The God Terror

WTC Attack 9-11

(Borrowed via Squire)

Today's heading is an expression that I picked up this morning from Don Bryd, who used it in the immediate aftermath of 9/11:

The god Terror has two kinds of followers -- the agents of terror and the terrified. They belong to the most vicious circle. The one makes no distinction between the guilty and the innocent, killing indifferently. The others accept the terrorists' simplification and respond.

This statement and the essay in which it occurs, "Something Big Has Happened: There are no Commercials on TV (In The Aftermath of the Terror, 9-11-01)," appear in the online journal CTheory. I know nothing of this journal, which describes itself as "an international peer-reviewed journal of theory, technology and culture" edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.

Its editorial page lists Jean Baudrillard, which gives me some idea of its intellectual orientation. Baudrillard is infamous for his remarks in the wake of 9/11:

That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, -- this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.

It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity. (Jean Baudrillard, "The Spirit of Terrorism," translated by Dr. Rachel Bloul, Le Monde, November 2, 2001.)

Both Bryd and Baudrillard would make us all worshippers at the altar of the god Terror, though Bryd draws a distinction between terrorist and terrorized that Baudrillard erases. In Baudrillard's words, "It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it." Perhaps Baudrillard wouldn't have wished his French translated to sound so eerily like the classic rapist's defense -- "She wanted it" -- but there it stands.

I don't like the theoretical style of either article, for both tend to over-intellectualize the motives of the 9/11 terrorists, but both Bryd and Baudrillard rightly sense the religious significance in the terror of 9/11.

And by that, I don't mean Islam ... not quite yet, anyway.

What I mean is that both Bryd and Baudrillard perhaps implicitly understood that the terror experienced at the force of 9/11's overwhelming destruction echoes the extreme dread that Rudolf Otto characterizes as a fundamental response to "The Holy."

Since primal religions do not radically differentiate the holy and the impure, both being felt as powerful, dynamic spiritual forces that can overwhelm human beings, and since we all perhaps retain the tendency to react in primal ways to extreme circumstances, then I would argue that the dreadful awe experienced in the presence of the holy can also be felt in the presence of overwhelming evil.

I think that Baudrillard is right to refer to "evil ... as an obscure object of desire." We tend to worship what we fear, desire what we worship, and direct that powerful desire toward destruction.

In "What We Have to Lose" (City Journal, Autumn 2001) Theodore Dalrymple recounts a personal experience with the delight of destruction:

I remembered an episode from my childhood. My brother and I took a radio out onto the lawn and there smashed it into a thousand pieces with croquet mallets. With a pleasantly vengeful fury, as if performing a valuable task, we pursued every last component with our mallets until we had pulverized it into unrecognizability. The joy we felt was indescribable; but where it came from or what it meant, we knew not. Within our small souls, civilization struggled with barbarism: and had we suffered no retribution, I suspect that barbarism's temporary victory would have been more lasting.

As John Milton put it, "Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather" (Areopagitica).

The terrorists of 9/11 submitted themselves completely to a primal religious force that aims at casting nonbelievers into a state of terrified dread. We must resist that dread in the face of evil. Even more, we must resist submitting to that part of us that finds in "evil ... an obscure object of desire," the impurity within that echoes the impurity without, the delight in destruction, the worship of the god Terror.

This is our great moral struggle.