Power, Wisdom, and Virtue
Vol. 57 No. 46 | The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity | October 11, 2026
The reports of the attack aboard flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week were riveting. Two hours into the flight, the Omani-Syrian co-pilot Hamam al-Hammami attacked Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, with the emergency crash axe kept in the cockpit, with a likely intention to crash the plane in the desert or in Israel. In the struggle, the aircraft plunged into a near vertical descent. Amazingly, it did not disintegrate, despite the terrific strains imposed on its structure. Equally amazing, though bleeding profusely from multiple wounds, Captain Machchhar managed to unlock the cockpit door, allowing passengers and crew to overpower his attacker. Additional pilots travelling aboard helped bring the aircraft under control and it landed safely. All one hundred and seventy passengers survived.
The attack is being treated as a terrorist act, and the co-pilot was known to browse radical Islamist websites. Worryingly, this information was not shared or sought by security services of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and even Israel. Individual malice and institutional weakness almost led to disaster, There is a parable here about technology, institutional safeguards, and individual virtue. Technology places extraordinary powers at our disposal. An airplane carries large numbers people across great distances – yet, as we know from 9/11, it can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction. Even the emergency axe, provided to save lives, became an instrument of attack. That is why technology requires sound institutions. Recruitment, training, security checks, maintenance, and the sharing of information are all ways of making powerful machines safe to use.
But the failure to vet the co-pilot is a warning. Rules protect us only when people conscientiously carry them out. Institutions require individual virtue: honesty in reporting danger, diligence in investigating it, prudence in entrusting responsibility, and courage when an emergency comes. The wounded captain’s determination, the passengers’ readiness to intervene, and the other pilots’ professional competence worked together to avert disaster. Their actions also depended upon the aircraft remaining flyable under such extreme conditions. Its survival testifies to the work of engineers, technicians, instructors, and standards of safety set for them under law. Behind the extraordinary courage of a few stands the ordinary conscientiousness of many.
Populists tilt against institutions, and elitists dismiss individual virtue, but we need both, and even more so now, given the perils of emerging technology. Artificial intelligence has grabbed the headlines, but it is not the only technology that could be harnessed to murderous malice or sheer recklessness. Advances in quantum computing could break much of the encryption on which confidential communications and digital security depend. Experiments in mirror biology might produce self-replicating mirror organisms that could evade natural immune defences. Increasing our technological power does not necessarily improve our judgment or discipline our ambitions. Even without deliberate malice, competitive pressure and institutional complacency can put others at risk. We need institutions capable of testing claims, sharing warnings, enforcing standards, and assigning responsibility without ideological bias. We also need individuals in those institutions with the honesty to acknowledge limitations and the courage to hold back when necessary rather than plunge ahead.
What I have written here is just common sense – though common sense can be overlooked when the intoxications of power, fear of losing out, or partisan animosity are warping judgment. How can Christians help to make sure it prevails? In issues of public policy, the church is a small voice – and too often wastes its breath in absurdly grandiose pronouncements (here’s looking at you, General Convention). Where we do not waste our breath is in prayer for the civil authorities. When we ask God to “fill them with the love of truth and righteousness”, and to “make them ever mindful of thy calling to serve this people in thy fear”, we are bearing witness to the individual virtues upon which sound institutions and our common life depend. We are bearing witness that authority is a trust and that those who bear it are accountable for its exercise. That’s not wasted breath. Yet what we are asking of God for the civil authorities, we must also be asking of him for ourselves. Our witness to moral responsibility is inadequate if we do not subject ourselves to the moral law ourselves. We must learn not only to tell the truth, but to hear it; to accept correction, restrain selfish desire, keep promises, and seek our neighbour’s good. In these pages I have recently criticized the moralism of our culture – but there is an equal and opposite error, one arising in populist reaction against progressive moralism, and that is the error of antinomian (lawless) moral indifference. The pendulum swings from one destructive extreme to the other, and I think we are a long way from finding the middle way of wisdom. From the legalism and license, from moral blindness and degraded institutions, Good Lord, deliver us.