Is Peace Possible After September 11th?

Whether this country is right to go to war-the violent option-or whether we can sit down and negotiate with terrorists depends entirely on what we believe to be human nature. It is ironic that my entire career is founded on the premise that people are essentially good, yet, at this moment, I nevertheless must capitulate to those who think there is indeed evil in the world.

When I sit down and talk with people, even hurtful people, even the most hurtful people such a s child abusers, I operate under the assumption that with enough love, care, patience, respect, and skill, I can heal that which has somehow thrown the individual off the path of good. With enough of all the right things, I can reach beyond the defenses and pain and literally call forth from the soul of that person a healing process. That is how I work with couples that spew venom at one another. That is how I work with rejected and rejecting teenagers. I begin with the premise of goodness to which I apply deep care. It nearly always works.

So it greatly pains me to admit that there may be a time when the evil in a person's soul is too far on a path of destruction and hate for me-or anyone-to reach him. When he is traveling on an ideological voyage based on the valuelessness and meaninglessness of life. When he does not want to talk; he does not want to communicate; he wants to kill. Such a person is beyond anything familiar to our cultural values. Oh, there are killers in our community, and perhaps they are evil too. Some kill out of momentary rage or habitual rage. Some, indeed, are cold-blooded. But none are sanctioned by the community. And even when we have the option of applying mitigating circumstances as a legal way of reducing a sentence, those evil people remain under state control; they are not free to perpetrate further crimes.

And that last sentence is the key point to my thinking here. We can always negotiate; we can always try to understand the motivations for unspeakable horror. But when we do, we do not sacrifice our own safety. That, in fact, is how I handle the cognitive dissonance between believing that we live in a world of good people and facing the possibility that evil does exist: I study it. In doing research, one gives oneself the illusion of control. Gradual understanding of how evil works creates the fantasy that it makes sense. It may make logical sense, but that only lasts as long as the researcher does not allow her or his human emotions to get in the way of that logic. When emotions enter the picture, even the researcher is reduced to horror. The picture radically changes when the evil is not available for study and what's more, is footloose in the world wreaking destruction and pain. I have some assistance in coming to grips with the sad truth that there is evil which is out of my reach to help and heal. I had the spiritual teachings of Torah, the Jewish book of wisdom. One of it's aphorisms is "Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor." That usually means, when someone is in trouble, get the person some help fast! It recognizes the sanctity of life and of the human soul. In the current situation, it means to me that all life is too sacred for a given group to unilaterally decide to take the lives of innocents. It means to me that to protect others, terrorist lives might have to be sacrificed.

Another point made in the Torah comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes which was purportedly written by King Solomon, the wisest of men. He said that there is a time for peace but there is also a time for war. That statement recognizes the possibility that some people choose ways that are too harmful to the community to be allowed to continue. An argument was made to me that my position is no better than that of terrorists: All I have to do is define the Other as evil and that permits me to kill him. Why I'm no better than he is! Straw man. This line of thinking has big holes in it. It only is true if evil were something anyone could willy-nilly define, but that is not what we are doing here. There is something absolute about an evil that kills innocents. An evil that goes to the territory of the supposed enemy to destroy that which is precious to it on its own soil. An evil that starts up with no warning and no chance to talk and work out a solution to differences of perception. In the history of our civilization, murder for self-aggrandizement and murder of innocents has always been considered evil. Society as a collective body defines evil and that is the conclusion society has always come to.

I'm having trouble seeing the actions of terrorists at this moment in our history any other way.