opinion Thirty years ago, I was in college and Nixon had just invaded Cambodia. We were all up in arms, and all of us converged on the dining commons, the students, the professors, the administrators. What were we going to do? How were we going to respond?

Our distinguished American history professor got up and declared this moment the crisis of American history. Not to be outdone, our eminent new-age classicist got up and declared it the crisis of universal history.

And we all nodded our fervent concurrence. But then our visiting religious historian from England, a tall, lanky lay-Catholic theologian, got up and suggested mildly that "We really ought to have a little modesty in our crises. "I suspect," he went on, "that the people during the Black Death must have thought they were in for a bit of a scrape."

Having momentarily lanced our fervour, he went on to allegorise, deploying the story of Jesus on the Waters. "Jesus," he reminded us, "needed to get across the Sea of Galilee with his disciples, so they all boarded a small boat, whereupon Jesus quickly fell into a nap.

Presently, a storm kicked up, and the disciples, increasingly edgy, woke him up. He told them not to worry, everything would be all right, whereupon he fell back into his nap.

The storm meanwhile grew more and more intense, and the increasingly anxious disciples woke Jesus once again, who once again told them not to worry and again fell back asleep. And still the storm worsened, till the disciples, beside themselves with terror, awoke Jesus one more time, who now said, 'Oh ye of little faith' - that's where that phrase comes from- and then proceeded to pronounce, 'Peace!' Whereupon the storm instantaneously subsided and calm returned to the water."

Our Historian waited a few moments as we endeavored to worry out the glancing relevance of this story. "It seems to me," he finally concluded," that what that story is trying to tell us is simply that in times of storm, we mustn't allow the storm to enter ourselves; rather we have to find peace inside ourselves and then breathe it out."

The Englishman's comments came back to me these past terrible weeks with the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: indeed, it's hard to imagine a worse storm. The rhetorical response, at any rate, has been way off the chart, with the event repeatedly being characterised as virtually unprecedented in its dimensions, its demented ferocity, and its implications.

In a certain sense, it obviously was. Over twice as many people died at the World Trade Center as during the attack on Pearl Harbor, many times more than in the past year's Palestinian Intifada, and more than in all the troubles in Northern Ireland over the past several decades. On the other hand, just looking back over the past decade, still more people were killed (and killed one at a time!) over a couple of days in Srebrenica.

Guilty by association

In Rwanda, the equivalent of the full working populations of both Twin Towers, completely filled and with no one escaping, were being butchered every single day, day after day, for weeks on end (again, one at a time) - with no one lifting a finger to help.

One great danger with a failure in the sense of proportion is the consequent warping of our capacity for response. If this is indeed the worst disaster of all time, unprecedented in its implications, then all prior restraints may in fact have to be jettisoned, including in the area of civil and human rights.

In the United States, for example, the Attorney General is advocating new regulations which would grant authorities (who already have the power to detain and deport any alien who has engaged in or supported any terrorist activity here or abroad) further power to deport any alien who ever associated in any way with any group any of whose myriad activities might be deemed to have included support for "terrorism" - and they could do so on the basis of secret evidence, never disclosed to the alien or the public.

The trouble is that guilt by association is not only wrong, it's counter productive. It invites wasteful investigations and prosecutions. Further, by treating aliens as guilty not for their individual conduct but for their group identity, it ends up alienating entire communities, thereby making it more difficult to identify true threats.

Meanwhile, outside the US, the American military's first impulse was to label their own worldwide response to the new threat "Operation Infinite Justice". One can easily imagine those very words - "Infinite Justice!" - spewing from the lips of the terrorists as they gleefully plowed their fuel-laden planes into the various doomed targets. "Infinite justice" leaves no room for doubts or mistakes, no price not worth paying.

It's not hard to envision all the violations of civil and human rights such absolute self-righteousness could be understood to sanction, including tacit support for the practices of corrupt, but momentarily allied, regimes. Nor is it hard to envision the counter-response of despair, fury, and violence such practices may elicit in their opponents.

Why shouldn't Finite Justice suffice? Can human justice ever aspire to anything more? Precisely because of the true scale of the horror visited upon the entire civilised world on September 11, and the actual scale of the threat it portends, response needs to be measured, considered, steady and precise. Civilisation itself mustn't be sacrificed in the process.

Lawrence Weschler, the author of A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, is director of the New York Institute for Humanities at New York University. 'Operation Infinite Justice' has since been renamed 'Operation Enduring Freedom'.