“Conflict Returns to History”
Twenty years since the September 11th attacks, we still are waking up to history
I was a graduate student writing a dissertation in politics on the morning of September 11, 2001 when I encountered my mentor climbing the same staircase I was descending. It was shortly after the second tower fell. We paused wordlessly, not even greeting each other. I remember the awkwardness of the moment dawning on me as I also realized that I was silently hoping my mentor would say something that might give meaning to the enormous moment. I wanted to be taught. He must have sensed that. He shrugged, and before resuming his ascent he said simply, “Conflict returns to history.”
In the days and years that followed the September 11th attacks, that idea appeared to have a straightforward meaning. We were in a new conflict. There was religious extremism, there was terrorism, there was the smoking gun that might be a mushroom cloud. “America is at war,” White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card is said to have told George W. Bush after the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Conflict returns to history.
But from our vantage twenty years later, I think there is a deeper meaning we should sense. In part that meaning was disclosed by the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as it also has been disclosed by the pandemic that will not stop, five years of toxic Trumpism that has shaken our institutions, and confronting the racist violence in our past and present. Our exceptional American sense that we are excused from history’s primal forces has been deeply disturbed as division and danger seem everywhere to surround us. Conflict returns to history.
The 1990s were a holiday from history for many Americans. Having ‘won’ the Cold War, smart people had declared “The End of History” and the final triumph of our way of life. We enjoyed an idyllic departure from reality, a fantasy that made a presidential sex scandal seem like the end of civilization and the American way of life seem like the only winning option.
The end of the Afghan war is a signal that we did not wake fully from that dream twenty years ago. The naïve expectation that the U.S. ought to have controlled the end of the Afghan war better than we did, or that we bear a permanent responsibility to institute Western politics and Western social values in a free and secure Afghanistan is a reminder of the confused attitudes that led to long-term wars where we hoped for many years to build nations much like our own. But now as we depart Afghanistan, we discover again what we ought to have known throughout the 1990s and what others not so insulated from the harsh political facts of life as we have been always have known. Nations are people, and the deepest desires of other peoples is not to be our building blocks for a nation we would like better than the one they have.
It is much the same with our own American people, too. We have come in recent years to see clearly how difficult it is to say that phrase — ”American people” — with any coherence. Being one people seems to have gotten beyond our ability. We are fragmented along old lines of race and class. We also are fragmented along new lines like masking and vaccination, and it is because we (like the other peoples of the world) do not want to be told how we should act or feel or think. It does not matter, either, whether people are being told something better than what they have decided they want. For better and for worse, we each want to chart our own way.
Conflict returns to history because history does not stop even when we think it has, or when we think it should stop because we deserve it. In fact, conflict never is gone. Conflict arises when people possessing different interests and perspectives collide. The feeling of having control taken from us (much as we all felt on the morning of September 11) gives rise to conflict. Uncertainty overtakes our reason. We want to assert ourselves. We want to take control. We do as the U.S. did in 2001 — we try to impose our own sense of order. And, when we do that we take others’ feeling of control away. Conflict returns. Whether the U.S. nation-builds in Afghanistan or whether Americans try to re-make one another into the Right’s or the Left’s version of a better America, the outcome always is the same. In history, it always has been. Conflict is a reality — really, a responsibility we only can elude for so long.
History has a lesson for us: conflict always returns, there is no “end of history” or final settlement of political differences. A peaceful world and a nation at peace are messy, built on frustrating compromises, and fully satisfying to no one. They result from addressing conflict to resolve it. Avoiding conflict will do no good.
By now, we ought to know that. We have paid dearly to learn it.
