“Lest we forget 9/11, let the bond that unites those who perished, the survivors,
and the rescuers inspire us to live in peace through a bond of mutual understanding.”**

Once we accept the reality that annihilating ourselves is an increasingly imminent possibility, perhaps then we will take steps to prevent its inevitability.

One step proposed by Oleg Grabar, Emeritus Professor of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is to build bridges of mutual understanding between the different cultures of the world through a series of seminars. Participants would be scholars and students, all from different countries and cultures, who would share their views on selected topics of history, culture, belief, behavior, art, music, health, and politics. Funding would be sought from corporations, foundations, and individuals.

Under the common heading, “Being Understood by Others and Understanding Others,” these international and multi-cultural seminars would be a fitting commemoration of the almost 3,000 innocent victims from more than eighty countries, who were murdered in the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the survivors, and the dedicated rescuers.

Moreover, these “9/11 Seminars” would bear witness to the wisdom of Rudolf Wittkower’s spirit of collaborative inquiry, a guiding principle in his scholarship, his teaching, and his life.

Each seminar would spawn others. The entire enterprise thus would become at once an engine driving the world community toward universal peace through mutual understanding and a commemoration of the tragedy of 9/11 that would be self-perpetuating, as one seminar becomes two, the two become four, the four become eight, and so on, ad infinitum.

In that commemoration, one salutary contribution of the “9/11 Seminars” to succeeding generations is aptly expressed by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Return of the King:

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what
is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting
evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may
have clean earth to till (Ballantine Books, 1965, p. 190).

A selection of these proposed seminars is discussed here today by the distinguished scholars who conceived them.

Iran and Iranian Culture, Past, Present, and Future.

Parts of the Muslim world, each with its own agenda, are committed at the moment to a government based on religious law, but with a deep practice in very democratic procedures. Moreover, the large Iranian population outside of Iran, especially in the United States and western Europe, usually highly educated, has special historical and geographical connections to Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Tajikistan, all countries of Central Asia, and Russia. Its members are very active in education, science, and the arts, as well as in politics, all of which will be analyzed in this seminar.

Religions of the Book: Contact, Conflict, and Resolution Among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The misunderstandings among the three great monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, have contributed greatly to the wars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and to the tragedy of 9/11. The goal of this seminar will be to build understanding among adherents of these three great religious traditions by studying their common roots and the ways in which they have diverged, both as a matter of philosophy and of history. The visual riches of the three religions will be explored as an integral component of the seminar’s work.

Pilgrimages in Christian Europe.

Simultaneously practice, stimulus, and vision, pilgrimage is one of the defining characteristics of the European spirit. There are actual pilgrimages, in which the pilgrim travels on a set itinerary to obtain specified benefits, such as to holy sites in Rome, the Eternal City, and Santiago de Campostela in Spain. Then, there are symbolic pilgrimages, or Quests, exemplified by the quest for the Holy Grail in the Arthurian Legends. This seminar will demonstrate that there is a gradual shift from pilgrimage as an earthly journey to particular places and relics, to an internal concept in which pilgrimage becomes a metaphor for self-actualization.

Wayne Andersen

Cultural Exchange Through Crafts.

Crafts are independent of language and often of time, yet they represent the unique cultures of people who may be widely dispersed geographically and in time. Modern students of the history of technology look less to the individual craftsman, such as a Paul Revere or a Duncan Phyfe, and increasingly to the crafts as evidence of a social and economic context. In this seminar, participants will analyze large-scale projects that involved an interaction of crafts from various cultures in which artisans contributed according to their own craft traditions. Thus, the projects were not a blending of national and ethnic crafts in order to homogenize cultures, but a mutual coming-together of unique cultures as individuals.

Trade over War: the History of Non-Imperial Nations on the Silk Road.

For five thousand years, war was believed to be the effective means of disseminating cultural standards throughout the world. Yet, archaeologists, from the beginning of the twentieth century, have revealed that trade has been more effective in cultural exchange. The Silk Road, for example, a system of land and sea routes connecting East and West from China to Rome, played a formative role in the cultural heritage of ancient Eurasia. Along with merchants, envoys, monks, and artisans traveling along its branches transmitted intellectual and religious ideas, literary traditions, and artistic modalities. It is the history of those people in which economic and cultural achievement served as the measure of success, as opposed to political gain or military conquest, that will occupy this seminar.

Joseph Masheck

Marjorie Welish

Learning from an Exemplary Cosmopolitan Impulse in Modern Architectural Culture.

Though the actual World Trade Center destroyed in 2001 was taken for a whole generation as exemplary of modernism in its last phase of confidence, ever since its demise, the question of what to build has thrown architectural people into as much of a tailspin as those who never had a chance to “get” modern architecture. Besides fostering a new cosmopolitanism, perhaps more culturally nourishing than the usual cross-cultural salad, this proposed seminar promises to advance appreciation of modern architecture as a lively component of culture among the people at large.

The Preservation of Our Cultural Heritage.

The guardianship of our artistic treasures throughout the world has been controlled to a large extent by museums and to a lesser degree by commercial art galleries and private collectors. Decision-making regarding the treatment and care of the objects has been unsystematic, idiosyncratic, and conducted without input from the society at large. There appears to be little or no philosophical basis for actions carried out. It would be highly desirable in this seminar to define the issues and ultimately to develop an ideal system, which could serve as a goal for a public policy towards preservation.

Understanding the Bases of Human Consciousness and Behavior.

Human beings are most strikingly distinguished from all other life forms by their symbolic cognitive processes. These processes give our species both a unique sense of itself and a highly unusual way of interacting with the rest of nature. There is certainly an evolutionary underpinning to the remarkable human capacity, but our extraordinary cognition is not, as so often assumed, the result of a gradual fine-tuning over the eons. Understanding this, and knowing to exactly what extent our behaviors result from fixed evolutionary influences, is critical both to the future of our species and to that of the world it inhabits.