More Humanity, Less Theory

Sometime last fall, the solemn words and silent vigils faded and the discourse of Sept. 11 began, offering little pause for the tragedy. I was lulled by hollow news reports and the kitschy “9-1-1” metaphor, whose appropriateness troubled me. Its simplicity befit the attacks themselves—large, uncomplicated and unsubtle.

Although the attackers hit our financial and military capitals in order to condemn U.S. foreign policy, the attack lost its meaning in execution. For on Sept. 11, each individual symbolized an undifferentiated “America,” each a symbol of the American government. The victims’ particular lives were renounced. Further, the attackers exploited the value we give to the individual. They knew that a few localized attacks—on individuals—would bring our whole country, united, to its knees.

Despite the terrorists’ conceptual disregard for the “individual,” reality exists only for individuals. The devastation of Sept. 11 was real only to individuals; it was only experienced on the personal level. Many of us at Harvard felt the blow to the towers and heard the death knell of the attacks. Even as the frightful reports streamed in, I myself didn’t cry on Sept. 11 until I remembered the calm of the damaged St. Paul’s Church I had experienced one Sunday last spring. My memory is now disrupted—that was the blow I personally sustained.

But while my encounter with Sept. 11 was so limited, I found myself bandying about terms exhausted by their own size: words like democracy, capitalism, poverty, Islam and America. Although I took part in the troubling discourse, I grew wary of analysis that clung to these terms, and I grew silent out of fear of saying meaningless things myself.

My difficulty with language was symptomatic of greater limitations of reason. The terror itself proved every rational explanation inadequate. Our policies on Israel and the Palestinians were not themselves culpable, neither our program of economic sanctions nor our indefatigable allegiance to foreign oil. All of these causes were vapid because they were boundless—each leads into the next in a way that leaves the words that describe them faded in light of real calamity.

Nevertheless, we continue to rely on such words. We have to, motivated by the tireless question about the origin of the hatred toward the U.S. To answer questions like these, many of us turn to scholarship—for instance, to Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, who has described a narrative of Muslim bitterness provoked by a crusading Christian West. In his 1990 essay, The Roots of Muslim Rage, Lewis concludes that the U.S. and Islam represent worlds fated to clash.

The problem with Lewis’ account is what we like most: It rings with a decisive air. It is an explanation for the attacks. In truth, though, it is not a resolution. Rather, it abandons the project of resolution.

It is not just that Lewis purports cultural polarity and human intransigence. His defeatism aside, his very approach stands in the way of his project. Like any individual, Lewis cannot offer a solution because he deigns to reflect on issues no one man can surmount. No lone individual could truly understand the attack, for it was too large to address any one of us, although it confronts all of us. To create a healing discourse and work toward resolution, our approach has to accommodate the attack itself. The best any one of us could do, it seems, is to live within the bounds of the individual perspective. On Sept. 11, I lost St. Paul’s Church. Thousands of Americans lost particular people, particular memories once dear to them.

Of course, “democracy” did lose something that day—the luster of this ideal was somehow dulled, and Americans were incensed. Our government has responded in its own institutional way, stripping intelligence of its Cold War accoutrements, demanding redress between the riven CIA and FBI, and creating a new Department of Homeland Security.

But what about us? Can’t ordinary Americans engage foreign affairs? After all, the attackers of Sept. 11 conflated their victims with U.S. foreign policy. What we clearly need now is a social solution that lives up to this expectation—a sustained program for ordinary people to engage our foreign policy.

Broadly conceived, this program must be one of education and humility. In high schools and in homes, students, parents and teachers need to study history, talk through current events and refrain from broad theory. More and more, we have to watch our language and resist easy generalizations whenever they may occur. Dismissive of intellectual modesty, academia and government still suffer these pitfalls, speaking expansively, rather than narrowly and concretely. As individual Americans, we have the opportunity—if not the obligation—to foster a new paradigm whereby scholars and policymakers take after a public that respects the complexity of the issues and approaches them with limited goals. Collectively, we should set the standard, encouraging further questioning, rather than accepting easy appeasement through comfortable theories.

Christine A. Telyan ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House.