9/11 Attacks Killed Nearly 3,000; Commemorations Mark 25th Anniversary
After 9/11: Defence, Grief, and the Temptation to Make Politics of Terror
The state is right to defend and to mourn, but when blood and ashes are turned into an argument for faction, the impartial spectator turns away in disgust.
When I read of New York City firefighters marching near the 9/11 Memorial on the twenty‑fifth anniversary, I know at once what sentiment is at work. In that slow procession, with the names of at least 2,977 dead behind them and many thousands more fallen since, there is no calculation of interest, no higgling and bargaining. It is the simple fellow‑feeling I described when I began my Theory of Moral Sentiments: the spectator, imagining himself in the place of the sufferer, is moved to applaud the courage that ran towards the burning towers and to lament the lives that never returned. Public mourning of this sort does not enrich a faction; it repairs a community’s heart.
The attacks of that day were not only murders on a dreadful scale; they were an affront to what I called the exact administration of justice and to the first duty of the sovereign, which is defence. That so many perished shows that the institutions charged with protection failed in some degree; that the world did not at once dissolve into reprisals without limit shows that institutions of justice still retained some authority. A people so wounded is entitled to demand that its government learn, adjust, and, where necessary, strike back. It is no part of wisdom to preach a passive security where enemies have shown both will and ability to destroy.
Yet in The Wealth of Nations I observed that the sovereign has three duties, not one: defence, justice, and certain public works and institutions. Defence which forgets justice, or public works which forget the prosperity of the people, cease to be duties and become pretexts. In the years after such an outrage, every measure wrapped in the flag of security deserves the most suspicious attention. The obvious beneficiaries—contractors who sell protection, officers who gain in authority, politicians who enjoy the splendour of command—stand clearly before us; the payers are more obscure. It is the taxpayer, the consumer facing higher prices, the labouring poor encountering fewer opportunities, who settle the account without ceremony.
The anniversary brings another spectacle alongside the firefighters’ march: politicians using the memory of 9/11 to urge voters to support this or that party in approaching elections. Here the impartial spectator must distinguish carefully. To argue sincerely that one’s principles would better secure the public peace is not blameworthy; it is part of free government. But when the dead are summoned chiefly as orators for party, when images of the falling towers become mere posters in a contest for office, we are no longer in the realm of praise‑worthiness but of what I might call political theatre. The actors seek not the safety of the people so much as the sweetness of power; they spend other people’s tears as lightly as some men spend other people’s money.
After a great shock, the man of system is never far away. He beholds the horror of the ruined buildings and imagines that, if only he might rearrange the pieces upon the great chess‑board of society—alter every rule of travel, trade, and communication at a stroke—he could make such a calamity impossible. He forgets that each citizen has a principle of motion of his own. Measures which suppose that millions will behave like obedient chessmen, renouncing long‑standing habits of exchange and intercourse, may promise security but deliver only evasion, smuggling, and the quiet decay of commerce. Whatever fragments the market, whatever makes the crossing of borders and the movement of goods unduly costly, limits the division of labour and with it the natural progress of opulence.
In judging the policies that follow 9/11, one must always ask: what do they do to the price system, and who bears the hidden cost? More guards and inspections do not fall from the clouds; they appear as higher ticket prices, dearer goods, heavier taxes. They may be worth paying, for perfect safety is not the object and some precautions are plainly reasonable. But to treat every increment of fear as a license for any increment of expenditure is to adopt, in matters of security, the vile maxim of the masters of mankind—“all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” In this case the “ourselves” are those who sell protection or harvest votes; the “other people” are those anonymous citizens who merely wish to work, travel, and trade.
There is also a more intimate deception. Men of ambition, whether in commerce or in politics, imagine that if only they could command a great security apparatus, or stand at the head of a mobilized nation, they would at last be content. In truth, as I remarked of the poor man’s son who labours all his life for distinction, the prize often disappoints. The labouring poor pay in money and in lost chances; the anxious citizen pays in liberty; the ambitious statesman discovers, perhaps too late, that the world is no more secure, and his own breast no more tranquil, than before. The surest monument to the dead of 9/11 is not a swollen apparatus of fear, but a steady, just defence that protects trade, honours courage, and refuses to turn grief into an engine of faction.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions) and the four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, economy.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — The impartial spectator internalized: we judge ourselves by imagining how a fair observer would see us, and self-command is the discipline of living under that gaze.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market: whatever widens the market — roads, ports, peace, cheap carriage, open trade — deepens specialization and enriches; whatever fragments it impoverishes.