While killing innocents was definitely part of their plan, the prime targets of the terrorists were two of the most powerful symbols of American dominance—the immodestly named World Trade Center and the Pentagon, nerve center of the world’s premier military force. The message: We reject your vision of globalized western capitalism and we will fight you to the death. Chilling indeed.

The real targets on the morning of 9/11 were not the American people per se, but the investor class, the less than one percent who own the wealth, direct the corporations, determine who sits in high office and decide when and where the military is to be unleashed. Despite its contributions, this worldwide class is perceived not only by Osama bin Ladin but by scores of millions of people around the world as the perpetrators of a global order that stampedes other cultures and menaces the planetary ecosystem.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon can best be understood as the result of two fundamentalisms clashing: the West’s hypermarket-based way of life with its dominant "ethic of the bottom line" and a religious fundamentalism that believes itself to be under attack from western "interests." If these two sides can’t move beyond their mutual hatred, the dead in New York and Washington D.C. will be only a down payment on the annihilation yet to come. But how? To gain some perspective, we have to go back in time and figure out what got us to where we’re now killing each other. Again.

When capitalism came into being several hundred years ago, it blasted gaping holes in the logic of the system that preceded it. It brought about the downfall of an entire system organized around landed wealth under the absolute power of the monarchical state. Capitalism was a force of liberation wherein Man grew from his subordinate role as a political subject to a new role as an economic being, a breadwinner free to compete and win material redemption.

Human societies are always organized around a threat (i.e., a "significant ill") and a plan of salvation. Religious fundamentalisms, whether Christian, Jewish, or Moslem, are based on the threat of damnation and prescribe obedience to the will of God as the means to salvation. Secular fundamentalisms are based on the threat of scarcity and prescribe obedience to the Free Market as the redemptive path.

Like fish in water, we can’t help but perceive our particular culture as the true reality. Margaret Thatcher stated this most poignantly and succinctly when she said with respect to globalized corporate capitalism: "There is no alternative." But if we learn anything from 9/11, it should be that there is.

All human cultures throughout history have experienced their mode of being human--their particular, local culture--as the only true mode of being human. This perception, at its rigid extremes, is the foundation of fundamentalism.

Also characteristic of human societies is the idea that normal or optimal behaviors are "handed down" from a power that is outside the realm of human control and therefore not subject to human manipulation. In the medieval order, this mandate came from the Christian God as elaborated by the Pope and his priests. Modern day fundamentalists from Osama bin Ladin to Jerry Falwell know the world through a theological interpretation of reality.

In the West, social behaviors are understood to be mandated by the vast processes of Evolution. The Free Market is the device through which evolutionary advantage is gained or lost. Like the theological narratives that predated it, Evolution is anchored in an extra-human determinant. Evolution identifies certain behaviors, primarily the human "propensity to compete", as natural, and therefore, immutable. But if there is anything that human beings do by nature, it is not that they compete. It is that they institute cultures in all their historic multiplicities. These cultures in turn socialize people to experience a particular reality as the norm.

The secular fundamentalism of the West posits an Invisible Hand of a Free Market in which human beings compete for scarce resources. The West’s mantra is that only by accumulation (which is, after all, the primary goal of capitalism) can one be liberated from the potential damnation of poverty, homelessness and joblessness. Only by accumulation can one defeat the enemy that is "natural scarcity."

Material success is therefore as much a sign of virtue in our secular culture as service to a Higher Being is in the realm of various forms of religious fundamentalism. Conversely, the "backwardness" of the poor nations, and the poor in general, is seen by our cultural order as less than human, not making "it", not doing "it" right, or what Professor Sylvia Wynter of Stanford calls "evidence of biological (i.e., genetic) dysselectedness by and through the extra-human processes of Evolution."

We, the people of the West, have proven to be the most successful competitors in the history of the planet. Our stunning achievements, from landing a man on the moon to modern medicine to the Internet, are testimony to the vitality of the capitalist logic of material redemption. However, while we have mastered the metaphysics of production and accumulation, capitalism is not designed to distribute. This fact, and the fact that western-led industrial expansion has destroyed historical checks on population growth with attendant pressure on the environment, have created enormous tensions throughout the world. It is largely because of our awesome success that we are now being forced to come to terms with the relativity of our particular form of social organization.

In order to stop a downward spiral into unparalleled catastrophe, we need to come to grips with the fact that neither God nor Evolution has written human social orders into existence. We ourselves institute our realities collectively, and inscribe them into our consciousness rigorously. Humans throughout time have brought their social orders into being. Not the Stars. Not God. Not Evolution. Fortunately, because we create our reality, we have the capability to deconstruct it, and reconstruct a reality that is better suited to ensure the general welfare of the human race and the planet as a whole.

If we can grasp the fact of human-constructed realities, then we can move beyond homo economicus and beyond fanatical religious dogmas toward a more complete, more cooperative and tolerant human. This is our best chance to save ourselves from war’s unthinkable death and destruction and to advance the cause of building a peaceful and prosperous world for all.

Matt Hamburg is a graduate student at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, CA. Dan Hamburg is a former congressman (CA-01) and is currently executive director of Voice of the Environment.

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