Climate of Fear : The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World

One A Changing Mask of Fear

I have taken myself back to the late seventies when, at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, I delivered a lecture under the title “Climates of Art.” Introducing that lecture, I made the following admission:

In the course of the lecture, variations of the title of this present series cropped up at least half a dozen times. My departure point, my main area of concern at the time, was the fate of the arts — and artists — under the burgeoning trade of dictatorship and governance through a forced diet of fear, most especially on the African continent — in common parlance, the fear of “the midnight knock.” Arbitrary detentions. Disappearances. Torture as the rule rather than the exception. Even cynical manipulations of the judicial process, whereby a political dissident found himself in what could be described as a revolving dock without an exit, a Kafkaesque nightmare that had no end except perhaps at the end of a rope, for a crime of which the accused might even be completely unaware. Decades after that lecture, the world took bitter note of the hanging of the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his companions after a kangaroo trial — mostly because he was a writer, but also because his cause, that of ecological preservation, had become a global agenda.

At the time of that lecture, Nigeria, my immediate political constituency, was reeling under the execution, by firing squad, of three young men under a retroactive decree — in other words, the crime of which they were convicted, drug trafficking, did not carry a capital forfeit at the time of commission.That defiant act of murder had a purpose — to instill fear into the populace by deliberately flouting the most elementary principles of justice. And so on and on it went.The Nigerian event wrung two plays out of me—A Scourge of Hyacinths for radio, and From Zia with Love, its stage version — so persistently did that episode insist on lacerating my re-creative temper. I was not alone.The entire nation was deeply traumatized. Even the normally carnivalesque atmosphere that marked the main arena of public executions of armed robbers, dubbed the Bar Beach Show, was reported unusually subdued. So improbable was the outcome that the crowd had persuaded itself to believe a rumor that the military dictatorship intended only to mount a charade, instill some salutary fear into traffickers, and would reprieve the young men at the last moment. Instead of giving voice to the usual chorus of derision at the exit of hated felons, the crowd had come prepared to cheer the moment of reprieve. When the ritual of final priestly ministrations, blindfolding, and other motions made it quite clear that the sentence was moving remorselessly toward its decreed end, a shout of “No, no, no” went up from the crowd. After the deed was done, there followed moments of absolute silence, of utter disbelief; then the crowd more or less slunk away, downcast and shocked. The dictators had not expected such a reaction. Not long after, public executions were banned and, following the overthrow of that dictatorship by another, the edict was repealed.

While that regime lasted, however, there was no question about it: for the first time in the brief history of her independence, the Nigerian nation, near uniformly, was inducted into a palpable intimacy with fear. The question on every mind was simply this: what else were they capable of, those who could carry out an act that revolted even the most elastic sectors of the public conscience? It is a question to bear in mind in our attempts to understand what distinguishes from the past the new fabric of fear that we all seem to wear at this moment. As each assault on our localized or global sense of security is mounted or uncovered in the nick of time, the residual question is surely: What next? Where? How? Are limits or restraints any longer recognized?

What was happening on the African continent in those violent seventies and eighties was echoed, perhaps with even greater ferocity, in the Americas, where those danger words desaparecidos, right-wing murder squads, government-sponsored vigilantes, etc. gained international notoriety. Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Panama. Iran under the SAVAK. Apartheid South Africa under BOSS. Fear was almost uniformly a state-run production line, except of course where right-wing volunteer agents of repression lent a hand, as in Latin America. Between right-wing governments and the efficient state-run communist machinery there was, however, hardly any difference. Hungary, Albania, East Germany, Bulgaria, and so on. Émigrés from these would-be utopias, no different from survivors of apartheid South Africa — both the defeated and the yet combative and conspiratorial — crisscrossed the world seeking help and solidarity. Again and again, our paths — those of creative people — would meet, leading to that immediate question: How did creativity survive under such arbitrary exercise of power? How did Art survive in a climate of fear? Today, the constituency of fear has become much broader, far less selective.

We are all agreed, I like to believe, on what constitutes fear. If not, we can at least agree on the symptoms of fear, recognize when the conditioning of fear has afflicted or been imposed on an individual or a community. Certainly we have learned to associate the emotion of fear with the ascertainable measure of a loss in accustomed volition. The sense of freedom that is enjoyed or, more accurately, taken for granted in normal life becomes acutely contracted. Caution and calculation replace a norm of spontaneity or routine. Often, normal speech is reduced to a whisper, even within the intimacy of the home. Choices become limited. One is more guarded, less impulsive. A rapist is on the loose in society. A serial killer terrorizes an entire community — as happened recently in the state of Maryland in the United States, where two men, an adult and his protégé, placed an entire state under siege as they picked off victims at random.

Now, such a disruption induces a totally different sensation from that created by a war situation, where a town is placed under siege. Even if bombs and rockets are raining down on the populace without cessation, the very process of war permits a certain space of volition, and thus reduces the inner debilitation that comes with a sense of impotence. In the case of Maryland, the murdering pair succeeded in making fear the controlling factor for a population. This anonymous force shut down schools and institutions and destabilized normal existence. Parents took to escorting their children right into the schoolroom, with a look cast over the shoulder. Obviously, while the killing spree lasted, there was deep resentment of, even rage at, the unknown assailant, but the commonest product of that phase was simply undirected fear. A notable aspect of all-pervasive fear is that it induces a degree of loss of self-apprehension: a part of one’s self has been appropriated, a level of consciousness, and this may even lead to a reduction in one’s self-esteem — in short, a loss of inner dignity. Not always, admittedly, and those times when such a claim is invalid offer us the chance of making some crucial distinctions among the various contexts within which fear takes its especial quality.

It so happens that I recently underwent an experience that enables me to reinforce such a distinction, one that may explain why the experience of fear is actually more tolerable in some circumstances than in others — in other words, there does exist a kind of fear one can live with, shrug off, one that may actually be absorbed as a therapeutic incidence, while others are simply downright degrading. I refer to the recent fires that ravaged southern California and resulted in the devastation of one of the largest swaths of land, we are told, in the history of fires in the United States. I was one of those thousands of residents who found their homes in the path of the ravenous invader, unable to predict — literally— which way the wind would blow.

Well, let me describe what I observed in the comportment of neighbors. They were anxious, of course, and fearful. Watchful and insecure. But their humanity was not abused or degraded by the menace that bore down on them. On the contrary, they remained in combative form, constantly exchanging news as well as tactical suggestions for saving the neighborhood. Sleep was out of the question. At any moment, we had been warned, police sirens and fire-truck Klaxons could rip through the night, signaling the moment for compulsory evacuation. As the fires came closer, choices became reduced. Sprinklers lost power, garden hoses gave up the last trickle, and we began to wonder if electric power was now threatened. Indeed, a blackout soon followed. Our endangered community became apprehensive of the worst — but no one was truly intimidated, nor was there the slightest sign of a loss of dignity.

The relationship between that fire, a naked force of Nature — even though probably the work of arsonists— and the humanity that was menaced was very different from the exercise of the power of an individual over another, or that of a totalitarian state over its populace. There exists a vast abyss of sensibilities between the raw force that is Nature, on the one hand, and the exertion of force by one human being in relation to another. I suggest that this has to do with yet another human possession, an attribute that is as much a social acquisition as it is inherent in the human species — dignity. A number of philosophers — Hegel, Locke, and so on — even stretch this notion of self-esteem to the human need for recognition. This last is a concept of which I am not particularly enamored, and I find the bulk of expository literature on that extended impulse mostly unsatisfying — we shall touch again on this theme in our fourth lecture, “The Quest for Dignity.” For now, let us simply observe that the assault on human dignity is one of the prime goals of the visitation of fear, a prelude to the domination of the mind and the triumph of power.

A few decades ago, the existence of collective fear had an immediately identifiable face — the atomic bomb. While that source is not totally absent today, one can claim that we have moved beyond the fear of the bomb. A nuclear menace is also implicated in the current climate of fear, but the atom bomb is only another weapon in its arsenal, the theoretical do-it-yourself kit that fits into a suitcase and can be assembled in the nearest bathroom.What terrifies the world, however, is no longer the possibility of over-muscled states unleashing on the world the ultimate scenario — the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) that once, paradoxically, also served as its own mutually restraining mechanism. Today the fear is one of furtive, invisible power, the power of the quasi-state, that entity that lays no claim to any physical boundaries, flies no national flag, is unlisted in any international associations, and is every bit as mad as the MAD gospel of annihilation that was so calmly annunciated by the superpowers.

The last century, post — Second World War, was indeed dominated by the fear of a nuclear holocaust. That fear, let it be noted, however, was only a successor to another. It replaced, once the war was over, yet another collective fear — that of world domination by a fanatic individual who preached, and sought to actualize, a gospel of race purity. In the cause of that mission, some millions of humanity were systematically annihilated, while millions more perished on fields of battle that stretched from the North Pole to the South Sea Islands. As I narrated in my childhood memoirs, Aké: The Years of Childhood, the figure of Adolf Hitler was one fearsome presence that percolated distances all the way from embattled Europe to farflung colonial possessions. Parents invoked Hitler as the bogeyman to quiet the obstreperous child. Households were compelled by decree of the colonial officer to darken their windows at night. Infractions were penalized by fines. And when, finally, a cargo ship caught fire on the lagoon in the capital city of Lagos, and explosions shattered windows even far away from the marina, we, as children, had no doubt that the Terror of the Free World had indeed arrived to cart us off into slavery.

That universal season of fear ended on the battlefield. In its place rose the fear of the very weapon of the world’s liberation — at least, that was the excuse— whose devastating effects appeared to have no limitations. The literature of science fiction took a swing toward prospects of a devastated world, peopled by mutants in whom the loss of the last vestiges of humanity would be reflected in their very physical decomposition. The cinema bore graphic witness to this mood. Beyond the grotesquerie, the caricatures, and the gallows humor of Dr. Strangelove was a more than subterranean revelation of a penetrating fear, a caution, and a strong moral message to the world to pull back from the nuclear brink. Nothing was left to chance in its aim of exacting a moral apprehension of power and destruction through a recourse to negative memory — who can forget Peter Sellers’s manic performance, the arm that jerked up of its own volition in a Nazi salute, an iconography that was surpassed only by the whooping rodeo ride on the back of a nuclear bomb into oblivion and obliteration by yet another obsessed angel of MAD!

That fear went, predictably, beyond artistic expressions and provoked practical responses. There were protest marches, Aldermaston being perhaps the pioneer and the most famous of them all. I took part in some of these, enjoyed their carnival atmosphere that was laced with purpose. I was filled with excitement at participating in what struck me as a preemptive course of action by civil society. I felt that I was part of a universal undertaking — not to mention the thrill of actually marching in the company of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, incidentally the first Reith lecturer in 1948. My fond recollection of him remains that of a pipe-smoking leprechaun of a man with a giant brain, whose atheism was grounded in a faith that man’s first allegiance was to his kind, and that science must always be subject to humanistic considerations.

As the saber rattling grew louder during this Cold War, and the superpowers raced to surpass one another in mounting bigger and better explosions and to sneak a few of the deadly pods into the backyards of their ideological rivals, the fear of the atom bomb grew so affective that a few of my European acquaintances chose not to have any children, declaring that they were not about to provide fodder for the inevitable nuclear consummation. Some formed artist colonies on remote islands where they established communes, leading a simple life, culturing seaweed — for some reason that I cannot now recall — while they awaited the inevitable, from which, however, they fully expected to be spared. Folksingers such as Pete Seeger became cult figures on international circuits for their antinuclear lyrics. Tom Lehrer’s songs, laced with grim, apocalyptic humor, became a staple diet for student and antiestablishment caucuses, while the great baritone Paul Robeson lent credence to a great communist conspiracy by his appearances at socialist peace rallies in France, where the antinuclear theme overwhelmed virtually every other global concern.

Within my own continent, however, it would have been virtually impossible to find one extreme example of the preemptive strategies that were adopted by the artist colonies of Europe, not even when the French rode roughshod over the protestations of African nations and detonated the first nuclear device on African soil in the middle of the last century. Africans were already inured to other forms of fear, and a nuclear conflagration was such an exotic threat that the French explosion remained a pure political aggravation, not one that ever translated into a visceral fear. Today, few of us on the continent will deny that the circumstances, and the dimension, of the current face of fear have transformed awareness even in our normally immune corners of the globe and brought into immediacy the charms of Europe’s artistic exodus. The only trouble is, such overactive imaginations will find it difficult to think of a secure destination. Events of a hitherto unimaginable dimension have rendered virtually every corner of the globe vulnerable.

Reality is indeed catching up with science fiction, or, shall we now simply say, history is repeating itself in a phenomenon that appears to have been cloned from fiction. I refer to that perennial motif of the literature of megalomania, a fascination with the notion of one individual’s obsession to dominate the world — to be distinguished from ruling, or governing, simply to dominate—that stuff of science fiction that found reality in the historic aberration of an Adolf Hitler. Now James Bond 007 moves beyond fantasy derring-do where the global sword of Damocles is an orbiting satellite, awaiting the push of a button unless a hundred billion euros are paid into a special account and the whole world acknowledges a new Master of the Universe, ensconced in the bowels of some inaccessible island. However, even the orbiting pod of destruction has its limitations in in-stilling universal fear. Far more effective is the domesticated agency whose very ordinariness is more terrifying than the sophisticated bomb, and is inversely proportionate to the bomb’s lethal reach. A sachet of sarin is located no one knows where, but is ready to be punctured when the signal is given. The banal shopping bag left innocuously at the entrance to a metro station is eyed as a potential enemy, capable of devastation less dramatic than, but every bit as awesome as, a plane hurtling down from the sky in a ball of flames.

In 1989, less than a year after Lockerbie, a UTA passenger flight — UTA, like Pan Am, has since collapsed — was brought down by an act of sabotage over the Republic of Niger. That event was swallowed with total equanimity by African heads of state. Was this from policy, the tranquilizing pill of African and/or Third World solidarity, that catechism of historic victims of European imperialism that urged them to close ranks in the face of any accusations by the historic oppressors of the world? Or did this muteness emanate from fear of probable reprisal by the aggressor, who was predictably intolerant of any voice — within or without — that dared to criticize its methods of anti-imperialist challenge?

That silence, I confess, gave me pause, and here is why. In the original lecture to which I referred at the beginning—“Climates of Art”—when French arrogance sought to spread the fear of the nuclear holocaust to African soil, even during that immediate postindependence stage of insecure nationhood, I lauded the fact that African states had not hesitated to act in concert. The outrage of a continent was vocal and sustained. France was declared a pariah nation, and numerous African countries broke diplomatic relations with the arrogant Gauls for infesting African soil with nuclear fumes. The economic consequences, in the main, were bravely ignored. On a personal level, since that outrage coincided with my début on the stage of the Royal Court Theatre in London — one of those experimental one-night stands on a Sunday — I declaimed an angry poem in condemnation of such an act of continental disdain. Indeed, the recent hysterical mood of resentment in the United States over the refusal of France to jump into an unnecessary U.S.-promoted war with Iraq was nothing compared with the mood of the African continent when France, despite stern warnings, went ahead and detonated its atom bomb.With that concerted response on my mind, I think I could be forgiven for expecting no less than the same heated reaction when a plane was deliberately blasted out of African skies.

Nothing of the sort took place. A planeload of humanity had been deliberately blown apart and, suddenly, the political touchiness of the continent appeared to have gone to sleep. None of that earlier fervor of moral outrage was forthcoming, not even a credible warning to whomever the perpetrators were to kindly take their warfare elsewhere or be confronted with the righteous anger of African nations. The commencing view on the continent was that this was a PLO gambit, aided and abetted by some Middle East allies, and there were sufficient reasons to lean toward such a view. Libya — and Gadhafi — entered the list of suspects some time later.

That studied muteness, I felt, could only be born out of fear. The political club that was then the Organization of African Unity made only the most tepid statements of condemnation. If it set up its own technical commission of investigation, it must have been deliberately low-key, an apologetic step that was shrouded in mystery — for fear of reprisals? Political cowardice or a lack of moral will, what dominated the thinking of many African leaders was, frankly, “Let us keep mute and maybe he will exempt us from his current revolutionary rampage, or at least exercise his restraining influence and cloak us in selective immunity.” They had only to recall that Libya, headed by a young maverick called Gadhafi, was then at the height of its powers. It advertised a progressive, even radical, agenda, one that threatened corrupt as well as repressive governments, provided a training ground for dissidents of the left, right, or indeterminate — and not merely on the African continent. In short, the fear of Libya was the beginning of wisdom.

That silence obtained its rebuke when contrasted with the combative cry of the world over Lockerbie. It was indeed a shock of contrasts. In the case of Lockerbie, a painstaking exercise of detective work spanned continents. The culprits were not only identified but boldly advertised, and a pursuit of the malefactors undertaken until they were eventually brought before a court of justice. That culture of “neighborly reticence”—let us take note — is yet again paralyzing the will of African leaders today as they turn a blind eye to the genocidal operations currently being waged in the Sudan. A new Rwanda is in the making — to cite the belated acknowledgment by the secretary-general of the United Nations — but the victims wait in vain for the moral outcry of a continent, or a structure of relief from the global community.

Again, an updated postscript to the pairing of those two aerial assaults: in the terms of settlements finally agreed in the last year by the Libyan government, the Niger atrocity appeared to be constantly attached as a footnote, a minor codicil to the Lockerbie agreement, almost an afterthought.Those terms of settlement, being derisory in comparison, further bore out my earlier plaint: even in the supposedly egalitarian domain of death, some continue to die more equally than others. But the succession of Lockerbie by Niger had at least impressed one fact on the world: the enthronement of a qualitatively different climate of fear, an expression of global dominance through a disregard for innocents, without respect to territory, and without even a pragmatic questioning of the possible rupturing of existing political alliances. Libya was after all — still is — a member of the Organization of African Unity, now the African Union. That fact did not prevent her assault on the constituency of that organization. The implicit proclamation appeared to be that, in the new arena of conflicts, there would be no cordon sanitaire, no sanctuary for innocents, no space that was out of bounds in the territorial claims of a widening climate of fear.

Even as the foregoing was being drafted, just a few months ago, the world was astounded by a once unthinkable volte-face by the Libyan government. I listened in a state of near hypnosis as the Libyan leader stepped up to the microphones to renounce not only the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction but — terrorism! Within the radical caucuses of the sixties, seventies, and eighties on the African continent, any suggestion that Mr. Gadhafi was remotely linked with the promotion of acts that involved the arbitrary disposition of lives, and should be condemned for this, was greeted with those knowing smirks that declared one a victim of Western brainwashing and an enemy of the anti-imperialist struggle. The notion that there should be rules and restraints even within an accepted mandate of justifiable violence in the cause of a people’s liberation was simply too abstruse a concept, one that identified only the lackeys of the imperialist order. Distasteful though the conclusion may be to such mind-sets, September 11, 2001, has proved to be only a culmination of the posted signs that had been boldly scrawled on the sands of the Sahara, over decades, in letters of blood.

We are repeatedly bombarded with the notion that the world we once knew ended on September 11, 2001. I find myself unable to empathize with such a notion, and we shall look at the reasons why as we proceed with our series. For now, let me simply admit that it is within that subjective context that I found it most appropriately symbolic that I, the only African passenger aboard a British Airways flight between London and Los Angeles on that day, should be the last person on the plane to learn what had happened, and perhaps one of the last million or two of the world population to know that the world had, allegedly, undergone a permanent transformation. It is an appropriate anecdote on which to end this introductory lecture.

What happened was quite simple: my routine on an aircraft — which I regret to admit has virtually become my third or fourth home — is quite simple. I take advantage of the total isolation to do some work, eat at meal-times, doze off in fits and starts, drink any amount of wine I feel like — in defiance of medical wisdom — but mostly engage in a sometimes intensive dialogue with my laptop. On September 11, the routine was no different. I must have been in one of my sleep modes when the event occurred.When I woke up, I simply reported back for duty with my laptop.

My surprise was quite subdued when, eight to nine hours after takeoff, I heard the pilot announce that we were now approaching Manchester — subdued because the United States makes free with the names of cities from all over the world, and I imagined that the weather had forced the pilot to follow a different flight pattern from the norm, one that brought him over some American town called Manchester, rather than the city of Boise, Idaho, a name I had grown accustomed to hearing from the flight deck as we drew close to Los Angeles. However, when, a few minutes later, the same voice announced that we were now crossing the Welsh border, I had to wonder if this was not one coincidence too many.

Before I had time to work out what it all meant, however, the next announcement informed me that we were making our approach for a landing in… Cardiff! I pressed the bell and the flight steward came by. Why, I asked, were we landing in Cardiff, and could he inform me in what part of the United States that was situated?

The poor man blinked hard, stared down at me. Didn’t I know that we had turned around in mid-Atlantic? There had been, he said, a “security incident” in the United States and all planes were being either diverted or not permitted to take off at all if their destination was the U.S. We were headed for Cardiff because there were no more berths at Heathrow, other U.S.bound planes having been grounded. Beyond that, he could offer no explanation. I shrugged it off. It was not, after all, the first time that my plane had been diverted or done a full turnaround, mid-Atlantic, on account of some technical problem.

Here is an appropriate moment to confess to my own five-year cohabitation with a personalized form of fear. Nothing less than fear had long since schooled me into traveling with only hand luggage. I have always been a light traveler, but the habit became de rigueur under the terror reign of Sanni Abacha of Nigeria. So unscrupulous were the methods of that dictatorship that its agents did not hesitate to introduce contraband, specifically hard drugs, into the luggage of the opposition, then alert the customs officials at the destination of the approaching drug baron. If I lived under any real fear during the struggle to rid the nation of that dictatorship, it was definitely that, over and above anything else. It surpassed even the possibility of being seduced by a designing female, like the hapless whistle-blower on the Israeli nuclear activities whose pleasure trip with his paramour ended up in the net spun by the Mossad, and an eighteen-year prison sentence. Against such a predicament one could at least protect oneself by resisting temptation; checked-in luggage was far more vulnerable matter. This project of incrimination through baggage tampering actually succeeded with a traditional monarch who had refused to surrender his domain to Abacha’s campaign for a life presidency. I was involved in what were fortunately successful efforts to extricate that innocent from a virtual illegal imprisonment in London, public embarrassment, and even extortion.

The fear of Abacha had thus turned me into one baggageless passenger you could swear by on any flight, and thus the very first out of the customs area — that is, when I was not being interrogated for having three passports stuck together, plastered with visas and immigration stamps from cover to cover. This time, passage was smooth. I ensconced myself in the bus that had been provided to take us to our hotel, settled down with a book. An hour, one and a half, then nearly two hours later, I was still seated in the bus, increasingly impatient, joined by only a handful of fellow passengers. Cardiff was apparently not accustomed to receiving so many jumbo jets all at once, and the baggage handlers were in a total flounder.

I got down to look for someone at whom to rail for the delay, stretch my legs, find out into what hotel we were booked, and look for a taxi — then recognized some of the passengers huddled around a mobile telephone, while others queued up for the public equipment. Only then did I begin to suspect that something truly out of the ordinary was responsible for our turnaround. I approached the mobile-telephone owner, who was transmitting to his circle live developments from the United States. That was how, nine to ten hours after the event, I came to know that the world I knew was supposed to have disappeared, or become altered unrecognizably.

Well, I must confess that the world still looked the same to me, not only on the outside but from what I sensed inside. And this was because my mind flashed in that instant to the day, twelve years earlier, when, for me, the world chose to pretend that nothing unusual had occurred over the continent of Africa, at the edge of the Sahara, knowing full well that agents of a yet unidentified cause had sown the seeds of fear in the hearts of millions of people. The leadership of the world, including the leadership of that continent, chose to absorb this abnormality as only another incident in the war of causes, though even the most tenuous rules of engagement had been unilaterally rewritten to eradicate the rights of the innocent.

What had I expected? I suppose an equivalent at least of the sense of universal outrage that greeted the destruction of the World Trade Center, an event timed deliberately to take the maximum toll of innocents. Nineteen eighty-nine for me was, therefore, the moment when the world first appeared to have stood still, waiting for a response whose commensurate nature was required to restart the motions of the globe. That response was lacking, at least in intensity, certainly in its neglect of a global repudiation and mobilization. That lack consecrated Lockerbie and set the scene for September 11, 2001. From Niger to Manhattan, the trail of fear had stretched and broadened to engulf the globe, warning its inhabitants that there were no longer any categories of the involved or noninvolved. No longer could not just innocents, but even a community of historic victims who inhabit the African continent, lay claim to a protective immunity.

Just as there has been gloating on that continent over the predicament of white settler farmers in Zimbabwe, and a history of colonial injustice is held by some to justify current injustices even against former victims of that same injustice, while a suffocating climate of fear envelops the entire land and its citizens, black and white, even so was there gloating in places, including open festivities, over September 11, as the world was sentenced to life imprisonment behind the bars of fear. And the judges? Are they identified and/or justified by history? By geography? Race? Ideology? Or religion? That emotive last especially, religion — and, unquestionably, the occupation of world center stage by Islam during this epoch of global fear is a phenomenon that has provoked extreme reactions, from the attribution of collective responsibility on the one hand, to the guilt-ridden avoidance language of political correctness on the other. We shall explore some of these viewpoints in succeeding lectures.

Let it suffice for now to acknowledge that responses to any challenge to the security of human society and indeed survival are bound to be varied, some shaped by the history of unjust global relationships, others by instinctive partisanship — ideological, religious, racial, and so on — in a world that has become truly polarized. Any course of action, or inaction, that appears to encourage impunity implicates, however, the submission of the world to a regimen of fear. Yet that very recognition makes it possible to propose that it is within collective, not unilateral, action — a theme to which we shall return in this series — that we can sustain the hopes of humanity’s survival. Terror against terror may be emotionally satisfying in the immediate, but who really wants to live under the permanent shadow of a new variant of the world’s… Mutual Assured Destruction?