I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning and economic optimism that ended on that day.
II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living ina a "new world order" and a "new economy" that would "grow" on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be "unprecedented."
VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.
VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.*
VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to "rogue nations," dissident or fanatical groups and individuals--whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.
IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homeland and our lives.
XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually happening in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for we all know, serious and difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has not far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.
XV. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a stage of weakness. Any war that we make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in a history of war in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.
XVI. It is a mistake also--as events since September 11 have shown--to suppose that a government can promote and participate in a global economy and at the same time act exclusively on its own interest by abrogating its international treaties and standing apart from international cooperation on moral issues.
XVII. And surely in our country, under our Constitution, it is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can justify any form of political oppression. Since September 11, far too many public voices have presumed to "speak for us" in saying that Americans will gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater "security." Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction in security (and in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any abridgment of our Constitutional rights.
XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is far to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.
XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, an active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.
XXIII. We must never again allow public emotion or the public media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam, then we would undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and languages of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.
Wendell Berry, "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear," In the Presence of Fear, Three Essays for a Changed World, The Orion Society, 2001, pp. 1-3.
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