Before I say what I'm about to say, I want you to understand something: I think the people responsible for the acts of 9.11 are mass murderers of the most monstrous kind and that they deserve death.

Now: What I want to talk about is American cultural and economic power and the disenfranchisement or destruction of traditional cultures and spiritualities throughout the world, including here.

It has been pointed out by many commentators that, if the acts were perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists, they represent only a tiny minority of Moslems worldwide and that Moslems, like Jews and Christians, believe in the sanctity of human life.

But traditional Moslems, like fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews, like traditional peoples everywhere, surely feel that American power endangers their sacred ways of life in many ways. For the vast majority of those Moslems and Christians and Jews, that cannot possibly justify taking thousands of innocent lives, nor of course should it.

But we need to reflect a bit on who we are and how we appear. American domination of world economies and exploitation of third world labor are real, and both those things were embodied by the World Trade Center.

And America exports a culture that is destructive of traditional ways of life.

I remember when, several years ago, then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright was on a trip to south Asia. She remarked that the Islamic society of Afghanistan was "more reminiscent of the past than the future." Aside from being an infelicitous formulation, the statement was profoundly uncomprehending of the values of the Taliban. They, and much of the rest of the world, see human history not as s shining path of progress into the sky, but as a place which God has grounded in values that are universally and permanently valid.

They see us (just as Albright's statement reveals) unmooring ourselves from history; in place of traditional values, they see sheer decadence and evil. What to us is just the latest sequel to American Pie or the latest song by Madonna is to them a violation of some of their deepest beliefs, one that we are trying, with all the glamour of our immense wealth and power, to sell to their children.

We are in fact engaged in this same conflict here in the U.S., where it is sometimes referred to as "the culture wars," which pit the progressive forces of globalization and secularization against the traditional ways of life of fundamentalist Christians, orthodox Jews, and those on the far right of the political spectrum. Even the Oklahoma City bombing was a symptom of that conflict, taken to its most insane extreme.

The World Trade Center represented the implacable gigantism, the incredible consolidation of world power, that secular capitalism wields over the world. Many Americans of good faith feel this way too. I don't think I was alone in having very mixed feelings about the building, as it dominated Lower Manhattan with its insane scale, its pristine modernist rectangles, its representation of arrogance and domination. It is deeply ironic that a few fanatics from a small-scale movement (if that is who they were) could destroy it.

Of course, the people who died - and so many, many people died - were not symbols or embodiments of secularism; they were parents, children, janitors, innocent victims just trying to make a living. We absolutely need to hold on to that fact. We need to mourn them, and we need to avenge them.

But even if we do link the recent acts of terror to representatives of the extreme wing of Islam, and even after we avenge them, we must rethink our relationship to traditional cultures. We must seriously consider the impact of our prosperity and our value system on these cultures both in the Islamic world and here at home.

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