• Sept.17, 2001: Forum - "Aftershock: coming to grips with terrorism in America"
•Sept. 24, 2001: Center for Humanities and the Arts Forum - "Humanistic values in a time of crisis"
• Oct. 8, 2001: International Forum: Understanding Terrorism - "Afghani, Indian and Pakistani Perspectives"
• Oct. 15, 2001: Forum - "International Students Speak about the War on Terrorism."
• Nov. 14, 2001: Cynthia Tucker, the editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, delivers the 24th Annual Ralph McGill Lecture - "The role of the press in the post-September 11 world"
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Betty Jean Craige Director of the Center for Humanities and Arts University Professor of Comparative Literature x |
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Bob Burton Associate Professor of Philosophy |
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Nancy Felson Professor of classics |
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Alan Godlas Department of Religion, associate professor of religion |
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Eve Troutt Powell Assistant Professor of History  x |
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xMonday, Sept. 24, 2001:
"HUMANISTIC VALUES IN A TIME OF CRISIS":
Forum Hosted by UGA's Center for Humanities and Arts
UGA's Center for Humanities and Arts sponsored a forum on "Humanistic Values in a Time of Crisis." Betty Jean Craige, director of CHA, moderated the discussion. Panelists included Bob Burton (Philosophy), Nancy Felson (Classics), Alan Godlas (Religion) and Eve Troutt Powell (History). The forum was held in the UGA Chapel.
Betty Jean Craige
Director of the Center for Humanities and Arts
Six thousand of our fellow citizens have been killed in the terrorist attacks on the United States. We Americans have experienced a unique solidarity with one another. We have recognized that we live in a strong, resistant country full of generous and heroic citizens eager to help one another survive the tragedy.
Last Monday, the Center for International Trade and Security hosted a forum called "Aftershock: Coming To Grips With Terrorism In America," which examined the implications for the future of international relationships. Today the Center for Humanities is hosting this forum entitled "Humanistic Values In a Time Of Crisis." We will examine the values that Americans will express in our response to the attack.
We are in a time of crisis. Our patriotism calls upon us to defend what we hold most dear, which is our country. But the particular circumstances of these 21st century assaults make retaliation difficult. The enemy is not a state, but a network of fanatics residing in many different regions in the world. They are willing to give their lives to bring horror to American citizens. These circumstances will test our soul. We must not let the fear of terrorists spoil the appreciation we have worked so hard to develop for the diverse cultures that compose our American society. Nor must we allow our fears to spoil the transnational relationships we have worked so hard to build among the diverse cultures of our global society. Our American values will be made known by our behavior and our actions in the coming years as we respond to the terrorist challenge. Let us do all we can in our teaching, learning, and our communication with each other to influence our political leaders in good ways and to keep them aware of those good values that we know to be the foundation of our nation. Now I would like to introduce our panelists. They are, in alphabetical order: professor Bob Burton, of the department of Philosophy; professor Nancy Felson, of the department of Classics; professor Alan Godlas, of the department of Religion; and professor Eve Trout Powell, of the department of History. Each will speak for five minutes, and then we would like to talk with you all to discuss the issues.
Bob Burton
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Thank you, Betty Jean, for organizing this forum. You have asked us to consider the question, “What values will Americans express in response to the horrendous attacks of September the 11th?” We have already seen or heard some of them. People who realized that they were about to die and were able to phone their loved ones, did so, and told them that they loved them. People whose loved ones had disappeared with the collapse of the two towers were seen with pictures frantically asking if anyone had seen them. This image of people with nothing but a picture and a hope that refuses to die is an image that has been familiar for decades in the Middle East, in the Balkans, and in Latin America. But this was happening in New York City and in our nations capital.
We saw men and women of the Fire and Police Departments give their lives in the attempt to save others, and we saw volunteers, from near and far, doing what they could in the rescue effort. There has been an extraordinary expression of compassion for the victims and their families. There have been long lines of blood donors and unprecedented giving to the Red Cross.
There have also been expressions of rage and calls for indiscriminate retribution. The rage is natural and probably unavoidable, but we can and must resist the urge to indulge in indiscriminate retribution; we must not become terrorists ourselves.
The symbol of the University of Georgia is the arch. The three pillars of the arch are wisdom, justice, and moderation. Anyone who has read Plato’s Republic will recognize these three moral virtues and readily supply the one that is missing, namely, courage. The motto of the University may be translated as follows: “to teach and to inquire into the causes of things.” This forum, the one held last week, and the one scheduled for next Monday entitled “Understanding Terrorism: Afghani, Indian, and Pakistani Perspectives” are all expressions of our motto “to teach and to inquire into the causes of things.” What are the causes of terrorism, and what are the causes of these particular acts? We think we know what some of them are. There is a huge gap between those like ourselves who have so much and those who have so little. Many resent and perhaps even envy us for our standard of living and the many freedoms that we take for granted. Many resent and perhaps even envy us for our superpower status and our attempts to act as benevolent, international police, which all too often appear to be self-serving. I shall not attempt to distinguish the many forms of injustice, whether real or imagined, that are at issue. Religious bigotry is certainly another factor. But why would an apparently rational adult spend years planning and training to become a suicide pilot bent on destroying thousands of innocent people? I think that we do not yet know the answer.
It will require wisdom, justice, moderation, and courage if we are to win the war that has been declared against terrorism. We are determined to bring to justice those responsible for the horrifying destruction of September the 11th. But we must inquire into the causes of terrorism and find acceptable ways to eliminate them, if we are to win the war.
Nancy Felson
Professor of classics
Thucydides, the brilliant fifth century B.C. Athenian historian, incisively analyzed the rise of Athens as a super-power in the ancient Mediterranean world. Athens had liberated Greece from the Persian menace. At the height of her prestige, Athens headed a confederate of Greek city-states, the Delian League, eventually consisting of 200 city-states, who collaborated in opposing the Persians. Once the treasury of the League got transferred from Delos to Athens, its members became increasingly antagonistic to Athens, whose growing arrogance toward them and whose belief in 'might makes right' are reflected in the speeches that Thucydides partially invents to explain what led up to the war with Sparta and to Athens' eventual decline. The speeches of Athenian politicians, including Pericles, sound remarkably like some of the more militaristic war-mongering we hear on tv as a response to the events of September 11th. One example: "the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must." (5.89).
A staunch democracy in her internal affairs, Athens in her foreign policy comes to behave as an arrogant and dictatorial force. Corcyra and Corinth, Mytilene, Potidaea and the island of Melos, all come to despise her, and Athens takes their opposition as an act of rebellion, punishable by massacre and enslavement. In her democratic assembly, the people vote in final solutions, and these actions, as Thucydides presents them, invoke a war that Sparta finally wins. Before it ends, as the historian writes, brutality has become the custom. A devastating plague to which Pericles himself succumbs contributes to Athenian defeat. (There is no evidence that any of her opponents is engaged in biological warfare.) The defeated Athens loses her primacy.
These momentous events of 2500 years ago do not offer exact parallels, by any means, to what we experienced as a nation on September 11, 2001, nor do they predict what lies ahead for us. But some principles about power and arrogance, about reactive rage, about hypocrisy, about cycles of violence, perhaps even about mediation and moderation, may illuminate the issues of our day.
As in the third play of Aeschylus' famous trilogy, the Oresteia, staged in 458 at the height of Athens' glory, only surpassing wisdom, symbolized by the goddess Athena, patron of ancient Athens, can stave off the impasse between Apollo and the goddesses of vengeance, the Furies, at the first lawcase in an ancient Greek text. The first step the goddess takes toward conflict resolution, as she attempts to incorporate the Furies into a larger world order is ... to look upon them face to face. The youthful Apollo had found them repellent: his rhetoric is a rhetoric of domination, self-justification, and zero-sum thinking (If I'm right, you're wrong). Whereas Apollo, entrenched in his own perspective and ideology, denounced the Furies and could not take their views into account, the wise Athena decided to hear them out.
Aeschylus shows how wisdom and compassion can (ideally) repair psychological damage, epitomized by the Furies. In the fictive context of an Athenian drama, at a moment of optimism about the triumph of reason, Athena's triumphant vision of reconciliation sets the tone for Athenian democracy, and the third play ends with a paean to this new just state.
We today are faced with an extremism that has grown out of hatred, envy, resentment, and outrage--at US foreign policy, lifestyle, eminence, arrogance, belligerence (e.g., in the Gulf War). We are only beginning to fathom the breadth and depth of these antagonistic responses, and to explore their causes. In these uncertain times, many of us feel that the line a terrorist has crossed makes it impossible for him to be reached by reason; certainly, as long as rage seethes, reason can not get through. But in our soul-searching for what we can do at UGA, in Athens, and in the nation, promoting dialogue with those who severely criticize our life-style, our foreign policies, our attitudes would be a step toward realigning our practices with other nations with our democratic principles. We need to be inclusive and dialogic as we interact with nations of the world; we need to build our long-term responses to terrorism on an understanding of its root causes; we need to exercise influence wherever we can, with a focus on action and on hearing opinions and judgments that may be repellent to us. Listening to one another, in open dialogue, is far better than enduring another September 11th.
Alan Godlas
Department of Religion, associate professor of religion
At the outset, I want to emphasize a point agreed upon by scholars of Islam and Muslims, that the attack on the World Trade Center was an act of mass murder; and that that act, in particular, and and terrorism, in general, is condemned in Islam. Like the bombers of abortion clinics, people who distort Christian teaching to achieve their ends, militant Muslims extremist mobilize dissaffected youths by twisting Islamic principles.
So since Islam is merely the pretext for terrorist actions, what are the real causes of terrorism? I will present what Ramadam Abdullah [Shallah] (the head of a terroristic organization, Palestine Islamic Jihad) said when he spoke here at UGA (at the "Islam and the West" Conference in 1995) before his terrorist connections were known. Abdullah pointed to four root causes, four forms of injustice.
One form of injustice that Abdallah mentioned is caused by the West’s double standard regarding global democracy. We preach democracy, but we do not practice it in the international political arena. Our government does not act like a participating member in an international democracy. Internationally, we do what we want, irrespective of whether or not a majority of countries support us. As Ramadan Abdullah himself said, "This kind of double standard is a big problem…. Because when we think of the global village, I don’t think it would be rational to ignore the rights of one fifth of this global village [which is the number of Muslims in the world]."
A second form of injustice noted by the Ramadan Abdulla is that which is caused by the pseudo-, secularism of regimes in the Arab and Muslim world; regimes that are economically, militarily, or otherwise propped up by the United States. As Abdulla stated, "The secularism in the Arab world is not the same as secularism in the West. It is a form of secularism [in which] any objective signs or aspects of [real] life in the secular society of the West [are] taken out. [It is] a secularism without democracy, a secularism without freedom, a secularism without justice, a secularism without any system of check[s] and balance[s]. This form [of so-called secularism] actually is alien even to the …secularism existent in the West. So this is a major obstacle, the state of repression [of basic freedoms in the name of secularism] in the Muslim world…. The elitist leadership over there [tries] to maintain the status quo, regardless of the needs of the people for economic participation, economic justice, and freedom of speech. None of these things are allowed." Since without the support of the US such pseudo-secular regimes would not survive, Abdallah regarded the US as being just as guilty of the injustices as the various dictators whom we support.
Citing the French economist, Michel Albert [Capitalism vs. Capitalism], Abdallah pointed to a third form of injustice, which to him is caused by the American form of capitalism, since it perpetuates injustices by maximizing short term profit at all costs. One result of this is that any economic competition from any other nations must be smashed. For Abdullah, the American model of capitalism is a cut-throat, takes-no-prisoners form of capitalism. American capitalism necessitates, as Abdallah put it, "the maximization of profit, … the maximization of pleasure, … the maximization of enjoyment. It is the character of the superman. If [this superman feels] that the maximization of [his] gain is threatened with any level of minimization, he has to fight."
A fourth cause of terrorism, a fourth injustice asserted by Ramadan Abdullah, is that the US continues to support depriving the Palestinians of their right of self-determination, the right to their own state. Abdullah stated the following: "Every student of Middle Eastern studies, when [he or she] opens up any textbook about the Middle East, will find something called Palestine prior to 1948; and when we pass that date in pages of the textbook, we will loose that name on the map…. Where is Palestine? It has already gone and disappeared. The attempt to answer this question was sometimes by guns, [by] United Nations resolutions that were never [given]... the chance to be [implemented], by conflict, bloodshed, everything. Because the reason for any kind of atrocities, or any kind of resistance, or any kind of bloodshed [is that] there is a nation here [whose existence was] at one time denied by somebody else." Abdallah continued by quoting Professor Edward Said, a prominent Palestine American professor of Comparative Literature. ‘"’What Hamas is doing in Palestine or in the Gaza Strip is legitimate… because [the Palestinians have been given] nothing in terms of their rights or the right of [self-] determination." ‘ And then, resumed Abdallah, "[So] it is better to concentrate on the reasons behind any kind of violence. This is the way to solve the problem. Look for the reasons for the problem, not the outcome or the consequence of the problem, [which is terrorism]. The root of the problem is that there is a kind of injustice."
For another angle let us see how a prominent Jewish-American thinker, Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of journal Tikkun, sees the problem. Lerner tells us that we should look beyond the perpetrators and instead focus on the role that our own lifestyles and manner of treating others plays in creating fertile ground for violence to germinate in.
"The narrow focus on the perpetrators allows us to avoid dealing with the underlying issues. When violence is so prevalent on the planet, it is too easy to talk simply of deranged minds. We need to ask ourselves, what is it in the way we’re living? And in the way that we are organizing our societies and treating each other that makes violence so plausible to so many people."
Also, Lerner critically questions our immediate need to react violently, asserting that such a need derives from our blindness to the spiritual dimension of our fellow human beings. "Any why is it that our immediate response to violence is to use violence ourselves--thus reenforcing the cycle of violence in the world. We, in the spiritual world will see the root problem here as a growing global incapacity to recognize the spirit of God in each other-- what we call the sanctity of each human being. But even if you reject religious language, you can see that the willingness of people to hurt each other in order to advance their own interests has become a current global problem…. We may tell ourselves that the current violence has nothing to do with the way we’ve been told to close our ears when we hear that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food, that one billion are literally starving. We may assure ourselves that the hording of the world’s resources by the richest society in the world’s history… has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us…. But we live in one world. Increasing interconnectioned with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger, and desperation, eventually impact on our own daily lives."
I would like to close with some solutions advanced by Rabbi Lerner.
First, America should use "its economic resources to end world hunger and to redistribute the wealth on the planet, so that everyone had enough."
Second, America should be "the leading voice championing an ethos of generosity and caring for others, leading the world in ecological responsibility, social justice, openhearted treatment of minorities, and rewarding people and corporations for social responsibility.
And the third solution Lerner stated is that America should "restructure it’s own internal life, so that all social practices and institutions are judged "productive, or efficient, or rational" not only because they maximize profit. [Furthermore, we should judge and refine our social practices and institutions so] that they maximize love and caring, ethical, spiritual, and ecological sensitivity; [so that we can] approach the universe based on awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation."
Eve Troutt Powell
Assistant Professor of History
My brother's bedroom window in Brooklyn overlooks the tip of lower Manhattan and yet, when I called him frantically at 9:00 on Sept 11, all he could see was smoke and debris and thousands of endlessly fluttering pieces of paper. He could only see the crash of the second plane into the World Trade Center on the television screen, so dense was the fog of the first tower's destruction. And now, almost two weeks later, we grieve for the fallen and rage at the injustice but our vision remains obscured. The debris now fluttering before us is made of slogans, fist-waving promises of retaliation, and the ever-murky image of the Arab Middle East and of Islam. It looks like Osama bin Ladin and it sounds like Osama bin Ladin, but knowing so little of him or what he stands for, we are hardly sure who is Osama bin Ladin. His image is now coalescing with hundreds of others, flickering images pulled from film and television, of the Arab as terrorist, of the Muslim as fanatic.
How many of us exclaimed, "it's just like a movie!" as we stood mortified in front of our televisions? Where else had we seen such elaborate and detailed violence? But what worries me most is the casting of Osama bin Ladin as the star which makes him recognizable, his fanaticism familiar and the ending familiar too -- retaliation by any means necessary, the more spectacular and bloody the violence the better.
In the aftermath of the despicable and tragic events of Sept. 11, the villain has become a household name. Again the Middle East becomes synonymous with terrorism, violence, anti Semitism. And one might ask, why not? What about all of the hijackings of the 1970s, the image of Beirut, the Palestinians of the West Bank dancing inappropriately, Saddam Hussein, the Gulf War?
These events took place in the Middle East, but they are not the Middle East. They are not the beautiful mosques of Damascus, Cairo and Jerusalem. They are not the smell of real coffee steaming in the sidewalk cafes, the music in the cabs, passing change from passenger to passenger till it all, every last coin, reaches the driver on the public bus. They are not the latest jokes.
We owe it to ourselves to learn more about this vast area known as the Middle East not to be politically correct but to be politically alert. We need to have as much of a sense of historical context about Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as we do about England, France and Germany. If we have learned that all Germans are not Nazis, so too must we acknowledge more nuance and understanding of how the Middle East has changed over the last century and why these changes have such an impact on all of us.
On this campus too, especially, we need to hear as many Muslim and Arab voices as possible, in order to move beyond representation. Move beyond talking about people and hear those people themselves, and hear the real voices of the Middle East so history doesn't blow up in all our faces again. Thank you.
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