Ethics Newsline®

On September 11, the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center permanently altered the New York City skyline. Less noticeably, but perhaps more powerfully, they changed something else: the moral thoughtscape of America.

The intense public cruelty of that day has driven us to the windows of the soul — to new depths of introspection, moral searching, and spiritual questioning. All across this otherwise pragmatic and down-to-earth nation, the air is suddenly filled with oddly metaphysical questions: Who are we? Why are we here? How do we understand our purpose? What can I do?

That last question concerns the individual’s role in the face of evil. That’s a profoundly moral question. And for most people the answer is, “I ought to get involved, lend a hand, help out in some way.” But there’s a nagging doubt: Can my involvement really change the world? Even if I, and all my friends and all their friends, banded together to help, could we make an impact? Compared to the six billion people in the world today, we’re but a rounding error. Can we really make a difference?

Yes. Let me explain with a kind of parable.

Some years ago, I interviewed a number of people here and overseas for a newspaper series on global education. Among the interviewees were several American men in their thirties. Each had grown up in a terrible ghetto environment. And each, in some way, had “made it” and was successful.

Why, I asked them, had they succeeded? Why had they not been gunned down at age 18 in a neighborhood alley as, statistically, they might well have been? Each, using different specifics and a different name, told me the same story: It was old Mrs. Smith in the fourth grade who really turned them around.

“But wait,” I asked them. “You’ve just told me about your schooling, where you had dozens of awful teachers. You’ve just told me about your large and dysfunctional family, where hardly anyone seemed to care. You’ve just told me about your scores of friends — many now in jail, others now dead — who set all the wrong examples. And now you’re telling me that, in the face of that relentless downdrag of depravity, Mrs. Smith alone lifted you up?”

“Yes,” each said, “that’s what I’m telling you.”

In itself, that fact doesn’t surprise us. We all know, intuitively, the enormous power of a single right example. The question is, Why should it be so? Why is it not equally true that a child raised in caring, attentive surroundings can meet one bad teacher and be plunged into a life of crime and vice? Somehow that’s far less observable.

To understand why, perform the following experiment. Find a closet that’s been closed up for years. It’s been shut so tight that no light can get in. If there’s any place darkness could grow thick and rich and ugly, this is it.

Now, light a candle. Turn off the lights in the room outside the closet. Open the closet door, and watch closely. Does this appalling darkness gush forth with such virulence that it extinguishes the candle and plunges you into utter blackness? No. In the entire history of the world, that has never once happened. Always, unfailingly, the candlelight illumines the closet and dispels the darkness.

That, too, is observable. But why should it be so? Because light is not the opposite of darkness. It’s the absence of darkness.

If light were the opposite, we’d be playing a zero-sum game with the forces of anti-light — where, about half the time, darkness would win. Maybe, if we pulled together a thousand candles, we could just barely defeat such a grisly accumulation of blackness — but only for a while, until the closet forces regrouped and came back to defeat the candle.

Put that way, it sounds silly. Yet notice how our metaphors work to persuade us that darkness and light are equal but opposite powers. We’re so used to thinking in terms of opposites — positive and negative charges in electricity, north and south poles in magnetism, up and down, left and right, yin and yang — that we let our metaphors overwhelm us. “Oh, yes,” we assert, without examining our premises, “the world is made up of opposites. Light and dark — they’re opposites, too. After all, night and day appear to be evenly balanced — in the course of a year, there’s about as much of one as of the other. So darkness must be the opposite of light.”

That mistake might be relatively harmless were it not for one final logical misstep, where we seize on light and dark as our principal metaphor for good and evil. Result? We think of ourselves as locked in battle with powers of evil that are balanced on a knife edge against the forces of good. What will it take, we ask, to defeat such a terrible force? Surely all the goodness in the world, if we could scrape it together, would barely be enough to overcome this equal and opposite power.

But what if — just what if — we’ve missed the real message of the metaphor? What if evil is less the opposite than the absence of good? Doesn’t that explain how old Mrs. Smith could single-handedly overcome the inertia and emptiness of our young friends’ ghetto upbringings? Wouldn’t it seem odd, in fact, if evil ever seemed to prevail in final combat with good?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to minimize the complexity and perversity of the world’s evil. I don’t for a moment imagine that the forces of depravity will evaporate just because we shift metaphorical gears — or that, in our current situation, terrorism will instantly disappear because we analyze it in a different way. But I’m equally sure that, until we think clearly about evil, we will never master it successfully. Such clarity begins with the understanding that, however massive the assertions of evil, they bear witness only to an absence, not to an opposite.

And that helps explain something else: That just as a single candle can destroy a whole closet-full of darkness, so a single life, lived in the light of goodness, can make an enormous difference in overcoming the reverberating void that calls itself terror and blackness. If that’s the case, is it any wonder that any one of us, accurately assessing the moral nature of reality and banding together with a few others in unity of action, really can change the world?

(c)2001 by the Institute for Global Ethics

Following the recent terrorist attacks, the editors of Ethics Newsline have begun conversations with thought leaders here and abroad about the way the world is changing.

Today we begin a series of interviews with individuals from various walks of life whose experiences and ethical outlooks shed light on our collective future. We’ve asked them to consider three questions:

• As a result of these attacks, what do you hope will change for the better in our country and the world over the next decade?
• What do you fear might change for the worse in our country and the world over the next decade?
• What two or three indicators will you be watching to see whether your hopes or your fears are more likely to come to pass?

We start the series with a conversation with Theodore J. Gordon. One of the world’s leading futurists, Ted is founder and chairman of The Futures Group, a large management consulting firm, and former chief engineer for the Saturn program at McDonnell-Douglas. He currently serves as a senior research fellow for the Millennium Project of the American Council of the United Nations University, a multination future scanning activity, and he serves on the board of the Institute for Global Ethics.

Kidder: As a result of these attacks, what do you hope will change for the better in our country and the world over the next decade?

Gordon: One effect of the atrocity is a lot of introspection. Many people are wondering just what have we done to cause such anger. Does the fury of the terrorists arise because we are perceived as the “great Satan,” the world-class evildoer? Does it come from our arrogance? You certainly have to admit that the United States has often been very arrogant in its behavior.

We ought to be vigorous and strong in our response, but wise. Without being very careful, a broad-scale attack by the United States would be likely to trigger more intense terrorist responses. So I would suggest that one of the hopes is that the United States, instead of taking the role of the last remaining superpower and using cowboy analogies, sees itself more in the role of keeper of justice, and the enthusiastic supporter of world justice.

Justice, here, means finding out who’s doing this — getting proof of who’s behind the terrorism, and using international justice systems to bring those people to account. There are some international institutions that have been created that we ought to be using — like the International Criminal Court (although the United States has not yet ratified the Court), and the tribunals that have been established for Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

One could imagine a future where international tribunals pursue crimes with global consequences and criminals are brought to justice in front of world opinion. Our role would be as a finder of proof or as an indicter, so that we don’t appear to be in an arrogant role once again, imposing our will for our interests and remaining the subject of enmity around the world.

Do I see it happening? Maybe. [United Nations Secretary-General] Kofi Annan has said some very good and important things here. His voice is not the strongest we’ve heard on CNN, but what he’s said makes a lot of sense. If we gave the UN some responsibility to do the trial — and we provide the evidence, the criminals, and present the case — we would have gone a long way towards establishing international justice and reinforcing our role, not as the strongest remaining superpower, but as the guardian of liberty and justice around the world.

Kidder: What do you fear might change for the worse in our country and the world over the next decade?

Gordon: There’s a very big downside. The downside is paranoia, if the atmosphere for terrorism continues. The mechanisms available to the terrorists have the property of being covert — though certainly not in New York, which was overt, since they wanted to get attention. But imagine a biological attack or a weather-manipulation attack, where you have to wonder if the epidemic or hurricane is natural or artificial. So you’re always looking over your shoulder, you’re always keeping records, you’re always saying, “Gee, maybe this has been induced rather than coming from natural causes.” And therefore the world becomes very paranoiac.

So we can have depression, both economic and emotional. We have a paranoiac world developing as a possibility, in addition to loss of freedoms — closing of borders, Big Brother watching, popular support for things that we would not support in more rational times, like vigilantism.

I also hope, but fear as well, some high-tech developments that can help us guard against terrorism, like TV cameras on all airplanes that broadcast what’s happening in the cabin to someone watching on the ground. I think we’ll see automatically landing airplanes — with a trigger signal, the airplanes can land themselves at the closest airport without a pilot, and there can’t be any override.

Kidder: From what you know about the technology, do you think we’re at the point where automatically landing airplanes could happen?

Gordon: Yes. But I would hesitate only from the standpoint that there would have to be built into that system no possibility for human override. There will also be many other high-tech terrorism-warning systems. For example, biochip sensors for biotech weapons — new kinds of “electronic canaries,” and ultra small bugs and video cameras.

And I hope there’s a parallel development in social science that will help us to understand the motivations that can drive people to this sort of thing. If I read Time and Newsweek correctly, the terrorists harbor much resentment, and suicide bombers have refuge in a promised religious reward. But how can this sort of behavior possibly be justified by religion? We don’t understand these motivations and what leads to this kind of human behavior. I would hope there’d be some new insight into religious psychology and social science that helps broaden our understanding — so that the new insight would help us with our decision making.

Kidder: What two or three indicators will you be watching to see whether your hopes or your fears are more likely to come to pass?

Gordon: I think the answer to that has to be mainly in people’s gut. How do you feel about today? How do you feel about tomorrow? What are the attitudes toward the future? What measures do you have of social stability and social pathology? Another fear is that, if the terrorist activities spread, that becomes a kind of justification for criminal acts elsewhere: It’s a brutality that’s imposed on society’s consciousness, and young kids see that as acceptable extreme behavior.

Kidder: What about public discourse? Does public commentary have a responsibility for lifting that gut impression — or is it better simply to be honest and paranoiac if that’s what we’re feeling?

Gordon: I don’t know how you separate the two. Which comes first: public attitudes or public discourse? Are we the product of what we read and see? Absolutely! Do our behavior and our attitudes determine what is written? Sure! So it’s a feedback system — one driving the other in a loop. And therefore there is a role for the media here. And that role is to avoid specializing in the downsides, and at least to show any glimmers of light as they appear.

Difficult times are the crucible in which values are forged, and this week’s news from the word of ethics highlights both the positive and the problematic in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States.

We lead with a report on the generosity of American businesses, which are contributing millions to the relief effort. Next, a six-story roundup related to the terrorist attacks: insurers opting not to attempt to invoke an “act of war” clause to escape financial liability; Congress approving a massive relief package for airlines; two televangelists criticized for remarks about the attack; a leading Canadian newspaper calling for an end to private-sector involvement in terrorist-sponsoring states; entertainment firms softening violent content in TV shows, films, and video games; and several investment firms being criticized for halting trading for an extended period following the devastation.

In other news from the world of ethics, we look to the international-affairs desk for a report about a federal judge throwing out suits targeting Japanese firms for using slave labor during World War II.

And from the “Whatever Happened to…” file comes an item about a compromise solution to U.S. federal judges’ protests about surveillance of their Internet activities.

Have a productive, ethical week.

– Carl Hausman

NEW YORK
U.S. businesses continue to answer the call for more help in New York City and Washington, D.C., following last week’s terrorist attacks.

According to reports from NewsFactor.com, recent corporate contributors include:

• Microsoft, which sent a team to help rebuild the Pentagon’s computer systems, and has pledged $10 million in cash, software, and services to the relief effort
• Drug giant Novartis, which has promised $3 million to the American Red Cross
• Bank of America, Home Depot, and Merrill Lynch, each of which have pledged $1 million to charities helping with the relief efforts
• Information technology provider SAP, which has offered free technical assistance and consulting to businesses damaged and disrupted by the attacks
• Pet-products firm Foster and Smith, which donated a supply of shoes for the paws of dogs being used to search the sharp rubble for survivors

Internet superpowers Amazon.com and eBay both placed information sheets detailing ways in which customers can give to the relief efforts on their home pages, reported E-Commerce Times.

As of late last week, customers of Amazon.com had used the company’s links to donate $2.3 million to the Red Cross.

NEW YORK
Most insurance companies with liabilities from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York have said they plan to pay out on their policies, despite possible legal loopholes that could be used to avoid the estimated $30 billion in insurance losses.

Recent announcements to that effect come as a relief to the airlines and World Trade Center tenants, whose repayment fate was made slightly uncertain after President Bush termed the attacks an “act of war.”

Many corporate insurance contracts carry “act of war” provisions, shielding insurers from paying for losses stemming from warfare. While court rulings have found that only sovereign nations, not rogue terrorist groups, can perpetrate “acts of war,” Bush’s remarks caused some confusion regarding the classification of this month’s attacks.

Most insurers have disavowed any interest in trying to avoid paying claims related to the attacks, but at least two firms — Bermuda-based Ace Ltd. and Bahrain-based Arab Insurance Group — said they are still considering the matter, reported the Wall Street Journal.

“Since the government of the United States has classified the attack as an act of war, this adds another legal dimension to the insurance aspect of this catastrophe, as acts of war are not covered by all lines of business,” the Arab Insurance Group said in a statement last week.

Such halfway positions were rejected outright by a spokesman for the St. Paul Insurance Cos., which said his company would not “hide behind the war exclusion” despite facing expected payouts of roughly $700 million.

After contacting most insurers with exposure from the terrorist acts, New York insurance superintendent Gregory Serio told the Journal that the “industry is very committed to meeting its obligations.”

Other leading insurers which have stated they plan to honor policies held by the airlines and corporate victims of the September 11 attack include American International Group, Chubb Corp., and Hartford Financial Services Group.

Despite industry pledges, the Journal notes that the catastrophic damage from the terrorist attacks is expected to make collection of private insurance claims, especially property-insurance claims more difficult, due to doubts over insurance fraud.

“I hate to say it, but if there are 3,000 [destroyed] cars under the World Trade Center, there will probably be 10,000 claims,” an insurance-company spokesman who declined to be named told the Journal, adding, “If we don’t adhere to some type of rules or need for evidence, we could be out of business.”

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Congress last week fast-tracked legislation giving airlines $15 billion in immediate aid and future protection from some lawsuits stemming from the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks.

The measure passed by a vote of 96 to 1 in the Senate and by 356 to 54 in the House. President Bush was expected to immediately sign the legislation once it was delivered to him.

With $5 billion in cash aid and $10 billion in loan guarantees, the move was the object of heavy lobbying from U.S. airline companies, which warned they could not recover from the terrorist attacks unless they reduced lenders’ fears about their financial futures.

Executives from American, Delta, Norwest, and United airlines told the U.S. House Transportation Committee that they faced skyrocketing insurance premiums and wary lenders following the terrorism.

United and American, both of which suffered the loss of two planes and their crew at the hands of hijackers, did not seek immunity from suits filed by crewmembers’ and passengers’ families. But they did request protection from lawsuits filed by victims and companies on the ground, reported the Reuters news agency.

Under the $15 billion aid package, airlines would get cash and loan help, as well as war risk insurance coverage on all domestic flights — a provision previously limited to international routes, reported the Washington Post.

The government also is slated to appoint a “special master” to oversee and judge the merits of lawsuits filed against the airlines following the hijackings.

Some lawmakers said the $15 billion package fell short of their hopes, saying that it propped up firms that were having financial difficulties before the attacks and failed to provide assistance to the more than 100,000 airline industry workers laid off since the attacks.

LYNCHBURG, Virginia
Television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson came under withering criticism last week after blaming the federal courts, feminists, gays and lesbians, and the American Civil Liberties Union for contributing to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

On Robertson’s “The 700 Club” television show, Falwell said that the courts and civil liberties groups had turned the nation’s focus far away from a retributive God, allowing “the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”

Robertson concurred twice, according to the New York Times, although Falwell claims Robertson was merely commenting on a narrowly defined discussion of divine retribution.

During the program, the conservative ministers enumerated groups, including the federal courts, which they blamed for “throwing God out of the public square” and creating a climate that merited the attacks.

“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked,” Falwell said, according to a transcript provided by ABCNEWS.COM. “And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Robertson responded, “Well, I totally concur,” according to ABCNEWS.COM.

An official from the White House, which received strong support from the followers of Falwell and Robertson during last November’s campaign, said President Bush “does not share those views.”

Following the broadcast, both Falwell and Robertson were blasted for contributing to a climate of hate and intolerance, especially at a time when the nation was reeling from attacks brought on by similar rhetoric, reported the Washington Post.

“The words of these men are similar to the acts of equally contemptible retribution that are being waged against people of Middle Eastern origin or appearance in some areas of our country,” warned the Human Rights Campaign, which works for the civil rights of gays. “To blame blindly, based on prejudice and rage, represents an ominous part of our world and we must work to overcome it wherever we find it.”

Robertson later recanted his on-air statements, saying he really did not understand what Falwell was saying. Falwell then apologized, saying the timing of his remarks was poor, and that they had been misunderstood by a “secular media and audience.”

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
The Ottawa Citizen in its lead editorial is urging the Canadian government to prohibit Canadian companies from doing business in states that are accused of sponsoring terrorism.

This leading Canadian newspaper’s editorial said that if Canada is truly at war with countries such as Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, which stand accused by the U.S. State Department of sponsoring terrorist activities, then there should be a serious debate about the Canadian government invoking the Special Economic Measures Act (SEMA) to prohibit business operations of Canadian companies in those countries.

SEMA allows the Canadian government to impose sanctions against any country, including a prohibition on Canadian companies operating there, when “a grave breach of international peace and security has occurred that has resulted or is likely to result in a serious international crisis.”

The Ottawa Citizen editorial argues that whether SEMA is invoked by the Canadian government or not, Canadian companies have a moral obligation to restrict or cut off ties to rogue states that sponsor the bin Ladens of the world.

Among the companies mentioned by the Ottawa Citizen in this regard is Talisman Energy of Calgary, which has a 25 percent stake in an oil project in Sudan. This investment has been condemned by civil society groups in Canada and other organizations around the world for allegedly contributing to the exacerbation of a brutal civil war that has claimed almost two million lives.

There are also other media reports that Sudan hosts several of bin Laden’s business operations that fund his terrorist networks around the world.

LOS ANGELES
U.S. entertainment companies last week began reworking, rethinking, and purging their products of violent content after the terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.

Some radio stations in the United States and Canada carefully screened their playlists for songs that could offend, shelving a small number of tracks for a while, reported the Ottawa Citizen.

TV networks across the United States pushed back the September premiers of their series, and began shelving and reshooting several shows that focused or touched on terrorism.

Hollywood’s five major film studios also took steps to shield the public from violent content that could seem an echo of the airliner attacks on September 11, reported CNN.

Warner Bros. terrorist-themed “Collateral Damage,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been tabled indefinitely. Disney’s Touchstone Pictures pushed back the premier of “Big Trouble,” starring Tim Allen and Rene Russo, until next year, noting that the film included a scene involving a bomb on a plane. “Men in Black 2″ and Jackie Chan’s upcoming “Nose Bleed” are both reshooting scenes already filmed in New York.

Columbia TriStar pulled its press kits and trailers from the Internet for the upcoming “Spider-Man,” because the media spots show Spider-Man catching criminals while swinging from the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attacks.

“The decision was an easy one,” Columbia TriStar marketing president Geoffrey Ammer told Daily Variety. “It’s based on humanity. No cost [of editing] can outweigh the sensitivity of the issue.”

Video game makers are reacting in a similar manner, postponing popular new releases that center on terrorism and violence, and erasing the World Trade Center from silhouetted skylines in Microsoft’s best-selling “Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002,” reported the Associated Press.

LONDON
Several British and Asian investment firms were criticized last week after they barred their customers from trading in many funds not directly affected by the terrorist attacks in America.

As U.S. and foreign markets tumbled or shut down following the violence, many companies understandably halted trading, the U.K. Sunday Times reported.

But as markets reopened, or continued operating despite the attacks, some firms still refused to allow investors to buy or sell fund shares — a move that critics attributed to the companies’ unfair attempt to hold onto revenues.

“There should be no reason to close funds investing in markets that are open,” Jason Hollands of U.K. independent financial adviser Bestinvest told the Times. “We can only assume they were trying to stop a flood of sales. But they should not dictate what small investors do with their money.”

In Britain, the companies singled out for criticism included Artemis, Deutsche, and Norwich Union. In Asia, they included Franklin Templeton, Manulife Financial Corp., New Aliance Capital Management, and Principal Capital, according to the press reports.

Some of the firms that barred trading even in markets unaffected by the attacks said they would do so again should similar circumstances reoccur, saying unreliable pricing and shareholder liability warranted the extreme actions.

SAN FRANCISCO
A California judge last week threw out 11 lawsuits targeting Japanese firms that forced foreigners into slave labor during World War II, saying the state’s allowance of such suits was unconstitutional.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker effectively kills nearly a dozen suits filed by plaintiffs from China, Korea, and the Philippines. Last year, Walker made a similar ruling against U.S. citizens forced into labor by the Japanese during the war.

Judge Walker said that such claims have no place in California courtrooms because they were officially covered under the 1951 treaty between Japan, the United States, and Allied nations, reported the Reuters news agency.

Furthermore, the 1999 California law allowing foreign citizens to sue companies in state courts violates the U.S. Constitution because it “infringes on the federal government’s exclusive power over foreign affairs,” Walker ruled.

Walker’s decision comes only days after a California court upheld a plaintiff’s case against a Japanese cement conglomerate with U.S. holdings, which stands accused of forcing a Korean-born U.S. citizen into hard labor during the war, reported the Reuters news agency.

The future of that suit is now uncertain.

WASHINGTON
U.S. Federal judges and court employees will have their online activities monitored, with the exception of email, under a compromise deal worked out last week.

The plan ends a sometimes-bitter feud between the nation’s federal judges and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Court, which oversees the government’s judicial branch, reported the Associated Press.

Led by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, a large number of federal judges balked last summer after the Administrative Office announced it would begin monitoring their online activities.

The resulting disagreement sparked a wide debate over the extent and legality of monitoring online activities — both of judges and by rank-and-file workers in the United States, where the issue increasingly has been raised in court.

While email will remain surveillance-free, judges last week agreed to have the online activities of the roughly 30,000 court employees monitored, and to allow pornographic and Napster-like music sites blocked, according to the AP report.

From Mothers & More:

“More parents are employed than ever before, yet time at home with the kids continues to be a deeply held value for American families.

“The U.S. Census Bureau reports that more than half of American’s families have two parents working outside the home. Yet nearly two out of three mothers are employed less than full time, and 40 percent of mothers care for their children full time at home.”‘Devoting time to raising children is still very much a priority for American families,’ says Pam Hainlin, president of Mothers & More, a national nonprofit organization for women who are ’sequencing’ — altering their career paths in order to care for their children at home.

“Only one-third of mothers return to full-time employment within a year of having a baby, according to the most recent Census figures. Though two parents are now employed in most American families, one, usually the mother, is likely to be working part time.

“This highlights the growing demand for flexible work schedules for parents, according to Mothers & More.

“‘Survey after survey shows that parents want flexible work options in order to dedicate more time to their kids,’ says Hainlin. ‘Some news coverage of the Census report leaves one with the impression that there has been a massive shift of mothers into full-time employment in the past decade. That’s simply not the case.’

“About 60 percent of mothers work less than full time during the key career-building years, according to Joan Williams, author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It. Yet such women often find themselves on a ‘mommy track,’ says Dr. Williams. ‘We have an economy of mothers and others. When mothers choose flexible work options they are often pushed to the margins in the workplace; they do not get proportional pay or proportional opportunity for advancement.’

“‘We want society to recognize the value of ALL the work women do, paid and unpaid,’ says Hainlin. ‘The work of raising children is tremendously important work. Women who are employed, by choice or financial necessity, should not be penalized for working part time instead of full time.’”

“To have a free, peaceful, and prosperous world we must be ever stronger … particularly in the spiritual things…. It is American belief in decency and justice and progress and the value of individual liberty because of the rights conferred on each of us by our Creator that will carry us through…. There must be something in the heart as well as in the head.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th U.S. president (1953-1961), 1890-1969)

This special issue of Ethics Newsline seeks to draw some of the moral lessons from the terrorist attacks on the United States this past week.

Our coverage begins with a column by Rushworth Kidder on the link between terrorism and hypnotism.

We follow with a “Reporter’s Notebook” section that includes three personal pieces by staff members and trainers for the Institute for Global Ethics from various parts of the world — Alan Goodman in New York, Brad Rourke in Los Angeles, and Sheila Bloom in London.

Finally, we bring you a shortened version of the week’s news.

As usual, we invite your responses in what we hope will become an ongoing public discourse about the values-based issues that underlie this attack and the world’s responses to it.

A friend tells the story of a hypnotist who, before theater audiences, would ask a volunteer to join him on stage. He would tell the audience he was going to hypnotize the volunteer, hand him a candle, tell him it was a banana, and suggest he eat it.

As the volunteer gnawed away, the audience would become agitated by this disregard for the subject’s health, whereupon the hypnotist would break the spell and inform the audience that there was neither candle nor banana — though both subject and audience had been hypnotized into thinking so.

That story came to mind as I asked myself the question on everyone’s lips these days: What made Tuesday’s terrorists willing to give their lives in suicidal attacks? The desire to protect life, especially one’s own, is one of the most powerful of human impulses. What force overrode that primordial drive?

These aren’t the world’s first suicide bombers, of course. But until now, they’ve tended to be young men working close to home, whipped to a fury by their handlers, and sent quickly into action without opportunity for reflection. Tuesday’s attackers were different. Among them were middle-aged men, working for years toward their own certain demise, far from home, and with ample time to change their minds. What made them do it?

The answer, I suspect, has to do with a form of mental manipulation not unlike hypnotism. To call it “religious fanaticism” is to paint only part of the canvas. Yes, there was a religious impulse here — a perverse reading of the Koran that promised a blessed afterlife to those who perpetrated these murders. And yes, there was a political overlay that fomented hatred of Western culture for its influence on the Muslim world.

But if we leave it there, we ignore a key player in this story: the mental manipulator. Somewhere in this chain of events is the shadowy figure who takes over another’s mentality and persuades him to do what, left to his own devices, he would not have done. We’ve seen these people before: Charles Manson in his psychic control of “The Family” who murdered celebrities for him in Beverly Hills in 1969; James Jones in his suicide pact with his followers in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978; David Koresh in the mesmeric devotion of his Branch Davidian followers at his Waco, Texas, compound in the early 1990s. Each used a monumental ego to prey upon less tempered minds, creating cult behavior that relegated even the value of self-preservation to secondary status. So Tuesday’s terrorists, too, were probably the victims of a similar backstage mental manipulation.

What to do about it? Three things. First, hypnotists admit that it’s much harder to hypnotize those who don’t give their consent — or, more accurately, don’t withhold their non-consent. We need to engage our collective non-consent — lest, like the hypnotist’s audience, we believe in what’s not there and fall for suggestions that we’re too scared to fly, invest, or work. We also need to address the bigger picture. The more we can provide a rationale to young Muslims for resisting the manipulators’ wiles, the fewer recruits they will have. That rationale won’t be easy. It may demand wholesale changes in the way America deals with the appalling conditions within Palestinian refugee camps, and a more respectful engagement with the Islamic world in general. But reason, inserted into the equation early on, provides a strong defense against hypnotic self-surrender.

Second, we should recognize that the fanaticism of the terrorists gives them a huge incentive for success. We need to inspire an equally powerful commitment to the values underlying Western democracy. We can’t, and won’t, create that inspiration through hypnotic influence. But we can reinvigorate the campfire stories that help explain this idea of a free people freely pursuing individual and mutual prosperity. In the last few days, that inspiration has emerged across America in ways not seen since World War II. It will be a key factor in dismantling international terrorism.

Third, we need to drive through effects back to causes. The terrorists who died on Tuesday were just the tip of the spear. We need to find the spear throwers, the manipulators who lured them to their deaths. Osama bin Laden may be one. But behind him stand the politicians and financiers — in Afghanistan, perhaps elsewhere — who sheltered and abetted him. And behind them all stand those who supplied the theological interpretation — and, perhaps, the skilled psychic manipulation — that could turn ordinary students into world-class criminals.

President Bush has vowed to “eradicate the evil of terrorism.” The real evil, here, is the deliberate and willful ego that mentally turns others into tools for its own purposes. Go after that, and terrorism implodes. Miss that point, let the mind benders off the hook, and only the surface changes.

(c)2001 by the Institute for Global Ethics

NEW YORK
I retired from the New York Police Department five years ago, and the guilt I feel when something happens and I’m not there has never weighed so heavily on me as it does now. I was not there at the World Trade Center, and my eyes are burning. Tuesday morning I was locked down in a government building between the Capitol and the White House, unable to leave Washington for New York until Wednesday evening. Despite watching the coverage for 24 hours, it wasn’t until I drove over the Verrazano Bridge and saw lower Manhattan, with its missing icons and the cloud of smoke, that the ache of anticipation became the pain of reality.

I am asking myself two questions on behalf of many others. First, what values led my fellow Police officers, the firefighters, and emergency first responders to run toward disaster and die in the process while others are running away? Second, what value mechanism allows terrorists to murder thousands of innocent people — and in a New York City described by a former mayor as “the gorgeous mosaic,” undoubtedly kill and maim many followers of Islam? The first question I will answer passionately, with tears in my eyes. Let me try to answer the second question more analytically.

Question One: Public safety personnel are attracted to the job by their values of courage, justice, compassion for victims, and loyalty to comrades who also risk their personal safety. The value of individual freedom is always present in the background as an accepted constitutional restraint on efficiency. So whether it’s a “gun run,” as we call it, or a building collapse, or a bomb threat, or a suicidal “jumper” waiting to take someone with him, we run with lights and sirens, sometimes racing each other to be the first one there. Aristotle recognized a continuum that placed true courage at a midpoint between timidity and brashness. What we have seen in New York City is not the extreme of foolhardiness on one end nor the extreme of faintheartedness on the other. What makes those hundreds of dead firefighters, police officers, and emergency medical responders (including some chiefs and chaplains) so special is that their values of justice, compassion, mercy, and courage operate from the midpoint of the scale — from calculated, logical risk taking. That midpoint between passion and reason is a place from which most of us who say we share those values have difficulty operating. Please pray for them and their loved ones.

Question Two: Terrorists have values, too. It’s just that, to operate, they have to be disengaged somehow from their values, especially from responsibility. In an article titled “Moral Disengagement and the Role of Ideology in the Displacement and Diffusion of Responsibility among Terrorists,” Robert J. Kelly describes the process from a psychosocial perspective.

The terrorist’s moral values, he argues, have to be modified so that inhibitions against terrorism can be disengaged. That can be made to happen in several ways: by compartmentalizing tasks so that each person is distanced from the outcome, by using linguistic twists to misrepresent the consequences, by dehumanizing the victims, and by describing the behavior as serving socially desirable goals. This “conversion process” is facilitated by ideological indoctrination that includes linking the present predicament to reinterpreted “sacred texts” from the past, by creating a picture of the future that paints followers into the terrorists’ goals, and by having charismatic leaders who can persuade their followers of all of the above.

To explain the terrorist’s concept of responsibility, Kelly distinguishes terrorism from civil disobedience. The civilly disobedient welcome responsibility, announce their plans, act in the open, and expect retaliation without using retaliation. Their goal is to focus public attention on the nature of the conflict. The terrorists’ goal is to instill fear and make the status quo too expensive in life and property to continue. The terrorists, with their so-called claims of responsibility, actually hide and try to escape punishment. They displace responsibility for the act and blame the victims. The civilly disobedient use their acceptance of responsibility for the act and the attending punishment to pressure the powers that be to change policies.

Right now polls say that 70 percent of us want to exercise our value of justice through retribution. That includes me. I’m afraid, however, that after we surgically remove the growth, the value of resolve that the President and others are talking about will call upon us to accept a more clinical, analytical, and methodical response to the disease. The disease of terrorism has been spreading in many places and has been unresponsive so far to our strategies and our moral and ethical persuasion. We will have to use our values and actions to defeat the terrorists’ process of moral disengagement.

LOS ANGELES
The temptation is to believe yourself unique. Your own inconvenience outstrips that of others. Stranded on a west coast business trip in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles last week, I quickly learned that wasn’t the case. And as a handful of us watched and learned more about what had happened on the east coast on Tuesday, we discovered what lies behind the strength of the American experiment in self-governance.

Kate Raffa, a New Yorker in town for a cancelled convention, choked up as she summed up the mood. “I am stuck here and it’s an inconvenience,” she said. “There are a lot of people for whom, if all they had was inconvenience, they would trade everything else.”

Arriving at the hotel Tuesday morning after switching from a hotel closer to the airport, I found that the usually bustling lobby, an international tourism hub that doubles as a downtown lunch spot for people looking for a place to brown-bag, was empty. As I walked from the parking garage to the registration desk, I passed a series of movie publicity posters that share Los Angeles as their theme. The poster for the political thriller “In the Line of Fire” stood out, with a decal proudly stating that the film had used the Bonaventure as a location. The scene in question was an attempted presidential assassination. Irrationally but perhaps understandably, I became uneasy about my choice of locations.

There was foreboding this week in Los Angeles. Three of the four hijacked planes were bound for Los Angeles International Airport. While that fact appeared to have nothing to do with Los Angeles specifically, there was almost a sense of guilt pervading the town. You could hear it on KFWB, a local AM news radio station, and in the voices of the commentators on television.

This week, among the people I spoke to in Los Angeles, there was another sense. It was hard not to find someone personally affected by the terrorist acts in some way. Yet the responses I heard were measured and thoughtful. In a town so intensely focused on presentation and image, where even the bail bondsmen have a keen marketing savvy (billboard downtown: “Bad Boy Bail Bonds: Because your mama wants you home”), even the anger had a quiet deliberation to it, while the compassion for the victims and their families had a sober quality that seemed out of place here in the beating heart of popular culture.

I asked people what they thought individual citizens should learn from the events of the week. The answers were a mixture of wake-up call and reminder of what’s really important in life. “Be more streetwise, and security wise,” said Matt Hourihan, who had moved from New York to Los Angeles for a new job at the end of August. “Every good New Yorker walks down the street and is always aware of what’s around them. I think all Americans need to learn that.”

Meanwhile, Kate Raffa focused on the personal. “I don’t know what people learn from this,” she said. “I do know that, being away from home, it became very, very clear for me that all I wanted to do was touch my little girl. That you can physically reach out to [your family] and comfort them is such a gift anytime, but especially now.”

And what is the role of our government in all this? For most, the lesson to be learned was strategic. Jim Meyers, in Los Angeles for a cancelled convention and waiting to get back to Chicago, said, “The government should take away from this that the days of the Cold War policy of basically taking a passive approach to smaller rogue countries is over.” Matt Hourihan thought the lesson for government was also policy-based. The chief lesson, he said, should be “to focus the money that they are spending on missile defense into fighting guerilla warfare and terrorism.”

I can remember once, shortly after the Persian Gulf War, I was listening to a talk radio station in Los Angeles, where I used to live. I was almost blown out of my seat by the extreme, angry words of one of the callers, who railed at the racial inferiority of Arabs, sprinkling his invective with creative epithets. The host let him go on at length. I lost my stamina before he did, switching stations. The intensity of the tirade had shaken me, and I feared for the state of the world — mostly because the host and nearly every caller were in complete agreement. I saw visions of government internment camps.

Some see that the role of government is to help us to be more than vigilantes. At a time when revenge can be foremost in the minds of citizens, some see a need for moral leadership from elected officials — to remind us of the values we share as humans, to remind us to avoid blanket condemnations and faith-based profiling. Katie Buckland, special assistant for public safety for the Los Angeles city attorney, put it this way: “There is a public role in educating people to the fact that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all loving faiths. These acts would be condemned by any of those faiths.”

Certainly justice will need to be done, and those responsible for the attack on the United States will need to be punished. But we will also need to take care to remember that the perpetrators are responsible for these acts because they are terrorists, not because they believe in the prophet Mohammed. Thankfully, in the midst of anger and the lust for revenge, there are those who seek understanding and balance.