MICHAEL MORRIS | Freedom and the dangers of fighting fanaticism with force after 9/11 - Business Day

Michael Morris

As it was happening, 9/11 had the quality almost of impending Armageddon, if not, strictly, on a scale even remotely comparable with the terminal biblical mayhem of the fundamentalist imagination.

Still, something was shaken in those moments.

Perhaps what it came down to was the diabolical inventiveness, the breathtaking demonstration that zealotry bent on changing the world by violence was every bit as human as kinder enterprises in its unprejudiced impulse to innovate.

And who doubted, back then, novelist Martin Amis’s memorable precis of 9/11 as “atrocious ingenuity”?

Of the “defining moment” that was the second plane’s arresting appearance, Amis wrote perceptively: “I have never seen a generically familiar object so transformed by affect… That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien… For us, its glint was the world flash of a coming future.”

Naturally enough, this quarter of a century later, our grasp of the events of that sunny Tuesday morning along America’s northeastern seaboard amounts less and less to vivid recollection (or recollection at all for upwards of a third of the world’s population not yet born then) than to that reasonably factual if vaguer awareness that necessarily calls for an effort of imaginative reconstruction. Again, the scale isn’t quite right, but Hiroshima comes to mind.

Amis was not mistaken in casting the second plane’s “glint” as “the world flash of a coming future” ― but we seem to need reminding that neutralising the inventiveness of the fanatic calls for a greater commitment to freedom, not less.

This much I had in mind in arguing on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11 that “the risk was inevitably going to be that the powerful would fall for the deceptive catharsis of what is always an irresolvable contradiction: defending human rights by undermining human rights”.

A year later, this column in October 2022 dwelled on the “almost unaccountable enthusiasm for … [the idea] that preserving liberty depends mainly on defeating by lethal force anyone who wants to take it away”.

“Doubtless, people in every free society will from time to time confront having to risk dying in its defence,” I wrote. “But I am not convinced, as some are, that the vigour of the free world wells from maintaining military superiority (and a gimlet-eyed hawkishness to go with it), and that where the unanimity of this proposition is even slightly diluted by dissent, disaffection, indifference to traditional verities or a willingness to subject old moral certainties to doubt or ridicule, the free world — the West — can be said to be in decline and fated to succumb to its enemies.”

As Amis’s friend and fellow novelist Salman Rushdie said of the immediate, and eternal, post-9/11 task, “Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.”

And, of course, the quality of that unafraid way of living has wider implications.

Towards the end of his piece 25 years ago, Amis acknowledged that it would be “painful” for Americans to absorb the fact that they were “hated intelligibly”.

He went on testingly: “How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5% of the Iraqi population? How many of them then transfer that figure to America (and come up with 14-million)? Various national characteristics ― self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in Western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity ― have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away.”

And we should know ceaseless human invention is closing that distance by the minute.

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-09-14-michael-morris-freedom-and-the-dangers-of-fighting-fanaticism-with-force-after-911/