The Assault on Civilization by David Kelley

[Matthew Gaylor]

http://www.objectivistcenter.org/pubs/dk_assault_on_civilization.asp


The Assault on Civilization

by David Kelley, Executive Director

Most of us still find it impossible to grasp the destruction of the 
World Trade Center. It was real, we saw it, but it does not belong in 
any reality we can understand. We saw the airliners, full of people 
who might have been us, streak incomprehensibly toward the walls of 
steel and glass. We saw them morph into fireballs that trapped 
thousands of people, working at their desks on a routine morning, in 
an inferno that killed most of them. We saw the shimmering towers 
collapse, and the towers of volcanic smoke that rose to take their 
place in the New York skyline. The images have been imprinted on our 
minds, never to be forgotten, but they will not compute.

In that sense, the terrorists succeeded. They have rocked our sense 
of reality. They have confronted us with a horror we could not have 
imagined, and may never assimilate. But they have also revealed, for 
everyone to see, the real nature of their cause. The assault is being 
described as an act of war against America, and it is. But unlike the 
Pentagon, the World Trade Center had no military significance. Unlike 
the White House--which the fourth, unsuccessful plane had apparently 
targeted--it had no political significance for U.S. policy in the 
Middle East, or anywhere else. The attack on the twin towers cannot 
be seen as an effort, even a twisted effort, to redress the 
grievances of people who feel dispossessed. It was an act of sheer 
destruction, for the sake of destruction.

With rare unity, Americans have grasped that this was an assault on 
their values, and it was. The buildings were obviously chosen as 
symbolic targets. But the values are not uniquely American, or even 
uniquely Western. They are the values of civilized life anywhere. 
This was an assault on civilization as such.

When it was built in 1973, the World Trade Center was an engineering 
marvel, innovative in structural design and in the construction 
techniques invented to erect the towers on that site. Though larger, 
taller structures have since been erected, New Yorkers were justly 
proud of these towering symbols of technical, industrial audacity.

The buildings' tenants were a cross-section of a productive economy: 
insurance companies, engineers, banks and investment houses, law 
firms, educators, employment agencies, construction companies, travel 
agencies. The tenants included great names in American 
finance--Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers. They 
included Empire Health Choice, which provides health insurance and 
medical services to millions of people in New York State. Dow Jones, 
one of the world's great publishing companies, had offices in the 
South Tower. The top floors of the North Tower housed the 
transmitting facilities for the major broadcasters in New York. Fuji 
Bank of Japan occupied three floors, and scores of businesses from 
other countries had offices in the building. Befitting its name and 
the intent of the builders, it was a crossroads of international 
commerce, a symbol not only of wealth but of trade as the civilized 
mode of human interaction.

"World trade means world peace," said the chief architect, Minoru 
Yamasaki. "The World Trade Center buildings in New York had a bigger 
purpose than just to provide room for tenants. The World Trade Center 
is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace. 
The World 
Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a 
representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual 
dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through 
cooperation, his ability to find greatness."

These towers became landmark of the skyline of New York City, which 
has always been a powerful symbol in its own right, a beacon of 
freedom and opportunity. From the Statue of Liberty to the Empire 
State Building, that skyline was forged from the melting pot where 
the best in man is refined from the accidents of race and 
nationality. In Ayn Rand's Fountainhead, the famous novel of a New 
York architect, one character says that when he sees the city, "I 
feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw 
myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my 
body." Many of us wished we could have done just that when we saw the 
towers finally crumple and collapse.

Technology, achievement, trade, law, peace, freedom-these were the 
values under attack. They are not American values but human values, 
the values of civilized life.

Though it is not yet known for certain which particular terrorist 
band committed the atrocity, we have every reason to believe they 
sprang from a fanatical subculture of Islamic fundamentalism. But our 
enemy is not Islam, which created one of the world's great 
civilizations, nor is it the Arab or Iranian or Afghani peoples. Our 
enemy is the nihilism of this subculture.

The terrorist leaders claim to speak for Palestinians. But the 
grievances of that people, even if legitimate, cannot explain the 
motivation for this act, much less justify it. The terrorists claim 
to speak for the victims of Western imperialism. But any literal 
imperialism is a thing of the past, long since redressed by the 
wealth that Europe and America have showered on these countries. It 
is clearly not the military or political power but the cultural power 
of the West that they resent.

What makes them denounce America as the great Satan is nothing as 
superficial as Coca-Cola or blue jeans. It is our secular culture of 
freedom, reason, and the pursuit of happiness. They hate our 
individualism; what they want is an authoritarian society where 
thought and behavior are controlled by true believers. They hate 
capitalism as a system of trade, production, innovation, and 
progress; what they want is a return to a primitive mode of existence 
from which these "materialist" aspirations have been banished. They 
hate the political system of individual rights, the rule of law, and 
secular government; what they want is a tribal society ruled by 
command.

The nihilist subculture is a worldwide phenomenon. We see it in the 
Japanese Aum Shinrikyo sect that released poison gas in the Tokyo 
subways. We see it in the hate-filled eyes of Christian killers in 
Northern Ireland. We see it in the eco-terrorists who spike trees and 
blow up electrical transmission towers. We see it in less murderous 
forms in the anti-globalization protesters who want to stifle 
international trade. We see it in the theorists of primitivism from 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Unabomber.

Civilization has always attracted parasites who wanted to steal 
wealth from those who produce it. But this phenomenon is different. 
The nihilists do not seek wealth for themselves. They want to destroy 
the wealth of others. They do not seek freedom from domination. They 
want to abolish freedom. They do not seek a place at the table of 
world commerce. They want to smash the table. They do not seek a 
better life. They glory in death. They represent the worst form of 
envy, the most vicious form of human evil. They hate us not for our 
sins but for our virtues, and they will not be appeased.

The United States and its allies must cease the policy of trying to 
counter terrorism by negotiation. Negotiation is an exercise of 
reason that civilized people use to resolve their differences. We are 
not dealing with civilized people. We must cease the policy of 
excusing their violence by their poverty and trying to buy them off 
with subsidies. We are not dealing with people who seek such gain. We 
must declare war on the terrorists and use whatever force it takes to 
render them incapable of posing any further threat. In the early 
1800s, Thomas Jefferson sent the United States navy to rid the 
Barbary coast of pirates. We urge President Bush and the Congress to 
undertake a similar campaign not merely against the perpetrators of 
this outrage but against every nest of terrorists who have declared 
themselves, by the death and destruction they have wrought, to be 
enemies of mankind.

In doing so, we will be acting in our own self-defense, with the 
moral authority of those who have been attacked. But we should 
understand and declare to the world that we are acting to preserve a 
world order on which civilized values depend, and civilized peoples 
everywhere must join in this cause.

* * *

) 2001 The Objectivist Center
Formerly the Institute for Objectivist Studies
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