Honoring September 11th: The Restart of History

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” – Michael Corleone, Godfather Part III

True story:  As a young man just out of law school, I was consumed with politics.  I even went to work on the Hill (Capitol, that is, Washington, DC) and in journalism.  But at some point in the ’90s, my interest faded away.

Francis Fukuyama wrote a then-notorious book called The End of History, published in 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse.  He argued that the age-old ideological struggles over what constitutes the best form of government were over, and the undisputed universal champion was Western liberal (in the classic, free-market sense) democracy.

I grew up during the latter stages of the Cold War, when the existential threat of nuclear war hung over and colored almost everything.  It made politics seem vital to one’s very survival.  And I found the debate between capitalism and communism hugely compelling.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the (apparently) decisive victory of free markets over collectivism, politics lost its import and thus its grip on my attention.  But I didn’t miss it at all.  I was perfectly content to retreat to the status of a casual spectator, and to focus on more aesthetic matters.  I wrote screenplays instead of news commentary, gladly.

But Fukuyama and I were wrong.  9/11 proved it.

On that fateful morning, my phone rang a little after 6 AM.  A friend who’d recently moved to Boston insisted that I turn on the TV, despite the early hour.  The second plane had just hit the second tower.  And we were at war with a strange new foe.  (Which turned out to be an age-old foe, but I didn’t know it at the time.)

As for many others, my world changed that day.  I was dragged back, kicking and screaming, into the maelstrom of politics.  History had risen from the dead.

I knew the Internet well, but I’d largely avoided political websites.  That changed on 9/11.  I studied topics I wish I never needed to know about.  I got involved again.

I discovered another book that emerged in the ’90s, in part as a response to Fukuyama’s thesis.  It was called The Clash of Civilizations, by Samuel Huntington.  He agreed that the age of ideology was over, but argued that fault lines over culture and religion would deepen and become a greater source of conflict.  And he believed one of the principal fault lines of conflict would lie between Muslim and non-Muslim civilizations.

Huntington was remarkably prescient.  But I would add this:  I don’t think the struggle over ideology is over.

The collectivists are by no means through.  As wrong as they are, their message is too seductive to die forever.  They will always be around, in one form or another.  And I see them now joining forces, dangerously, with some of the West’s cultural adversaries.

History will never end.  We were fools ever to think so.  One evil perishes; another rises in its place.  That’s what 9/11 taught me.

One of my artistic heroes is J.R.R. Tolkien, whom I believe has much to say, albeit obliquely, about our present state.  I close with a quote from one of his letters that I oddly find somehow comforting:

“Actually, I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”