REFLECTIONS ON COPING:
THEN, NOW, AND TOMORROW

WILTON S. DILLON

“We have learned the answers...It is the question that we do not know.”
Archibald MacLeish (CC 1939-40)—1928

Can all human behavior be understood? Why does the enemy fight? Does understanding imply forgiveness of aggression?

September 11th zoomed many Americans back to December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor launched me on a long road to becoming an anthropologist. The current infamy prompts me to question how the human sciences, history, biology, literature, and religion might inspire inquiry about our own culture and that of those who brought, and continue to bring, terror and mass murder of innocents.

To raise such questions is rooted in my World War II experience and three years as a civilian on General MacArthur’s staff during the occupation of Japan. As part of the Allied demilitarization effort, I was supposed to help make the then 90 million Japanese feel guilty for the war. Ruth Benedict’s 1946 book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword offered a reality check by distinguishing between “shame” and “guilt” cultures. I gave up the guilt quest and embraced anthropology as a vocation aimed at reducing my naïveté, and as a tool for practicing responsible citizenship. I first focused on the Shinto and Judeo-Christian legacies, and then moved on to try to understand the great varieties of Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and Islam as engines of civilizations with contrasting and overlapping world views and mixtures of worship and politics. Religion does not explain everything, but it helps us to know where people are coming from, without necessarily knowing where they are going.

Margaret Mead stressed the importance of revisiting timeless questions about our own and other cultures that need to be asked in time of peace and war. Long-term strategies and how to cope with pandemic terrorism today are both dependent on asking the right questions. Even imperfect answers require great powers of synthesis to find patterns out of seemingly isolated traits.

Is it a foolish fantasy to hope that “infinite justice,” or our less ethnocentric battle cries as time passes, may have more universal meaning when applied to our understandable feeling for the need to punish the surviving collaborators of the suicidal killers of September 11th? Of course, the attack on America and the whole civilized world required some immediate response. But the guilty need to know that we, too, are capable of patience, and feel strong enough not to hurt ourselves by the instant gratification of a revengeful “quick fix.” The new killer “nomads” may see our rush to revenge as one of their assets; it might put us at a military and psychological disadvantage and generate new terrorists who perceive us as the new Crusaders. A perspective that abides the passage of time is vital to preparation of effective responses.

Such cultural data and insights are essential in the mobilization of all of the civilized world’s collective economic, political, scientific, diplomatic, military, intelligence gathering, and spiritual resources to protect the United States and other homelands from slaughter and destruction by planes turned into guided missiles, or even the indiscriminate dispersal of toxic germs. But in coalescing together, we must protect religious freedom— not mere tolerance—along with free speech and all the other indicia of individual freedom that characterize the Free World. These are the sources of our strengths, and also the fears of our attackers who believe that such freedoms will destabilize or threaten the new theocracies, and not necessarily just the oil-rich regimes they also seek to undermine.

The Koran does not countenance or condone in any fashion the acts of suicide and the killing of others. We must be sensitive to the history of Islam that endured the Crusades, and the prospect perhaps shared by millions of Muslims in America and throughout the world that an uninformed reaction to raw terrorism might lead yet again to another form of those “holy” wars.

So it is imperative that we promote a multicultural and indivisible global community. Anthropologists, theologians, secular pundits, and all students of human behavior must join with colleagues around the world in public discussions of questions and issues related to the dehumanizing acts of September 11th. Among others, the themes and questions that must be addressed include (1) the values a given culture ascribes to children; (2) what the strengths and weaknesses are of systems of kinship and friendship and whether they influence governance; (3) the key myths and symbols around which leaders rally a nation or a dispersed coalition of sharing believers; (4) the cultural sources of shame, guilt, sacrifice, and the role of punishment; (5) host-guest relationships in a culture; and (6) the negative images of outsiders or “otherness,” and how the insiders and outsiders are portrayed by the media. Gandhi remarked that “The deadliest form of violence is poverty.” But what about the seemingly benign acts of just being ignored, individually and culturally?

These questions and issues are only for starters. More are planned as part of the December 2001 Margaret Mead Centennial Symposium at the Library of Congress on “The Interplay of Cultures: Whither the US and the World?” Understanding is not to forgive and forget, alone, but a way to inform us in developing our strategies by genuinely knowing ourselves as well as others while preparing to make war and, ultimately, peace.

Wilton S. Dillon (CC ’85) is senior scholar emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution. For more than 30 years, he has been responsible for the Smithsonian’s international, interdisciplinary symposia series.

Return to COSMOS 2001 Table of Contents
Return to COSMOS Journals
Return to COSMOS Home Page