An End to Nonsense
Byline: Owen Harries
Someoneâ€"was it Nietzsche? Henry James? Lionel Trilling?â€"hasobserved that those who lack the imagination of disaster are doomedto be surprised by the world. Until September 11 such a lack wasvery prevalent in the Western world. While it was particularlycharacteristic of liberals, with their belief in progress andperfectibility, it was by no means confined to them. Indeed, inretrospect, the emergence of a species of optimisticconservativesâ€"a term that until our time had been close to beingan oxymoronâ€"may come to be seen as a distinguishing feature ofthe last decades of the 20th century.
In any case, many people of many political and temperamentalstripes were taken by surprise by the awful disaster of September11. That they were was clearly evidenced by the widespreadinsistence that the acts of terror in Manhattan and Washingtonmarked the beginning of a new era, that the world would never bethe same again, that everything was changed and changedutterly.
With all due respect, this was and is nonsense. It reflects not thereality of the matter but the difficulty that intellectualshabitually have in distinguishing between the state of their mindsand the state of the world. It also reflects what the philosopherJohn Anderson termed the “parochialism of the presentâ€, acondition resulting from a combination of ignorance of history andan egotistical insistence on exaggerating the importance of eventsthat more or less directly involve oneself. Horrifying andatrocious as the acts of terror were, it should be remembered thatthey have happened at a time when people who experienced the Sommeand Verdun, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, are still alive.
