Since September 11, 2001, I have often thought that perhaps it was fortunate for the world that the attackers targeted the World Trade Center instead of the Statue of Liberty, for if they had destroyed our sacred symbol of democracy I fear we as Americans would have been unable to keep ourselves from indulging in paroxysms of revenge of a sort the world has never seen before. If that had happened, it would have befouled the meaning of the Statue of Liberty beyond any hope of subsequent redemption -- if there were any people left to care. I have learned from my students that this upsetting thought of mine is subject to several unfortunate misconstruals, so let me expand on it to ward them off. The killing of thousands of innocents in the World Trade Center was a heinous crime, much more evil than the destruction of the Statue of Liberty would have been. And, yes, the World Trade Center was a much more appropriate symbol of al Qaeda's wrath than the Statue of Liberty would have been, but for that very reason it didn't mean as much, as a symbol, to us. It was Mammon and Plutocrats and Globalization, not Lady Liberty. I do suspect that the fury with which Americans would have responded to the unspeakable defilement of our cherished national symbol, the purest image of our aspirations as a democracy, would have made a sane and measured response extraordinarily difficult. This is the great danger of symbols -- they can become too "sacred". An important task for religious people of all faiths in the twenty-first century will be spreading the conviction that there are no acts more dishonorable than harming "infidels" of one stripe or another for "disrespecting" flag, a cross, a holy text.

Friends I sent this to last week were doubtful that having the Statue of Liberty destroyed in this way would provoke the kind of response Dennett posits, but I'm not so sure. Symbols are tremendously powerful things, and it's taken a lot less to provoke warfare in the past.

A few other thoughts on this interesting passage. First, thinking locally, I mentioned to out-of-town friends shortly after 9/11 that the Twin Towers were by no means a beloved feature of the landscape here in New York. They were there, they dominated the skyline downtown, but no one really much liked them, so the response to their destruction (apart from the horror of the deaths involved, which is another matter altogether) was somewhat strange. They were there, and then they were gone, and we miss them (still), but the buildings as buildings didn't mean much to us.

Now, if the terrorists had attacked, instead, the Empire State Building, that would have been another thing entirely. For one, because of the way it was constructed, it probably wouldn't have fallen down, and many, many less people might have lost their lives, but even if the building had remained standing, and been repaired, an attack on that icon of New York would have gone much more to our hearts, and, as Dennett reasons, would have made it much more difficult for New Yorkers (specifically) to think rationally about what kind of response was appropriate. Dennett's argument about the Statue of Liberty -- a more general, national icon -- and the reaction to its destruction by Americans across the country thus would also strongly apply to New Yorkers and the Empire State Building.

But that didn't happen, the World Trade Center, as a building or a piece of property, had little iconic or symbolic value to us here in New York, or to the nation as a whole (and the symbolic value of the Pentagon is mixed as best), so the initial American response to the attacks of 9/11 could be, and in general was, appropriate to the scale and nature of the attack, and measured to obtain a specific and confined set of goals, the overthrow of the Taliban, the break up or disruption of al Qaeda, and the capture of bin Laden. (Not that we achieved all those things, but that was the legitimate aim of the invasion of Afghanistan.)

It also has to be said, again, that the extended use of the attacks of 9/11 as justification for the invasion of Iraq was not appropriate, and not in any way a measured response. It is, in fact, an example of just the kind of overreaction that Dennett is afraid might have occured if they had gone after the Statue of Liberty. Bush pumped up the significance of the attacks and used them to bootstrap the invasion of Iraq, utilizing false "intelligence" and outright lies about Saddam's relationship to al Qaeda, and managed to do exactly what Dennett feared might happen -- he besmirched the reputation of the US for decade to come, made us into essentially an overburdened bystander in the Middle East instead of a true player, unable to act either as an honest broker or as one with an enlightened self-interest in the region. We can only be seen there as a bully with a stick that's not quite as big as the neo-cons thought it was.

So without even attacking the Statue of Liberty, thanks to the miscalculations, intransigence, stupidity and ideological blindness of Bush and Cheney and their advisors, that icon's global symbolic value has been drastically decreased.

Way to go Bush, helping the terrorists to do their dirty work. What a putz.

Update: Other excerpts from Breaking the Spell are here. here and here.