Can We Escape the Cycle of Cruelty and Revenge?

A 9/11 Reflection

On the afternoon of September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was tapped by Robert C. Messina, president of what was then Burlington County College in Southern New Jersey, to deliver an address to the college community. I was one of several faculty speakers that day.

The other addresses were all focused on national security and military challenges facing the country in response to terrorism. Mine was different. That day I quoted and drew upon, at length, the work of Simone Weil.

My address was greeted by dead silence and gasps. Messina did not speak to me for three years. There were many others who did not publicly support me, until one day when I took one of my environmental ethics classes to Whitesbog Historic Village, an educational center located at the heart of our county’s cranberry and blueberry farms. The director of its ecology program, in a response to a student question about the earlier 9/11 anniversary program, said that she agreed with only one of the speakers: me. This opened the door for others to say they agreed with me too.

Simone Weil’s insights were that the response to massive cruelty should just be suffering: tending the wounded and nothing more. She said that the cycle of violence—war, retaliation, war, retaliation—can only be interrupted by the extraordinary spiritual strength of not responding.

That made sense to me.

It makes further sense that the Abrahamic religions, of which Weil embodied two, are particularly susceptible to not getting this right. Their scriptures include ones that are full of hate and revenge. This is true even of the Psalms, dear to both Jews and Christians, but especially parts of Genesis, Exodus, Revelations, and the Qur’an.

Mass killings and stealing of land were justified as God’s will, with much quoting of scripture, by such diverse leaders as John Winthrop in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and monarchs Phillip of Spain and Elizabeth of England regarding Latin America and Ireland respectively. It continues with Netanyahu in Palestine.

The secular philosophers have been almost as bad. John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Hume thought up convoluted justifications as to why certain groups of humans are subhuman—this time not to “please God,” as in the Abrahamic religions, but to please logic.

To find a spiritual understanding like Weil’s, one may need to go outside Western religions. Laurent Evrard recently observed from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in “A Tale of Two Genocides” that, unlike the situation in Israel–Palestine, the Buddhist response in Cambodia has not become trapped in the cycle of cruelty and revenge. I don’t know how true that is; but I can see the potential in Tibetan Buddhism, which I have long studied. Weil, Jewish but drawn to Catholic mysticism, and widely known as “the outsider’s saint,” stands out in the West in her expressing such views so boldly.

In the 25 years since 9/11, America’s actions in its “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, much like Israel’s and like the Islamic world’s, have largely poured fuel on the destructive cycles. And yet, within each of these religions are seeds of the opposite view: seeds of knowing the mystery and power of not killing back. Some say this is impractical on a nationwide scale. But, with a lesser degree of purity, what about Norway in World War II, India in the time of Mohandas Gandhi, and the United States with the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr.?

I remain convinced that the best form of “national defense” is to become a civil, empathetic country united enough to go into nonviolent resistance if anyone tries to occupy us. What do you think?