In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002) 267-278



[Access article in PDF]

End of War

Rowan Williams


So much of this seems to oblige us to think about language. 1

The day after, there was a phone call from Wales, from one of the news programmes, and I faced a familiar dilemma. The caller started speaking to me in Welsh, which I understand without difficulty, but don't always find it easy to use in an unscripted and possibly rather complex discussion. I had to decide: if I answered in Welsh, the conversation would go on in Welsh, and I had some misgivings about coping with it.

I am spoken to; I have some choices about how to answer. It seemed a telling metaphor at that particular moment. Violence is a communication, after all, of hatred, fear, or contempt, and I have a choice about the language I am going to use to respond. If I decide to answer in the same terms, that is how the conversation will continue. How many times have you heard someone say, "It's the only language they understand" to defend a violent reaction to violent acts? And perhaps we should at least ask, before we reply, the kind of question we might ask if we're addressed in a language we're not quite [End Page 267] sure about: can I continue this conversation, have I the will and resource for it?

At the same time, the question is a little unreal in some circumstances. The fantastic surge of violent energy needed to plan and carry through a colossal suicide attack is, fortunately, beyond the imagination of most of us. We can partly cope with thinking about the exchanges of conventional war, because we assume a measure of calculation on each side that is fairly similar. Increasingly (and this is something else we shall have to come back to) this is not what large-scale violence is like in our age. We face agents who don't seem to calculate gains and losses or risks as we do. It is not like the deceptively comfortable cold war notion of a balance of terror.

A Palestinian woman brought up in New York, Suheir Hammad, wrote, one week after the 11th:

I do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill.
I have never been so hungry that I willed hunger.
I have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen.
Not really. Even as a woman, as a Palestinian, as a broken human being.
Never this broken.

And if not even as a woman, as a Palestinian, what about the rest of us? What do we know?

The truth is that if we respond violently our violence is going to be a rather different sort of thing. It is unlikely to have behind it the passion of someone who has nothing to lose, the terrible self-abandonment of the suicidal killer which is like a grotesque parody of the self-abandonment of love. It is not that we are "naturally" less violent or more compassionate. The record of European or American military engagement should dispel that illusion. But we are not acting out of helplessness, out of the moral and imaginative destitution that can only feel it is acting at all when it is inflicting pain and destruction.

The response of at least some people in the face of deep injury, once feeling has returned, is a passionate striking out; there is something recognisable about the language of Psalm 137—"let their children die horribly, let them know what humiliation and exile are like." It is an honest moment; but for those of us who are not totally helpless in terms of internal or external resources it is only a moment. We feel very uneasy when it seems as though [End Page 268] there is a sustained effort to keep that level of murderous or revengeful outrage alive. The point at which we need to show more footage of collapsing towers or people jumping to their death, when we raise the...

pdf

Share