Listening After September 11

By Judith Andre, PhD

On September 11, 2001, I took a small private vow. I promised myself to speak up against false absolutes. Sitting in front of the television, unable to move, unable almost to think or feel, I nevertheless understood one thing. The perpetrators of the destruction lived in a world of absolutes. They had created, with encouragement from others, a picture of themselves as good and others-us-as evil. During the day I heard various world leaders keep the image and reverse the polarity: "This is a moment of moral clarity," said one. "This is good versus evil."

I do believe that what was done was evil, and I have no interest in explaining it away, condoning it, justifying it, or mitigating it. But the horror of the attack does not insure that we, the victims, will automatically be forces of good. That it does is such an easy mistake to make; the self-induced blindness of the attackers tempts every human being, at some time, to some degree. Fanaticism is, to use a medical metaphor, the hypertrophy of something quite ordinary and often good: the human attraction to clarity. Uncomplicated worldviews supply emotional and often intellectual satisfaction. When Newton formulated the laws that explained the motions of the heavenly bodies - when he captured thousands of observed facts in three simple principles - he transformed our mental worlds in a deeply satisfying way. The moral world does not admit of such a reduction, but most of us would be comforted if it did. There is where the danger lies.

Trying to comprehend what was happening on September 11, my first reaction was that we had been sucked into a river of hatred and blood, from whose current we could never escape. I knew that our foreign policy was part of the context for the attacks. I also knew that we had to respond to them, but I could imagine no response that did not feed the river until it became a torrent. I ended the day and the week in despair.

In retrospect, I think that my image of an inescapable torrent depended on an assumption of high, steep banks. However, between the attackers' pathology and Newton's brilliance is a vast graduated landscape. Even a thesaurus suggests how varied it is: synonyms for "simple" (as in oversimplify) include crude, graceful, callow, rudimentary, and tasteful. Simplicity can be ugly, it can be beautiful, it can corrupt, it can redeem.

What haunted me on September 11 were memories of the too many simplistic and angry conversations to which I had listened over the years. As it happens, the people I love span a wide spectrum of political, religious, and ethnic identities: Byzantine Catholic, Shiite Muslim, atheist; right-wing and left-wing; Jew and Arab. I remembered an Arab woman widowed by the Gulf War chanting rage to her grandchildren; a Christian pastor who told his congregation that Muslims believed they would go to heaven if they killed a Christian; a cousin who suggested that the United States government had bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City; left-wing friends who believe that everyone on the right is stupid or pathological. On that Tuesday I remembered all this, and my own frequent silence in the face of it.

I had recently been writing on the virtue of intellectual honesty, a virtue upon which medicine, the life sciences, and the humanities depend. An honest person, philosopher Linda Zagzebski reminds us, does more than avoid telling lies. She "is careful with the truth. She respects it and does her best to find it out, to preserve it, and to communicate it," choosing ways to communicate that permit hearers not only to understand and accept it, but also to be justified in accepting it. [1] This is much more demanding than avoiding falsehood, but it is what academia is all about. It is part of what the best clinical encounters are about.

On the Tuesday of the attacks I was revising a manuscript in which I argue that the medical humanities, as a professional field, can be understood as a participation in moral development: deepening, in ourselves and in clinicians, scientists, and the public, an ability to see the moral dimensions of health care, health policy, and health science; the ability to reflect upon what we see, to reason about it, and to act (that is, to help make things correspondingly better). Progress in seeing, reflecting, and reasoning, I believe, necessarily includes progress toward cognitive complexity. Cognitive complexity is not what the Queen in Alice in Wonderland achieves (believing impossible things "for half an hour a day," sometimes managing to believe "as many as six impossible things before breakfast.") Nor is it the nihilism of some forms of post-modernism. It is a recognition that understanding is always limited, perspectival, contingent - and capable of growing.

Hence, on September 11, my small vow to speak up. To complicate, or at least resist, oversimplifications, especially political ones and those entangled with anger.

Not surprisingly, I soon heard some oversimplifications, as well as the pure fabrications that narrow worldviews permit. I heard of emails circulating within a Jewish community to the effect that patrons in a local Middle Eastern restaurant cheered as they watched the World Trade Center collapse. I heard of Arabs who believed that Israel was behind the attacks, and 4,000 Jews having been warned left the twin towers early. Some on the left attributed ultimate responsibility for the attacks to U.S. foreign policy; some on the right found any criticism of U.S. foreign policy treasonous. Among the militant there was joyful anger: surfing radio stations one morning I heard "What's the difference between Christmas and Afghanistan? Come December, Christmas will be here."

Extreme reactions to extreme events are not surprising. Sometimes I kept my small vow, sometimes not. Much more important than what I said was what I heard. For soon, in fact almost immediately, I began to hear other voices. They were voices not only of intellectual responsibility but of compassion; for the problem is not just oversimplification but an accompanying hardness of heart.

Already on the 12th I heard Norma Baptista describe a group of students who groped their way through pain toward a renewed commitment to medicine. Almost abashedly, they affirmed the nobility of their chosen profession. (Dr. Baptista tells her own story in "InkLinks", p. 5.) My own profession is of less immediate and physical use, but the health of the mind matters as much as the health of the body. I was able to use my own professional setting - a bioethics classroom - to deal with the moral dimensions both of what had happened and the United States' response to it.

In the week after the 11th I heard from friends as well. To my description of a river of hatred and blood one replied immediately, "There's a far wider river of compassion." And of course she was right. There is nothing sentimental about her observation; we would not survive as a species unless this was true. The evidence was every-where, from my student late for class because he was giving blood, to the memorials on campus that Friday, to the national outpouring of help for victims on the East Coast. Within hours of the attacks email went out: we must protect our American Muslim neighbors.

So I rather quickly became convinced that love and compassion are far more widespread than hatred; they are also more fundamental than intellectual complexity. Yet I was soon becoming aware that the latter was also clearly evident. On September 11th itself, for instance, the media was careful not to attribute responsibility prematurely; it even refrained from estimating casualties. (Not so one national figure, who thought the day was probably the bloodiest in American history. Someone reminded him of Antietam.) From the beginning political leaders distinguished between the Islamic mainstream and the fanatic hatred of particular men. The Jewish community I mentioned called itself to task: Arab-Americans in that restaurant had of course not rejoiced, and some of those who received the electronic rumor made sure the truth was published (literally: a newspaper story covered both the rumor and its halting). The grandson of the Gulf War widow I mentioned earlier resisted her rage: he flooded me one evening with stories of mercy and love from the Islamic canon, and especially of compassion toward one's oppressors.

As I listened, the complexity grew. People became able to say that while this was not Islam versus Christianity, or Islam versus the West, nevertheless religion is part of the story. We are dealing with religious, not just political, extremism, and religion deepens the intensity of whatever it touches. As for the role and responsibility of the West, it is becoming common knowledge that our Middle Eastern policy has often been disastrous, morally as well as practically, yet most people understand that what began on September 11th has other roots as well: a crisis of modernity in the Middle East (see the columns of Karen Armstrong in Britain's The Guardian, October 13); political expediency among leaders there; individual psychopathology (see the personal history of Osama bin Laden). Dealing with these tangled roots while in no way absolving the perpetrators of full responsibility is a complex task. It resembles in some ways the recent attention to error in medicine: emphasis on systemic causes (i.e., non-standardized equipment; overworked residents and nurses; foolish reliance on short-term memory, a faculty we know to be highly fallible) has to be juxtaposed with continuing high standards of individual accountability. The two kinds of
causes are not mutually exclusive, but under-standing their compatibility demands a certain degree of sophistication.

As I was listening through late September and October, I paid attention above all to the way the Bush administration approached its terrible new responsibility: to respond, to take action, to bring about death. I have not appreciated the metaphor of war. In health care our efforts have often been undercut by such language: the "war on drugs" did more to put people in prison than to cut down drug abuse; the war on cancer arguably diverted huge sums from riper lines of research. In spite of the administration's language, however, I noticed the nuanced and careful steps with which it prepared before taking action: its search for alliances, its constant distinguishing between Muslims in general and the terrorists in particular, its differentiation between the people of Afghanistan and the terrorist network, its provision of humanitarian aid. The day I finally put aside my despair was the day I heard that "Operation Infinite Justice" had been renamed, because Islamic scholars pointed out that infinite justice is the province of Allah. This administration understands that more is at stake than eliminating Al Qaeda; that what comes next in Afghanistan will have implications for our children's children. I tried mightily not to give credit for any of this to George W. Bush until finally someone reminded me that his was the final word, and that he chose from competing advice given by advisors he had himself chosen. One of my own comfortable simplifications of the world has gone, and I am glad to find this unexpected opening of my own heart.

It is still early days, of course, and the situation treacherous. This morning's paper spoke of the frustrating silence of the suspects who have been arrested. We will not turn to torture - but perhaps we could export them temporarily to countries that do? No. Please, no. Another article describes Afghans as savage and deceitful during war. On the other hand, still another article struggles for rationality and sense in the face of possible biological weapons. "Cures" and "prevention" might well be worse than the diseases.

Perhaps my listening has been selective, but the compassion and complexity I have heard are really not uncommon. I am convinced that our country has matured. Playwright and novelist Arthur Miller agrees; he finds parallels today with the America of 1940, but "this time around . . . silence is out of fashion, and a lot of us find our-selves struggling very consciously with our fears."[2]

A shared public struggle is far better than a private reinforcement of rigid minds and hardened hearts. September 11th did not, as I feared it would, harden us still further. Or if it did in some cases, it also greatly increased its opposite in others. If I may shift my metaphor from listening to looking, let me close by quoting novelist Dorothy Sayers. In Gaudy Night she offers the following prayer: "Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be." Listening to my friends, family, and country after September 11th, I believe we are learning to do just that.

Notes
1 Zagzebski, 158.
2 "Shattering the Silence, Illuminating the Hatred," Writers on Writing, The New York Times on the Web, October 22, 2001.

Judith Andre is a Professor of Philosophy
and Faculty at the Center for Ethics, MSU