of this world. Indeed, if being terrified is the defining political criterion for what happens in devastating times, for those of us who live in advanced liberal societies, the term “terror” is indeed a more than satisfactory explanation.

One of the most remarkable results of that memorialized day was the way the shared sense of grief translated into something like a genuinely felt shared sense of human sensibility. Operating on an emotional level, our sympathies extended the hand of friendship to victims who we would most likely never meet. If the humanitarian principle has any real meaning, it must be in times like these it finds its most affective power. This responsiveness wasn’t about universal legal proclamations. Neither was it about retributive calls for justice. Less grandiose, yet certainly charged with more potent realism, human togetherness showed itself through the willingness to affirm life in the face of the most indescribable suffering.

Yet all too quickly, this time of civic grief would be seized upon to inflict violence upon those deemed complicit. Tragically Orwellian, the dream of global peace would be transformed into a planetary war. In Afghanistan and Iraq, our retributive justice would soon adopt its own limitless utilitarian logic. “To save us at home, the war must be taken to them,” politicians reasoned. Hunting down perpetrators in this way inevitably produced its own collateral damages — blurring, once again, perceived enemies from those caught within the violent crossfires of ideological rage.

While the numbers of dead in those countries seem countless, and we imagine their terror, being terrified resonated here with the same petrifying force. Well intentioned bombs don’t do less damage. A wound inflicted by a stray humanitarian bullet has the same impact no matter the righteousness of the cause. A just cause cannot sanction an innocent death unless we subscribe to the belief that some lives are more disposable than others.

So, what could we have done differently? Surely not taking the fight to them (whatever the cost) shows weakness in the face of danger? Proposing here a more liberalized war effort is certainly not the intention. Students of colonialism will quickly appreciate that “war by other means” smacks of the worst cases of deeming others savage. Just imagine if we had not rushed into the all-too-predictable counter recourse to war and violence. What if the claim that the day our “world changed forever” demanded more considered philosophical reflection? More radical still, what if our response was to say to the Muslim world: We will do nothing, then wait for you to clear your own political name? That is was up to Islam to show its genuine ethical persuasion by dealing with the al-Qaeda problem on its own terms?

This is no more hypothetical than what we have now. We cannot know for sure whether the world is safer or not because of our actions. We have been travelling on a pre-emptive rollercoaster which can only deal with the future by attempting to create it through the rule of force. One thing is, however, clear. As Obama speaks at the site of the tragically fallen, the sentimentality of liberal humanism still reigns supreme. But one source of our problems is that liberalism preaches tolerance but only shows it to those who show it first. Its moral sentiments are predicted on peace yet, in practice, only amplify the reasons for war. While liberalism talks of humanity, its only method for realizing it is to wage war endlessly, so while we have a duty to remember the suffering of 9/11, political ignorance still remains our afflicted curse.

All this may sound remarkably emphatic. Maybe that is the point. For too long, our politics have been depleted of emotional considerations. Yet as we all know, life is full of emotional experiences which affect the way we see and relate to the world. Let’s not blind ourselves here. The politics of emotion is fraught with dangers. The history of fascism taught us that much. Attempting to remove our emotions as a frame of reference, however, not only clouds our political judgements, it also prevents us from making meaningful political distinctions between those emotions that positively affirm human togetherness and those that, in the face of dangerous uncertainty, call for the suffocating forces of militarism at any given opportunity.

Originally published in somewhat different form in Social Europe.