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9/11’s big winner: Irrationality

I’m sick and tired of pondering 9/11, but I don’t want to leave the subject without drawing attention to Noah Millman’s deeply self-critical piece about his initial reaction to 9/11. Noah writes that today, a decade on, he looks back at things he wrote at the time and realizes that he thought he was reasoning […]

I’m sick and tired of pondering 9/11, but I don’t want to leave the subject without drawing attention to Noah Millman’s deeply self-critical piece about his initial reaction to 9/11. Noah writes that today, a decade on, he looks back at things he wrote at the time and realizes that he thought he was reasoning courageously, but in fact “was engaged in a search for meaning in which reason was purely instrumental.

The great intellectual victors in the immediate post-9-11 period were the people who could imbue it with meaning. To do that required a plausible explanation and the confidence to advance it. Nobody would have that confidence without the explanation being pre-packaged, ready to be deployed in any available circumstances. In other words, the very fact that there was so little we knew, and that what there was to know wasn’t very satisfying in terms of imparting meaning to events, very naturally empowered those whose views didn’t depend on knowledge. That’s how we wound up in Iraq. The advocates of war did not begin advocating for war on 9-11 – “finishing the job” in Iraq had been on the agenda for the entire decade prior. Nor did they need to prove any connection to the 9-11 attacks. We wound up in war in Iraq, in a very real sense, because “finishing the job” in Iraq imparted an appealing meaning to the terrorist attacks. And opposing the war felt like it tore the meaning off that terrible day, leaving its empty horror naked before us. That’s how it felt to me, at the time, when I think back.

And that’s what I mean by saying that what suffered the most lasting damage was belief in my own rationality. Or in anybody else’s.

This is where I find myself today, with respect to 9/11. Like Noah, I hope I’ve learned to be a lot more skeptical about my own rationality, and everybody else’s. I hope so. I don’t know that I have. How can you know? Stepping outside of your own experience to examine yourself critically is difficult under the best conditions, and impossible when you are very angry and very afraid.

Robert Nisbet:

The power of war to create a sense of moral meaning is one of the most frightening aspects of the twentieth century. In war, innumerable activities that normally seem onerous or empty of significance take on new and vital meaning. Function and meaning tend to become dramatically fused in time of war.  … One of the most impressive aspects of contemporary war is the intoxicating atmosphere of spiritual unity that arises out of the common consciousness of participating in a moral crusade.

Intoxicating. Yes. A drunk in the middle of drinking is almost impossible to convince that he’s had too much. So it is with all of us when our passions have been engaged in a mission.

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