Osama bin Laden leads a small collection of angry and violent zealots, embedded in a set of societies deep in unrest, confronted by the modern world, and heading for the shattering upheavals of a passage to modernity. A vast sea of pent up frustrations and bridled human energies, which he just might be able to commandeer for his own ends, lies just beyond his reach, or the reach of someone like him. 

The conflict between George W Bush’s world and Osama bin Laden’s did not begin on September the 11^th,  2001. It began three hundred years ago when a resurgent West began riding a wave driven by its own burgeoning energies and the discoveries of modern science and technology. The West was swept forward into the modern era, while Osama bin Laden’s world remained becalmed in its own, initially at least, considerably substantial world. As the material advantages of the modern world began to mount up, however, Osama’s world found its relative decline to be increasingly disadvantageous, and its influence and control over its own fate rapidly diminishing. 

Without the discovery of oil on its lands, the eclipse of the Arab/Muslim world would be complete. Much may be said to pivot on this, and much hope as well, but there is more than a little irony in it. Oil is worthless goo in the ground, but for the fact that, over the last three hundred years, it has been struck by an alchemy of human creativity - first as the understandings of science and technology, and then as a firestorm of invention and enterprise which turns worthless goo in the ground into a resource that powers a world. The one claim to material consequence held by the Arab/Muslim world is, in effect, a gift of the modern West: Osama’s very own devil.  

Oil, in fact, can serve as a powerful metaphor for much of great importance and of great hope. It represents the creation of vast wealth for both the Arab and Muslim world and for the modern developed world. The realization of such wealth, out of the discoveries of modern science and technology and our own creative energies, has been part of a great material advance broadly shared throughout the populations of the developed world. Something like Mass Prosperity becomes genuinely possible.  

Great numbers of products available in the modern market place can serve as similar metaphors.

Consider the laptop computer. 

The “manufacturer” of the device is most frequently anything but. Be it Dell, Gateway, Sony or Toshiba they are most accurately described as assemblers of the product. A vast wealth of science and technology lies behind what they do, of course, but their principle role is to design the product’s final form, market it, sell it, and then service both the unit and its buyers – all the while making a profit which sustains them, and their employees. The various components of the laptop, the drives (magnetic and optical), the memory, the CPU, the battery, the screen, the keyboard, et al are themselves all technologies developed out of the understandings of modern science and technology, implemented through increasingly sophisticated manufacturing processes into products successfully marketed and sold. All of this is accomplished by an educated population that can, by these endeavors, make a life for themselves and their families. Nor are these components the end of the story. Nearly all of them have to be invented and/or assembled  out of other, still more basic, materials and products, and all of those represent still more realized opportunity for enterprise, invention and employment. You would likely have to peel back several more layers yet before you got to the essentially trivial “raw materials” which go into your laptop. Nor is this the end. The computer, as it sits in your lap, is worth nothing. It needs software to run it, and run on it. For this, a veritable galaxy of furiously innovative enterprises arises, featuring still more opportunities for human energies and employment. Finally, you will have to plug it into a wall to charge the battery. The electrical grid awaiting your plug is yet another enormous result of human invention and enterprise. This incredible layering and interaction of human creativity represented by “the laptop” dramatizes, was well as anything might, the process by which wealth is created in the modern world.  

Indeed, this layering of human creativity that lies between raw materials and products in the market place is possibly the distinctive feature of the modern world, and was simply not possible before modern times. The individual genius of Stradivarius could grace wood, lacquer and strings with a value far beyond ordinary price, and the genius of a DaVinci could bestow upon paint and canvas a value beyond measure. But today, ordinary human beings, with the benefit of mass education, can participate in a process creating value in a myriad of ways at many, many levels, realizing a good life for themselves and their families. Mass Prosperity thus becomes a reality. This is Hope, real and practical Hope for all mankind. 

Yet Osama wants to fight, to initiate violence in pursuit of his cause, and George W. Bush has elected to join him in that game. 

It is relatively easy to understand a basis for bin Laden’s direction. Even the choice of violence as strategy, as his principle tool, although morally unjustifiable, is hardly unexpected. Osama’s world does not substantially share in the material riches of George W. Bush’s world, and the paths laid open for getting to that world are unfamiliar and untried in the experience of the Arab/Muslim world. Change is inherently disruptive, and change both material and cultural, as this clearly will be, becomes doubly so. Fear arises, anxiety spreads, old truths and traditions beckon, fierce loyalties are evoked, and violence springs up as easily “as the sparks fly upward”. 

Yet this is a world that fights no longer with sticks and stones and blades, but with nuclear tipped missiles and vials of contagion. The sheer lethality modern weaponry, and the relative ease with which it may be brought into play, are both new, and an inalienable part of the modern world. Recourse to violence, whatever the cause, begins to take on the aspect of striking matches in a dynamite factory.  

Consider a simple vignette. If a mouse is nibbling at the foundations of your house, you are being attacked. Do you then choose to go out in an electrical storm with a lightening rod in your hand to chase the mouse? War in the modern world had better be worth the risk; because, whatever else it may be, it will always be an electrical storm and a lightening rod in your hand. 

Osama bin Laden and his world perhaps have some excuse not to be entirely cognizant of this reality, but George W. Bush and his world (WE OURSELVES!) do not. Yet locked in fear and rage after 9/11, America has chosen, at this moment, to ignore it. It is a luxury we will inevitably have only a limited time to indulge.  

And the failure is double. Shrouded by our fears, and  whistling past the graveyard on the dangers of “accident, miscalculation or madness”, we are also ignoring the one thing we, above all, should remember: the genuinely dazzling basis for hope the modern world opens to all people. The West came upon this truth first, and has benefited the most from it. It now must seek, before all else, to be the wise purveyor of this to the world. It is in this that America should be taking the lead. It is the surest long-term strategy for a war on terror. For ultimately a war on terror cannot ever be completely won – this world has engendered not only Osama bin Laden, but Timothy McVeigh. The most we can do is to try to realize a world in which the likelihood of terrorist attack is reduced to a minimum. That will be the broadest possible endeavor for all the world to engage in, and for that creating mutual trust becomes a paramount need.  

Osama bin Laden can ignore all this, but George W. Bush’s world (our world) cannot. Therein lies the danger the world sees in America’s recent turn. The cultivation of comity and cooperation as a fundamental mode for engaging the world was the arguably the major thrust of American policy over the past half century, and its major achievement. That we need to change direction now in order to combat madness, initiating violence and disregarding real, even catastrophic, possibilities for events gyring  beyond control, offers a poor excuse, and leaves the lunatics as masters of the asylum. America’s pursuit of peace through the idea of collective security engaged much of the planet for the past fifty years, and was a source for much of the world’s hope. The apparent abandonment of that policy by its chief advocate has shocked the world as surely as 9/11 shocked it. America, in this moment, has become a creature of its fears. 

We live in an amazing world where both Mass Destruction and Mass Prosperity become genuinely possible. There is reason for both great fear and great hope:

It is no longer by the land you hold, nor the resources you command that you prosper, but by the educated creativity of your people. Make Peace, and you move on, prospering by the creative accomplishments  of your people. 

The television series “Avoiding Armageddon”, aired on PBS and dealing with the great dangers alive in the modern world, ends with Walter Cronkite’s observation: “The choice is ours”. 

In Lincoln’s words: