Ethics Newsline®

Lord Phillips founded the law firm Bates, Wells & Braithwaite, London, in 1970, and is a specialist in charity law, business law, and defamation. Cofounder and first chair of the LAG, a legal aid charity; founder and president of Citizenship Foundation, an education charity; cofounder and president of the Solicitors’ Pro Bono Group; and on many charitable and business boards, Lord Phillips is also a working Life Peer. In addition, he is a freelance journalist, a regular panelist and occasional presenter on Anglia TV programs regarding current affairs, and legal adviser (”Legal Eagle”) on BBC2’s “Jimmy Young Show.” Rushworth Kidder spoke to Lord Phillips at his office in London on October 11, 2001.

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?

Phillips: I think September 11 was unprecedented. The nearest parallels don’t come close: Pearl Harbor, a distant island military hit; the London blitz, a declared war where people were expecting to some extent what they got, horrible and defenseless as it was. [On] the scale of pure evil, I think it comes as near to 10 out of 10 as you’ll get, particularly because there was no warning and there was no war.

What also marks it, of course, is that it was against America, which has a superiority of power, economic and military, unparalleled in the history of the world. It was unique for America, a country in the full flush of its unprecedented power that was suddenly exposed to something beyond imagining.

So what good comes out of it? As one deeply worried about the materialism of the West, deeply worried about the subjugation of spiritual values to material selfishness, I would like to think that it would give us all pause. We don’t lack intelligence. We may lack wisdom, we may lack spirituality, we may lack common sympathy, but we don’t lack intelligence. Our consciences have not been wholly anesthetized.

So the greatest obligation we have to those who suffered is to ask these difficult questions. I hope there will be a real self-examination that will go far beyond the traditional sources of self-examination — the churches, the intelligentsia, a certain part of the liberal community — and embrace the financial, professional elites. There is a massive need for collective reflection on where we’re headed.

Kidder: Do you see that kind of question happening in financial circles?

Phillips: I think this is something that will show itself, if it does, in the next few months or even year or two. I think one of the terrible things about materialism is that it actually coarsens the mind and heart of those who are grabbed by it. You don’t come out of it the same as you went in to it. But I suppose I’m an eternal optimist. I’ve got a sense that a lot of people will start to use their wonderful intellectual talents and energy in a slightly different direction. So a great richness could come out of this — a sort of metaphysical richness.

Kidder: As a result of September 11, what do you fear will change for the worse in the next ten years?

Phillips: That’s easy: The fear is that my optimism is misplaced! That it’s business as usual, and that the intense animosity that our economic and commercial imperialism has created — not just [in] the Muslim world — [is] an animosity that runs so deep that it merges into hatred. I was in Syria and Lebanon in February, and I had meetings with the foreign secretaries of both countries and the prime minister and president of Lebanon. I saw the effects of the Palestinian and Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973, and went into one of the refugee camps. I think particularly [that on] Wall Street and [in] the City [of London] — two of the symbols of an aggressive, hypercompetitive commercialism/mercantilism — we underestimate those feelings. [We] tend to make life easier for ourselves by saying that it’s just the envy of incompetent, illiberal, undemocratic societies, in the face of this wonderful Western superiority gained by energy and application and intelligence. I mean, there’s some truth in that, but not much.

So what I fear is that the divide has opened up between the Muslim world and the post-Christian world. I don’t think we should just look at the dangers in terms of the prospects of us getting on the wrong end of a terrorist bomb. There are other dangers that are different but serious. So if this [terrorist attack], far from giving rise to a reexamination of some aspects of our culture, instead reinforces the rift — [with] people saying, “You’re not going to knock me off my perch! It’s business as usual, with a vengeance!” — then I get very depressed indeed.

I don’t have any faith in the notion that we can deal with this by intensifying security. I think that is completely self-delusional. A man or a woman determined to inflict terrorist damage [and] prepared to die in the process is unstoppable. If we make security on planes so effective that [this kind of attack] doesn’t work there, then they’ll do it somewhere else.

There’s a strange paradox about security, in that in some ways it actually increases the prospect of terrorism. That which is locked is much more attractive to the would-be predator than that which is open. I think that’s also true of cultures. The psychology of openness and freedom is one which is in itself benign [and] sends out ripples that are generous and trusting. We are apt to suspect [these things] as being inadequate to the terrorist threat. And I’m not being silly about this — you’ve got to inspect people going on the planes. All I’m guarding against is the popular clamoring for identity cards and all the rest of it.

Kidder: How do you feel, then, about funding the intelligence services?

Phillips: I’m not very convinced by any of it. Again, I think it can create the very thing it seeks to guard against. You need some level of knowledge of who is in your midst and what, broadly, they’re up to. Soviet Russia didn’t suffer internal terrorism, apart from Chechnya, but collapsed in a great heap. And I don’t think the collapse and the level of security were disconnected, because a certain level of security becomes an expression of a cultural or social malaise, a neurosis on the part of the community.

Kidder: What two or three indicators will you be watching in the coming months to judge whether your hopes or your fears are more accurate?

Phillips: The number one indicator is what happens in Israel and Palestine. The biggest source of poison towards America and Britain is the lack of even-handedness over the Israel/Palestine problem. I think we kid ourselves if we say that bin Laden is a phenomenon [that has] to do with Saudi Arabia from which he came and Afghanistan to which he went. The seedbed of his support is much more wide and deep than we would like to admit. From the Palestine point of view, they’ve got more refugees registered with the United Nations [since] their removal in 1948/49 than there are inhabitants of Israel — 3.7 million. And 1.2 million of these [are in] 59 camps which are unbelievably degrading, dreadful places. How many people in the West know about those? How many people really look at the history of this tragic quarter of the globe in an even-handed way?

Don’t get me wrong: I am totally behind the existence of the state of Israel. In 1973 I offered to fight for the Israelis — I believed that strongly in [their cause]. [But] unless we are seen to be even-handed, I don’t think we can expect terrorism to stop. Worse than that, there could be a real instability in several of those [Islamic] countries which could be devastating, with a capital D, to world economics and world peace. It could inflame a series of countries across the world, and it could spread into Africa, where there are large Muslim populations [with] a lot of feeling against the West.

The second indicator is whether we’re prepared to look at all the world trade organizational structures in order to seriously re-jig things in a way that is less favorable to ourselves. We are the economic colossi. The multinational is broadly an instrument of the Western democratic countries. I think we need an even-handedness in our view of the commercial and economic realities of the globe that is not currently present. I think I understand the American point of view, and I’m about as pro-American as they come. [But] I think a great deal [of the problem] comes back to America, because it is at this moment in such a position of power and influence, militarily, politically, and economically. Unless America does a number of things in a far-sighted, generous way — [like] the Marshal plan after the last world war — and unless it decommercializes its own appreciation of some of these problems, I think we’re in for a very uncertain and probably very dangerous decade, or two, or three.