NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 30, 2001
Year of grace
Last year about this time I wrote a "New Year Letter" in verse to fill this space. (I said verse I didn't say poetry.) I was just rereading that effusion. It belongs to another era. Not only did it look back -- with internal allusions to W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter" from 1940. It simply could not look forward. We had had a pointless and dawdlesome discussion about whether the new millennium began in year 2000 or 2001. We prepared for such nonsense as Y2K. All that happened in another life. Historians create quasi-centuries to bracket large groups of events. For instance the 19th century would most conveniently be defined as 1815 to 1914 -- from the Battle of Waterloo and the final defeat of Napoleon to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of World War I. It was an age largely of peace and good order especially on the European continent; it ended in unprecedented freedom and open borders a huge expansion of world trade; it was a Pax Britannica with the Royal Navy in control of the high seas and piracy eliminated almost everywhere; an age of optimism and scientific progress; a missionary age in which European ideals and religion were transported to the farthest ends of the earth and men began to glimpse a world civilization. It was an age of illusions including all of the above. A comprehensible 20th century could then be bracketed between 1914 and 1989 an age of ideology of international conflict of huge and brutal power rivalries of the disintegration of empires ending in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the surprisingly bloodless defeat of Soviet Communism. It was the age in which the United States passed through superpower status to unchallengeable world leadership ending in a kind of Pax Americana. We don't yet know quite how to assign the days between Nov. 9 1989 and Sept. 11 2001. From this vantage they seem a no man's land between the end of an old and violent order and the beginning of a new one. Twelve years through which the assets of the former Soviet Empire were scattered by the breeze of history and those of Islamist terrorism were gathering together. In a single moment on Sept. 11 -- let us say the moment when the second plane flew into the second tower of the World Trade Centre in New York -- we could know with some certainty that the new dawn had arrived. All the old certainties were now fully collapsing just as the certainties of the 19th century had been shelled in the trenches of France. I think the chief certainty of the 20th century was that "God is dead". All around we could see the evidence accumulating as the years wore on. Even in the West where the Christian religion had soldiered through the carnage of three world wars (counting the Cold War as the last one) there seemed indisputable evidence. Francis Fukuyama famously identified 1989 as "the end of history" (except for some mopping up). The whole world had come to see the benefits of a harmless consumer capitalism; the era of "eras" was effectively over. Samuel Huntington is the tutelary intellectual spirit of the world we entered instead. His contrasting thesis on "the clash of civilizations" seems on the face of things a much more plausible description. History never ended but was merely hiding under the rubble of the 20th century. With the collapse of the Soviet Union all the ancient cultural rivalries nationalist aspirations and ethnic hatreds of central and eastern Europe re-emerged. From the Far East we learned from even our pro-Western friends that there were such things as "Asian values" in contrast with the Western secular ones. Immense China persists in its claim to offer an alternative model of order and discipline to the chaos and libertinism of Western democracy. Any number of "third ways" continue to be assembled in India Africa and the "Third World". But most signally we discovered on Sept. 11 that radical Islam had now actually declared open war upon our "arrogant and decadent" culture. More surprising still it used a vocabulary to describe this conflict from some scarcely remembered bad dream. Suddenly our imaginations were confronted with imagery more dark and satanic than Hitler's. In Osama bin Laden Islamic fanaticism had found a voice that actually called for the liberation of Andalusia -- i.e. for the restoration of Spain to the Moors driven out in the 15th century. Who demanded the removal of "Jews and Crusaders" from any station in the Arabian sands. Who announced the approaching triumph of Islam that would through Al Qaeda's terrorist cells launch upon its final world conquest and impose Islam on every surviving soul. " Jihad v. McWorld" in the title of the pop historian Benjamin Barber. The final clash of civilizations between the suicide pilots of Air Islamism and people queueing for hamburgers. And as it appeared at least until noon on that memorable day in lower Manhattan Jihad wins! Of course it doesn't win. No great and horrible evil has ever prevailed in this world for long; though one has a way of replacing another. Islam itself cannot be so bad must have been doing something right to last 1 379 years. The contest between radical Islam and the United States Air Force was more profoundly unequal as we saw in the Afghan return match. The most for which the former can even aspire is the massacre of large numbers of civilians; but this tends to arouse the survivors to do it in. Even to accomplish its massacres radical Islam must make use of technology that wasn't invented by mad mullahs and exploit freedoms not offered by them. So though we might conceivably get killed ourselves our "civilization" is not mortally threatened. In the long historical scheme of things 2001 may prove to have been truly a year of grace. We were able to escape it with only a few thousand casualties. The terrorists took the first three planes into their targets by surprise; but the passengers alone have prevailed in the last two encounters. We have been reminded that God is not dead. And though the world no longer resembles the one we grew up to expect we have reason to celebrate a Happy New Year. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top