New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
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911 and the I and Thou
I wrote the following essay in November, 2001 (two months after the 9/11 tragedy). I wrote it to be included in my Christmas cards to friends. At the time, and up until just a few weeks ago (January, 2005), I had not heard of Ward Churchill or his essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (which by December 2001 had been on the internet for nearly 2 months).
When Churchill and his essay became an issue in the national media this winter, three years after it was written, I did not at first remember my own essay on the subject. But in the course of writing my essay,“Ward Churchill, 911 and the American Dream,” something about the issue of innocence kept haunting me and I found a copy my original essay, “9/11 and the I and thou,” buried in one of my trunks. I believe it has a particular bearing on the central issue of the Churchill controversy: American “innocence” and the American Dream. Here is what I wrote.
Every year about this time I try to find words—mine or someone else’s—to express my feelings about the season or the year that has past. This year has been particularly difficult. Like everyone else I was shocked and saddened by September 11. But in the aftermath my sadness has been tinged more and more with disappointment as I learned about the roots of this horror and watched America’s collective reaction.
In the past few years I have been reading books by scientists like Steven Weinberg, E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. What emerges in my mind from their wisdom is a kind of scientific confirmation of the conspiratorial nature of human societies and the troubling but nevertheless cohesive role played by religion, patriotism and family.
What has bothered me these last two months has been the way in which American society can so quickly shift into a blind hatred of the “other”—a blind hatred that is nothing more than a mirror image of the very behavior we are condemning. In a season traditionally intended to celebrate “the better angels of our nature,” it seems fair to fashion a more compassionate response. Writing in the Nation this month, Martha Nussbaum says,
Compassion begins with the local. But if our moral natures and our emotional natures are to live in any sort of harmony, we must find devices through which to extend our strong emotions—and our ability to imagine the situations of others—to the world of human life as a whole.
The horrendous slaughter of innocent people that America sustained on September 11 now joins a trail of tragedies of genocide, terror and unspeakable suffering that remain routine beyond our borders. Unfortunately, however, they are not beyond our involvement. Not only are these horrors the inevitable consequence of religious fanaticism and tribal barbarism, but of colonial imperialism and capitalist exploitation as well.
America is clearly culpable, along with many other nations, of the last two of these. But when you place alongside American imperialism abroad, our homeland history of genocide of America’s indigenous peoples, slavery and racism, McCarthyism and anti-abortion terrorism, the darker side of the American character seems dark enough to look askance at those in our midst who would fall back on xenophobic paranoia rather than educate themselves and their children about the actual cultural and political roots of the mess the world—the whole wide world—is in now.
The Jewish theologian Martin Buber’s idea of the I and Thou relationship, as opposed to the I and it relationship, is particularly illuminating for me in this season of American grief. We stopped using the word “thou” in America over a hundred years ago. It was a word more commonly associated with the antiquated King James version of the Bible. In French, in Spanish, the corresponding word “tu” is still in use as the term for the familiar.
In our personal relationships, according to Buber, we ought to seek a connection that is more personal, more familiar, more about the connection itself—the dialogue with that person—than it is about either one of us alone. When such a relationship is established, then it is possible for us to always hear what the other person is saying—and they, us—rather than what our preconceived ideas of each other might be.
Once we develop personal I/Thou relationships we are primed for the broader context of local, national and worldwide community. Martin Buber was a Zionist and as such deeply involved with events that led eventually to the foundation of the Jewish state of Israel. Cynics could argue that his utopian vision of a world wide human community (that began for him in the kibbutz) was a pipedream.
But though the road to hell might well be paved with good intentions, I don’t believe that visionaries from Buber and Marx to Jesus and Mohammed should be blamed for their inclusive hopes and dreams any more than we should blame the world’s evils on the world’s dispossessed.
In an I/Thou relationship we are always grounded in each other and must take responsibility for our part—or lack thereof—in maintaining that groundedness.
I’m not always sure I know what to do to foster even my own personal I/Thou relationships, but to quote Nussbaum again, “we know that we live in a complex, interconnected world, and we know our own ignorance.” Let us hope that Socrates was right in seeing this as the beginning of wisdom.
Austin, Texas
December 1, 2001
Ward Churchill, 911 and the American Dream. Part 1: The Crucible of Ideas
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