The Congregation in Raleigh

Photo by Abby Lady Bug.

I am not religious but I was thinking about church as I left Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh on 8 September following a Granta panel on 9/11.

I attend Episcopal services with my family a few times a year and, despite my lack of faith, I almost always find them inspiring (I also like singing). Life affords few such opportunities to wrestle with fundamental questions – the space between our best thoughts and our daily actions, our relationship with ourselves, with others and the world.

Our panel, which consisted of three remarkably accomplished writers – Our panel were committed to listening to, challenging and learning from the audience members. Ariel Dorfman, Randall Kenan and the historian Tim Tyson – was similarly powerful because it allowed about sixty people who dared to skip the start of the NFL season (evidently the Packers/Saints game was a doozy) to stop and think deeply about 9/11 and its aftermath. Miracles do happen!

Our church was Nancy Olson’s gracious bookstore. The theme of the sermon all the participants wrote that balmy evening was not the mindset of jihadists, the search for WMDs or just war theories, but empathy – the difficulty and necessity of understanding those who seem different from us.

Our panel were committed to listening to, challenging and learning from the audience members.

Kenan set the tone at the get-go by discussing Pico Iyer’s piece from Granta 116, ‘The Terminal Check’. He was particularly impressed by Iyer’s assertion that the shadow of vulnerability that has long surrounded marginalized people and those ‘with darker skins’ has spread over once insulated Americans. ‘One thing the 9/11 attacks have achieved’, he writes, ‘. . . is to make suspicion universal; fear and discomfort are equal opportunity employers now . . . The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity. On September 12, Le Monde ran its now famous headline: WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. On September 12 2011, it might more usefully announce: WE ARE ALL INDIANS.’

Kenan, who is African American, smilingly disputed Iyer’s unifying conclusion. Experiencing fear and discomfort is not the same as living it; America’s cocoon may have frayed, but it has not disintegrated. watching a plane fly across the sky and wondering about its pilot’s intentions or worrying for the safety of its passengers is not the same as fearing that the jet overhead might well drop a bomb or missile upon your head. America’s cocoon may have frayed, but it has not disintegrated.

Nevertheless, the group agreed that 9/11 has given Americans an entry point for imagining the often frightening reality endured by human beings in far-flung places, and the many marginalized people here at home. Dorfman countered that 9/11 and its aftermath did not present us with knowledge so much as with a choice about what to do with that experience. He made the case eloquently by reading an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, Feeding on Dreams:

‘We Americans – yes, we – received that day all of a sudden the curse and blessing of being able to look at ourselves in a way habitually denied to most of our citizens, the chance to distressingly imagine ourselves as part of the rest of humanity . . . And consequently never were Americans more tempted to apply amnesia to their yesterdays and innocence to their tomorrows, never was it more perilous and easier to sweetly, vindictively rid themselves of the complexity and contradictions of their newly naked predicament.’

The overwhelming sense of the group, which was composed largely of self-described progressives, was that America had given into destructive temptation during the last decade. Instead of using the tragedy to expand our its understanding and empathy, we the US gave into vengeance and fear. Rather than exploring the root cause and, perhaps, our American complicity, in the events that unfolded, we chose to see ourselves as victims. The two wars and increased security measures that were the chief features of our response turned our minds inward.

This led to one of the most interesting philosophical exchanges of the evening. Tim Tyson The overwhelming sense of the group, which was composed largely of self-described progressives, was that America had given into destructive temptation during the last decade.said that the US response to the attacks was hardly surprising. History, he said, shows that threatened people often turn, almost instinctively, to violent self-protection. Empathy, he said, is a mindset that the culture must teach time again to every generation. Kenan asserted that empathy is our natural state, that children, by and large, are naturally cooperative and understanding. It is culture, he said, that instills dangerous values.

The audience agreed that the conflict between these ideas might be resolved by a culture which dedicates itself to promulgating the golden rule.

Easier said than done, of course. And throughout the evening audience members voiced their frustration and anger with the Bush administration and others that pursued policies they strongly oppose. It was at this point that Dorfman made the evening’s most provocative and useful comment. Four decades ago, Dorfman was a cultural advisor to Chile’s President Salvador Allende. He was forced to leave the country after General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973 but continued to serve as a witness to the regime’s brutality.

Years later he watched a woman weep at Pinochet’s funeral. Here, he said, was someone with a deep attachment to a repugnant monster. But he also recognized that she felt a connection to Pinochet just as he had felt an attachment to Allende. He introduced himself to her and offered consolation. But he did not stop there. Empathy was not enough. He told her in the fullness of his heart that reconciliation depends on honesty; for her this meant acknowledging Pinochet’s terrible actions. Dorfman did not report her response. Instead, he added that anger can be a useful, even a sustaining emotion; but we can never let it rule us.

It is that brassring thought that has stayed with me since the panel, a thought that is at once necessary and out-of-reach.

After such gatherings people often say, ‘it raised more questions than it answered’. That was not the case in Raleigh. The fundamental answers were clear to all and so was the much harder challenge that they raised: how to diminish the space between our ideals and our action, between who we want to be and who we are.

The panel itself pointed one way forward. A healthy community and culture reconnects us to our ideals. It provides opportunities for us to look up and listen to our better angels, even though it often seems easier to keep our heads down and plow ahead. For sixty people in Raleigh that evening, Granta provided such a forum. ■