Terror fails in face of hope and respect

Human beings will never be satisfied with a new status quo won through violence and suppression. They will always look beyond it for a new day born out of hope.

In the midst of the suffering around them, several by-standers put aside their own fears to offer assistance and succour to the injured on Westminster Bridge today. They will be remembered with fondness by peace-loving people wherever today's story is told. They are promoters of hope.

Terrorists offer no hope for the future, only a blinkered vision of the past and a brutally incoherent understanding of the present.

Ask most people what dominant trait marks out terrorists from the rest of us and many will answer, intolerance. Yet the terrorists' fundamental failure lies deeper than this, in their seeming inability or refusal to acknowledge the human hunger for respect.

Much is said about tolerance these days, yet it is inferior to respect. Tolerance often assumes a downward-looking posture. 'Look at you,' it says, 'with all your strange beliefs and even stranger behaviour. It's a good thing that I'm as tolerant as I am or we'd never co-exist.'

Respect, by contrast, assumes a level stance or even an upward-focused outlook. 'I disagree with you on some things,' it declares. 'At times, we disagree vehemently. Yet I recognise your inherent value as a human being and I acknowledge that there is likely much I can learn from you.'

Through the ages, this has been the fundamental difference between two of the biggest change-agents across civilisations – violent conquerors and servant-minded missionaries.

The former have sought to quench identity and bring change through a strategy of alienation-for-integration. Separate people from all that they hold dear, their thinking goes, and their identity can be re-engineered, their worldview re-programmed.

Throughout history, however, true missionaries – as opposed to opportunistic colonialists – have tried to bring constructive change through persuasive advocacy and by modelling a more beneficial way forward.

They have recognised that a human conscious is sacrosanct; that it may be wooed, persuaded and challenged but it should not be bullied.

When a former-slave-turned-churchman by the name of Patricius left Romanised England to serve the people of Ireland, he encountered there a fierce, warrior-like culture. Change came through violence and the threat thereof. Alpha males wore the shrunken heads of their enemies in their belts as a status symbol.

Within little more than a generation, Patricius (as we know him) and his monks had seen the culture largely transformed, to the point where men wore small scrolls in their belts to signify their newly acquired literacy skills.

Later, during the invasions of Europe by the barbarians, it was the disciples of St Patrick (as we know him) who helped to rescue and preserve the foundational works of western literature.