As the American government plans its approach to Osama Bin Laden and his network, we ought to consider the sort of power he exercises. And we ought to be aware of the history of the forms and sources of power in general.
With the disintegration of the Roman empire came the dominance of the Church. For the Church, the deepest crime was a crime against the Godhead, and the heretic or blasphemer must be chastised. The power of the church and of the sovereign were considered to be God-given, and the law God's law. Truth and power were conceived to be eternal, permanent, affecting all persons in all things, though the legal system was hit-or-miss. War was holy war or jihad, and the Crusades, for examples, were concxeived of not as wars of one nation on another, but of God against the heretic.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe saw the rise of the nation-state, with large police forces, systematic legal systems, and unwieldy bureaucracies. The obligation to obey to the state was held to be the result of a contract into which the individual had entered, and the legal system began to permeate everyday life in a much more thoroughgoing way. Nations developed military institutions and standing armies.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the corporation became to a large extent the locus of power. Transnational and concerned with the transparency of markets and governments, the corporation cuts across nations and supplies them with armaments. By the same token, however, it sees war as a waste of resources and as a threat to the consumption it supplies. And it wants what it calls freedom: free trade, democracy, and free disposal of disposable income.
And finally, we have the kind of power that is beginning to be felt everywhere: power as a something both liquid and abstract, as something that moves effortlessly everywhere and that has no central location: a diffuse power in information. All things, including money, can be conceived of as or translated into information, until wars may be fought through viruses. Power, as in religion, is marked by access to information and the generation of content: possession of the scripture and provider of God's word.
It is perhaps rather unfortunate, however, that forms of power do not supersede one another, but accumulate. This is unfortunate because each form of power is also a form by whcih people are stripped of power, and each form of power carries with it forms of violence. But once, for example, the mode of power of empire or religion is invented, it is something that can always thereafter be revived and remade.
One should think of the World Trade Center as an embodiment of corporate power as it mutates into information, as embodying the "trade" that compromises nations even as it strengthens some of them. And one should think of Osama Bin Laden's power as religious, as on its own account authorized by God.
To a deeply religious sensibility, the World Trade center is a tower of Babel, a gargantuan expression of worldliness and pride. Osama Bin Laden saw it as his task to humble this pride; he saw his own plan as the hand of God tearing down the corporation, interrupting the flow of corrupt information, destroying a Tower of Babel.
George Bush saw the attacks as attacks on freedom and the economic system. He immediately thought in the only terms that make sense for a national leader: war.
But you can't really wage a war on Osama Bin Laden in the sense that one nation can attack another; Bin Laden's place is not a nation but a quasi-religious order that pops up here there and anywhere; it has both the omnipresence and the elusiveness of God. You see us struggling to make the issue one nation against another. But the parties to the conflict do not consist in the same sort of power and so cannot face one another squarely.
One approach might be to work directly through Islam, to try Bin Laden in a theological court rather than by the law of nations. That is in fact what the Afghans are hinting they might accept. We should listen carefully to the idea.
Bin Laden's religious trial, assuming that the people who conduct it have some degree of religious legitimacy, is the sort of thing that could actually serve to compromise his power as a man and as a symbol. Assassination, military action, or a criminal trial do not engage the source of Bin Laden's power, and only serve to martyr him. This is not to say that we should not destroy his resources, training facilities, weapons.
If Bin Laden and his like seem to have been abandoned by God, the nation can stand proud and the "global economy" can be revived. But if the question still seems to be God against the nation and God against the corporation and God against the information, then we are in for a long bewildering crusade. ____ .
