9/11’ and its aftermath
by
Wim van Binsbergen
|
A major challenge
for intercultural philosophy: 9/11’ and its aftermath by Wim van Binsbergen |
GRIPh
(Groningen Research Institute of Philosophy) Lecture, Groningen,
1st June, 2005[1]
After taking
over the chair of Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy at
Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1998, I annually taught[2] a
post-graduate course, with the same designation as the chair.
Being offered in English, the course was part of the
Philosophical Faculty’s so-called ‘English stream’
(now formalised in our Master’s programme), which every year
attracted one to two dozen students from all over the world. In
the academic year 2001-2002, my course was scheduled to start on
12th September 2001 (‘nine-twelve’). So that afternoon
the lecture room filled with a heterogeneous collection of
students fresh from, without a doubt, the most shocking
television event of the new millennium; you may remember that the
impact of the second plane into the New York World Trade Centre,
twenty minutes after the first, received world-wide and
practically life television coverage. The group that welcomed me
that afternoon was tense, indignant, and shocked. Nearly all of
them were totally new to me, and they represented a significant
selection of continents: one student from sub-Saharan Africa, two
from the Islamic Middle East, one from Israel, another one from
the eastern Mediterranean (Greece), one from South East Asia, one
from the Indian Ocean, four citizens of the United States of
America, a few from the United Kingdom, one from Ireland, a few
from Eastern Europe, and a handful of Dutch citizens, including
some whose recent immigrant status equiped them with identitary
and social links in the Middle East, South Asia, or South
America. The chance composition of the group made it a sample of
non-specialist world opinion. The glances and remarks exchanged
across the room suggested that (with the exception of the one
American girl of recent West European extraction who had married
a fellow USA citizen from an Iranian Muslim background) the
students were more than willing to play the parts geopolitically
to be expected from them in those tense days of violent and
devastating intercontinental confrontation. The original,
standard purpose of that first session had been to outline the
technical details of the course and to allocate specific tasks
for each student, to be followed by my Revised Introductory
Lecture IIIb, in which I always describe (cf. van Binsbergen
2003) my path, through the decades, from empirical social science
(as a historicising anthropologist of sub-Saharan African
religion and ethnicity) via a – unsettlingly subjective and
exoticising – phase of anti-hegemonic and anti-objectifying
criticism of North-South academic knowledge production, via
comparative and theoretical research on identities and
(proto-)globalisation, to intercultural philosophy. However, the
miniature ad hoc world forum convened, that afternoon, in
my lecture room was not only going to sit in judgment on the acts
of undeclared war claiming, only the day before, the lives of
several thousands of citizens on the eastern seaboard of the
United States of America, against the recent historical
background of the years of tension , confrontation and violence
leading up to it. I felt that it was also my version of
intercultural philosophy that was on trial. Would I declare
myself and my subject irrelevant by ignoring, and by failing to
challenge, the students’ display of partisan certainty of
being, one way or the other, on history’s right side,
scarcely tolerating to be in one room with what was undeniably
being construed as enemy forces, and vice versa? Was it not my
duty, as a lecturer, to skip my prepared discussion of the
subtleties of transcontinental anthropological fieldwork and its
epistemological and moral dilemmas – suddenly rendered
irrelevant and an act of navel-gazing self-indulgence. Should I
not, instead, scrape together such perspectives on identity,
globalisation, and reconciliation as I had already developed with
a more specific focus on Africa, and on that basis try and
improvise on how intercultural philosophy could begin to make
sense of the devastating global moment we were all living through
then, – bringing out how, perhaps, intercultural philosophy,
of all subjects, could begin to illuminate the dilemmas of
enmity, identity, ethics, justice, a shared world history and the
apparent impossibility of reconciliation that were on the minds
of all of us then? Anyway, the primary task forced upon me, that
afternoon, was to try and apply whatever intercultural skills I
could summon in such domains as emphathy, hermeneutics,
chairmanship and discussion leadership, in order to make it
possible that opinions and emotions from all the various relevant
identitary positions present in the room, could be expressed,
listened to, and discussed, in an orderly fashion, without any
further violence, and as a basis for the semester of discussion
and criticism that lay ahead of us. You may agree that, as a
lecturer, I could not have hoped for a better kick-off to the
next annual installment of my course on intercultural philosophy,
than ‘9/11’, even though to say so would be most
impious vis-a-vis the innumerable direct and indirect victims of
9/11, and, again, to say so it would be most irresponsible
in the face of the manipulation of public opinion by the media
and governments, the rewriting of standards of accountability, of
international law, of intergentile law, of human rights, of
democracy, of the history of the crusades and of the jihads,
during the nearly four years that have passed since
‘9/11’ –yet
The present argument originates in that afternoon of distress,
heated debate and unexpected illumination (or apparent
illumination) four years ago; meanwhile the initial improvisation
has been somewhat enriched by subsequent reflection and scholarly
debate.
As, probably, the most traumatic single event occurring in the
North Atlantic region since the assassination of John Kennedy in
22 November 1963, or even since the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbour on 7 December 1941, ‘9/11’ is multi-faceted.
Its overwhelming effects of mobilisation and counter-mobilisation
lie largely outside the realm of discursive academic work anyway,
and within the academic domain these effects touch on many
disciplines apart from philosophy. The literature on the event is
already too voluminous to review in our present scope. As a key
event involving a significant, and politically dominant, part of
the northern hemisphere, nothing short of a comprehensive
analysis of our globalising world today would do justice to the
event. Meanwhile, many essential details constituting the event
itself have remained obscure and contradictory, and the
subsequent intercontinental political and military developments
suggest that this state of affairs cannot be expected to change
in the immediate future.
It would be futile to hope that a philosophical discussion would
throw unexpected light on an event that has rapidly become the
most stereotyped and the most appropriated in contemporary
history. Only at the cost of extreme academic facetiousness is it
possible to indicate the event with another term than the pet
designation it soon received in the USA media: ‘9-11’,
linguistically an unmistakable Americanism no one is even aware
of any more. Trivialisation, and the subtle conjuring open, with
well-phrased academese apotropaeic formulae, of already wide open
doors, are genuine dangers besetting the present argument.
‘9-11’ is a powerful common referent, an almost
inescapable collective representation throughout the world today
(although, inevitably, experienced and valued in radically
different ways at the various opposing identitary and combative
positions the event itself has first expressed, then engendered
in its own turn). My principal aim is not to systematically
deconstruct the notion of such an event as ‘9-11’ as
the outcome – although that is clearly what it is – of
complex and contradictory strategies of identitary mobilisation
executed, not so much by national or religious collectivities,
but by various intellectual, media, political and military elites
situated at, or at least entertaining close virtual association
with, various places on the globe today. To bring out the details
of such manipulative strategies amounts to a project of empirical
knowledge production, which with all its philosophical
implications is hardly philosophical in the first place. I
will leave such a task to competent others, and take ‘
9-11’ rather for granted, even though this involves the risk
of uncritically regurgitating manipulated collective
representations, rather than (as is the philosopher’s task)
exposing them. I take this risk, on the understanding that in
order to make one or two specific points in a short paper, one
must be prepared so skip over hundreds of more equally
interesting or more interesting points. There is however at
least one respect in which I refuse to take over the common North
Atlantic parlance in regard of ‘9-11’. Even though I
condemn the related acts of violence of ‘ 9-11’ as much
as the acts of violence that preceded or followed
‘9-11’, I will not employ the term
‘terrorism’ to describe ‘9/11’; for
‘terrorism’ smacks of an evaluative ethical position
already taken, a verdict already pronounced, a partisan position
that can only be one-sided, as an invitation to further violence.
What are the challenges that ‘9-11’ puts before
intercultural philosophy? How does ‘9-11’ bring us to
formulate an approach to intercultural philosophy that has is
serious and relevant in the sense that it addresses, and seeks to
philosophically articulate, some of the most urgent problems and
predicaments of the world today?
Intercultural philosophy is the branch of philosophy that was explicitly established, in the last few decades, in order to address philosophically the globalisation of difference.
I draw attention to the shift away from ‘culture’ as its initial central focus of research in intercultural philosophy, even though this was the eponymic element. We may define ‘culture’as as ‘everything an person derives, through social as distinct from genetic transmission, from the society that person belongs to’ – Tylor)As I have argued at length elsewhere (van Binsbergen 1999a, 1999b, 2003), the social-scientific concept of culture however illuminating and initially liberating in itself, has become too much appropriated by all varieties of actors in modern local, national and intercontinental political arenas (largely informed by the politics of recognition) than that it can still function adequately as a philosophical concept. Moreover, much of what actors claim, in such arenas today, to be their ‘culture’ to which they allegedly owe unmitigated allegiance and for which they demand the unmitigated respect of others, often turns out to consist of selected, arbitrary, situational, performative and ephemeral, mere boundary markers of explicit difference, scarcely covering a much more undifferentiated cultural continuity in which such actors share which numerous others even though the latter would tend to claim different cultural identities for themselves. It is within this culturally unmarked continuous space, much more than in the particularist culturally marked and bounded space of distinct proclaimed identities, that people are capable to live a complete life, across the time-span from conception to grave and, on a daily basis, around the 24 hours of the clock – during which they continually move in and out of specific particularist spaces (family, workplace, sports club, peer group, place of worship, street, public transport, media, music, Internet, etc.), all the while pre-empting on the overarching existence of the continous common space, whose linguistic, social and technological premisses they have usually mastered to a considerable degree of effectiveness, and that usually without being greatly hindered by the specificity of the particularist spaces which they move in and out of several times a day. ‘Cultural’ claims thus have become short-hand for particularist identitary claims within an essentially pluralist and globalising socio-cultural space. And although the continuous globalising space is punctuated in terms of myriad identitary specificities, in other words consists of the articulation and negotiation of difference on a global scale, many of these identities are not strictly speaking cultural in the accepted sense.
What, then, is globalisation? If today we have the feeling
that globalisation expresses a real and qualitative change that
uniquely characterises our common condition, it is because state
of the art technology (typically in the trappings of
capitalist commodification), which has brought about
unprecedented levels of mastery of space and time. When messages
travel at light speed across the globe using electronic media,
when therefore physical displacement is hardly needed for
effective communication yet such displacement can be effected
within one or two days from anywhere on the globe to anywhere
else, and when the technology of manufacturing and distribution
has developed to such levels that the same material environment
using the same objects can be created and fitted out anywhere on
the globe at will — then we have reduced the fees that time
and space impose on the social process, to virtually zero. Then
we can speak of globalisation in the narrower sense.
Globalisation is not about the absence or dissolution of
boundaries, but about the dramatically reduced fee imposed by
time and space, and thus the opening up of new spaces and new
times within new boundaries that were hitherto inconceivable.
Globalisation as a condition of the social world today revolves
on the interplay between unbounded world–wide flow, and the
selective framing of such flow within particularising localising
contexts of identity, of difference (cf. van Binsbergen 1997: 1f)
It is in the specific field of the globalisation of difference
that the dramatic events summarised as ‘ 9-11’
represent the greatest challenges. My argument will review some
of these challenges, and propose very tentative responses within
the framework of my personal approach to intercultural
philosophy:
Hermeneutics
(i.e. the art of explaning human phenomena by vicariously
articulating what they seem to mean for the actors who originally
produced them) has been a standard intercultural approach; what
is its potential, and what its limitations, if brought to berar
upon the global contradictions under consideration here?
One recent example of a hermeneutical approach to
‘9-11’ is from Richard Kearney. Working at the
forefront of hermeneutical philosophy, widely known, inter
alia, as mediator in seminal round tables on the gift and on
forgiveness around Derrida and Marion, and combining a
professorial position in Ireland with one in Boston, U.S.A.,
Professor Kearney is particularly well situated to reflect on the
way out from the aporia generated by 9/11’. With the article
under discussion here (Kearney 2005), he does so in a recent
article in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Crossroads,
published in South Asia yet electronically circulating
world-wide, which adds another element of potentially global
relevance to his argument.
As a context for his hermeneutics of ‘ 9-11’, Kearney takes
for granted that ‘9/11’ is to have an effect on inter-religious
dialogue. He suggests that what he considers the
perpetrators’ misappropriation of religion (of Islam,
specifically) ought to be countered by a corresponding
re-appropriation of non-violence among the other camp –
loosely but significantly identified by him as ‘us’,
‘we’. Unmistakably, Kearney’s ‘we’
means mainly ‘U.S.A. citizens and others identifying with
them’, including himself. Admittedly he qualifies the
‘we’ perspective in several ways: it should not imply
condoning the torture of Iraqi and Guantanamo Bay prisoners; it
should not imply the mutual demonisation in which not only the
perpetrators but also the U.S.A. leadership have publicly
engaged; it should combine a Christian inspiration with a
Buddhist, Hinduist, and Graeco-Roman classical one, and even have
some room for Muslim mysticism; it should not be entrapped in a
naïve ‘we’/’them’ dichotomy; it should not
fall into the Huntington (1996) trap of conceptualising the
conflict in terms of a clash of civilisations (but neither
overstress pardon at the expense of justice, i.e. trial and
punishment). Yet despite all these qualifications, the
‘we’ in Kearney’s argument remains a North
Atlantic ‘we’ that is loyal to U.S.A. concerns. It does
not shun from criticism of the U.S.A. leadership, it does
acknowledge the existence (but scarcely the contents) of a highly
critical assessment of the U.S.A. performance like Virilio’s
(2002), yet carefully matches such criticism with ample attention
for no-nonsense patriotic statements of such hawks as Dooley and
Hitchens, who are cited in (apparent?) approval. Even for an
Irish intellectual there are, apparently, limits to what one can
write if one has a part-time professorship at Boston, which is
from whose airport the ‘9/11’ airplanes took off on
their way to destruction.
However, given his practical commitment to U.S.A. society Kearney
probably needs to wrap up his unmistakable criticism in this way.
He needs to create a context of mainstream credibility in which
he can yet pose his question ‘How do we even begin to
imagine pardoning Bin Laden?’ without immediately
disqualifying this question as rhetorical, as implying ‘such
pardon is impossible to imagine under whatever
circumstances’.
It is Kearney’s hermeneutical position that is
primarily responsible for his seeing ‘9/11’,
legitimately, as a religious event: he is merely representing the
protagonists’ own views of the matter. The demonising
idioms, the emotional repertoire of images, employed by the
leadership on both sides suggest that one is not dealing here
with a secular conflict but with one saturated with religious
overtones, on both sides. ‘Axis of Evil’ (in the idiom
employed by the U.S.A. leadership) is not a secular but a
religious term. Yet I suggest we must go beyond what Kearney
advocates: we must not only apply our hermeneutics to the
religious imagery here which we may at first have risked to
ignore, – we must also take our distance from the
actors’ religious imagery and see what implications it has
for understanding, controlling, and resolving this
intercontinental conflict that has already claimed many thousands
of lives and that threatens to endanger world peace for decades
to come. The gain of empathy and representation inherent in the
hermeneutical position, may also be its loss: it allows us the
identification and exegesis of the protagonists’ public
pronouncements, but does not allow us to speak of their hidden or
dissimilated agenda’s, let alone to analyse, distantly and
objectifyingly, the political economy and other structural
constraints to which the protagonists may be argued to be
subjected even without them consciously, explicitly realising so
– or without us having evidence that they do. In terms of an
established usage in cultural anthropology (cf. Headland et al.
1990), hermeneutics allows us an emic analysis but not an etic
one. The dilemma also reminds us of the classic Gadamer/Habermas
debate of the 1960s-1970s – of which Ricoeur has been a
major commentator.
If, complementary to a hermeneutical perspective, we would feel
free to adopt a distancing analytical perspective, we would ask
ourselves whether the ‘9/11’ confrontation between the
(dominant elites of the) North Atlantic region and the world of
militant Islam, in addition to the emic religious overtones, is
not also a rational conflict over scarce resources in the
political and economic domain (on the U.S.A. side: solidarity
with Israel, a new phase of geopolitical expansion into the
Middle East, and reliance – for industry and for
highly-valued individual mobility – on cheap mineral oil; on
the side of the militant Islamists: acknowledgment of historical
wrongs done to Muslims in recent global history, and recognition
of the validity of the view that Islam as a path through
modernity and globalisation offers a valid alternative to
dominant North Atlantic patterns). Such an analytical perspective
would do something very important that is utterly beyond the
hermeneutical approach: it would allow us to view
‘9/11’ in terms of global hegemony and
counter-hegemony. In more practical terms, it would make it
possible to contemplate the extent to which the U.S.A. leadership
themselves may have been partly responsible for the escalation
leading to ‘9/11’, so that the firm rhetorical
distinction between perpetrators and victims begins to dissolve,
and one obvious (if only partial) way out after ‘9/11’
would become discernable: trying to undo, on both sides,
the conditions that led to such escalation.
For Kearney the fact that the ‘9/11’ conflict has
profound religious aspects, means not that it is unsolvable
(Huntington), but, quite to the contrary, enables Kearney to
point at the potential of religion to cross or overcome
boundaries and to move towards reconciliation. In that respect
his approach is far more sympathetic than Huntington’s. It
is as if Kearney is saying:
‘you
who are casting your post-’’9-11’’ enmity in
a religious (Christian and Islamic) idiom, and who are
capitalising on the perennial association between religion and
violence,[3] please realise that the same idiom contains
such elements as would allow you to overcome your enmity –
and, incidentally, the same elements also appear in other
religions and worldviews, e.g. in those of South Asia’.
This is meaningful, even profound. Yt two crucial conditions continue to inform the situation and render Kearney’s recommendations rather ineffective:
1.
Kearney’s overall appeal to wisdom traditions’
hermeneutical tolerance fails to identify the specific social,
political and communicative conditions under which the parties
involved may reject, or may be prepared to adopt, the proposed
shift from a conflictive and boundary-emphasising to a
boundary-crossing and reconciliatory selection from among the
repertoire of their respective religion, as exponents of the long
history of wisdom traditions in the world. Kearney’s
strategy in his argument – even though it is published in a
South Asian venue – is to address those in the North
Atlantic with Christian, Buddhist and Hinduist identifications or
sympathies, and show them – with considerable erudition and
eloquence – how here a road to hermeneutic tolerance
may be found which would allow them (‘us’) to forgive
the perpetrators (but see above) of ‘9/11’. It is
somewhat unfortunate that Kearney’s hermeneutical
perspective does not extend beyond the dominant groups in the
North Atlantic region, especially not to Muslims in general
(including those many millions of Muslims currently residing in
the North Atlantic region), let alone the militant Islamists who
most probably were behind the ‘9/11’ attacks. Only
towards the end of his argument there is a passing admittance
that also Islamic spirituality provides examples of the same
hermeneutic tolerance that Kearney advocates as the way out. His
argument would have been much more impressive if he would have
explicitly addressed the crucial question as to what kind of
perspective (religious, political, economic) one would have to
offer to Muslims, and to militant Islamists particularly, in
order to bring them to the point where reconciliation becomes
possible and past deeds may be brought to redressive and
reintegrative, properly judicial trial in mutual
recognition of their unacceptability. Moreover, it would have
been an impressive display of intercultural sensitivity if
Kearney had acknowledged traditions of reconciliation world-wide,
including those outside the established literate world religions,
e.g. in the African and Native American context.[4] Kearney’s plea to let the world’s
wisdom traditions do the work of reconciliation would have been
more effective if this plea had not stressed the North Atlantic
region, philosophical and Christian/ theological tradition so
ethnocentrically – which is where his short excursion into
South Asian wisdom traditions soon takes Kearney. If he mentions
mysticism, why miss the golden opportunity of exploring Islamic
mysticism (al-DJili, ibn al-‘Arabi, al-Hallaj, al-GHazzali,
etc.) as a possible source of a wisdom that could well be
persuasive to militant Islamists. If he mentions Aristotle, why
not exploit the fact that Aristotle was transmitted to the North
Atlantic through Islamic thinkers and left traces in Islamic
thought even after al-Ghazzali had concluded the victory of
theology over philosophy, in the world of Islam? The existence of
an extensive and enduring Islamic wisdom tradition (Sufism,
associated with its exponents’ woollen – Arab. suf
– garments according to some popular etymology, but in fact
the pursuit of (Greek) sophia, ‘wisdom’) is
largely ignored by Kearney. This is all the more regrettable,
because Sufism, much more than the formal conceptual and
confrontational thought of militant Islamism, has been the
popular Islam of the Middle Eastern and North African masses for
almost a millennium now.[5]
2.
The public underpinning of either side’s
post-’9/11’ position by reference to a religious idiom
may be only a minority option. Kearney seems to preach for his
own parish, which not only is limited to dominant groups in the
North Atlantic region, but among the latter, to those with a
Christian or South Asian religious identity or at least sympathy.
Given high levels of secularisation, the set thus defined only
comprises a minority of the current population of the North
Atlantic region. How are the secularised others to be involved,[6] including those who
prefer to see the Christian idiom employed by the U.S.A.
leadership as mere rhetoric? How are Muslims to be involved,
without first being blackmailed into having to publicly denounce
the militant Islamists and the, admittedly totally unacceptable,
extremes to which the latter went in the context of
‘9/11’? Surely it would be an interreligious naivety,
not to say insult, to expect Muslims to let other religious
orientations than Islam inspire them towards an attitude of
reconciliation that is, in the most literal sense, at the very
heart of Islam. Are we seriously to consider the polysemy of the
Judaeo-Christian Bible’s Song of Songs, to which Kearney
refers, as an argument that is going to win Muslims over towards
reconciliation? Moreover (contrary to some of the examples
Kearney gives: Griffith, Makransky, Tolstoy), the sensitivity
politics of interreligious and intercultural hermeneutics would
certainly abhor a situation where outsiders, strangers to
one’s own religious tradition are claimed to occupy a
privileged vantage point from where to interpret one’s own
religious tradition; such a claim smacks of condescension and
hegemony – it does not do to tell others what their identity
is (cf. van Binsbergen 2003b). How are Muslims to be involved in
the post-’9/11’ reconciliation process, on the basis of
their own spiritual traditions? This is for Muslims to say; and
all non-Muslims need to do is to reserve seats for Muslims around
the table, far more explicitly and generously than Kearney has
managed to do in his argument, even though his argument was
clearly written in the same spirit as my recommendation on this
point.
Kearney’s plea for hermeneutical tolerance is sympathetic,
timely and well-taken, but we need to be far more specific if we
want it to work. The hermeneutical recognition of polysemy alone
is not the answer to ‘9-11’. The point is not that
words can be interpreted in so many ways at the same time. The
point is, for instance, that, in the modern world, hardened
positions of exclusion and enmity represent a violence of words
simultaneous with – often even preceding – the physical
violence of deeds, while state-of-the-art technologies lend to
these violent words an unprecedented new power by diffusing them
all over the globe, at the same time lending the technological
means to bring them into violent practice. And the point is to
recognise militant Islamism, not as an inevitable and perennial
core of Islam, but as a recent and relatively deviant ideological
product of the very same globalisation of our times[7] as
has lend, to militant Islamism, its singularly widespread appeal
(through globalised media) and (in the sense of von Trotha’s
2003 argument) its singularly material destructiveness. Militant
Islamism, as a performative and thus deliberately atavistic
revival of jihadist tendencies of the times of the Prophet
Muh?ammad, is not the intrinsic nor the inevitable format of
contemporary Islam, but a mutative re-invention, the result of
the marriage between Islam and recent globalisation.
Anyway, given the links between words and violence, one place
where reconciliation may be found is in the interstices between
words and between messages, in silence.
But that is not the only place.
As Kearney suggests, a legal framework ensuring fair trial may
also be a way to bring about ultimate reconciliation, and would
certainly not stand in the latter’s way. I do agree on this
point, and I am reminded of a case where the emphatic insistence
on non-violent patterns of confession, forgiving and
reconciliation, rather than on lawful punishment, may have
prevented the catharsis that is needed for a true overcoming of
the violence of the past: the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.[8] But, much like I myself in the latter work
cited, Kearney does not give the reasons why pardon should be
complemented by justice – he simply tells us that this is
what Ricoeur posits.[9]
Undeniably, by North Atlantic national versions of public law,
and by the human rights code adopted by the great majority of
states in the hope of thus rendering it universal, the
perpetrators of ‘9/11’ acted criminally; yet in their
own eyes they must have considered themselves legitimated by
reference to some higher law, and in the process they were
prepared to sacrifice not only other peoples’ lives but also
their own. Reconciliation is only possible if we do not deny this
conflict of perceptions of legality, but if, instead, we actively
invent a discourse (cf. van Binsbergen 2003b, especially the
introduction) in which, through creative symbolic
sleight-of-hand, both perspectives may be recognised,
accommodated and overcome. This is a way in which hermeneutics
can still be of considerable value in the present contexts, and
this I will explore towards the end of my argument, when coming
back to reconciliation.
Meanwhile, as the next step in my argument, let me explore the
extent to which globalisation as a frame of reference is
illuminating for ‘9-11’.
Although to the
outside observer (particularly if informed by the philosophy of
difference) the definition of an identitary position in the
context of globalisation may be accidental, this is not
necessarily – not even typically – how such a position
appears, subjectively, to those who hold it. Meaning (and indeed,
philosophy) is constructed within a local space that is
considered ‘home’, and within which the degree of
meaningfulness is directly related to
Boundaries are
created in order to protect local meaning, and physical practices
(rituals) are engaged in to inscribe these meanings so
effectively into corporal and collective experiences so as to
render them subjectively inescapable – in other words, real.
Many an
identitary position, and (because of the ritual effectiveness of
their collective en-corporation practices) especially many a
religious identity in the modern world hinges on the following
dilemma: it is world-creating, cosmogonic, in the sense that it
offers the concepts, the collective representations, to
articulate a world, and to make that world alive and real to
those who carry that culture or adhere to that religion. One
cannot create a part world, any more than one can claim oneself
to be a part person. World creation implies the pretense of
universality. But these claims of universality, of a totalising
world picture, are fostered – and there is the paradox
– not by the whole of humanity, but typically only by a
small subset of humanity. The world creation of the one
obliterates, implies the absolute denia of, the world
creation of the other. It lays claims to absolute and total truth
(the truth of Islam, the absolute respect due to such as
representative democracy, human rights, the Prophet Muhammad, or
the Qur’an), and that is when opposite positions of
absolute, irresolvable difference are being created.
It is here that modern globalisation invites a radical mutation
of the experience. As a long as various identitary world-creating
constructs could live at a considerable distance from each other
without being effectively thrown together as part of the same
continuous globalising space, there was not much of a problem
– the other remained sufficiently distant so as not to
threaten (as an intolerable alternative, and as a refutation of
the home logic underpinning the entire home world), one’s
own local holist particularism, one’s own world creation.
Globalisation however brings out, and drives home, the
incompatibilities of various holist particularisms, reinforces
the tendencies for each to entrench into itself with increasing
hostility towards the outside, and to oppose and confront the
other with which it has now been brought to direct confrontation
for the first time. The hardening of identitary conflict today
has little to do with any inherent tolerance in North
Atlantic democratic / neo-liberal ideology, or with any inherent
tolerance in Islam. That hardening is rather a product of a
modern condition of our present, early phase of total
globalisation, and it may be intensified to such a degree as to
result, as a mutation, in the absolute mutual intolerance known
from recent years. Now one is competing for the same
global space, and for unique all-encompassing truth, for a
coherent an credible world, within that same space – so now
that conflict becomes a matter of life and death, in a
zero-sum game, where – in the subjective awareness of
the actors involved – the existence of the one precludes the
existence of the other, and calls for the latter’s
annihilation. Moreover, effective annihilation has now come
within reach, on both sides, with the omnipresence realised by
modern electronic and digital media, and with the unprecedented
killing capacity of modern weaponry.
But if the underlying conflict is really structurally
caused, in a very formal way, by the fact that the present state
of globalisation can no longer accommodate the habitual forms of
world creation through holist particularism, then we have reached
the limit to the relevance of hermeneutics in this
connection: if the primary cause of the conflict is formal and
structural, then the actual specific contents of world making,
and the modalities of their incompatibility, hardly matter –
it is not what world is being constructed, but that that world
construction is local and universalising/totalising at the same
time, but now in a globalised situation where the illusion of the
local is even less tenable than ever before.
And if the conflict is really an effect of the ills of
globalisation in this way, then an obvious way out suggests
itself:
In this respect
‘9-11’, however tragic in its intransigent
juxtaposition of enemy positions, and however intolerable as
massive mortal violence, also comes as a timely and serious
reminder that any attempt to push the success of the North
Atlantic hegemonic project any further is utterly pointless and
will merely lead to the destruction of the global texture –
just as one cannot have a texture that is all warp and no woof. The
identitary position of militant Islam is not a rejection of
modern rationality, and least of all of the science and
technology which that rational has created, but of geopolitical
submission to the North Atlantic region. It is a refusal to
accept the end of history.
Meanwshile two factors make it immensely difficult to create (or
rather, since it has already been created ever since the League
of Nations in the 1920s, to sustain) the overarching, global
frameworkl to accommodate the positions of identitary difference
around ‘9/11’:
This means that,
although we cannot legitimately invoke an enduring, cultural,
normative basis for the hardening of positions of difference on
either side, and although we can relegat the conflict to the
formal deficienceis of holistic particularism in this present
phase of globalisation, still such entrenchment cannot be treated
lightly as if it were ‘ merely performative’. As a
downright mutation, among small but powerful elites, of
pre-existing, enduring normative systems of collectivities, the
idiosyncratic thought procedures that, for the violent and
intransigeant actors themselves, create new justifications of
violence are to be appreciated as products of globalisation, cast
in a format that is new and global, rather than local and
atavistic. But subsequently they are rendered real,
and sacred, because of the pain inflicted and the blood shed in
the process of contestation itself.
When – as
in the case of ‘ 9/11’ – a small set of humans are
brought to violate widespread and fundamental codes such as the
respect for human lives, for civilians, for the latter’s
beloved ones, for other people’s property and the fruits of
human labour (in the form of buildings and airplanes), for the
orderly conduct of armed conflict, and even turn out to be
prepared to sacrifice their own lives in the process, then, in
principle, the whole of humanity qualifies as victims –
materially, by association, vicariously, and by implication; and
this even includes the perpetrators themselves, whose sense of
historical injury and dehumanising hatred we, the other humans,
can only begin to fathom inside ourselves. This implies the
possibility of a ‘we’ that encompasses the whole of
mankind, and that contains in itself the conditions for all
suffering and for all reconciliation. It is here that we may yet
press hermeneutics into service.
Thus in principle Kearney is right in his claim that
hermeneutic tolerance may be the way out of protracted violent
conflicts such as in Palestine/ Israel, Northern Ireland, Bosnia,
and by implication, ‘9/11. In this connection Kearney cites,
as an instance of hermeneutic tolerance, the founding of
Christianity in the formal, collective acceptance, by Jesus’
earliest followers, of Paul’s universalism’. Yet this
example has only limited applicability to such modern situations,
pace Kearney. For although that foundational situation may
have considerable appeal to Christians as a model for emulation,
it was very small-scale, and it particularly lacked the history
of accumulated collective violent trauma in a conscious,
identity-constructing historic process, which characterises all
such protracted modern conflicts including that leading on to,
and following, ‘9/11’. It is the historicity of
identity formation through violence, which we have to deal
with in the context of ‘9/11’, on both sides; and that
has no parallels in the New Testament except perhaps
(obliquely and in largely unarticulated form) in the
confrontation between Jews and Romans (which, more than
Paul’s universalism, may well have been the prime factor in
the emergence of Christianity). Moreover, the subsequent two
millennia of Christian-Jewish relations (which, without much
exaggeration, may be summarised as a long chain of intolerance,
exclusion and violence inflicted upon Jews by Christians) has
shown that Paul’s universalism has seldom allowed his
spiritual heirs, the Christians, to effectively mobilise a
similar hermeneutic tolerance towards the co-religionists of the
founder of Christianity, the Jew Yoshua bar Miriam. Nor has the
appeal to such hermeneutic tolerance, however admittedly
foundational to Christianity (Badiou’s idea (2003) as cited
by Kearney is correct but far from new), inspired the
proclaimedly Christian U.S.A. leadership to employ that attitude
in its stance vis-à-vis the perpetrators of ‘9-11’.
Therefore, after identifying this kind of hermeneutical tolerance
as one of the ways out, Kearney would have been expected to spell
out how it can be practically deployed in the present situation,
by Christians not automatically practicing it, and by Muslims not
likely to be impressed by it as long as it is presented in
specifically Christian trappings. Of course Kearney far from
suggests that such hermeneutical tolerance is specifically
Christian: indeed, as I have myself argued elsewhere (van
Binsbergen 2003a), any conflict resolution involving
reconciliation depends on it, and it is particularly small-scale
African societies that can be shown to have developed this
socio-communicative technology to high levels of perfection. In
my argument cited, I also explore the inner mechanisms of such
reconciliation. These turn out to involve, inter alia:
1.
the recognition that both sides in the conflict are, by their own
standards and perceptions, right, and act in rational integrity;
2.
secondly, the only way to reconcile two such positions is by a
hermeneutics that is not only tolerant, but that is to be
emphatically inventive and innovative: a new overarching
discourse needs to be invented that, in the eyes of both parties,
dissolves their irreconcilable positions of incompatible
rightness into compromise – which requires a skilful and
inspired, charismatic act of social communicative
sleight-of-hand;
3.
as already indicated above, this can only be done by virtue of
both parties recognising and affirming each other’s common
humanity which they share – putting an end to all earlier
rhetoric of mutual demonisation.
We note that
in this conception of reconciliation, hermeneutics is employed,
1)
not so much for explaining, in retrospect, what the protagonists
in the conflict do think, and what their hidden motives are, but
2)
for inventing, i.e. by creatively and deliberately thinking
beyond their present position, what they should think in order to
make the conflict resolvable.
In fact, what
may be proposed as the way out of ‘9/11’, amounts to a
move, away from the immature globalisation of holistic,
universalising particularism and its delusions of a zero-sum game
of extermination of the other, and towards the creation of a new
and effective (finally worldwide) framework in which (much like
ethnicity in any national or regional context) one accepts
one’s own proclaimed identity to exist, pluralistically,
alongside several or many others – and where one can truly
accept such a state of affairs with peace of mind, in the
certitude that one’s identity is safeguarded by the overall
framework. Here an analogy with regional and national ethnicity
in the African context may be illuminating. One of the important
lessons to be learned from post-colonial politics in Africa
– rife with ethnic conflict as the national framework of
difference, often to the point of secession, sometimes genocide
– is that ethnicity can usually be contained, may even
constitute an integrative and productive force in nation states,
as long as the overall structural framework survives of which the
constituent ethnic groups form part and within which they oppose
each other without destroying each other. The explosive, fatal
situations arise only when one of the constituent ethnic groups
gains absolute control of the overall framework, and appropriates
it, but appropriating the state and its instruments of violence,
sanction and legitimation. By analogy, globalisation (as the
emerging overall framework of difference at a world scale) risks
to become destructive as soon as one of the constituent units
within the global structure can totally control the rest: as soon
as, specifically, the global hegemonic project of the North
Atlantic region comes close to success. Then we would have truly
the end of history, but in a sense that warps Fukuyama’s
Hegelian understanding in a distorting mirror.
If (in the field of technology, child care, medicine, the
environment, the exchange of musical, dancing and pictorial art
forms, the debate on global justice, on collective guilt and
reconciliation, the shared historical spiritual roots of Islam,
Judaism and Christianity, the shared linguistic background of
Christianity’s Indo-European and Islam’s Afro-Asiatic
as, presumably, branches of the linguistic macrofamily of
Nostratic, or whatever other argument) a framework could be
forged in which North Atlantic secular, nominally democratic
neo-liberalism, and militant Islam, could exist and function side
by side, ‘9-11’ could be written away in history as a
tragic reminder of an earlier, immature phase of globalisation finally
left behind us.
Following Ricoeur, and in a way remarkably similar to mine yet
somewhat less concrete and practical, Kearney sees four benefits
to come from an hermeneutics of tolerance:
1.
an ethic of narrative hospitality (cf. my ‘recognition of a
shared humanity’);
2.
an ethic of narrative flexibility (cf. my
‘sleight-of-hand’);
3.
narrative plurality (cf. my recognition that both parties are
right and endowed with rational integrity);
4.
the transfiguring of the past (cf. my ‘creative and
innovative’); and is to ultimately lead on to
5.
‘exceptional moments (...) where an ethics of justice is
touched by a poetics of pardon’.
I could not agree more. What is involved is really an exercise in
rhetoric in the original Aristotelian sense (cf. van Binsbergen
2004): presenting a rational political argument in such a skilful
way – seeking to effectively convince them, but not
necessarily by hollow or false arguments – that it may
persuade fellow actors in the political arena.
Yet again we hit on the ominous ‘we’: for
‘us’, it is difficult to forgive the perpetrators of
‘9/11’ – but where is the empathic argument that
makes their position at least understandable, and would allow
‘them’ to forgive ‘us’, or would allow
humanity (‘history’) to forgive both ‘them’
and ‘us’?
Badiou,
Alain, 2003. St Paul:The Foundations of Universalism, Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press..
Bewaji,
J.A.I., & Ramose, M.B., 2003, ‘The Bewaji, Van
Binsbergen and Ramose debate on ubuntu’, South African
Journal of Philosophy, 22, 4: 378-415.
Headland,
T.N., Pike, K.L., & Harris, M., 1990, eds., Emics and
etics: The insider/outsider debate, Frontiers of Anthropology
no. 7, Newbury Park/ London/ New Delhi: Sage.
Huntington,
Samuel, 1996, The clash of civilizations and the remaking of
the world order, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Kearney,
Richard, 2001. The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kearney,
Richard, 2005, ‘Thinking After Terror: An Interreligious
Challenge’, Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads,
2, 1 (April, 2005): 1-24.
Massignon,
L., 1922, La Passion d’Al-Hallaj, ii vols., Paris;
English version: The Passion of al-Hallaj, 4 vols.,
Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983
Ngwane,
George, 1996, Settling disputes in Africa: Traditional bases
for conflict resolution, Yaounde: Buma Kor.
Salazar,
Philippe-Joseph, Sanya Osha, Wim van Binsbergen, 2004, eds., Truth
in Politics, Rhetorical Approaches to Democratic Deliberation in
Africa and beyond, special issue: Quest: An African
Journal of Philosophy, XVI, pp. 238-272; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/2002.htm
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1981, Religious Change in Zambia:
Exploratory studies, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International.
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2001a, ‘Witchcraft in modern Africa as
virtualised boundary conditions of the kinship order’, in:
Bond, G.C., & Ciekawy, D.M., eds., Witchcraft dialogues:
Anthropological and philosophical exchanges, Athens (Ohio):
Ohio University Press, pp. 212-263; also at: http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/witch.htm
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2001b, ‘Ubuntu and the globalisation
of Southern African thought and society’, in: Boele van
Hensbroek, P., ed., African Renaissance and Ubuntu Philosophy,
special issue of: Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy,
15, 1-2, 2001: 53-89; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/Quest_2001_PDF/binsbergen.pdf
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003a, ‘Reconciliation: Ideas and
procedures constituting the African social technology of shared
and recognised humanity’, in: van Binsbergen 2003b: 349-374;
earlier version available at: http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/reconcil.htm
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003b, Intercultural encounters: African
and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of
interculturality, Berlin/Müenster, LIT; in part available
at: http://www.shikanda.net/intercultural_encounters/index.htm
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2004, ‘Postscript: Aristotle in Africa
– Towards a Comparative Africanist reading of the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in: Salazar et
al. 2004: 238-272; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/2002.htm
van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Schoffeleers, J.M., 1985, eds., Theoretical
explorations in African religion, London/ Boston: Kegan Paul
International.
Virilio,
Paul, 2002, Ground Zero, London & New York: Verso.
von
Trotha, Trutz, 2003, ‘ Wars of defeat from Hiroshima to
9/11’, in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., ed., The dynamics of
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[1] This is a slightly revised, but (due to pressure of time) still very rough version of my GIPh Lecture as presented.
Most of the very stimulating discussion at Groningen still needs to be implemented, but already I wish to thank the Faculty of Philosophy, Groningen University,
for a highly stimulating intellectual event, and a most cordial reception.
[2] Due to the restructuring of the philosophy curriculum at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, as from the academic year 2004-2005
my course has become a bachelor’s III course, and is now taught in Dutch; hence the otherwise surprising use of past tense.
[3] Kearney acknowledges the intellectual movement (Freud, Girard etc.) that sees religion as essentially a product of violence.
I have no quarrel with Kearney’s rendering of that movement, however succinct, but I think the idea behind the movement is utterly one-sided. Both Kearney (2001) and I
(van Binsbergen 1981, van Binsbergen & Schoffeleers 1985, and many later publications, largely available at http://www.shikanda.net) have written extensive theoretical
arguments on religion, and this is not the place for a debate on this point. Let me merely say this. In my opinion religion is not just about the transmutation or sublimation
of violence. It is an (apparently almost inevitable) by-product of human thought organised into patterned action and relatively stable metaphors. It is risky to make
presuppositions about an undocumented distant past (the Middle Palaeolithic) when we have evidence of interhuman violence but not of articulate speech. Yet under
contemporary, literate conditions it is safe to say that violence may be as much a product of discursive thought (inter alia, religious thought), as that discursive
thought (inter alia, religious thought) is a product of violence.
[4] On Africa, cf. Ngwane 1996; van Binsbergen 2003a.
[5] This is not an idle claim, but one based on my years of historical and ethnographical research on North African popular Islam, around
1970 – basis for a two-volume scholarly study now being finalised for publication.
[6] Failure to appreciate how the vast majority of the North Atlantic population is no longer actively committed to Christianity
or Judaism also affects other parts of Kearney’s argument. Thus he claims that the tolerance between adversaries is to be increased by the realisation that they both belong to
the Abrahamic tradition (but so do the opponents in the Northern Ireland conflict, and in most conflicts that have waged in Europe in the course of the last thousand years,
including Christians’ treatment of Jews throughout that period), and also (Ricoeur) by reading each others’ sacred scripture. Again, the latter recommendation is correct in
principle, but how is it going to have a genuine impact on the North Atlantic region today, and on North Atlantic / Muslim relations, if due to secularisation only a minority
of North Atlantic inhabitants identify as active adherents of the Christian and Jewish faith any more, while Islam is establishing itself, in the same region, rapidly and self-confidently?
Christianity may be the rhetorical and performative idiom of the U.S.A. leadership, but it is no longer the worldview of all U.S.A. citizens, let alone of all citizens of the rest
of the North Atlantic region.
[7] In other words, I propose to analyse today’s contemporary militant Islamism from the same perspective as that which I applied
elsewhere to Southern African ubuntu philosophy and to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; cf. van Binsbergen 2001b, 2004. My approach has
however generated considerable controversy, cf. Bewaji & Ramose 2003.
[8] 1994-1998; cf. Salazar et al. 2004 with references to the extensive literature; van Binsbergen 2004.
[9]The obvious reason, not likely to be found with Ricoeur, is that the opponents on both sides bring to the conflict and its subsequent
reconciliation general notions of justice, punishment and retaliation which may be creatively addressed and negotiated in the course of reconciliation (especially by a skilful
outsider), but hardly so creatively as to totally eclipse or obliterate these notions; therefore, any reconciliation that does not take such particularistic notions of justice into
account, risks to remain on performative, unable to prevent that the conflict simmers on underneath as a form of resentment still demanding satisfaction.
[10] The plausibility of my analysis here is borne out by the fact that on both sides, the opponents in the ‘9-11’ conflict have dissimilated,
denied, and sought to escape from whatever overarching, global framework already exists. On the side of militant Islamism this is clear in the complete violation of intergentile
law and conventions of warfare, through the absence of a declaration of war, the absence of any post-war message annouoncing the perpetrators’ identity and their motives,
and the targetting of civilians. On the side of the USA (and subsequently, in what was typically an unsystematic, ad-hoc alliance, the UK) there has been the denial of the
binding nature of the global, treaty-supported institution of the United Nations Organisation, the launching of large-scale military attacks on two nations that, as nations,
had nothing demonstrably to do with the ‘9-11’ (Afghanistan and Iraq), and in the process ignoring vehement and massive international protests, while not even the
trouble was taken to invest the paper-thin pretexts as to the presence if mass destruction weapons with enough credibility to at least respect these democratic leadership’s
accountability to their own electorate. On both sides, the paramount message has been: there is no overarching framework of authority or legitimacy to which we are answerable,
it is just us against the enemy in mortal combat.
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