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O Ataque à Civilização

O Ataque à Civilização

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September 13, 2001

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.With rare unity, Americans have grasped that this was an assault on their values.

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.

Our enemy is not Islam.  Our enemy is the nihilism of this subculture.

These towers became landmarks 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 The 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 want 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.

David Kelley

SOBRE O AUTOR:

David Kelley

David Kelley é o fundador da The Atlas Society. Filósofo profissional, professor e autor best-seller, tem sido um dos principais defensores do Objectivismo durante mais de 25 anos.

David Kelley, Ph.D.
About the author:
David Kelley, Ph.D.

David Kelley a fondé The Atlas Society (TAS) en 1990 et a occupé le poste de directeur exécutif jusqu'en 2016. De plus, en tant que directeur intellectuel, il était chargé de superviser le contenu produit par l'organisation : articles, vidéos, conférences, etc. Retraité de TAS en 2018, il reste actif dans les projets TAS et continue de siéger au conseil d'administration.

Kelley est philosophe, enseignante et écrivaine professionnelle. Après avoir obtenu un doctorat en philosophie à l'université de Princeton en 1975, il a rejoint le département de philosophie du Vassar College, où il a enseigné une grande variété de cours à tous les niveaux. Il a également enseigné la philosophie à l'université Brandeis et a souvent donné des conférences sur d'autres campus.

Les écrits philosophiques de Kelley comprennent des œuvres originales en éthique, en épistémologie et en politique, dont beaucoup développent des idées objectivistes avec une profondeur et des orientations nouvelles. Il est l'auteur de L'évidence des sens, un traité d'épistémologie ; Vérité et tolérance dans l'objectivisme, sur des questions relatives au mouvement objectiviste ; L'individualisme brut : la base égoïste de la bienveillance; et L'art du raisonnement, un manuel d'introduction à la logique largement utilisé, qui en est à sa 5e édition.

Kelley a donné des conférences et publié sur un large éventail de sujets politiques et culturels. Ses articles sur les questions sociales et les politiques publiques ont été publiés dans Harpers, The Sciences, Reason, Harvard Business Review, The Freeman, On Principle, et ailleurs. Au cours des années 1980, il a écrit fréquemment pour Magazine financier et commercial Barrons sur des questions telles que l'égalitarisme, l'immigration, les lois sur le salaire minimum et la sécurité sociale.

Son livre Une vie personnelle : les droits individuels et l'État social est une critique des prémisses morales de l'État social et de la défense d'alternatives privées qui préservent l'autonomie, la responsabilité et la dignité individuelles. Son apparition dans l'émission télévisée « Greed » de John Stossel sur ABC/TV en 1998 a suscité un débat national sur l'éthique du capitalisme.

Expert de renommée internationale en matière d'objectivisme, il a donné de nombreuses conférences sur Ayn Rand, ses idées et ses œuvres. Il a été consultant pour l'adaptation cinématographique de Atlas haussa les épaules, et rédacteur en chef de Atlas Shrugged : le roman, les films, la philosophie.

 

Œuvre majeure (sélectionnée) :

»Concepts et natures : un commentaire sur Le tournant réaliste (par Douglas B. Rasmussen et Douglas J. Den Uyl), » Reason Papers 42, no. 1, (été 2021) ; Cette critique d'un livre récent inclut une plongée approfondie dans l'ontologie et l'épistémologie des concepts.

Les fondements de la connaissance. Six conférences sur l'épistémologie objectiviste.

»La primauté de l'existence» et »L'épistémologie de la perception», The Jefferson School, San Diego, juillet 1985

»Universels et induction», deux conférences lors de conférences du GKRH, Dallas et Ann Arbor, mars 1989

»Scepticisme», Université York, Toronto, 1987

»La nature du libre arbitre», deux conférences au Portland Institute, octobre 1986

»Le parti de la modernité», Rapport sur la politique de Cato, mai/juin 2003 ; et Navigateur, novembre 2003 ; Un article largement cité sur les divisions culturelles entre les points de vue pré-modernes, modernes (Lumières) et postmodernes.

«Je n'ai pas à« (Journal IOS, volume 6, numéro 1, avril 1996) et »Je peux et je le ferai» (Le nouvel individualiste, automne/hiver 2011) ; des articles complémentaires sur la concrétisation du contrôle que nous avons sur notre vie en tant qu'individus.

Idées et idéologies