Crumbling pillars: anarchy at home and abroad

THE ATTACKS ON the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, constituted an attack not simply on America but on the modern world order. One of the proud towers of the modern world is confidence in reason--not in the human power for reason (the ancient world celebrated that power) but rather the powers acquired through reason. Modern science yields technologies that benefit humankind. So we proclaimed on the surface of the moon: one small step for man, a giant step for mankind. However, today those hostile to modernity have argued that Western power leads only to the mastery of some men over others. So bring down the tower of technical reason.

The second tower of the modern world is the social contract state. According to Hobbes's account, the state comes into being in order to protect us from death. We give to the state a monopoly over the power of death through the police department, the fire department and the military. In exchange, the state assures us that when we go to sleep, we will not be murdered in the night; when we go to work, we will not be incinerated; when we read our mail, we will not be lethally infected.

Perpetrators of random violence seek to expose the social contract state in its relative powerlessness. Decades ago, when the Irish conflict erupted in the bombing of various pubs in London, a member of Parliament said, "From now on, every man his own magistrate." Scotland Yard cannot protect you. Random violence suffuses everyday life with uncertainty and therefore with a dread before the anarchic.

The terrorist attack doesn't seem to fit into the ordered cause-and-effect world of political means and ends. What is its political utility? What does one hope to accomplish by a propaganda of deed? Persuade the power-holders? Make life intolerable for the society at large so as to compel it to attend to a grievance that a minority finds unbearable? The terrorist attack seems only to galvanize hatred and fear.

Terrorism cannot be wholly understood as a political strategy. It 'also reflects a kind of religious ecstasy. Whatever the specifics of their religious tradition, terrorists have often depended for their foot soldiers upon ecstatics who stand outside the ordinary, practical world of means and ends. They consummate a deed that has become an end-in-itself.

Formally considered, the concept of an action which is an end-in-itself puts us rather close to the religious meaning of celebration. As Josef Pieper pointed out, "To celebrate a festival means to do something which is in no way tied up to other goals; it has been removed from all 'so that' and 'in order to.' True festivity cannot be imagined as residing anywhere but in the realm of activity that is meaningful in itself." In the case of terrorism, of course, we are talking about a festival of death, a celebration that has its own priest and victim and that carries with it the likely risk that the priest himself will become one of the victims. The rest of us become awed witnesses to this liturgical action through the medium of the media.

A government seeking to stop terrorism--whether Russia, Indonesia, the United States or Israel--faces in reverse the same dynamics of irrational and counterproductive politics. Disproportionate retaliatory action is difficult to curtail because it offers, by discharging a boundless resentment, an immediate satisfaction, even though it may solve no problem. In this sense, argues Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, Ariel Sharon lives in the present. He offers no future.

In the first stage of the American reaction to the attack of September 11, American leaders seemed aware of the problem of shaping the future. The president talked about the importance of humility and the fair treatment of Muslims and about the ultimate necessity of nation-building in Afghanistan. The government seemed aware that, after overthrowing the Taliban government, we should not leave Afghanistan in the lurch, as we had earlier when we helped engineer the defeat of the Soviets there. If we simply kill a hundred possible terrorists in Afghanistan and do little about the swamp of poverty, hunger, despair and political disarray in that country and elsewhere in the Third World, we will fail to "dry out the breeding ground of terrorists." We may simply produce thousands of terrorists in their place.

By October 2002, however, saber-rattling replaced staying power in our response to the world scene. In Afghanistan, we have engaged in what Michael Ignatieff has called "nation-building lite." The passions of war aroused, we diverted attention from Afghanistan to the prospect of a preemptive strike against Iraq, not simply to remove banned weapons but to replace the regime. Government leaders also proposed a long-term weapons policy that would brook no rivals among nations or any combinations of nations.

A RATHER CLEAR vision of America and its role underlies the policies of hard-liners. Hawks liken America to ancient Rome. We are not a nation-state primus inter pares, but primus super omnes. Robert D. Kaplan notes approvingly the ascendancy of civilian tough guys in the Defense Department over the State Department. His book Warrior Politics (2002) carries the subtitle, Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. America occupies the position today of imperial Rome in stabilizing the world, and Kaplan recommends a sacred canon of literature to guide leaders who wield such power: Livy, Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Malthus, Alexander Hamilton and Tiberius. Machismo rules. If you want to be a Tiberius today, get yourself elected president of the United States.