Sontag became notorious for her reaction to the 9/11 attacks. She argued that hijackers had political and military objectives and that the attacks were not simply irrational acts of inscrutable malice. Predictably, her critics misconstrued her remarks as a defense of the hijackers.
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(It is ironic that the FBI profiler is a latter day folk hero. Americans love fiction and non-fiction about brilliant forensic psychologists who crack a baffling crime by "getting into the head" of a serial killer. I have never heard anyone argue that profiler shows generate sympathy for serial killers by acknowledging that they act for reasons.)
Unlike many of my generation, especially those of the female persuasion, the death of Susan Sontag doesn't conjure for me many intellectual epiphanies of my youth. When I was encouraged to read an article by a enthusiastic friend or reviewer, I'd find a paragraph here or there noteworthy, but neither her thought nor expression were compelling for me personally. And in later years I found her writing either opaque or a replay of "greatest hits" that wasn't all that relevant.
Yet her comments immediately after 9/11 I found all too sadly to the point. Their relevance was immediately proved by the outpouring of venom in response, whereby Sontag became the poster child for a vicious bundle of caricatures -- "sleeping with the enemy," betrayal of the memory of the victims, and "hate America first," all rolled into one. A total rejection of the simple acknowledgment that can more effectively protect ourselves from such horror in the future if we have some understanding of what the perpetrators thought were not only justification, but compelling motivation, for actions which are to us quite literally incomprehensible.
Ironically, it is those who pretend to a warrior ethos who seemed most likely to reject such a sensible inquiry. Yet isn't one of the first rules of waging war to understand the enemy? For armchair generals who love their Clausewitz, isn't the first step to understand the political foundations of a conflict -- from both sides -- before one extends that conflict into actual use of force?
We each have options: choices of action and inaction, of initiation and response. The conservative call for "moral clarity," for choices driven and constrained by values, is closely linked in their discourse to notions of accountability and responsibility. We are subjected to scathing critiques that we have become a culture attached to feel-good therapy and illusory self-esteem.
Yet how can we behave in a morally responsible fashion if we reject inquiry. Shouldn't we be held morally accountable for a failure to make informed choices? Shouldn't an examination of a range of actions available to us -- past, present and future -- as well as those available to the enemy, be part of any moral action? And shouldn't we be feeding what we learn from experience back into that calculus, adjusting it as we learn more about both ourselves and the opposition? What could possibly be threatening in a statement that we should look at the dynamic of how our own attitudes and behavior interplay with those of our opponents?
But her call for clear-headed thinking was a profound threat. The prevailing attitude was not simply to ignore the antecedents of the attack, the rationalizing and expectations of the enemy, the enemy's possible future behavior (other than anxiety about similar episodes of terror) and how that might change depending on our own course of action. It was to condemn the very asking of the questions! As if "moral clarity" precluded informed choice.
In the process of raging against those who would ask questions, who would insist on informed choice, "moral clarity" became more than simply "black vs white" or "good vs evil." As many a religious leader or theologian would argue, an understanding of "evil" in no way precludes our implacable and total opposition but rather arms us better to fight against those who would do evil. To fail to know those who threaten evil is to err both in making them seem bigger than they are and to underestimate their true danger, danger which is heightened if we ignore the risk of our own actions increasing our vulnerability.
Our much vaunted "moral clarity" instead seems to be a nice little security blanket, giving us comfort that all may not be right with the world, but all is right with us. It has become an excuse for unquestioning attachment to ignorance and prejudice that allows us to condemn those who are different while patting ourselves on the back. It has become the same thin gruel of self-esteem so caustically condemned by the very people who insist on moral clarity.
More commonly concerning terrorism, "moral clarity" wrapped in a flag has been a simplistic justification for framing our actions within the limited vocabulary of force and an honor code of retaliation. As if we didn't fear the terrorists but rather we feared we might learn we had other choices than to wipe off the face of the earth anyone who might oppose us (or at least "punish" them for their failure to acquiesce in our moral righteousness). That we feared reason would somehow deprive us of the fiery rage we needed to carry out our duty to avenge the victims and ensure "it will never happen again." Or that we fear if we ceased to rage, we might begin to feel frightened, not just by what the enemy could do next, but by the unacknowledged choices we face.
If we take the trouble to go back to read Sontag's words, along with those of other New Yorker contributors, rather than quote a few memorable phrases, they don't look quite so outlandish. Viewed after the first trauma wore off, her mistake seems to have been, as my brother would say, to offer sandpaper when folks wanted a tissue. But she saw far too many tissues being handed out, and thought a bit of sandpaper was in order. She was right about the tissues, and she said little that didn't become common observation throughout the recent presidential campaign. But no question, her timing was lousy. And for that she will be infamous; for other contributions she will hopefully be remembered.
The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.
Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. "Our country is strong," we are told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.
—Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
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