Martin Sheehan finds that September 11 says as much about us as it does about the terrorists.

But it seems that something has happened that has never
happened before: though we know not just when, or
why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no
God; and this has never happened before
that men both deny gods and worship gods, professing
first Reason
and then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or
Race, or Dialectic.
                                                - T.S. Eliot, Choruses from ‘The Rock’ (1934)

Two anecdotes to start off with: on entering a café I frequent, I noticed that a new menu had been written up on a chalk board advertising the latest desert. The sign read, "Try Our New Desert – Mortal Sin!" The cake in question, all dripping with cream and crowned with strawberries, was a reference to the film Chocolat and the notion that sin is no sin, but what is good and beautiful to do.

Second anecdote: walking through the Canberra Central Shopping Centre the other day, I noticed a store selling mind games. What was the store called?

Why Socrates of course! In these two examples lies the substance of the conundrum that besets modern Australia , and the West more generally. Heir to the rich cultural tradition of the West, with its roots in classical Greco-Roman culture and the Christian religion, westerners have reduced the great ideas of western civilisation to whatever sells the best in department stores and restaurants. The riches of our cultural and spiritual tradition, built up over centuries by some of the greatest minds of the West, have been traded for a cheap deal on the latest consumer products.

Meditating on Terror

John Carroll’s book, Terror: A meditation on the meaning of September 11,*uses the terror attacks on New York and Washington to study our contemporary consumerist and materialist culture. Faced with a campaign of violence and intimidation by Islamic militants bent on forcing the US to withdraw support for Israel , and to remove its bases from the holy territory of Saudi Arabia , the western world is experiencing its greatest challenge since the fall of communism. For this challenge is not merely political or military, according to Carroll, but an attack on the fundamental beliefs and culture of western society.

Carroll takes as his starting point the injunctions attributed to the pagan Greek god Apollo at the dawn of western civilisation: "Know Thyself!" and "Nothing too Much!" The modern West has violated these maxims to the extreme.

We are obsessed with the acquisition of things, with the pursuit of comfort and a purely material happiness, while the spiritual life – where man explores the transcendent and interior realms - is the occupation only of ‘cranks’ kept at a distance by the rest of society. We dwell in security and luxury while large parts of the world descend further into abject poverty or struggle, often vainly, to maintain their traditional culture from the onslaught of consumerism and greed.

Having all but abandoned the Christian churches for the secular shrine of the shopping centre, westerners stand on the brink of an abyss. Faced with the destruction wrought by terrorists motivated by an absolute certainty in the rightness of their religion and their cause, the West is culturally paralysed by an enemy it cannot comprehend. For to comprehend people motivated by adamant beliefs, westerners would have to have some comparable convictions of their own – but their traditional store of these has been traded for an easy existence.

The Emptiness

Carroll’s fear is that the West is unable to take up the cultural challenge – all that we can talk about is freedom (which is primarily a negative freedom, freedom from restraint), which we already have enough of, but cannot say what it is we are for. Are we fighting against Islamic terrorism in the name of the free market?

Are we fighting for democracy and freedom? Or are we fighting for God and country? What is it we westerners truly believe?

At this stage Carroll thinks it is hard to say – and judging from the ambivalent response of the populace since September  11, most seem to just want to get back to living their lives and making money.

To Carroll this mentality is appalling - terrible though the events of September 11 were, the West has suffered little so far, compared to the mass destruction and vast misery wrought by the Second World War. And yet we’ve had enough already – it’s as if the populace fails to see the gravity of the threat facing it and just wishes it would all go away.

Heart of Darkness

This is not surprising given the type of society that has appeared in the last twenty years, reaching its apogee arguably in the greed and excess of the economic boom in the 1980s and 1990s.

Obsessed with a secular humanist dream of building a globalised world culture, based on market economics and liberal democracy, the West has ignored its own spiritual tradition. Having abandoned the heroic spiritual culture of Christianity for the shallow, imageobsessed pseudo-culture of the shopping mall, westerners are ill equipped to deal with a foe like bin Laden.

The lack of belief that lies at the heart of western culture has found a monumental representation in the gaping emptiness now at the centre of Manhatten , New York , where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre once stood. Before the West can rally to meet the challenge offered by bin Laden, the spiritual and cultural hole in its heart must first be filled.

Carroll cleverly uses Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, to illustrate the West’s spiritual bankruptcy. Conrad’s story was written in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but he gave voice in the text to many of his fears for the world of the coming twentieth century.

The story charts the journey of Marlowe up a river in Africa to recover a trading company agent who is being recalled to answer questions regarding his conduct among the natives. Marlowe leaves Europe disgusted with the spiritual emptiness and cultural decadence of western civilisation – in Africa he hopes to rediscover the primitive roots of humanity, and thus regain the vitality and creativity that the modern world lacks.

It is the figure of the company agent, Kurtz, who begins to dominate his thoughts, however, as he moves up river – a man like himself who fled the decadence of modern Europe to build an empire among the primitive tribes of the interior. Kurtz becomes an image of the heroic individual who throws off decadence and takes a stand in wilderness against a bankrupt civilisation.

Kurtz wants to take the place of God and create a new way of life – instead he goes mad and in despair indulges in an orgy of violence and destruction. For Conrad any such attempt at cosmic self assertion is bound to end in madness and death, and the utter destruction of civilised existence. Kurtz is a monster deserving of our condemnation.

The modern West is trapped in the Kurtz story, according to Carroll - realising the absurdity of a world without God, a world without spiritual or metaphysical beliefs, yet unable to tear itself away form a fixation on material comfort, and, what Carroll calls, the "package tour through life".

The challenge is to prove what kind of men we are, according to Carroll, before it is too late. Are we men of conviction and faith, able to rise to the terrorist challenge? Or are we so effete, so lacking in the courage that comes from belief, that we would prefer to pretend that it just isn’t happening?

"What kind of man are you, dude?”

One of Carroll’s favourite movies, referred to in a number of his books, is the John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. In the movie Jimmy Stewart plays a young lawyer travelling out West who is confronted by the notorious outlaw Liberty Valence.

Stewart’s character is a believer in progress and education, a champion of humanism and tolerance. Valence holds up the stagecoach he is travelling on and, when confronted by Stewart, beats him savagely and challenges him by saying, "What kind of man are you, dude?”

This is a challenge not only to the lawyer’s manhood but also to his most fundamental values and convictions.

How can liberalism and humanism comprehend the vicious and anarchic nature of a character like Valence ?

They cannot because liberals believe that all men are basically good and capable of rational thought. Other men of another mould are needed to deal with Liberty Valence.

Carroll believes that the modern West is in a similar predicament – dedicated as we are to reason, liberalism and tolerance we are ill prepared for criminals like Usama bin Laden who recognise no western law and cannot be reasoned with.

Our problem, and the problem of the West, is the problem of being: "Who are we?" and "What kind of men are we?”

So absorbed are we by buying and consuming, and keeping on the move, zooming around our cities or jetting about the globe, that we have forgotten how to be. This is the point we have reached. We are on the edge. Is there a way back, or more realistically, through the darkness enveloping us? There is.

But is there time for us to take it? And if there were, would we have the will?

If only we could choose to place ourselves once more within the mystery of being, we stand a chance of rediscovering our spiritual heritage, the Christian heritage of the West which has been gradually obscured over the last two hundred years.

(*John Carroll, Terror: A meditation on the meaning of September 11; Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2002; $16.50 )   

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