The Events of '9/11' and the Concept of Outrage

The word 'outrage' exploded onto the pages and the screens of the media as a result of the explosion of the fuel tanks of two aircraft which had been flown intentionally into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, and most people would agree — but immediately one is arrested by the thought: who actually are these 'most people'? There was a sizeable chunk of Middle Eastern people celebrating the vision on screen of this, by any objective standard, remarkable coup — and that too was an outrage to our lot of 'most people'.
But my purpose is not so much to try to define which groups in the world at large would line up within the consensus that saw the event as outstandingly immoral; I am sure that the head counting could be done, and it could well be a majority. What interests me is less to whom it was evil, but against whom it was seen as evil. Then, after that, those to whom any dissent as to the absoluteness of the evil, or even as to whom it was against, is itself shocking.
Declaring one's own view is often the only way of beating through this sort of moral undergrowth, so I will say that to me the supreme evil was against the passengers in the planes; next, those in the WTC towers, and next those hijackers who, we are told, did not know that they were on a suicide mission; they, surely, were as murdered as any other. And in all cases, of course, people bereft by those deaths.
To some commentators, however, this was not the full extent of the outrage — it was to some not even the essence. To some, its essence was an attack on 'civilisation' or 'liberty' or 'the free world'.
I think that what this gropes towards is that, beyond the immediate evil are consequences for the world at large should such acts become common, and that is wide-scale social chaos and insecurity; as I have said elsewhere, one of the distinguishing marks of terrorism, as distinct from war, is the de-stabilising of the rule of law.
To yet others it was an attack on 'capitalism', or 'fortress America', and it is among these that one would begin to count heads that were not altogether deploring the event.
So then we come to the 'outrage' produced by dissent from whatever is, in any one social group, the 'received version' of how to view the event '9/11'. First and foremost among these examples are those who said the attack was not cowardly. I believe that one talk-show host had his programme discontinued because he said this. Nothing however, has yet beaten for hysteria the reception given to a short article by Susan Sontag in The New Yorker of Thursday 13 September, or '9/13' to bring Ms Sontag's only real mistake fully home.
I append as evidence for your own consideration both Ms Sontag's article and her later reaction to the subsequent cries of outrage. It is easy to see just what it was that so provoked her compatriots; as well as pointing out that 'cowardly' was a misdescription, she pointed to bombing from a great height as something that the word fitted perfectly. What this illustrates is that one of the most outrageous things you can do is to voice an unbearable truth. It is less easy to understand the berserk lynch-mob reactions, but these are sadly common enough once the word 'outrage' has been let loose and reason has for the moment departed.