The Bin Laden Memorial

This essay was originally published by The Radical Capitalist Inserts on January 22, 2002

The professional mourners want to erect a shrine where the Twin Towers used to stand.

The professional mourners are the consolers and High Hand-holders of all faiths. They are of no use to happy, confident men, but in tragedy they find employment and even acclaim for uniting rich man and poor man to contemplate the meaning of life in the context of death. No horror is so unexpected that they are not ready with a chorus of "Amazing Grace." They sing "we shall overcome someday," always with the emphasis on someday. They share with Allah's martyrs the belief that an individual's true value is to be found at the time of his death.

None of the professional mourners has, to my knowledge, suggested erecting their shrine on private funds. But even if they did, there is no good reason to sell it to them; there is no good reason to replace the World Trade Center with a September 11 memorial. Our memory of the dead will not fade because there is no pyramid where they died.

I anticipate several objections. I expect, for instance, to hear it claimed that the fallen heroes of the police and fire departments deserve such a memorial.

In fact, they deserve better. Their job was to protect the World Trade Center and keep its occupants safe. They died on that job when they could have run uptown or across the river. By rebuilding on the site, we act according to their final wishes; by evacuating the site, we act according to bin Laden's.

Others object that the deaths at the site have made the ground sacred - "hallowed" - and therefore off-limits to activity not consonant with kneeling and mumbling. This objection asserts a subjective sense of the sacred as if it were a reality more valid than objective reality, and demands the medieval form of reverence for the graveyard; to wit, forbidding the business of the living for fear of annoying the dead. By calling the ground "hallowed," and refusing to explain myself further, I imply that I have a reverence for my country and/or the fallen, and that, by the way, if you keep pressing me to defend my position you are probably not a serious person, and maybe even a casual blasphemer.

The astute observer will have noticed that the hallowers' motivated core consists of luddites, and its rank-and-file of dilettantes. The luddites possess already an enmity for the business of living; an enmity now masquerading as reverence for the dead. What has happened to the New Yorkers and out-of-towners who thought that cities, particularly big cities, particularly skyscrapers in big cities, were blights on God's landscape canvas? Who always thought that the site of the World Trade Center would have been better used as a public park? They have become sisters in the Order of the Eleventh. What has happened to their canards about sunlight deprivation and the starry summer nights hidden from the city-dweller's view? They have been thrown over for a better rationale. They have been thrown over for "hallowed ground."

If you doubt the strength or even the presence of the luddites among the hallowers, then consider: what is it precisely that makes Ground Zero sacred?

I do not ask this question lightly. I believe that "sacred" denotes a valid concept, if by "sacred" you mean "deserving of reverence." But I would like to hear the theory of death that makes it a consecrator of the soil upon which it occurs. And once I have heard the theory, I am likely to ask why it is that every death does not possess whatever power its fans attribute to the deaths that occurred last September. If the site is hallowed because 3,000 died there, why wasn't it already hallowed because 6 died there in the bombing of 1993? Is it the sheer number? -- Or is it that the bombers in 1993 were unsuccessful? Calling the ground hallowed is not enough to get your fellow-citizens to voluntarily relocate and demolish their tall buildings. But it might be enough to keep them from rebuilding structures already in ruins.

The best argument the hallowers could concoct (although I have not heard it from them) is that Ground Zero is sacred because some individuals died there performing confirmable acts of heroism. This is the best argument, because the heroism of the cops and firemen makes the event at least ostensibly unique for the site, and because heroism unto death reveals the ultimate integrity, and tales of the ultimate integrity are proof that man - even modern man - has the capacity for glory in the classical sense; proofs against the cynic and the aesthetic naturalist. As I say, this is the best argument for hallowing the downtown ground, which means that it is the best of some very specious arguments. There are still a million miles of broken links between the plaque that reads "A hero died here" and the one that reads "A hero died here. - No trespassing."

The dilettantes will hallow the ground to salute the dead for the same reason they hold hands across America to cure hunger. It is a combination of low-risk grunt work and hype intended to replace the kind of effort they dread the most. - Cognitive effort. Anyone who knows the story of a Ground-Zero hero, and who believes the story should be told, should tell it. He should write the article, the book, the play. Found the foundation. But including a name among 3,000 other names on a stele in downtown Manhattan is a tribute only to the dilettante's willingness to invent something even smaller when the very least he can do is still too much.

In case you still doubt my assessment of the hallowers' motives, consider which activities will not be prohibited on this site, taking New York's other city parks and landmarks as a guide. The hallowed site will still be trodden by the living. Bums will invade it, horses will defecate in it, the phlegmatic will spit on it. It will be open to the public, after all, and it is a civil right of the dregs Americana to make any public park their pied-a-terre. The one activity that almost certainly will be prohibited is the activity that the victims were engaged in at the time of their deaths; that is, making a living in private enterprise. No buying or selling will be permitted at the Bin Laden Memorial. After all, Jesus purged the temple of the moneylenders, not of the codependent marchers in a Pride Day parade.

In brief, the medieval notion of ground made sacred is accepted and repeated by luddites and dilettantes, whose true motives will not endure scrutiny.

Others object that not erecting a memorial in place of the World Trade Center is the equivalent of turning our backs on history: of intentionally "not remembering." We must remember what happened so that it will not happen again, the argument goes.

I do not argue with the proposition that Americans must remember the attacks of September 11; specifically, that Americans must understand the fundamental conflict of values that it represented and still represents. But there are another million miles of broken links between remembering an abomination and erecting a "soaring memorial" (to use Mayor Giuliani's term) to commemorate it. Shrines have always been top-heavy information media, but prior to the inexpensive dissemination of printed text, they - along with other primitive media, such as ballads and oral chronicles - were the means of communicating historical events. Pyramids, steles, cathedrals, tombs, all conveyed information for future generations of the era in which they were created. Often this communication with future generations was intentional and elaborate. But the typical Egyptian who lived at the time the pyramids were built got his information from traders, soldiers, and the readers of the pharaoh's edicts; in short, anyone who brought information to him. Had he relied on the hieroglyphs at Abydos to teach him the lessons of history, he would have known nothing of them at all. Seeing these tombs and shrines would have meant putting down his plough and traveling days, weeks, or months to reach his destination. Then, even assuming he was literate (and literacy was a privilege of the priesthood) he would have spent more days, weeks, or months studying the inscriptions.

The invention of the printing press, and the subsequent availability of inexpensive volumes of printed text, did far more to inform the literate masses than any landmark anywhere at any time. News of the world, printed in London, could be carried to every part of the Empire. Yesterday's news and historical comment were available in books. Schools used books to educate the young.

If landmarks were never good stores of information for the present, and if the printed word made them obsolete as stores of knowledge for the future, photography, motion pictures, documentaries, and the distributed terabytes of raw information driving the Internet have killed and buried them.

Critics of this position often point to the long lines of tourists at historical landmarks as evidence of their contemporary relevance. In fact, these long lines prove that landmarks are utterly unnecessary to the remembrance of the events they commemorate. No tourist plans even a day visit to a landmark whose moment in history is unknown to him. That is, the long lines of tourists at landmarks are evidence - not of the landmarks' power, but of the power of the information media that made the tourist book the trip. Visitors to Pearl Harbor's museums already know of the Japanese sneak attack, and have come to the harbor in order to see the place where the famous event occurred. Even supposing the existence of a tourist to Hawaii who had never heard of the sneak attack, visiting one or all of the museums would leave him with only a vague idea of why it happened, and he would know less about how it happened than any homebound Scandinavian with a copy of Tora! Tora! Tora! on her nightstand.

The same is true for the restored concentration camps of the German Third Reich. At the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau stands a museum and a restored portion of the most infamous of the Nazi death camps. The museum contains all of the edifying materials: the documents, the photographs, and so on. The restored barracks are just grisly tourist attractions.

I know that the camps are, officially at any rate, preserved in order that visitors, chastened by the tour, may return to their own parts of the world better able to fight the occurrence of similar atrocities.

They have the opposite effect. Visitors make plans, board and debark airplanes, put up at hotels, then at last view the preserved site of the atrocities. They then take their memory of the low-risk grunt-work required to travel to the place, combine that memory with their visceral reaction to the artifacts of torture and humiliation, and substitute the compound for the intellectual work of determining how these artifacts came to be used on a daily basis by what was once one of the most civilized nations of Europe. They see where the gas pellets were dropped, shake their heads angrily at the people who let it happen, then check out of their hotels, board and debark airplanes, tell their friends about the evil Germans they now know all about, and vote for their local national socialist.

But the death camps at least had utility as a reminder at one time and in a limited context. Just after the liberation of the camp at Buchenwald, but before the stacked corpses of the victims could be taken away, General Patton rounded up the citizens of nearby Weimar and marched them through the camp so they could see with their own eyes the product of their moral cowardice and rationalizations. That day, the mayor of Weimar and his wife committed suicide. -- Maintaining the death camps as a scar on the lands of the former Reich was a form of retribution on the generation that made them a reality.

The Bin Laden Memorial will not have even this limited utility. The American government and its citizens were the targets, not the perpetrators, of the atrocity in Manhattan. Why compound the significant injury to this city and its people by forcing them to bear the cost and endure the sight of a Bin Laden Memorial?

Just after the attacks, Mayor Giuliani grasped the issue clearly: let our enemies change us - let them change the landscape of New York permanently - and they win a victory greater than perhaps even they expected. At a memorial service at Ground Zero a month after the attacks, he said, "We will dedicate the rebuilding of New York [to those who died in the attack] and [make] certain that we do not allow the terrorists in any way to break our spirit. Instead, they have emboldened it."

Who knows what whispers turned his head between that service and his farewell address last December, in which he suggested that New Yorkers would be better off dedicating the entire site - sixteen acres in downtown Manhattan - to some sort of memorial. Said Giuliani: "We have to be able to create something here that enshrines this forever and that allows people to build on it and grow from it."

"Enshrines it forever"? Bin Laden was surprised the buildings fell - He was only going for the top floors. Now, not only are the buildings gone and the neighborhood in ruins, but his enemy wants to take his handiwork and enshrine it forever.

Why enshrine it? So that we may "build on it and grow from it.".

It would appear, from his choice of words and change of heart, that he has been seduced by the over-rated ideal of unity. - Even unity in tragedy. It is the voice of the professional mourner again. People came together as a result of this tragedy. There is nothing warmer or more touching than people united in faith and a common knowledge of their shared mortality I.e. , there is nothing warmer than a hug at a funeral. If we can perpetuate the trauma, perhaps we can also perpetuate the unity. It is our new found unity that Giuliani wants to "build on" and "grow from."

He continues thus:

"This place [Ground Zero] has to become a place in which when anybody comes here immediately they're going to feel the great power and strength and emotion of what it means to be American."

This is how I felt about the World Trade Center before it was attacked. The difference in what provokes these feelings in us lies in our differing definitions of "being an American." As Giuliani defines it, being an American means going to the funerals of other Americans. - Forever. As I define it, being an American means having the freedom to create and earn and to associate or compete with others doing the same, until our combined energies become the dynamo that sustains and extends the modernity of all aspects of human life. The Twin Towers were steel-and-glass expressions of a way of life that feeds, clothes, and makes life enjoyable for the rest of humanity; ornaments on the constructive explosion that is the unleashed energies of free individuals.

Rebuilding the towers - or structures better than the originals - does not cheat the heroes of their tribute, it is their tribute. If you want to commemorate the event of the attacks, put a plaque on the side of one of the buildings, and for an inscription write: "On September 11, 2001, a handful of tent-dwellers thought they could stop this."

The world that comes to this site will be far larger than the world that would come to rubberneck the Bin Laden Memorial. - And it will see first hand what some brave men and women died to perpetuate, and what other brave men and women died to protect.

—Dan Roentsch

The Disingenuous Ethics

This essay was originally published by The Radical Capitalist Inserts on March 20, 2002

You are no doubt familiar with the adage, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." This adage implies that the hungry man's benefactor

a) is interested in seeing that the hungry man can care for himself, and

b) knows how to fish.

The odds, then, are against the hungry man's ever learning to feed himself, for the altruist ethic that dominates East and West considers cognitive effort a presumption and condemns self-sufficiency for the self.

It is thus the ethic of that human subspecies which does not think, yet refuses to surrender its moral and social pretensions: it is the ethic of the dilettante.

As if to illustrate this fact, the February 20 edition of the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes II" featured an interview with "bioethicist" Peter Singer of Princeton University. According to the program, Singer has made something of a splash among the dilettantes for concocting a new version of an old practical joke. It consists of a thought experiment, in which Singer asks you to imagine that you have spent most of your retirement money on an expensive automobile. You have just parked it astride a working railroad track and gotten out to stretch, when your tranquility is interrupted by a locomotive headed down the track and at your car. You can easily divert the locomotive by throwing a switch and sending it down another track, but that other track has a child from Bangladesh standing on it. The crisis is honed: do you save your car or a child's life?

According to the program, "Singer thinks that most people would want to save the child, but by the way people live their everyday lives, they are choosing to save the car."

The implication: the dangers threatening the miserable of the world are too immediate to suffer discussions of cause-and-effect, and can be averted easily and obviously by your self-sacrifice.

Singer's hypothetical is thus useless as a guide to individual conduct in the real world, but it is valuable in that it demonstrates to the honest doubter that altruism is indeed the ethic of the dilettante; the ethic of anyone who believes that he can buy, with a mixture of guilt and cash, an exemption from the responsibility to focus his intellect.

And if Singer's hypocrisy is any indication, the dilettante's conscience is of the forgiving variety. Even though the professor believes that everyone should give to the poor all of his property beyond that which he needs for "basic necessities," he admits that he gives away only 20% of his income. It seems he is waiting for the rest of us to match his pace. "Then maybe," he says, "it would be a little easier to keep going down that track."

So, for 20 cents on the dollar, Peter Singer has bought from his conscience the right to ignore, among other considerations, how wealth is created and accumulated, why some societies are able to create and accumulate wealth while others are not, and the moral value of earned luxury.

20 cents on the dollar! He isn't choosing either the car or the child. He's keying the paint job, flipping the switch, and tossing the Bangladeshi an umbrella.

And in spite of the fact that he cannot live by the so-called "ethic" he foists upon others, and in spite of the flaws that riddle his "railroad" hypothetical, he has found an audience. According to "60 Minutes II":

Singer used the example of the car and the child in an article he wrote for the New York Times; it struck a chord with readers. Two charities mentioned in the piece, UNICEF and Oxfam, received donations of about three quarters of a million dollars in response.

To understand the appeal of the "emergency" hypothetical, one must understand that the appeal of hypotheticals generally is that they help one to focus on an abstract principle by isolating and concretizing it, usually for the purpose of grasping its implications or consequences. The "emergency" hypothetical takes the same form. That is, it appears to focus the process of evaluation, but it in fact alters what is being evaluated.

Characterizing a hypothetical as a "thought experiment" is convenient when considering why the introduction of an emergency misaligns the hypothetical with reality. An experiment must test the change of only one variable, or its results will be ambiguous. The introduction of an emergency represents the change of more than one variable in the same experiment.

Imagine that you are using lab rats in a series of experiments meant to determine the safe dosage of a new drug. If the first rat dies, and you must conduct another experiment, you can change only one of the two variables you know about: the dosage of the drug or the relative health of the lab rat. If you change both and the rat lives, you don't know which changed variable was responsible for the new result. Worse, if you are malicious, you can misrepresent the effectiveness of the drug by manipulating the relative health of the rat and keeping that manipulation out of your report.

This principle applies to all honest experiments, including those that take place in the imagination. There is, for example, a popular thought experiment conducted by minors and that begins with a parent asking: "If your friends asked you to jump in a lake, would you do it?" The parent is altering a single variable; namely, the scope of the demand made by the child's friends. Nothing else - like the identity of those friends, the child's relationship to them, or the reason for the demand - is altered, because the parent wants the child to isolate and assess only the implications and consequences of conformity for conformity's sake.

But imagine a mother who says to her child: "If one of your friends were drowning, and you were the only person nearby who could swim, would you jump in the lake if your friends asked you to?" - She is changing not just the scope of the demand made by the child's friends, but also the conditions under which the demand is made. If the child replies: "Yes, I would jump in the lake," the mother does not know whether she has tested the child's love for his friends or his fear of them.

Now add a perverse twist to the experiment. Imagine that you have told your mother that your peers have been urging you to jump in a lake, but that you have resisted. Your mother has had it "up to here" with your ego, and says: "Proud of ourselves, are we? Well, suppose one of your friends were drowning and you were the only one nearby who could swim. Are you telling me you would stand there like a statue while your other friends begged you to jump in the lake?"

Your mother is not confusing herself by altering two variables in the same experiment; she is attempting to confuse you. In so doing, she is conflating, against reason, the incongruous concepts of conformity and loyalty, for the purpose of whitewashing the former with the meaning of the latter.

Now go back to Singer's hypothetical. His arbitrarily-introduced variable of imminent death for a child if the car-owner does not sacrifice his car is intended to conflate private wealth with manslaughter, for the purpose of condemning the former with the meaning of the latter.

(Without exception, the introduction of an emergency into a hypothetical intended as a guide to everyday conduct always signals an irrational conflation. In the Singer hypothetical, the everyday-life variable is anything with which you can compare the value of a human life. The value Singer applies to this variable is "most of your retirement money." The emergency variable in the hypothetical is the time allotted before action must be taken. The value Singer assigns to this variable is the time it takes a locomotive to travel from within range of vision to a point near the observer. In fact, Singer's hypothetical could have been made into two valid hypotheticals, one testing everyday values and another to test conduct in an emergency. For instance, the everyday hypothetical might have gone something like: "If you've always had your eye on an expensive automobile you can now afford, but you know it is made by the slave labor of Bangladeshi children, would you buy it anyway?" The emergency hypothetical might have been: "You say you would never step in front of an oncoming train? Well, what if a child were on the tracks?"

It isn't until the lecturer attempts to combine these two experiments into one that we cross the boundary separating honest inquiry from swindle.)

By blurring the context within which an individual is supposed to act (i.e., by blurring the causes of action), the emergency makes context per se unimportant. - And this appeals to the moral intrinsicist, who believes that actions have the same moral value in all contexts. Discovering "the answer" in a hypothetical like Singer's means he doesn't have to consider what is moral in the real world, where real luxuries are bought and real Bangladeshis suffer. When it is unimportant to consider how some of the poor acquire wealth and some of the poor stay poor, then the answer to inequity is simple: take from the lucky and give to the hapless. On this view, inquiring after context, cause, and consequence is just an excuse to ignore the obvious, moral answer.

Consider some of the many questions made meaningless by Professor Singer's hypothetical:

How is disposable income created? If everyone consistently applied the professor's "ideal," and gave away everything but that which he needed for "basic necessities," you would not have any money for charity, because you would not have a job. And you would not have a job because anyone who might have given you one is now living at the subsistence level, having given his capital to the Bangladeshis.

Is guilt necessary to charity? If you give assistance to others because it is what you want to do - because the sight of your power effecting some good gives you pleasure - then it is a luxury. But if you gave your money to the first hand that clutched for it - because letting it accumulate in your own pocket made you feel like a bad person - you will have nothing to give when the opportunity to aid a friend, a relative, or a cause presents itself.

What is the source of luxury in a free society? If a car is your luxury item, who designed it, built it, sold it? Why? On whose terms? Do car makers and car salesmen have children? Are their children's stomachs any less real because they are fed by your desires rather than your guilt?

What about the moral value of earned luxury? It may be that buying something for the pleasure of owning it is an advance you pay yourself on a future that is otherwise only plans and promises. When everything else seems tentative, an earned luxury is the certain, concrete assurance of your power to obtain good things. It may also be a reward you pay yourself for goals reached. Again, if your luxury item is a car, perhaps you have wanted it for a long time but were unable to afford it. Once you are able, it invigorates you; it shows you - in concrete terms - that life is not all restricted consumption and delayed gratification. It offers evidence to your senses that your life - the context that gives meaning to all of your values - is good.

If this is true for all individuals, then why don't the Bangladeshis acquire luxuries? Why aren't their altruists urging them to send their money to unfortunate American children? Is there a reason that the average per capita income in Bangladesh is around $1,500.00 per year, while in the United States it is more than twenty times that?

Now you are at the real crossroads. You can either ignore these questions, sell your car, and throw the proceeds into the black hole - and flatter yourself that the portion of your funds not diverted to administration, bribes, and sundries, will buy a barefoot child a bowl of porridge - or you can make the effort to ask yourself why the social system of Bangladesh does not work the way yours does, and how one might replace it with a system like yours; the effort that continues as you ask yourself whether or not it is better to create more capitalist societies, in which most individuals may obtain luxuries, or to denounce luxuries everywhere because they cannot be gotten somewhere.

Bangladesh is a democracy practiced with brutal consistency: its political parties are not limited to non-violent means of making a majority. In 2001, the losers in the national election - the mostly-Hindu supporters of the Awami League - were dislocated, robbed, and their women raped by the winners - the mostly-Muslim supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. The preamble to the constitution of Bangladesh states: "Pledging that the ideals of absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah, nationalism, democracy and socialism meaning economic and social justice ... shall be fundamental principles of the Constitution."

Thus, the rights of individual Bangladeshis, including the right to own property, are denied by both democratic practice and constitutional theory. Wealth cannot be accumulated in Bangladesh because those who would create it know that it will be taken from them by force. Large-scale, long-term trade is nearly impossible, so no one benefits from the sale of goods, luxury or otherwise. As a consequence, millions die and millions more barely subsist.

These conditions will not get worse because you buy one car or a fleet of cars, or get better if you sell your house and furs. Your wealth is beside the point.

The moral implications of using self-sacrifice to rationalize intellectual inertia can be observed in the following thought experiment:

There is a concentration camp in your town. One day you walk past the camp and see, through the barbed wire, men, women, and children chained to stakes in the earth. They are otherwise unoccupied, staring blankly at your face and stamping their feet for warmth. Their teeth are rotten. Uniformed men with rifles periodically intimidate them, sometimes with beatings. They are gaunt and their tongues are swollen with thirst.

You walk away, wondering what you can do to help them. You can't get the image of the swollen tongues out of your mind, so you decide to petition the camp commander to let you inside with a pitcher of water. Days later, the commander sees the signatures you've gathered and agrees. You enter the camp grounds and walk from stake to stake, pouring water down each throat you come to, until the pitcher is dry. With regret you leave still-thirsty hundreds as they beg you for water you do not have, and you think: "If only more people gave water!"

This is immoral. And it is immoral - not because you give prisoners water to drink, but because you have fashioned a way to make the fact of their thirst an excuse to ignore the cause of their thirst. You ignore the need to find out what you can do to break their chains, because you expect your brain will be less taxed and your conscience just as flattered by a cheap rationalization. The cognitive effort required to discover the root causes of their misery is a task you will not perform because it portends too many repercussions for your world-view, your personality, the company you keep, and every other sphere of your unexamined life.

So you adopt the disingenuous ethics. You dip your pitcher in the water, leave the miserable behind the barbed wire, and chide those unlike yourself by concocting a fantasy world in which concentration camp inmates are not in chains, but standing in front of oncoming locomotives that no one but you has the good sense to redirect.

Singer's dilettantes are the chumps of a misanthrope. When Singer admits that he cannot live up to his alleged ideal, and is waiting for the rest of the West to sacrifice harder before he worries about his own hypocrisy, he is confessing that his real purpose is not to use self-sacrifice in order to help the starving, but to use the starving as a means to effect self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, self-denial, are the ends, not the means. His goal is, in his own words, "fighting human arrogance and domination of the planet."*

You can help him reach this goal by giving your money to UNICEF and Oxfam - or by burning it up in a big bonfire.

While waiting for the apocalypse, he provides his customers with their own, perverse luxury; namely, the bizarre but uncomplicated belief that your sacrifice will solve my problems.

If his so-called ethics were on a railroad track as starvation crept slowly but inexorably toward them, and the dilettante could choose to save either the ethics or a child from Bangladesh, I would like to think that he would choose to save the child.

But by the way he lives his everyday life, he is choosing to save his disingenuous ethics.

—Dan Roentsch

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*"20 Questions," an interview with Peter Singer by Vance Lehmkuhl. Citypaper.net, October 7-14, 1999.