Bin Laden seems to have acquired his political ethics through religious rhythms coursing through his region of the world. Though I am an aging and settled secular person, quite a few of the people whose strivings I admire have drawn on sundry religious ways of being. The fact that I cannot emulate them in my personal life in no way diminishes the esteem in which I hold these people. Bin Laden, however, is not one of them. While never admitting that his activities have been causal to any acts of terrorism, he has otherwise associated himself with specific murderous acts and openly praised them. I find his larger associations to be uniformly sobering: The Taliban has an appalling sense of how people must act to merit inclusion in their definition of the human community. And I am absolutely unnerved by the way he, and they, think about “holy places.”
Nevertheless, we have a great deal of madness in the world and these examples have not in themselves been the cause of my recent brooding. What has is this: I think the events of September 11, 200l and their transparent ramifications have tilted the human community in fundamentally new ways. I harbor new uncertainties as I contemplate how I am to act and what I am to say to my grandchildren. Or to any of those children who are being taught to dance in Middle Eastern streets as a way to respond to sights of mass deaths.
Other venues of causality come to mind. Among the most notable is the so-called world market and such accoutrements as the IMF, the World Bank, and the military capability of core countries to enforce these international instruments of trade. Over 30 years ago, I began to write about the controlling economic impact of banker domination of western monetary systems, not only how sanctioned banking practices systemically impoverish farmers in America but (in the last chapter of both Democratic Promise and The Populist Moment) also about why there could be no structural equity in global exchange until we formulated some kind of commodity-based international monetary system conceptually structured around low interest rates. While the books were praised as studies of American Populism, no one inside the academy, Wall Street, or the left has ever written one word about these summary components of the Populist studies – components that necessarily inform in vivid ways the global producer-financier relationships that undergird the third world’s relationship to the centers of world credit. The politics of getting such matters on the stage of democratic discussion is very serious business in my view and recent events have (marginally) enhanced the possibilities of a measure of progress in shaping a context for such discussions. I shall do what I can to facilitate this possible opening but I am not holding my breath. It will take time – years.
But the post-September 11th crisis does not and cannot begin to turn on this question in the first instance for the simple reason that we can now see that structures are in place which guarantee the continuance of mass murders. First, there is a symbolic and material source in bin Laden and his money. Second, there is the university of terrorism that he created in the Sudan and then moved, under pressure, to Afghanistan. Third, there is the state regime that houses both the university and the symbolic leader. Fourth, there are in place the thousands of graduates of the university who now reside in countries all over the globe. They constitute thousands of tiny armies poised to generate mass murder.
In my brooding, I have been unable to conceptualize a non-violent way to deal with the four levels of the structure of terrorism that have become visible in the aftermath of September 11. That is to say, I have been unable to conceptualize a non-violent way to deal with any of the four levels, either individually as a problem or collectively as an interrelated problem.
I may add (necessarily as an aside for the time being) that however relevant long term they are or some day may come to be, speeches about the structure of globalization or about American foreign policy do not address the immediate crisis that flows from the structure of terrorism now in place. This leaves aside the fact that the motives of bin Laden, for one, turn not on the fine points of global exploitation, but on religious outrage at the defilement inherent in the American military presence in the country of holy places, Saudi Arabia. The irony, here, of course, is that the Saudis, including bin Laden, possess wealth that is a product of the existing global system of exchange.
There is, it seems to me, an absolute ethical urgency to the reality that large-scale murders will go on while we brood. I therefore hope that there will be not one drop of innocent blood. But bin Laden and his university of terrorism must cease to function as unfettered creations of religious fanaticism and technical sophistication.
They have taken actions that insure that our world will never be the same. A global village. Yes. And it is absolutely necessary that we realize it is a new one. We, also, must think anew.
From November, 2001