Me:
I'm sorry to hear about the funerals - I hope that things are slowly
returning back to normal for you.
Jon:
Anyway, Thomas Friedman's column in today's NYTimes was really incredible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/02/opinion/02FRIE.html
An excerpt:
"Their constant refrain is that America is a country with wealth and power
but "no values." The Islamic terrorists think our wealth and power is
unrelated to anything in the soul of this country ? that we are basically a
godless nation, indeed the enemies of God. And if you are an enemy of God
you
deserve to die. These terrorists believe that wealth and power can be
achieved only by giving up your values, because they look at places such as
Saudi Arabia and see that many of the wealthy and powerful there lead lives
disconnected from their faith.
Of course, what this view of America completely misses is that American
power
and wealth flow directly from a deep spiritual source ? a spirit of respect
for the individual, a spirit of tolerance for differences of faith or
politics, a respect for freedom of thought as the necessary foundation for
all creativity and a spirit of unity that encompasses all kinds of
differences. Only a society with a deep spiritual energy, that welcomes
immigrants and worships freedom, could constantly renew itself and its
sources of power and wealth.
Which is why the terrorists can hijack Boeing planes, but in the
spiritless,
monolithic societies they want to build, they could never produce them. The
terrorists can exploit the U.S.- made Internet, but in their suffocated
world
of one God, one truth, one way, one leader, they could never invent it. "
If anyone needs the full text, let me know.
Jon
Me again:
I should say, before anything else, that Friedman was a professor of mine,
we got along very well, and I think he's a great guy, so I am naturally
predisposed to praise his work. Although, on the other hand, I should add
that I spent most of the class disagreeing with him about a lot of what he
said :-)
Friedman hits upon a fascinating point here, one that a stunning number of
people - the terrorists among them - are somehow unable to understand. The
wealth and power that have accrued to the United States in particular, and
the Western countries in general, is not accidental. To pick the case of
the United States, it was, in a very real sense, the product of choices.
It leads to an essential truth about what happens to countries (and people)
- many good things go together. Not _all_ of them do, but many of them do.
In the particular case of the United States, it did many things that were
good and worthwhile in and of themselves - that is, its government
protected freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, and protected private
property in general, allowing the establishment of free and efficient
markets. Equally important, and here the US is virtually unique, rivaled
only by Canada, the United States allowed a huge number of immigrants to
flow into the country. This, again, was a good thing in and of itself.
Any of these policies should have been supported _even if they had no other
positive consequences_. But they did have a positive consequence. That
consequence was wealth and power such as no society in human history has
ever possessed. _These things were not an accident_. Nor are they morally
neutral. Wealth and power are not necessarily signs of virtue - but
virtuous behavior, we have seen, produces them.
There is a corollary here to domestic politics - in particular, welfare
reform. For a generation people concerned about poverty fought against the
stigmatization of poverty, arguing that the poor were not responsible for
their condition. And, for msot of my lifetime, conservatives fought
against that characterization, arguing that the root of morality was
personal responsibility, and that the poor were poor in large part because
of their own behavior, not because of the pressures imposed upon them by
society. The conservatives won, and the result was the welfare reform bill
signed by Bill Clinton. The result of that is clear - I refer anyone
interested to Mickey Kaus's website, www.kausfiles.com, for a series of
articles describing its success. When the poor were placed in a position
where they were told that they _were_ responsible for their own destiny, a
huge proportion of them soon became no longer poor. The success of welfare
reform is one of teh great triumphs of modern social policy. It has been
so successful, in fact, that one of the two Clinton Administration
officials who resigned in protest of the bill has now publicly admitted
that he was wrong and that the policy has been a smashing success. The
lesson here is simple - when you ask something of people, they often find
themselves capable of doing it. When you relieve people of responsibility
for their own fate, they fail to take action. Moral, like physical,
virtue, atrophies when it is not used. The same is true of countries.
Countries that demand nothing of themselves - that blame outside
opporessors for their fate _even when there is truth to that accusation_
soon find themselves in a worse situation. Those that refuse to do so soon
improve their place. Contrast South Korea and Singapore with almost any
country in Africa, for example. In the 1960s South Korea had a per capita
GNP comparable to that of Africa. That isn't true anymore, because the
people and government of South Korea _made a choice_. And that choice was
the right one.
There is something astonishing in seeing so many members of the left argue
that the terrorists, in a sense, have a point. I expected it from Jerry
Falwell, but what he dislikes about our society is what the terrorists
dislike about us. But the terrorists hate feminism, they hate
homosexuality and those who accept it, they hate secular society, they hate
freedom in every sense of the word. We actually have a quote from Mohammed
Atta who said that he hated the fact that he could go anywhere in the
United States without being confined - he despised the very freedom that
defines us. I can understand why Jerry Falwell would say that these things
brought about the attack upon us. He's right. It's just that these things
are worth defending. What I do not understand is people who are,
supposedly, in favor of feminism, and secularism, and the acceptance of
homosexuality, and freedom of speech and the press, saying that the
critique of the United States expressed by those who turned lower Manhattan
into a charnel house has some validity.
To get back to my main point - Friedman is exactly right. The terrorists
accuse us of having no values, when in fact what they hate about us are
precisely our values that are worth defending - worth dying for, in the
end. Salman Rushdie wrote about this very well in today's Washington Post,
in an article which I recommend to everyone. The United States is the most
religious industrialised country in the world, it has the highest rate of
charitable giving, volunteer work, and participation in public-service
organizations. This is not a clash of those with values (the terrorists)
against those without them (us). It is, in fact, a clash between worthy
values and evil ones. Our values - secularism, freedom, the Open Society
(as Karl Popper described half a century ago), and tolerance, are
antithetical to those of the terrorists, and it is our values, not our
wealth and not our power, that have been attacked. It is precisely because
our values are good, and worth defending, that we shall not, and must not,
be defeated.
Gautam Mukunda
