It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.
~Mark Twain, Christmas greeting, 1890
The Blog
September 11, 2011
Yesterday my daughter asked, “Where does gravity come from?” She is two and a half years old. I could say many things on this subject—most of which she could not possibly understand—but the deep and honest answer is “I don’t know.”
What if I had said, “Gravity comes from God”? That would be merely to stifle her intelligence—and to teach her to stifle it. What if I told her, “Gravity is God’s way of dragging people to hell, where they burn in fire. And you will burn there forever if you doubt that God exists”? No Christian or Muslim can offer a compelling reason why I shouldn’t say such a thing—or something morally equivalent—and yet this would be nothing less than the emotional and intellectual abuse of a child. In fact, I have heard from thousands of people who were oppressed this way, from the moment they could speak, by the terrifying ignorance and fanaticism of their parents.
Ten years have now passed since many of us first felt the jolt of history—when the second plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We knew from that moment that things can go terribly wrong in our world—not because life is unfair, or moral progress impossible, but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions of our ignorant ancestors. The worst of these ideas continue to thrive—and are still imparted, in their purest form, to children.
What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them—for they are badly posed—but we can live our answers all the same. At a minimum, we must create the conditions for human flourishing in this life—the only life of which we can be certain. That means we should not terrify our children with thoughts of hell, or poison them with hatred for infidels. We should not teach our sons to consider women their future property, or convince our daughters that they are property even now. And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with magic and will end with bloody magic—perhaps soon, in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest. One must be religious to fail the young so abysmally—to derange them with fear, bigotry, and superstition even as their minds are forming—and one cannot be a serious Christian, Muslim, or Jew without doing so in some measure.
Such sins against reason and compassion do not represent the totality of religion, of course—but they lie at its core. As for the rest—charity, community, ritual, and the contemplative life—we need not take anything on faith to embrace these goods. And it is one of the most damaging canards of religion to insist that we must.
People of faith recoil from observations like these. They reflexively point to all the good that has been done in the name of God and to the millions of devout men and women, even within conservative Muslim societies, who do no harm to anyone. And they insist that people at every point on the spectrum of belief and unbelief commit atrocities from time to time. This is all true, of course, and truly irrelevant. The groves of faith are now ringed by a forest of non sequiturs.
Whatever else may be wrong with our world, it remains a fact that some of the most terrifying instances of human conflict and stupidity would be unthinkable without religion. And the other ideologies that inspire people to behave like monsters—Stalinism, fascism, etc.—are dangerous precisely because they so resemble religions. Sacrifice for the Dear Leader, however secular, is an act of cultic conformity and worship. Whenever human obsession is channeled in these ways, we can see the ancient framework upon which every religion was built. In our ignorance, fear, and craving for order, we created the gods. And ignorance, fear, and craving keep them with us.
What defenders of religion cannot say is that anyone has ever gone berserk, or that a society ever failed, because people became too reasonable, intellectually honest, or unwilling to be duped by the dogmatism of their neighbors. This skeptical attitude, born of equal parts care and curiosity, is all that “atheists” recommend—and it is typical of nearly every intellectual pursuit apart from theology. Only on the subject of God can smart people still imagine that they reap the fruits of human intelligence even as they plow them under.
Ten years have passed since a group of mostly educated and middle-class men decided to obliterate themselves, along with three thousand innocents, to gain entrance to an imaginary Paradise. This problem was always deeper than the threat of terrorism—and our waging an interminable “war on terror” is no answer to it. Yes, we must destroy al Qaeda. But humanity has a larger project—to become sane. If September 11, 2001, should have taught us anything, it is that we must find honest consolation in our capacity for love, creativity, and understanding. This remains possible. It is also necessary. And the alternatives are bleak.
September 9, 2011
‘I Always Thought That We Did It A Little Bit Wrong’
Alec Baldwin Actor
A Conversation On 9/11
The 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks is in just three days. Much has happened in this country since that Tuesday morning in 2001. Tonight (Thursday), I will moderate a discussion about the political and cultural after-effects of 9/11 for New York Public Theatre’s Public Forum program. The evening will offer a reading of author Richard Nelson’s new play, Sweet and Sad, as well as insights from radio host and author Kurt Andersen, journalist and author Carl Bernstein and the playwright.
The attacks of 2001 remain unshakably frustrating for me. The US government’s response to these events has seemed grossly insufficient and perhaps even negligent in terms of this country’s long-term interests. I keep asking myself why the group responsible for 9/11 committed these acts. What did/does the US and its policies represent to these people? Beyond some vague conception of jihad and other fundamentalist Muslim madness that has been introduced to Americans — and that has been kept fresh in our minds for a decade now — I often think, “What are the changes we need to be making here at home in addition to the changes we seek to effect elsewhere in the world?”
I refer to real changes; changes in the demands we make as Americans on energy supply, infrastructure, natural resources, the environment and our own health in order to do what Americans have grown to expect as their birthright: to be able to go anywhere, do anything, buy anything and as much of it as they want, whenever they want.
A birthright that is now slipping away — and quickly.
Is the current, rapid erosion of our standard of living in part the result of our leaders’ reactions to 9/11? Did a trillion dollars worth of wars with no tax hikes, in addition to a corrupt, usurious real estate lending market, Europe’s financial collapse, China’s currency hegemony and their invulnerability to other common market imperatives (e.g., little to no environmental regulation) and a spate of fierce natural disasters collectively bring us to this brink?
Did our response to the 9/11 attacks need to lean so heavily on attacking others? 10 years ago, only a small percentage of this country’s federal intelligence community spoke any of the languages of the Muslim world. Has our ability to understand that region, not just linguistically, but culturally and politically, improved? These factors and others like them matter, particularly in light of the Arab Spring and the recent widespread upheaval in that region.
But perhaps most important of all is the question: has American Narcissism changed? By that I mean, how the US has spent so much of the post-Word War II period believing we are always the dominant actor in world affairs and that others must always react the way we need them to.
This evening, I want to moderate a program that touches on the shared horror and grief of September 11th, to honor the lives lost and to celebrate the heroism and integrity of so many Americans in response to that tragedy. But I also want to talk about what we have learned: that 9/11 is a reminder about how, after that day, America is not the same and never will be. I want to talk about how we need to recognize that hard fact before it is truly possible to move forward.
As unimaginable and cowardly as the 9/11 attacks were, it’s important to ask ourselves what we must learn from them. Not just about terrorism, but about our country and ourselves as well.