Centcom is drawing up plans.
They will drop snow on Congo.
It will melt without leaving a trace, at great expense.
America will pay any price to whiten darkness.
My fellow citizen cicadas rise to the tops of the vanished Twin Towers
And float back down white as ashes
To introduce a new Ice Age.
The countless generations rise from underground this afternoon
And fall like rain.
I never thought that I would live to see the towers fall again.  

– Frederick Seidel, “The Bush Administration”

I was standing in the tube station at Piccadilly Circus in London, England when I first heard news of the 9/11 attacks. I had just flown in from Toronto and met up with a friend at Gatwick airport, and together we travelled into the city to meet another friend who would be joining us on a month-long backpacking trip around Britain and Ireland. The news came from a sympathetic-sounding man in a business suit, who asked us if we were Americans. We weren’t, but he told us anyway:  what turned out to be the first plane had crashed into the twin towers in New York, and hundreds of people were dead.

My friends and I didn’t know what to do. The sightseeing we’d planned felt somehow inappropriate under the circumstances. Eventually we decided to make our way to the American Embassy, where a large pile of flags, bouquets, make-shift shrines, and other mourning paraphernalia had already begun to accumulate. My journal from that day tells me I was moved to tears by the sight of a Yankees cap someone had thrown on the pile, and that I scribbled my own little note to leave for whoever might read:  “and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well – In God We Trust.” The first part is Julian of Norwich’s theodicy as quoted by T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets, and the second, of course, is the official motto of the United States.

Competing convictions

In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot reflects on a political moment of perhaps comparable gravity to 9/11, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s decision to accede the Sudetenland to Hitler in September 1938. For Eliot, this event cast doubt on the very “validity of our civilization. We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?” It’s striking how easily these words could be applied to post-9/11 America.

I’m 32 years old, which means that I grew up after the end of history. According to Francis Fukuyama and others, the end of the Cold War and the triumph of liberal democracy signalled a final homogenizing stage in human socio-cultural development. Western ideas – of which America was the apotheosis – had proven most compelling, or so we were told, and in the increasingly global world all societies would one day organize and conduct themselves largely as we do. For people my age this seemed like a bit of a rip-off. Sure, our side had won, but many of us felt that we’d missed all the meaningful debate. Furthermore, many of us had reservations about what “our side” actually stood for. As Stanley Hauerwas put it in his pacifist response to 9/11, “what can freedom mean if the prime instance of the exercise of such freedom is to shop?”

Time for reflection

Then on Sept. 11, 2001, history abruptly restarted. Upon being confronted by enemies with such deeply held convictions, western liberal democracies might have taken time to re-examine our own. After a necessary period of mourning, 9/11 should have been an occasion for ideological humility and introspection. We should have tried to figure out in earnest depth and seriousness why anyone would go to such terrible lengths to do us harm. Please don’t get me wrong:  like King Lear, America was more sinned-against than sinning. But instead of rushing headlong back to the mall and into two intractable foreign wars, the United States should have stopped to consider that “trusting in God” at such a time might mean breaking its addiction to getting and spending and refusing to answer violence with violence. Rather than “giving thought to our ways,” as Proverbs 14:8 prudently suggests, western societies responded to 9/11 by reasserting the unequivocal superiority of our way of life and elevating to the status of virtue our refusal to change anything about ourselves – lest the terrorists should win. Had we paused for legitimate self-examination, we might have realized we’ve put too much faith in the spirochete of money and things. And maybe, just maybe, we would have realized that our love of profit is rootless and inadequate when compared to the powerfully spiritual – if severely misguided – convictions held by the terrorists.

Of course this sort of soul-searching did go on in some sectors. As Christian Bell’s analysis of the 9/11 10th anniversary memorial coverage in this issue of the CC suggests, many Christian voices have advocated “grace and peace” over violence. And only a few months after the dust from the twin towers had settled, Wendell Berry suggested that “the time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.” Ten years removed, these words seem remarkably prophetic. Almost seven years to the day after 9/11, America’s fourth largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy protection and propelled the unfolding financial crisis of 2008 past the point of no return.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 another prominent public intellectual, Jean Baudrillard, infamously suggested that the twin towers were not attacked at all but had merely collapsed under the weight of their own nihilistic capitalism. As what used to be called “the free world” sinks further and further into debt, the gap between rich and poor widens into a gaping chasm, and many of us continue living recklessly beyond our means, Baudrillard’s claim sounds less and less absurd with each passing day. Perhaps when our society’s faith in eternal increase and unending profit is finally shaken, we will learn what it truly means to put our trust in God and recognize that only by his grace shall all manner of things be well.

Michael Buma teaches at the University of Western Ontario, and is the interim editor of the Christian Courier.