9/11 and the Blindness of Intellectuals
Fifteen years after the attacks in New York, the comments made by the great thinkers of the time are striking. The religious nature of terrorism was almost completely hidden at the time.
Published in Les Échos (France) on 8 September 2016 by Roger-Pol Droit [link to original]
Translated from French by Louisa Devine. Edited by Melanie Rehfuss.
Posted on September 20, 2016.
The commemoration of the 9/11 attacks will take place in New York this weekend. All around the world, a host of reports, television shows and articles will revisit the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and take stock of what has changed in its wake during the last 15 years. Everyone, or almost everyone, agrees on one assessment: A kink in the world’s history was formed that day, the repercussions of which can still be felt to this day and will continue to be for a long time. However, understanding what we can see in the rear-view mirror is less simple. Analyses of the root causes of the attacks differ, as do interpretations of the political and military responses, particularly those of George W. Bush. In this stream of discussion, one point is still rarely perceived – the blindness of philosophers. It is a point that is worth pausing over and questioning.
Rereading the most notable texts on the subject of the attacks, written by renowned philosophers, makes for a strange experience. Predictably, stylish elaborations, grand and peremptory assertions and impressive rhetorical performances are all to be found. Despite all of that, in hindsight, there is an obvious and vast discrepancy between those virtuoso performances and the creeping reality of global terrorism that we are now experiencing in our daily lives. Over the years, a striking gap has appeared between subtle speeches and crude realities, between ethereal words and hard facts.
