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 few years
back, the deconstructionist literary critic Stanley Fish published
a controversial and influential book entitled There's No Such
Thing as Free Speech …and It's a Good Thing Too. In the
days since September 11, numerous public figures have been made
painfully aware that, while we may still be free to speak, Americans
are taking public statements much more seriously than they have
in many years. In an episode of Politically Incorrect, the
host, Bill Maher, opined smugly that the terrorists' willingness
to die made them courageous, while Americans who lob cruise missiles
should be branded as cowards. Maher's statements engendered an angry
public response, and after major advertisers pulled ads from the
show, he apologized. The head of Comedy Central has said, "Irony
is dead for now."
We need not adopt Fish's radical position to see that — on
important matters, and especially in times of national crisis —
speech without costs or consequences does not exist. While some
worry about censorship, the mood in the country actually indicates
a high level of seriousness about who and what we are, and how we
are to describe ourselves, our allies, and our opponents. The depth
of the divide between the mainstream West and the proponents of
radical Islamic jihad is dramatically evident in the language each
uses to describe the suicide hijackers. The devotees of bin Laden's
jihad celebrate their colleagues as heroes, even martyrs. Our politicians
characterize them as evil or at best mad. In the most memorable
line — predictably, one the press has overlooked — from
his speech before Congress, President Bush described the terrorists
as "abandoning every value except the will to power,"
thus invoking Nietzsche and nihilism. Concurring with Bush is Christopher
Hitchens, who says that the attackers are not so much "terrorists
as nihilists at war with… modernity… pluralism and toleration."
So which are they? Cowards, courageous martyrs, or nihilists? And
how ought we to think about these heavily charged words?
Given the peculiar nature of the terrorist attacks — the massive
loss of life caused by the suicide bombers, and the lives lost trying
either to fight the terrorists or to save the lives of the injured
— it's hardly surprising that the language of courage has taken
center stage. There is no question that Americans, who not long
ago found it difficult to identify public heroes, have found unmistakable
courage and heroism in the stories of those who faced death bravely
and willingly sacrificed their lives for others on September 11.
But what are we to make of the terrorists? Aren't they willing to
face death — even to bring it on themselves — for the
sake of a cause they deem just and holy? Maher's proclamations echo
Susan Sontag's New Yorker diatribe against calling the terrorists
cowards. She writes, "If the word 'cowardly' is to be used,
it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the
range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to
die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage
(a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators
of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." Is this right?
The terrorists certainly don't fit our ordinary image of cowards
as cowering in the face of danger. But does their ability to overcome
fear make them brave?
While her juxtaposition of "neutral" and "virtue"
in describing courage creates an oxymoron evidently unique to her,
Sontag shares with many others the failure to see that there exists,
beyond courage and cowardice, a third possibility: rashness or boldness.
So far as I can tell, only Andrew Sullivan, in an online response
to Sontag, has seen that courage and cowardice are not the only
descriptive options for the terrorists' actions. In what is surely
as much a rhetorical question as a taunt, Sullivan asks Sontag:
"Read your Aristotle lately?" He then explains that courage
is bravery in the service of what is good and noble, and so is to
be distinguished, not just from cowardice, but also from rashness
or fanaticism.
Current discussions indicate that, while we have little problem
differentiating between cowardice and courage, we often confuse
boldness with courage. Courage differs from boldness in that
it serves a just or noble end. Those who celebrate boldness have
a vision of virtue as raw power — liberated from prudence and
justice, and exhibited especially in acts of destruction.
But bin Laden and his followers are not engaging in what many commentators
have called "senseless acts" of destruction. They have
a very specific target and goal in mind. They see themselves as
dying for a noble cause, a just cause. They may be, as Hitchens
urges, at war with modernity and pluralism — but this does
not, in itself, make them nihilists. Were they straightforwardly
nihilistic, they would be much easier to combat and would doubtless
attract fewer adherents. Bin Laden does not hesitate to justify
violent retaliation against his American "oppressors,"
who have "fallen victim to Jewish Zionist blackmail" and
whose presence in Saudi Arabia has tainted the "land of the
two holy mosques" at Mecca and Medina. He dismisses the liberal,
western explanation of the increased popularity of his movement
as resulting from economic deprivation. (And the involvement of
educated, affluent individuals in the September 11 atrocities certainly
contradicts liberal expectations.) The "awakening," bin
Laden insists, is a blessing of Allah.
The dispute over how to describe these acts — over whether
to call them courageous — hinges on judgments about the goals
or ends in service of which their perpetrators readily offer their
lives, and about the specific means through which they pursue their
goals. When, in interviews, bin Laden has been asked to account
for ends and means, he has responded with a theology that is a strange
and incoherent mixture of religious absolutism, moral relativism,
and divine determinism — a mixture that does indeed court nihilism.
There is, on the one hand, crystalline clarity about the division
between the faithful and the unfaithful — and, on the other,
nihilistic-sounding assertions about the absence of "morals…
in today's wars." When asked about suicide bombers and the
many Muslims killed in terrorist attacks, bin Laden invokes a thoroughgoing
theological determinism that risks rendering human judgments about
good and evil entirely pointless.
In our attempts to come to terms with what Condoleezza Rice has
called the "transforming" atrocities of September 11,
we need more than improved international intelligence, diplomacy,
and military preparedness for what we hope will be a prudent and
just response. We also need to reflect on the ends or goals to which
are committed as a people. If courage is bravery in the service
of noble ends, then we need to be clear about our ends. For what
goods — beyond safety and comfort — do we live, and are
we willing to die? We do a disservice to the memories of the heroic
and courageous acts at Ground Zero in New York, and in the air above
Pennsylvania, if we fail to answer that question.
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