The terrorism that last week destroyed the calm routines of American life has forced us all to ask the question "How do we go on?." What is more, it has raised that question with an urgency seldom equaled in American history. We may hope to provide an answer by relying on our sense of our own righteousness—by relying, in particular, on our righteous indignation at the evils that have occurred. And indeed, the best response very likely will be informed by a judicious, but firm, expression of genuinely righteous indignation. There may be no alternative means of acknowledging the enormity of the evil, and responsibly diminishing the possibility that the evil will be reenacted. The problem is that unless we are careful, righteousness is too easily transformed into self-righteousness. In fact it is all too easily converted into the very forms of self-righteousness that gave rise to the evils we must combat. Spiritual traditions, and secular moral conceptions alike, confirm that struggles to achieve righteousness can have morally unpredictable consequences. Ultimately, the challenge of morality is to find a way to control those consequences by reconciling the demands of righteousness with those of humility.

Let us first consider one of the most familiar attempts to say precisely how we should respond to last week’s attack: the claim that we must appeal principally, if not entirely, to demands of national self-interest. Those who make this claim will urge that the problem of responding adequately to terrorism is quite clearly a problem of means not of ends, a problem of strategy not of morality. More than a few who accept this view will urge that the boundaries of the problem are so "obvious" because the righteousness of the goal is "obvious" too. In support of this stance they may claim that, as a free and open society that supports economic and technological development capable of benefiting humanity as a whole, America is surely [in the words of Matt 5: 14] "the light of the world." For them, America comes as close as humanity can come to building that city "set on a hill"—the city that Jesus spoke of in the Sermon on the Mount—and Americans are therefore justified in doing whatever it takes to restore and preserve their way of life.

Now this unwavering confidence in the American way might well be justified. But even if it is entirely justified, we may plausibly wonder whether it is consistent with the demands of righteousness to proclaim one’s confidence in this way, at this moment in history. This is a moment, after all, in which we possess the technological capacity to cause far greater suffering and loss of life than anyone has so far endured. It cannot therefore be righteous to undertake massive counter-terrorist actions simply as a way of underscoring our sense of our own righteousness. In fact, to do would seem to embody not righteousness at all, but a profoundly immoral arrogance.

Even more important, we must ask whether our own history might fundamentally challenge the notion that we ought to have unwavering confidence in American righteousness. To ask this question is not to challenge the belief, to which I firmly subscribe, that the fundamental tenets of American political morality embody some of the highest ideals to which human beings can aspire. Nor should it shake our justified admiration of the ongoing American ability to embed some of ideals in documents and institutions that other societies, and even individuals, can emulate. But America has sometimes failed the test of righteousness, even as measured by our own standards. We all know that, in the distant and not-so-distant past, we have failed as a nation to live up to the best of American ideals. And sadly, even in recent days some Americans have turned on other Americans whose faith or national origin they wrongly presume to create some kind of allegiance with those who may have committed terrorist acts. We must understand how such actions might justly shake confidence in American professions or our own righteousness.

But the incautious defender of American righteousness certainly has no monopoly on self-righteousness. A particularly potent self-righteousness can be found in some of our staunchest critics’ efforts to denounce what they take to be our moral failures. Now the hatred and envy that helped produced the terrorism that erupted on American soil should teach us that terrorism is not simply an expression of self-righteousness. Yet those actions remain especially horrifying examples of the kind of self-righteousness I have here in mind.

Less horrifying but, no less dangerous in the long run, is the tendency of some skeptical Americans to insist that we are getting just what we deserve. Some of these critics claim that what happened on Sept. 11 was not really terrorism at all, but instead an expression of justifiable anger at the consequences of American imperialism. Now assume, for the sake of argument, that American wealth and power are in fact the result of imperialist crimes. Let us even grant, for the time being, that merely by virtue of enjoying the benefits of imperialist evil all American citizens bear some guilt, by association, for the crimes. Even granting all of this, however, we can legitimately ask whether it is consistent with righteousness for any group to arrogate unto itself the authority to serve as both judge and jury, pronouncing on the appropriateness of the penalties for the purported crimes—particularly when the penalty on which they settle turns out to be the irreversible penalty of death. The problem is not just that such condemnations are frequently self-righteous, but that those who issue them fail to appreciate the inconsistency of their claims. They justify American suffering as a way of avenging the suffering of others. How can they then condemn those who would justify the suffering of non-Americans as means of protecting American national interests?

In the days since the attack, some influential religious leaders at the other end of the American political spectrum have also asserted that America got what it deserved. Condemning what they view as American libertinism and sinfulness, these critics charge that the events of Sept. 11 constitute punishment for violating God’s laws. They go on to confidently identify particular people and groups who, they believe, have exploited American liberty and openness in ways that have led us away from the path of righteousness, and thereby invited God’s wrath. According to Pat Robertson, quoted in the Sep. 15 New York Times "what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve."

But let us grant, for argument’s sake, that such critics are in fact more righteous than the alleged libertines and sinners they blame for the attack. Perhaps only an amoral smugness would lead anyone to deny that a nation might be visited with divine punishment for human sinfulness. But even still, we can wonder whether it is consistent with righteousness to confidently proclaim this act of terrorism to be a response to some particular instance of purported sinfulness. We can wonder, that is, whether these critics have fully pondered the requirements of Christian humility—requirements that might seem to demand recognition of the extent to which every human being is diminished by the suffering and death of any other. It is surely possible, moreover, that there are moments—including, perhaps, the present moment—when the need to acknowledge human suffering morally outweighs the need to call the sufferer back to the path of righteousness.

In fact, at this moment, what we need in order to decide how we can go on is a realization that instead of constantly proclaiming and relying on our own righteousness we must strive to unite righteousness with humility. Morally speaking, there are two separable tasks here. The first is the task of actually affirming our humble status—the importance of this task gives special meaning to the familiar question from Psalms 144 "Lord, what is man that thou should take knowledge of him?" The second task, should we make reasonable progress on the first, is then to strive to reconcile righteousness and humility. The demand that we undertake this effort is eloquently and simply expressed in the Beatitudes of Jesus [ for instance, Matt. 5: 5-6]

But at this moment, perhaps more than any other moment in American history, we should not forget that failures of humility can be found in every human society, and that virtually every religious tradition and nearly every secular moral conception explicitly condemn those failures. Concerned Islamic clerics and scholars from around the world have, in fact, denied that the terrorists who acted on Sept. 11 were by licensed by Islamic principles. Of course the path that leads from righteousness to self-righteousness is far smoother than that which allows the reconciliation of righteousness and humility. Reconciling righteousness and humility (though required of us as stringently as anything can be required of us) is therefore not an easy thing to accomplish. It is not without reason, indeed, that the crowds who gathered to hear the Sermon on the Mount were reported to have been "astounded" at Jesus’s teachings.

We will wonder, of course, what true humility is. And many of us will have great difficulty in providing a contextually rich answer to that question. There are just so many cultural pressures in contemporary American life that militate against any effort to appreciate the value of humility. Regrettably, the pressures associated with achievement in academic life may be a significant part of the problem. I have found myself wondering how members of a university community might best emphasize some of the most important moral lessons emerging from the national crisis. But the structures of evaluation and ranking that define what we do (and, more importantly, what we demand of students, even before they arrive on our campuses) seem entirely antithetical to the spirit of humility. A special source of moral confusion and despair for students may, in fact, be the very great disparity between what is required of them to think constructively about how to "go on" from this moment, and what has been required of them to live constructively up until this moment.

Ironicallly, a solution to this problem may arise out of our recent tragedy. We know that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers has already become a symbol of our collective vulnerability. A complex that took seven years, and a combination of extraordinary architectural ingenuity and technological sophistication, to build was destroyed (before our eyes) in a matter of hours. This fact will not—and should not—easily be forgotten. A few days after the collapse, an MIT professor of the history of technology reported, in a radio interview, that many of his engineering students had responded to the collapse by despairingly declaring that their training now rendered them useless. They simply did not know how they could "go on," equipped primarily with technological expertise and, most often, an insufficient degree of very much else. Like the towers which were so terrifyingly "brought down to earth" these bright young engineers had been humbled. Yet, perhaps for the first time, this had led them to question the notion that technology might be counted on to cure or to prevent humanity’s ills by itself. However important it might be for human survival, and however richly it might reveal human inventiveness and creativity, technology alone cannot save us. We would surely wish for a less catastrophic means of producing this insight. But the initially despairing response of those young engineers may well prove to be one of the few hopeful results to emerge from the rubble of "ground zero."

Regrettably, a judicious use of the technology of war may prove to be an indispensable part of what is required now to "go on" from here. We are profoundly troubled by that thought, and we should be. But we know from history—World War II and the Civil War, for instance—that judicious reliance on force is sometimes a morally necessary means for combating evil. Yet, ultimately, we can restore the global balance of righteousness and humility only if we are willing to make fundamental changes in the way we live, as well as to demand change from others. Let us hope and pray that we are ready to take the right path—and that, in so doing, we might make it easier for future generations to "go on" more peacefully than we have.