A Blog Post by Christopher Gohl
On September 11, twenty-five years ago, on a clear Tuesday morning with a bright, blue sky, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists murdered nearly three thousand people. Families lost loved ones, children lost their parents, and friends lost people close to them. They came from more than ninety countries and belonged to all major religions; among them were also many Muslims. Anyone who remembers that day first thinks of the dead, the injured, and the families who have been living with a painful loss ever since—an empty seat at the dinner table, a missing face in the family photos.Anyone who was old enough at the time still remembers exactly where they were when the images from New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania shook the world. A quarter-century later, however, I am less preoccupied with the question of what happened back then than with what has become of us since.
The terror of September 11 has struck fear into our open societies and sown deep mistrust. It was directed not only against people and buildings, but also against the belief that people of different backgrounds, religions, and convictions can live together freely. Internal and external security remain necessary: a state must protect its citizens. But security measures alone cannot restore the trust on which a free society depends. This is a challenge we must continually face:
How do we treat one another with humanity when the world fills us with fear?
First and foremost, people were murdered that day; nothing can overshadow this concrete suffering and the remembrance of the victims. But the attack was also directed at the way we live together—the everyday trust that people can coexist in peaceful diversity.
The Islamist terrorists acted out of a closed worldview that allows for no doubt, no contradiction, and no dialogue. Their aim was not merely to undermine military and economic power; they also sought to make the unspectacular, peaceful coexistence of people impossible.For nothing refutes a dogmatic worldview more thoroughly than people who simply ignore it in their daily lives by getting along peacefully with one another.
Terror begins with physical violence, but its true goal is to sow mistrust: it aims to make us treat one another with greater wariness, coldness, and caution from now on. It seeks to categorize us by origin and faith. Whether it succeeds, however, is not decided by the perpetrators of the past. That is for us to decide today.
In a complex and often chaotic world, mistrust promises quick protection against disappointment. The promise is that those who mistrust the world can no longer be taken by surprise. That is what makes mistrust so appealing: it neatly divides the world into “us” and “them.” Such enemy stereotypes promise simple guidance. But they do not make our lives safer; rather, they make them more fearful and impoverished. And they deliver to terrorism precisely the success—the social division—that its strategy was designed to achieve from the very beginning.
Since 2001, much has been done to ensure our internal and external security. But honest self-criticism requires that we admit: the mindset of friend and foe, the polarization of emotions, has taken root in our society. This poisons our debates and weakens our democracies from within. A free society thrives on the trust of its citizens.And that should remain our guiding principle. We have learned to shield ourselves against threats. Now we must be careful not to become rigid within our own armor.
Hope is not naive optimism, but rather a well-founded—indeed, a resolute—refusal to let fear have the last word. Hope requires
Anyone who wants to ground hope must therefore not look away or ignore the fact that there are people with whom conversation is impossible because they despise any form of dialogue; and a resilient society must protect itself from them. But we must never confuse the few who seek to destroy with the many who want to live in peace. Hope counts on the possibility that things can turn out differently than fear constantly leads us to believe.And it has tangible evidence: beyond the bad news, trusting cooperation is evident in schools, workplaces, clubs, and neighborhoods. In all these places, it is clear that diversity is not a security risk, but can be enriching.
When asked how we can ground our hope, there is an answer from Tübingen. As early as 1990—eleven years before the attacks—the Tübingen theologian Hans Küng warned in his book “Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic” against precisely that spiral of fear and isolation that 9/11 would later set in motion. To this day, his idea remains the most concise expression of why security alone is not enough without mutual understanding:
In 1993, he distilled this idea into the “Declaration Towards a Global Ethic,” which was adopted by the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago—there, representatives of nearly all major faiths agreed for the first time on a fundamental ethical consensus: humanity, the Golden Rule of treating others as one would like to be treated, and four principles regarding nonviolence, justice, truthfulness, and partnership.
Just under two months after the attacks, on November 9, 2001, Hans Küng, speaking before the United Nations General Assembly in New York—a few city blocks north of the ruins of the World Trade Center—refused to declare the terrorist attacks as proof of an inevitable “clash of civilizations.” At the invitation of then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Küng presented the global community with a “realistic vision of hope” for coexistence—based on the fundamental consensus he had helped negotiate eight years earlier in Chicago.
And in 2003, Kofi Annan came to Tübingen to reaffirm this vision in his own Global Ethos speech.
To this day, the idea of mutual understanding through dialogue lives on in Tübingen—for example, in the Local Councils of Religions of the Global Ethic Foundation, but also in the stakeholder dialogues that our Global Ethic Institute organizes for actors from business, politics, and society. Mutual understanding enables change: For only those who talk to one another can also act together.
Trust is not a mood that sometimes comes over us, washes over us, and then leaves us again. Rather, trust is a social practice, and anything that is a practice can be actively cultivated. It begins with small, almost inconspicuous things:
This may sound modest in light of the historical impact and ongoing upheavals of September 11. But it is precisely this kind of action that strikes at the heart of terror where it is most vulnerable: Every encounter in which people do not reduce one another to identity-based characteristics such as origin, religion, or beliefs is a small but real and effective defeat for all those who rely on hatred and division.
This is how we remain human when the world frightens us: by giving one another concrete reasons to trust through our daily actions.Whether fear and mistrust ultimately prove stronger than trust and humanity is not decided by the perpetrators of that time.That decision is made anew every day—in our daily lives and at work.That is up to us alone.
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