The National Interest
Thanksgiving 2001

An End to Nonsense

by Owen Harries

 

Someone—was it Nietzsche? Henry James? Lionel Trilling?—has observed that those who lack the imagination of disaster are doomed to be surprised by the world. Until September 11 such a lack was very prevalent in the Western world. While it was particularly characteristic of liberals, with their belief in progress and perfectibility, it was by no means confined to them. Indeed, in retrospect, the emergence of a species of optimistic conservatives—a term that until our time had been close to being an oxymoron—may come to be seen as a distinguishing feature of the last decades of the 20th century.

In any case, many people of many political and temperamental stripes were taken by surprise by the awful disaster of September 11. That they were was clearly evidenced by the widespread insistence that the acts of terror in Manhattan and Washington marked the beginning of a new era, that the world would never be the same again, that everything was changed and changed utterly.

With all due respect, this was and is nonsense. It reflects not the reality of the matter but the difficulty that intellectuals habitually have in distinguishing between the state of their minds and the state of the world. It also reflects what the philosopher John Anderson termed the "parochialism of the present", a condition resulting from a combination of ignorance of history and an egotistical insistence on exaggerating the importance of events that more or less directly involve oneself. Horrifying and atrocious as the acts of terror were, it should be remembered that they have happened at a time when people who experienced the Somme and Verdun, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, are still alive.