HQ

Answers to the questions raised in response to 9/11 are not easy. Many are yet to be answered and more yet to be asked. But for the past six posts ( I , II , III , IV , V , VI ) I have argued that Christianity is uniquely equipped with the presuppositions—linguistically, metaphysically, epistemologically and ethically—which make the questions meaningful in the first place.

Christian ideas imply a view of the origin of creation entirely under the sovereign rule of God. In discussions of morality, the Christian must point backwards, to creation and to the fall. There are many, however, who see the past as irrelevant. They see progress aligned with improved morals and religion, always tied to the past, with getting in the way.

Much of what was written after 9/11 and in the build up to war in Afghanistan and Iraq was about morality. A common theme posed by the secularist was the problem of moral equivalence. Moral Equivalence is a phrase used in political debate to describe those who deny any moral hierarchy in a conflict, 1 it is the “100 percent and 360 degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own.” 2

How can we know what is real? In the wake of 9/11 many philosophers offered interpretations of the event from their own perspective of reality. Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, claimed that 9/11 was an event which woke America up. America, he wrote, has been awakened, like Neo in The Matrix to, using the phrase Morpheus used, “the desert of the real.” Americans, Žižek argued, were, before 9/11, like Truman in the movie, The Truman Show 1 – living in “ the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise...in its very hyper-reality, in a way ireal, substances, deprived of the material inertia. ” 2

If language is given to refer to what is real, to what reality do we refer? Let us consider an idea put forward by American, Don DeLillo, in his novel, Falling Man. He provides multiple perspectives on 9/11, all of which attempt to make sense of the event. They ask: what kind of reality is it into which 9/11 is a part? Listen to DeLillo’s imaginary conversation between two of the terrorists who flew the planes into the towers. Amir speaks to Hammad: The end of our life is predetermined. We are carried toward that day from the moment we are born. There is no sacred law against what we are going to do. This is not suicide in any meaning or interpretation of the word. It is only something long written. We are finding the way already chosen for us… there are no others. The others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them. This is their function as others. Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying… These people,...

Let us begin speaking about 9/11 with speaking about speaking itself – what can we say about 9/11? Is man to be left speechless in the face of such an event? Postmodern philosopher, Jacques Derrida, argues that 9/11 cannot be adequately spoken of, that it is beyond conceptual reach. Derrida argues that the events of 9/11 offer opportunities for deconstructive discourse. Deconstructivism sets out to subvert the conceptual pairs which are found in general discourse. Conceptual pairs include light/darkness, male/female and good/evil. These pairs, according to Derrida, have no reason for being in the order they are nor should their alignment be taken for granted. Deconstructivism attempts to identify the conceptual construction which makes use of sets of irreducible pairs. Then it highlights the hierarchical ordering of the pairs and, finally, it seeks to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of those pairs and to subvert them.

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night... The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, bursting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall. 1 Whatever we were doing that day, almost ten years ago, we stopped to look. We all have an image in our minds of those towers, the planes, the pentagon, the field in Pennsylvania. At some point we stopped looking and began to talk.  Those who wrote were able to provide frameworks for thinking about the event – historical cause, political quandary, existential meaning. But responses to 9/11 2  were not merely descriptive, but prescriptive – they attempted to convince us to think about the event in a certain way. They used the event to prove a point. 9/11 becam...