The National Tragedy of 9/11
On September 11, 2001, America suffered the worst terrorist attacks to have occurred in the modern era. Three thousand people died…
On September 11, 2001, America suffered the worst terrorist attacks to have occurred in the modern era. Three thousand people died, thousands more were injured, and thousands more lives were shortened or were damaged in the aftermath. Every year, Americans reflect on the event with a reverence that is nearly unparalleled.
I’m always compelled to sit quietly with the thoughts that people express on 9/11. And also the commemorations of September 11, in general, always make me a little uncomfortable. I don’t mean disparage the reflections of people who lost friends and loved ones in the attacks. I can only try to imagine what it would be like to have felt the teeth of something so large, raging, and undeniable tear through the fabric of everyday life so personally; I can only imagine the pointed feeling of a twisted, global-level hate being aimed so wrongly at gentle people one feels tenderly about, taking them permanently away.
And I don’t mean to disparage the more general tone of reverence toward the day either, because no matter how directly or indirectly we were affected, many of us felt the attacks as a brutal, heartless, and shattering intrusion in our lives. I see that the thoughtful return to those feelings is sincere, and that it deserves to be met with my sincerity and respect.
Also, though, even as the individual expressions of remembrance feel sincere and worthy of respect, to me, nineteen years on, I just can’t escape the feeling that, in aggregate the tone of the commentary on the tragedy feels hollow, and at the risk of being insensitive, it suggests to me a rather consistent American ability to distinguish moments of great pathos without necessarily really learning from them.
The past few years on 9/11 I’ve found myself re-reading, of all things, Osama bin Laden’s open letter to America, which circulated in 2002 in Arabic before being published in The Guardian that November. To be clear, this document is not a guiding light. It is radiantly antisemitic and homophobic. It is stunted and fundamentalist — in ways that remind me unfortunately of the rhetoric of contemporary Trump supporters. Its tone readily calls to mind the original connotation of the term, “the satan,” the accuser: It is a spiritually dark accusation leveled at a society that by contrast is not so dark, to be sure.
However, it is also interesting to see exactly what bin Laden was angry about. Primarily, he was angry about of American infiltration into Palestine and, generally, the ways America had become the heirs to and chief arbiters of a century’s worth of the West trampling across the Middle Eastern politics with its own agendas, without respect for local sovereignty or culture. He was angry about the way America was using its high-financed military to defeat opposition groups, and he was especially angry about the way America supported the development of secular culture in the Middle East, seeing American secularism as apostate.
He was angry that America had turned away from Islam, which, to him was “the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honour, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted . . . And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language.”
It may not take the reader long to compare the religion that bin Laden loved with the means by which he apparently thought it was best spread and find some dissonance. And again, if I had to rally behind a radical reformist leader, I would not have a particularly hard time choosing between, say, Bernie Sanders, or MLK, and Osama bin Laden. But also, I can’t help but wonder if I’m going to fully consider the longer conflict between America and militant Islam, and its acute a horrible eruption on 9/11, whether it can’t be understood to some extent why bin Laden was unable to recognize Islam, or the “surrender to God,” in American society.
Sir John Glubb’s observation in his 1973 essay “The Fate of Empires” has become my go-to way of framing the idea: Empires rise as they are driven by the pursuit of virtue, Glubb noted, and they go into decline as they transition from the primary pursuit of virtue to the primary pursuit of affluence (and, implicitly, the pursuit of self comfort).
When America is so criticized, in a blunt but decidedly gentler tone than bin Laden’s, it’s a criticism that I simply can’t ignore. And I feel like this year, when young adults flock to parties during the pandemic of a deadly flu, when citizens demand the Constitutional right to both patrol an angry crowd with an AR-15 and in the age of mass shooters not be the subject of aggression themselves, and when anthropogenically magnified wildfires devour unusually large portions of forests — and unusual forests — while we still cannot muster nearly the political will to even admit that our consumption habits have a role, it seems to me that the moral lapses of our way of life have rarely been more clear.
And I return to bin Laden’s open letter, where, after extolling Islam he began to get more specific in his accusations against American culture. Some of them — that American is permissive of usury, of general immorality, and of use of intoxicants — are perhaps hard for a modern secular mind to be too exercised about. But others are more interesting:
“You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.”
“You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them . . . You then rant that you support the liberation of women.”
“You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.”
“You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”
“Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts.”
In fact, America comprises 4% of the world’s population and consumes an estimated 20 to 25% of its resources, and I feel that a concurrent frowzy, self-regarding tendency in the culture, even a vaguely lusty moral aimlessness, is hard to overlook. Certainly the case has been made that our political system tracks with the desires of the rich more than the rest of the people. And I think few would argue that women haven’t been objectified and dehumanized. And we all should be beginning to understand by now what our consumption is doing to Earth’s living systems.
I think it’s definitely true that Americans, as a whole, are not pious. To the extent we should be may be fairly debated, but I think it’s fair to say that to whatever extent it’s worth keeping piety in mind Americans, today, often don’t.
Of course I can’t support Osama bin Laden’s antisemitism, homophobia, or his frankly insane idea that violence of any sort, let alone against unarmed civilians, is a righteous way to bring apparently wayward brothers and sisters closer to God. But also, in full truth, I can’t honestly say that his petition is completely lacking in insight about America — especially in its revelation of how America can be viewed from the outside.
I can say with conviction that I feel America did not deserve the tragedy of 9/11, but I am not sure that I can say with the equal conviction the exact measure of the moral high ground America claimed then, or retains now — nor, especially, what measure of the moral high ground America claims through a thoughtful reckoning with its own hard moral lessons.
After 9/11, America rallied, for sure. But what did we rally around? It seems to me that we rallied around Americanism. And what is that, exactly? I’m not sure that anyone knows. The word “freedom” is a seed concept — used both sincerely and ironically. But have we plumbed moral depths of this concept, or defined any other particularly American virtues in a way that results in a truly clear and truly laudable American identity?
America is an open society. I think that’s good. Among industrialized nations, America is a society with a noteworthy amount of religious mindfulness. It seems to me that can be good, too. Americans are hard-working and productive and, generally, I’d say, well-meaning. All good.
Also, though, we do consume a lot. We think do of ourselves a lot. Our media is saturated with morally dubious content — and it’s hard to say that that hasn’t affected our collective life. And as near as I can tell, most of people avoid at least to some degree at least some our common places from feeling some amount of disgust for them, because of what it’s like to be around one another in our current state.
And where we do gather enthusiastically, what do we gather for? What is more American than a football game, for instance? Football games are good enough. But what exactly are we saying about our nation, in the larger context of all civilizations throughout history, if its characteristic and defining values are circumscribed by what happens in a modern football stadium, or when an outsized share of national enthusiasm is aimed there?
The remembrance of 9/11 is a remembrance of personal tragedies, without a doubt. Families were shattered, and to some degree the peace security of every American was shattered. These individual losses seem to be worth processing.
But fundamentally, I honestly wonder whether 9/11 ought to be treated a national tragedy anymore. Because a nation needs a story, and I am not sure the extent that America has one — at least, I am not sure the extent it has a full one, that is really worth telling.
I think that there is an invitation on 9/11 to not only sit gently with the personal experience of trauma that we ourselves and others might have experienced, but also to sit with the discomfort of a national questions that 9/11 can write large before us:
What goodness do we mean to stand for, as a nation, and what do we allow into our lives that distracts us from that goodness? In what ways has progress metastasized into extravagance and outright greed? To what extent are we involved with, addicted to, entitled to things that make use shallow and materialist? To what extent has so-called Americanism actually actually made us less than decent?
What do we know about the impacts our individual lives, and our government’s assertion of our interests, have in the lives of others throughout the world? What should we know about it? And as we begin to know those impacts, how should we live our lives?
What are we really building together? How are we building it? How much time do we give to it, and what receives our time and attention apart from that? And how do our goals compare to the highest goals that have inspired people that have gone before us, or the highest aspirations that we ourselves could imagine for the human potential?
I simply can’t escape the feeling that every American day that is in any way patriotic should also be a sort of national Yom Kippur: I simply can’t escape the feeling that in our day American patriotism must be fundamentally infused with a vein of penitence. Not in deference to our “enemies,” not as victim blaming, or as admission of defeat, or as any kind of weakness at all. It just seems to me to be to be the necessary work of sincere people in a place where the purest anthems are perhaps not sounding at the moment. It is the decent activity of those who would not just be a rich nation, but would be a nation where people truly live richer and richer lives, and of those who are honest enough to admit that, in order to be that nation, we have some work to do.