Well, he's half right: These are the days when Stone Age anti-rationalist baboons turn the tools created by the rational thought of men against men. This they do with nothing more than the application of brute force against a society too civilized to recognize that it was under attack until too late - That the bipeds sharing their airplane cabin, studying at their schools, and infiltrating their society who appeared human, were really just animals in human form.
These animals are incapable of building an airliner, or a skyscraper, or fully appreciating what caused both to be created. They are only capable of destroying them, without ever having understood them.
Twenty-five years ago, when Julian Jaynes wrote The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I thought that his premise was insane. Jaynes postulated that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing. In short, he argued that rational thought is a relatively recent development in human history. Before September 11th, I dismissed this theory as an interesting, but whacky, intellectual exercise. Now, I'm beginning to suspect that much (not all) of the Islamic world operates at the bicameral level.
I don't for the life of me understand why so many choose to treat this failed culture of ignorance as the moral equivalent of our own.
i'd reckon that jaynes had it rather accurately...