Alternative Editorial: Twenty Years On
As we write, the memorials for the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers in 2001 are taking place. Even now, 20 years on, the shock and terror experienced by the people of New York feels fresh. When global leaders rouse themselves to make the claim that the perpetrators did not succeed in piercing the American Dream, are they right?
Only the day before, the newspaper headlines were full of America and UK’s calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan – marking the failure of their most sustained response to 9/11. Violence begetting violence, ending in violence. Once again, the fear of reprisals took up mind-space not yet relinquished by fear of Covid.
What has happened in those twenty years? Has global society got stuck in permanent reverse? It’s only too familiar to read commentators speak of the infinite fragmentation of our previous hegemonic culture, implying a loss of faith in the liberal values that America enforced in the world to establish our human rights. Not only from outside the States, but from within as well. (One of our blogs this week looks at how 9/11 changed cinema as we know it).
But is it right to characterise that loss of faith as entropy? It might just as easily be described as development. Before 9/11, Americans were reading Samuel Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations (1996), predicting that in this post cold-war world, wars would be arise not from nations competing, but cultures facing each other down. Thus it proved.
But in 2019, Steve Slocum’s seminal book ‘Why Do They Hate Us? Making Peace With the Muslim World’ was making waves. That rested on an altogether much more consilient world view which left the author with a ‘hunger to befriend Muslims’. At the core of it was an awakening to the destructiveness of America’s dominance in the global socio-economic-political sphere. Instead of protecting those countries (and their citizens) in need, America’s superpower status systematically robbed them of agency. This insight, coupled with a heightened appreciation of the Islamic history and culture that could only benefit the global community, marked a new direction.
Waking up to the structural and cultural violence of the 20th Century global system has taken many forms since 9/11. Decolonisation – the shift away from the habits and values of the old colonial powers – began with previous colonies becoming independent and forming new alliances of their own.
But since the 1960s this has deepened. “Decolonisation” now means citizens of both colonised and colonising nations identifying the extent to which their minds have been shaped by this wrong relationship. To decolonise is to dethrone the knowledge of the largely white privileged societies, welcoming others into the richer marketplace of ways of being and acting in the word.
Within America this has stretched to mean not only other countries but nations within nations. Indigenous populations that pre-existed the British invaders of the land that became America have been invited to take back their own cultures and in some (still rare) cases, their own land. Black Americans have caused others to confront the legacy of their enslavement, not only in centuries past but in the many forms that slavery continues into the present. While the civil rights movement had been very strong well before 9/11, the past twenty years of America’s self-inquiry has only accelerated the process. George Floyd’s death in 2020 had global repercussions Martin Luther King would have envied.
A similar steepening of the curve has occurred with feminism. The movement for equality was well established from the 60s onwards, bringing about legislation against discrimination in multiple fields. But over the past two decades an understanding of what is meant by patriarchy and its ability to stifle the flourishing of society has increased exponentially. Women who never understood their own oppression until recently are now calling it out freely, expecting to be heard by those around them.
Perhaps most unexpectedly, the convergence of this age of waking up to the unjust domination of leading global cultures, has brought with it an acutely growing awareness of how those same powers have been used against Nature itself.
Instead of working with the Earth in a regenerative fashion – harvesting what is freely given, taking care of its ability to renew itself – we have simply commandeered her. Extracting what we want, often burning the resources and destroying her fertility before abandoning her to become a wasteland. Whether this describes the rainforests or the ocean, the pattern of careless and alienated destruction has much in common with colonisation, racism and gender oppression (ref).
This is not a steady or even process of waking up to the past and renewing the present collectively. It’s a very uneven, controversial and therefore often aggressive process. Those whose ancestors lost the most in the growing dominance of white America, Britain and other colonial powers, have experienced the most grief in the process of learning the truth about the past.
And those who have most to lose, on the journey to equity, have often put up the strongest resistance. To some extent these are the new social conflicts which mainstream actors – politicians, businesses, media – are polarising into culture wars. “Woke” v “anti-woke” is only the most recent failure in a long history of disempowering narratives.
But as this piece of research suggests, more of us believe we can’t turn the clock back on the unveiling of past atrocities, the scale of which has shaped history and put us collectively on the path to ruin. We can only go on a journey with this realization, to see what can be done to improve upon past behaviour and aim for better outcomes. That involves patience, acceptance of each other – especially those who are most aggrieved – and a willingness to be uncomfortable as our relationships recalibrate.
With this mind-set, can we look at the wildly different manifestations of people waking up out of their previous entrancement by dominant powers, and exercise more latitude? Of course it’s easier to identify with those that have suffered untold abuse and become their allies. But what about those whose abuse is less obvious, who have been the victims of, for example, the false promises of the American Dream or the British Empire? Or subtler still, the vast majority of people who are fodder for the growth economy and consumer culture?
What people may we have been condemning, that deserve more support and encouragement on their journey? For example, take those that the mainstream describes as conspiracy theorists. Might they also be the newly awake, emboldened to call out the powers that be? Even when their next action is to replace them with a new, often unsubstantiated regime, isn’t the practice of taking back the choice of who to believe an important developmental step - a move towards growing your autonomy? And isn’t autonomy an essential human need, without which humans cannot experience agency or contribute to a sustainable, flourishing society? Can we imagine a future society that prepares us – perhaps at the core of our educational process - for these journeys of understanding and reclaiming power? Or is it already here, in part?
In many ways, that kind of possibility would signal the deepening of American and British soft power, projecting a new image of the former colonial powers as willing to evolve and welcoming a new era. After a weekend of mourning 9/11 at the end of a week of mourning for Afghanistan, it was a relief to watch the two young women tennis champions in the finals of the US Open, stealing the ecstatic headlines usually reserved for the men’s final on Sunday. Like a breath of new hope, Emma Radacanu (British, of Chinese and Romanian parents) and Leyla Fernandez (Canadian, of Ecuadorian and Pilipino parents) both credited each other in a mind-boggling display of power in fluidity.
How much can we credit the internet with imbuing this generation with emotional dexterity, the skills to manage their public personae? Only months before, Radacanu had drawn attention to the importance of mental health in the pursuit of success. Now, here, their capacity for holding the centre court – emotional strength that the young John McEnroe for example, could never find - caused past champions Wade and King to wonder at their maturity.
Fernandez’s speech at the end was also increasingly typical of her generations ability to make the personal, political. Describing her failure to win the trophy this time she said: “I know that this day (9/11) has been hard for everyone in New York and I can only hope to be as strong and as resilient as New York has been over these twenty years”.
For a brief moment, these young women were able to model a more conscious, psycho-socially intelligent future we can all look forward to. If we choose to invest.