Unlearned lessons of 9/11, a quarter-century later
Several weeks after Islamist terrorists hijacked four planes, wreaking havoc in lower Manhattan and at the Pentagon in the name of deranged religious convictions, I was at dinner in the papal apartment with John Paul II and three of his closest associates. The mood was somber, which was unusual at that table. The pope’s hope for a “new springtime of the human spirit” in the wake of the bloody twentieth century, which he had proclaimed at the United Nations in 1995, seemed to have been thwarted. And a country he had come to love and appreciate, the United States, had been deeply wounded. So an hour’s conversation revolved around what this all meant — a question John Paul put to me directly.
Here is what I replied, as recounted in Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II:
I said I thought it was a turning-point in world history; an example of the mystery of evil at work through the corruption of an already defective monotheism; a possible moment of moral sobering-up in the U.S.; and a very complex mess from a strategic and international-political point of view. All of this, I continued, was a moral challenge as well as a political challenge: and while the first duty of a responsible government was the security of its citizens, President Bush’s September 20 speech indicated that American military action against al-Qaeda and its Taliban facilitators would be conducted according to just-war principles and not as a matter of vendetta or revenge. It was essential for everyone to understand that what was at stake here was not simply the security of the United States but the very possibility of any world “order.” I also pointed out that Osama bin Laden was a very rich man and that it didn’t help clarify what we were all facing when it was said that terrorism was the product of poverty — the line being taken at the U.N. by Archbishop Renato Martino, the Holy See’s permanent representative.
How does that analysis stand up, twenty-five years later?
My first suggestion seems to have been borne out: 9/11 ushered in a new world disorder. What I did not foresee was that the new disorder would be made even more disorderly by inept American policy and the seeming retreat from global responsibility demanded by a vocal segment of the American people. And the latter — the new isolationism, exacerbated by social media and internet craziness — is going to make a serious address to the former — the decline of strategic and moral reasoning in American policy-making circles — even more difficult.
As for wrestling with the fact that jihadism, a form of Islam detached from reason and determined to impose a coercive Islamist regime on the world, was the primary cause of 9/11? Well, that process of reflection never really got started, despite the efforts of Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg in 2006 to suggest a serious agenda for interreligious dialogue on the question of Islam’s relationship to “the rest.” The low-comedy result of that failure was evident recently in the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s diktat (later rescinded after comprehensive ridicule) that its staff must not refer to 9/11 as “terrorist attacks” (to which the indispensable Babylon Bee responded with a D-Day photo of soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Fourth Division charging onto Utah Beach with the fake CBC headline, “American Teens Visit France”). The far more serious expression of this failure is the continued refusal of most Western foreign ministries, including the U.S. Department of State, to acknowledge that religious conviction remains a potent force in world affairs, both for ill and for good. One might have thought that 9/11 would have falsified, or at least tempered, secularist biases in the analysis of world politics. That has not happened.
As for the United States getting sobered up by 9/11, that, too, seems to have been a false hope. The tremendous national solidarity expressed on the awful day itself and in the weeks immediately following is virtually impossible to imagine today, as our public life has descended into a miasma of conspiracy theorizing, including a virulent antisemitism that, like all such eruptions of Jew-hatred and Jew-baiting, is always a sign of cultural decay.
Yet I cannot think about 9/11, twenty-five years later, without remembering something else: the passengers on United 93, who took counsel with each other and decided to risk dying as free men and women rather than certainly dying as jihadist cannon fodder — and in doing so, prevented the destruction of the U.S. Capitol. Their example ought to inspire us to do better as a civil society and a political community than we are doing at present.
