“I will send my terror before you,
and will throw into confusion all the people . . .”
- Exodus 23:27
This morning I want to try to tackle an issue that has been troubling me since long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It is the question of whether the terrorists of this world, by skillfully employing the insidious tools of fear, have already defeated us.
I am not an expert on terrorism per se. But as an observer who has lived through what we might call the “era” of terrorism, dating back even before the horrific blast which killed over 200 United States marines in Beirut, Lebanon in the early 1980’s, it has often seemed to me that there has been not only an increase in our fears about security, but also a slow but steady decline in our values around the rule of law since these attacks began to escalate three decades ago.
Ironically, the rise in terrorism has taken place in the context of what some scholars believe is a centuries long decrease in human violence. Hard as it may be to believe, the level of human violence has steadily decreased since at least the 13th century. According to Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, in some areas of the world the homicide rate has fallen as much as one hundredfold. As Pinker realizes, this decline in human violence is counter-intuitive. He sets forth his thesis that humankind is more peaceful now than at any time in the past in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature. In a review in the Boston Globe “Ideas” section, Leon Neyfakh writes of Pinker’s findings,
Not only had homicide rates gone down all over the developed world, but so had the amount of war, domestic abuse, rape, slavery, and all kinds of other unspeakable practices. The more Pinker read, the more convinced he became that humans, as a species, had undergone a truly profound transformation.
Pinker claims that we are living through “the most peaceful era in human history.” He says,
[If] reason, science literacy, democracy, open economies, empowerment of women—all of these things—if you can actually show there are ways in which they’ve made life better, you remind people that, hey, these things haven’t always been there, and a lot of what we appreciate in life, we should thank these developments for.
Interestingly for us Unitarian Universalists, Neyfakh writes that Pinker points more than anything to the Enlightenment as increasing the kinds of empathy and tolerance needed for people to live peacefully side by side. Unitarianism, with its emphasis on freedom, reason, and tolerance, may well be the quintessential religious product of the Enlightenment era.
Pinker’s hope in writing his book, says Neyfakh, is that it “will serve as a decisive defense of modern life—a testament to the fact that for all the complaints one hears about contemporary depravity and nihilism, and for all the carnage in the headlines, mankind deserves credit for having managed to largely free itself from its violent, beastly instincts.”
Alongside this optimistic view of human history, there have been recent studies showing that violent crime has actually decreased significantly in the United States over the past several decades. It sure doesn’t seem that way, and I’m sure that the people in Dorchester and similarly afflicted neighborhoods would dispute it. So what is really going on?
Clearly, the increase and scope in media coverage of practically everything under the sun has added to the impression that there is more violence in the world, and not less. Acts of terrorism in particular receive extremely wide coverage. What is hard to grasp is that even including the carnage of 9/11, the numbers of victims of terrorism are actually relatively small in comparison to history’s past atrocities, and the number of incidents relatively few.
In a New Yorker magazine commentary written twenty-five years ago, an anonymous author wrote that,
The terrorist . . . wants to change our minds. To this end, leaving our military forces largely untouched—and certainly undefeated—he attacks our civilian population. He calculates that when we see our people, including our children, being blown up in airports and discotheques, we’ll think twice about pursuing the policies he despises. The blood that the terrorist sheds is tangible, and the policy change he seeks will have tangible effects, but the means by which the one is supposed to produce the other—terror—is purely a mental product . . . .
“The challenge posed for us by terrorism,” wrote the author, “is how, in the face of it, to remain true to our ideals.”
I suppose this is the question that troubles me in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, in the light of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the shadow of the murky means by which the so-called “War on Terrorism” is being fought.
If the terrorists’ intent is to turn us away from our highest principles and ideals of justice and the rule of law, then we would have to say that they have succeeded, at least to some extent. If the intent is to make us waste precious resources of life and material in a prolonged and seemingly unwinnable armed struggle, they have definitely succeeded.
Alongside these two questions, there are smaller ones, about how since the modern rise of terrorism, we have begun to live more by our fears than our hopes. America, the most optimistic nation in history, has become pessimistic. A feeling of hopelessness is pervasive these days. Our house, which Lincoln reminded us could not stand divided, is seemingly divided as never before. The widening gap between rich and poor, one of the main issues among the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the real or imagined sense of disempowerment which is one of the main issues fueling the Tea Partiers, both seem to have roots in insecurities which have only escalated with our efforts to confront and defeat terrorism.
It remains to be seen to what extent those movements are motivated solely by anger, and whether and if that anger can be channeled to lead to and sustain any constructive change.
Our economy and the economies of most nations in the western world are in a mess, and the huge and increasing inequities existing between the haves and have-nots beg the question of whether the capitalist system can still be the means to a fairer society that its founders intended it to be. Our body-politic can’t seem to reach a compromise on just about anything. Our nation is more polarized than ever in recent memory. Xenophobia is on the increase as evidenced by the draconian measures that are being taken against immigrants both illegal and legal, and by the disturbing increase in violent anti-Muslim activity in parts of our country.
The idea that all Muslims must be terrorists is one of the most troubling stereotypes in an age of them. Several years ago when I was in India—a nation which we forget still has one of the largest populations of Muslims in the world, and one of the least violent—an Indian friend said, “Not every Muslim is a terrorist, but almost every terrorist is a Muslim.” Of course, it is not true, not even in India.
We know, for example, that there are many other varieties of homegrown terrorists than the Muslim variety, as evidenced by radical Christians who bomb family planning clinics, anti-government anarchists like Timothy McVeigh, or even the homophobic, anti-liberal gunman who stormed into a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee several years ago, murdering one of its members and wounding several others. In most of these instances, it remains to be seen to what extent “religion” is a direct cause of the violence, or is simply being used as a convenient cover for the goals of a radical politics.
All such acts of terrorism have a similar effect, though, of making us more fearful, less trusting, and more suspicious of anyone and anything that falls outside our area of familiarity and comfort.
While the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements may appear to have little in common, I believe that both represent the economic, political, social, and perhaps even religious fractures that have begun to open in our society. Are these fractures all the result of terrorism? Certainly not; but terrorism, I believe, has helped to make them even wider by sowing a kind of dis-ease and insecurity that makes it difficult for us to come together around common goals or even to agree on our common values.
In the current polarized state of affairs, no one seems to be able to imagine a third way. There’s way too much black and white, either/or thinking. It’s either a “clash of civilizations,” to borrow Samuel Huntington’s model, or nothing. Having spent considerable time in Romania, a country where fear was all pervasive, and where people of different ethnicities and religions were skillfully pitted against each other, I am dismayed by the idea that we cannot live successfully together in our differences, and I do not believe it.
What about the common roots and incredible synchronicity between the major western religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and the cultures they have spawned? Diversity and multiculturalism are too often seen as destructive forces these days, a kind of watering-down of “real” Americanism, instead of as the tremendous potential source of richness, energy, and renewal that they can be, and have often been in the past, for our society. Thus the mostly negative debate about whether to teach about religion in the public schools. God forbid that we should have accurate and objective information about the strangers already in our midst, let alone about those who are more familiar to us.
We need to stop cowering in fear long enough to have a conversation, and, perhaps more than anything, we need to learn to listen to what others are saying, and not to dismiss them on the spot because they don’t look or sound like us. Knowledge, as they say, is power. It is fear and ignorance, as always, that we need to fear the most.
In 1975, when the Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered evidence of five unsuccessful CIA-sponsored assassination plots against foreign leaders, then Senator Frank Church, the chair of the committee, wrote, “The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraint that makes us free; but each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.” In another place, Church wrote of the founding fathers, “They acted on their faith, not their fear. They did not believe in fighting fire with fire; crime with crime; evil with evil; or delinquency by becoming delinquents.”
The question is whether we have already crossed that line, and whether we have the will and courage to go back. The New Yorker article to which I referred earlier ends with the following thought, with which I will leave you:
The right balance between the need to prevent terrorism and the need to remain true to our ideals would not be easy to strike; but it is a task that free people, who know that there is always a cost in efficiency for adherence to moral standards, are well equipped to address, for they can be confident in the knowledge that against a nation abundantly armed with courage terrorists can never win.
Let us trust that this is still true, and that it is not too late to reassert those high values which have made our country, in spite of its many flaws, a light to the world. So may it be. Amen.
- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
Readings: Exodus 23: 27-33; from Terror in the Mind of God by Mark Juergensmeyer
