The Fifth Anniversary: Can Fear Be Enough?
As the fifth anniversary of the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, today is being marked by memorials and “remembrances” all around the country. Not least among the solemn rituals designed to honor the occasion was a wreath-laying ceremony yesterday at ground zero led by President Bush himself, followed this morning by a memorial including two moments of silence, one for each tower. The President will mark today’s anniversary at each of the three sites of attack, and conclude the day’s events with a national address from the Oval Office. The emphasis by both public officials and the American public has been to find a way to stamp today with appropriate significance, and somewhat perversely, to hang on to the grief, the sense of tragedy and shock that appeared to unite the nation on September 11, 2001. The fifth anniversary of 9/11 was ushered in by an outpouring of punditry in the past week expressing both this strange nostalgia for the moment of victimhood and a desperate attempt to make sense of it all.
The New Yorker gave voice to this nostalgia by raising the familiar lament that Bush squandered the international good will and domestic social cohesion that arose in the aftermath of 9/11. Most telling about this position is the longing it expresses for “simple solidarity.” Hendrik Hertzberg explains that immediately following the attack, “strangers connected as friends; volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and defiance.” It is as if 9/11 had precipitated a social transformation, and that Hertzberg hoped the nation could somehow hang on to it permanently. But as he describes it, this cohesiveness was nothing more than “traumatized togetherness,” and thus it is no surprise that, regardless of Bush administration policies, it would not last. What kind of togetherness could 9/11 really have fostered? The only thing that was shared was the immediate sense of shock, and later an underlying feeling of vulnerability. The sense of disappointment expressed by Hertzberg is palpable, because immediately after 9/11 some believed that it could provide a wider, collective meaning for American life. To some extent, there has been an attempt in many corners to do exactly that, to establish a new “post-9/11” era in which society organizes itself around a collective sense of fear and vulnerability and finds purpose at striking out against those perceived to be threatening.
This theme is taken up by social commentator Frank Furedi. As he puts it, some of the questions raised since 9/11 “highlight the difficulty we have in endowing contemporary events with meaning. From the standpoint of the traditional vocabulary of public life, many events today do not make sense.” That is to say, if we lack a common framework for understanding a particular phenomenon or event, we tend to endow it with a significance it does not have. In Furedi's words: "public officials also seem at a loss to explain who we are. That is why the "unknown" threats posed by an unimaginable enemy have not helped to forge a strong sense of common identity or resistance. Whatever US president George W Bush has done, he has not succeeded in mobilising a powerful base of support for the war on terror."
One prominent symptom of the common dissatisfaction with the predominant political project of survivalism is, as we have written before here, the rise of conspiracy theory. As this week’s Time magazine deftly explores, such conspiracies have not only survived for five years, they appear to have gained a quite stable foothold. The Time article perceptively explains that conspiracy theories “meet a basic human need: to have the magnitude of any given effect be balanced by the magnitude of the cause behind it. A world in which tiny causes can have huge consequences feels scary and unreliable. Therefore a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it…Absent another explanation, the idea that there is a malevolent controlling force orchestrating global events is, in a perverse way, comforting.” The Time article, however, presents the popularity of such theories as a timeless psychological need. Unconsidered by the article is whether such lack of meaning is inherent, or whether it tells us something more about our present political climate.
The Bush administration has redoubled its efforts to beat back skepticism of its war on terror policies, and to gather support for the greater security project. In speeches this week, Bush repeatedly emphasized the danger posed by al-Qaeda and renewed his commitment to capturing Bin Laden. This is a shift from recent policy, and as we wrote last week, the Republicans are keen to play up the war on terrorism as unambiguously as possible in the build up to the mid-term elections.
As conspiracist skeptics and 9/11 soul-searching highlight, the war on terror is often weak and incoherent. Nonetheless it is here to stay in the absence of a meaningful opposition to it and given the continued low-level anxiety and social atomization that gives rise to it. Rather than a means to resolve social atomization and the 'lack of meaning', the set of policies that is the war on terror serves to reinforce and exacerbate it. Thus, while so much of the collective reflection and memorializing of 9/11 seems to cry out for social purpose and a collective understanding of the present, these aims cannot be achieved by instantiating a quasi-religious day of mourning. The war on terror demands unity behind a project of security and survivalism, urging us to build our social solidarity out of vulnerability and projected victimhood. That is what today’s memorials, moments of silence, tributes to victims and survivors try to do. But the continuous calls throughout the week to understand or find meaning in 9/11 point to the very weakness of the survivalist framework as a way of understanding human life and of organizing society. The life being offered us by the war on terror project calls for the eradication of risk and the dispensability of freedom. It calls for a life that is itself meaningless. It is a life without liberty, because freedom requires a realm of risk in which to operate—choice cannot exist without it. It is the very meaninglessness of a secured life that makes the war on terror and politics of fear an empty framework. If the current political framework reduces our social aims to survival, at some point we cannot help but ask what the point of surviving, or really living, is. That is the question the war on terror forestalls. A thorough and continued opposition to the war on terror as a whole, not simply a critique of particular government policies but a recognition and rejection of the war on terror’s very premise of the secure life is a necessary condition of any meaningful politics that places liberty at its center.
The New Yorker gave voice to this nostalgia by raising the familiar lament that Bush squandered the international good will and domestic social cohesion that arose in the aftermath of 9/11. Most telling about this position is the longing it expresses for “simple solidarity.” Hendrik Hertzberg explains that immediately following the attack, “strangers connected as friends; volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and defiance.” It is as if 9/11 had precipitated a social transformation, and that Hertzberg hoped the nation could somehow hang on to it permanently. But as he describes it, this cohesiveness was nothing more than “traumatized togetherness,” and thus it is no surprise that, regardless of Bush administration policies, it would not last. What kind of togetherness could 9/11 really have fostered? The only thing that was shared was the immediate sense of shock, and later an underlying feeling of vulnerability. The sense of disappointment expressed by Hertzberg is palpable, because immediately after 9/11 some believed that it could provide a wider, collective meaning for American life. To some extent, there has been an attempt in many corners to do exactly that, to establish a new “post-9/11” era in which society organizes itself around a collective sense of fear and vulnerability and finds purpose at striking out against those perceived to be threatening.
This theme is taken up by social commentator Frank Furedi. As he puts it, some of the questions raised since 9/11 “highlight the difficulty we have in endowing contemporary events with meaning. From the standpoint of the traditional vocabulary of public life, many events today do not make sense.” That is to say, if we lack a common framework for understanding a particular phenomenon or event, we tend to endow it with a significance it does not have. In Furedi's words: "public officials also seem at a loss to explain who we are. That is why the "unknown" threats posed by an unimaginable enemy have not helped to forge a strong sense of common identity or resistance. Whatever US president George W Bush has done, he has not succeeded in mobilising a powerful base of support for the war on terror."
One prominent symptom of the common dissatisfaction with the predominant political project of survivalism is, as we have written before here, the rise of conspiracy theory. As this week’s Time magazine deftly explores, such conspiracies have not only survived for five years, they appear to have gained a quite stable foothold. The Time article perceptively explains that conspiracy theories “meet a basic human need: to have the magnitude of any given effect be balanced by the magnitude of the cause behind it. A world in which tiny causes can have huge consequences feels scary and unreliable. Therefore a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it…Absent another explanation, the idea that there is a malevolent controlling force orchestrating global events is, in a perverse way, comforting.” The Time article, however, presents the popularity of such theories as a timeless psychological need. Unconsidered by the article is whether such lack of meaning is inherent, or whether it tells us something more about our present political climate.
The Bush administration has redoubled its efforts to beat back skepticism of its war on terror policies, and to gather support for the greater security project. In speeches this week, Bush repeatedly emphasized the danger posed by al-Qaeda and renewed his commitment to capturing Bin Laden. This is a shift from recent policy, and as we wrote last week, the Republicans are keen to play up the war on terrorism as unambiguously as possible in the build up to the mid-term elections.
As conspiracist skeptics and 9/11 soul-searching highlight, the war on terror is often weak and incoherent. Nonetheless it is here to stay in the absence of a meaningful opposition to it and given the continued low-level anxiety and social atomization that gives rise to it. Rather than a means to resolve social atomization and the 'lack of meaning', the set of policies that is the war on terror serves to reinforce and exacerbate it. Thus, while so much of the collective reflection and memorializing of 9/11 seems to cry out for social purpose and a collective understanding of the present, these aims cannot be achieved by instantiating a quasi-religious day of mourning. The war on terror demands unity behind a project of security and survivalism, urging us to build our social solidarity out of vulnerability and projected victimhood. That is what today’s memorials, moments of silence, tributes to victims and survivors try to do. But the continuous calls throughout the week to understand or find meaning in 9/11 point to the very weakness of the survivalist framework as a way of understanding human life and of organizing society. The life being offered us by the war on terror project calls for the eradication of risk and the dispensability of freedom. It calls for a life that is itself meaningless. It is a life without liberty, because freedom requires a realm of risk in which to operate—choice cannot exist without it. It is the very meaninglessness of a secured life that makes the war on terror and politics of fear an empty framework. If the current political framework reduces our social aims to survival, at some point we cannot help but ask what the point of surviving, or really living, is. That is the question the war on terror forestalls. A thorough and continued opposition to the war on terror as a whole, not simply a critique of particular government policies but a recognition and rejection of the war on terror’s very premise of the secure life is a necessary condition of any meaningful politics that places liberty at its center.
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