I desperately want to agree
I desperately want to agree wholeheartedly with Bob Herbert, who writes today:
"The terrorists will not achieve their ends by blowing up innocents. And we will not be able to bomb the terrorists into submission. Atrocities like yesterday's hideous bombing in Israel cannot be allowed to occur with impunity. But it is time for all of us to begin searching for alternatives, to take those first tentative steps toward insuring that a world inhabited by billions of people remains reasonably hospitable to life."
If, while we search for alternatives, Seattle gets nuked and Chicago's subways are flooded with Sarin, many people are going to be very skeptical about continuing the alternative approach.
Searching for alternatives is a process of reason, and you have to be reasonable to do it. We're dealing with people who have already decided that there is no alternative. To be sure, we must work with those in positions of power in the countries that produce these terrorists. But the terrorists themselves--and, to a large extent, those in positions of power--have worldviews, mental languages, and logics that are non-Western and alien to much that we consider reasonable and true. We cannot simply export our notions of rationality and the priorities established by our particular brand of moral thought and expect them to flourish.
The problem is that the 'search' to which Herbert refers has already begun, and is an ongoing process. It began thousands of years ago, when we first decided that it would be good to gather people together in the cooperative effort called 'civilization.' Cultures the world over have been trying to figure out how to make it work ever since.
In 147 BC, the Romans killed 90% of the inhabitants of Carthage, sold the survivors into slavery, razed the city and salted its fields. They rendered the very earth unsuitable for life. Today, we have the capability to destroy the entire region that produces terrorists. We could turn its deserts into glass, its cities into ash, kill nearly every person within it and malform the DNA of any survivors for generations to come. That would be the vengeance of Rome.
The alternative we have chosen is to develop weapons so precise that they can destroy a military target in the midst of a city and leave the buildings around it largely unharmed.
It's still violent. But it is progress.
Herbert is right. Clearly, we cannot continue this way forever. But the process is not one that can be rushed. I very much doubt that we will see the next step in the evolution of human culture in our lifetimes. We will see much death, and great destruction.
