Public Liturgies

Trip Wires and Silicon Answers

Estimates suggest the number of suicide bombers in the Middle East and Africa is nearing one thousand per year, killing and maiming other tens of thousands.  The flash points behind this are mostly illegible to our Western eyes.  As the new World Trade Center Tower and Memorial nears completion in New York City—remembering the inestimable worth of 3,000 human lives lost on 9/11—no memorial rises for the tens of thousands of inestimable human lives lost during the past decade’s Middle East and African wars; wars in which the U. S. has been either directly or indirectly involved.  

The suicide bombers can be seen as a response to the missing memorials. The bombers are making a statement about their own life’s meaning, drained of opportunity, ennobled by their self-willed death that ends all future meaning and concludes all future social relations.

Note that the young Boston bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, drifted for days in anomie after their awful act. They appear to have had no future plans. The meaning of their act—like the acts of suicide bombers—lay in its potentially conclusive devotion.  The Tsarnaevs are reported to have resented that their own culture’s traditions were usually identified as despised and inferior, invidiously compared with U. S. traditions—where they found no place for themselves—composed of noble moral superiority; a superiority they could have heard reiterated in countless political speeches, usually dressed with religious sanctimony.  

Our Western minds never want for self-regard but this easily becomes a trip wire exposing a moral arrogance blind to the sight of a vastly unjust world, one plausibly filled with many more Tsarnaevs.  

This was documented days after the Boston bombers’ apprehension when the national news focus changed ineluctably revealing a second trip wire as Bloomberg News reported that half of New Yorkers are now poor or near-poor.  Two days later the Pew Research Center reported the net worth of 93 percent of U. S. households had declined 4% during the Recession years 2009 to 2011 while the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose 28%.   In dollar terms the mean wealth of the richest 8 million households rose $697,651 while the mean wealth of 111 million less affluent households fell $133,817.  

Across the Atlantic, prolonged Euro Zone unemployment ticked up May 1st to 12.1 percent.  Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union situated in Luxembourg, reports this is the highest unemployment in Europe since it began keeping records in 1995: 26.5 million are now unemployed in Europe including 5.7 million young people. [NY Times, May 1, 2013]

Current global conditions can be understood to guarantee a continuing supply of suicidal acts born among millions of people with no clear path to the future. Apparently invisible to many leaders in government and business today, the rising tide of violence is growing as the inequality gap grows. Suicide bombing is now a significant portion of the deaths in the ongoing global violence: approximately 3,043 deaths in the Middle East per month since January 2013 [CNN].    During this April alone in Iraq 322 people died, Afghanistan 323, Pakistan 89. 

With 11.7 million in the U. S. remaining unemployed, many for more than a year (BLS May 3, 2013) 4.4 million workers have been unemployed for at least six months not including people who have given up looking for work. Then there is the other dark side: the burgeoning U. S. prison population. The Population Reference Bureau (August 2012) reports:

Since 2002, the United States has had the highest incarceration rate in the world….the natural rate of incarceration for countries comparable to the United States tends to stay around 100 prisoners per 100,000 population. The U.S. rate is 500 prisoners per 100,000 residents, or about 1.6 million prisoners in 2010, according to the latest available data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

A growing domestic and global alienation from Western idealism is clearly visible in the growing tide of violence:  in the U. S. we see school massacres, murdered police and public officials, counter-pointed by a daily family death toll by gunfire.  In Pakistan twenty more died in a bombing in Pakistan as this was being written. (5/6/13)

We can be forgiven for believing that worse lies ahead.

 On the other hand powerful minds in Silicon Valley believe this does not have to be so. The Valley’s Kool Aid diet (the one that shipped millions of jobs out of the U.S) creates a steady drum beat of harmony between wealth and moral principle. Valley entrepreneurs Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have written a new book. The New Digital Age, that advances a parallel universe cut from biblical metaphors.  Technology will change all things, make all things new.  Schmidt, the executive chairman (and former chief executive) of Google, and Cohen, a foreign-relations expert and director of Google Ideas claim their book is meant to explore the ways technology and diplomacy can intersect.

There is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world’s toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge.…[but] a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed public… will be able to tell the difference….The consequence of having more citizens informed and connected is that they’ll be as critical and discerning about rebels as they are about the government.”

The Tech icons claim that to confront terrorism “a new accountability is coming, and a wired, well-informed [global] public will be able to tell the difference.  [the citations and this account are in The N Y Times 4/25/13].

The writers’ theory may enlarge their already ample fortunes but will its saving power reach the jobless, the disenchanted and the potential bombers whose wires have already been tripped?