Does History Make You Tolerant?

In my historiography class today, we discussed what history is for. That is, not what the past is for, but what is the discipline of history for – why do we bother to study and write about the past? Both the students and the text we are using suggested many of the usual ideas. We study history to learn who we are; we study history to learn what mistakes not to make; we study history to correct falsehoods and bad historical analogies (are you listening, Mr. Rumsfeld?); we study history because it is fun. The text, however, suggested a possibility that I’d never really thought of before – that we study history to make us more aware and more tolerant of cultural differences, more accepting of people different from ourselves.

Really?

I’m not so sure about that. I think the idea is that if we learn what other people have suffered, the struggles they have gone through, that we will more willingly accept their right to be who they are, or we will be less likely to dismiss them should they not measure up to our own standards of wealth, of knowledge, of civilization. Or perhaps, if we know our own history and its less-than-stellar aspects, that we will be more forgiving of the shortcomings of others.

Maybe.

I think a person inclined to be sympathetic to people who are different might well react that way, but I also imagine a person not terribly sympathetic might react quite differently. If I know your ancestors have a long history of mistreating my ancestors, perhaps I will blame you for that. Perhaps I might want to do you harm as a result.

Americans are not a terribly historically minded people, the subject of much moaning and wailing, and I have certainly done my share. But there is a silver lining to this. Americans do not tend to hold historical grudges. We tend neither to blame nor praise people for what their ancestors did generations ago. If we did, we’d love the French and hate the British, our respective allies and enemies from the Revolution.

There are plenty of places where this is not true, regions that are overflowing with history, where ancient hatreds are the stuff of modern politics and modern murder. Bosnia, anyone? For that matter, what about Iraq, or the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis? These battles are as much fights over history as they are over modern issues, which is one of the things that makes them so intractable. Perhaps we are better off, always looking forward, rarely looking back. At least, as long as Americans are historically clueless, I’ll always have a job.

What Really Changed on 9/11?

Another thought about the New York Maganize article “What if 9/11 Never Happened?”: I said that I tended to agree with the authors who believe we would be more-or-less in the same place today if that tragedy had never happened. Why do I say this? Because I don't think very much changed on 9/11.

I remember how on that day, and the days soon after, so many people seemed to be saying the same thing - "This changes everything." It felt so strange to me, like I was living in a different country. How, I thought, could anybody be thinking that? How could they not have known that this was coming?

Throughout the '90s, and perhaps even earlier, I found it both odd and very lucky that we did not suffer the kind of terrorist attacks on our own soil that plagued so many countries. Yes the World Trade Center had been bombed, but that seemed like a shot in the dark. The worst attack had come from one of our own, in Oklahoma, but without any subsequent attacks from people like McVeigh, that too seemed a fluke. Someone had planted a bomb at the Olympics, and the Unabomber was floating around out there, but overall, on our own soil, things were quiet. Too quiet.

To say that everything changed on 9/11, you would have had to believe that the quiet before that day was a natural, normal thing. I thought it was the product of good luck and good work by the CIA, FBI, NSA and the like. I knew that there were people out there who did not like us. I knew that there were murderous groups that had us in their sights. I understood that the politics of terrorism made us target number one for a lot of people. I also knew that it wasn't all that hard to hit us. I didn't worry about planes hitting the WTC - I wasn't that prescient - but I did worry, and I still do, about a stray nuclear bomb in a shipping container on board a cargo ship heading into Boston harbor.

I had a few friends who saw things like I did. We would just look at each other and wonder when people said - "this changes everything." Did we suddenly have brand new enemies on 9/11 that had not been there before? No. Had we suddenly become involved in the contentious politics of the Middle East for the first time? No. Had we suddenly become the world's only superpower, and thus the biggest target around? No. Had we suddenly acquired a militarily so powerful that terrorism was the only realistic weapon available to those who would do us harm? No. So what were people talking about?

What changed is a lot of people who did not know these things suddenly became aware. For them, I suppose, everything did change. Maybe they thought the whole world loved us and were shocked to discover otherwise, but for the world at large, things were much the same after 9/11. Oh things changed for al Qaeda and the Taliban, certainly. Life changed for a lot of people in the U.S. military and the intelligence services, of course. And most assuredly, everything changed for the families of the 3000 people who should have still been alive. But the rest of the world? I don't think much changed for the Iraqis - Saddam was already in Bush's crosshairs on 9/10, before then even. And we were going to confront terrorism more and more, regardless. Maybe with less intensity, but we would have had to face it.

So what changed on 9/11? 3000 people died, first and foremost. Further, the perceptions of millions of Americans who thought they were safe and beloved by the world changed, clearly. But beyond that, we were already on the path to our present day on 9/10. And that's not much comfort to anyone.

What if 9/11 Never Happened?

I’ve just read New York Magazine’s fascinating feature, “What if 9/11 Never Happened?” In it, a number of people were asked to imagine that different world in which four planes were not commandeered by hijackers and sent on their deadly journeys. Of course, speculating about counterfactual history (the technical term for “what if?”) tells us nothing about history. Mostly, it tells us about the psychology of the author - their perspective on events, their understanding of what matters, their personal quirks.

I tend to agree with the writers in the piece who imagine a world not terribly different from the one we are in – different details, but shaped by social, political, and economic forces into more-or-less the same place we are now. Most of the writers who talk about politics in their piece assume that Bush would not have gotten a second term, or alternately, that his bullhorn moment would have taken place in New Orleans, not New York. Maybe, there’s no knowing. It is entirely possible, as Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic suggests, that without 9/11, there would have been 9/12, or some other date, that bin Ladin really was determined to attack within the U.S., and September 11, 2006 would be different only in that the five year anniversary would still be a few weeks, months, or a year or two away.

For me, the most surprising piece came from real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller:

September 11 prompted this housing boom. Just before 9/11 we were in a recession; housing prices began to fall and volume really dropped off. We would have seen a continuation of a slide throughout much of the next two years. A run-up occurred as the result of the Fed’s post-9/11 action to drop interest rates, which led to a sharp decrease in mortgage rates. It’s that decrease that ultimately led to the price appreciation we’ve seen.

I was stunned at the parochrialism, but then I thought, no, this is no different from Thomas Friedman’s piece obsessing about China – these essays are about the personal focus of each author, not about history. And, this is New York Maganize – in New York, what 9/11 did to the real estate market is very important to a lot of people.

Notably, only Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant, makes the obvious statement – 3000 people would still be alive.

Trying to Remember the World Trade Center

Via the AP and the Washington Post, Amy Westfeldt has penned an interesting article about efforts to preserve historical artifacts from the World Trade Center. Wreckage from the buildings, artifacts from the stores and offices housed there, and reminders of the people who worked and died there are all being stored in a giant hanger at JFK airport. This collection is meant in large part to preserve objects for later display at a World Trade Center memorial and at museums around the world.

Memorializing is tricky. Memorials try to fix in place a particular understanding, a certain viewpoint about the events they memorialize. But the meaning of any historical event changes across time, and so too do the memorials to those events. Memorials to Confederate war heroes, for example, are viewed quite differently now than they were when they were erected, even by those who think well of the Confederate cause. We can never know how the future will view the past, or how it will view us. Bart Voorsanger, who directed the process of collecting these artifacts, asks the right question, but it is a difficult one:

"I wasn't interested in our particular generation. They've already seen it," said Voorsanger. "If your grandchildren came to visit, would it mean anything to them?"

Yes, it certainly will, but what? Depending on its size and design, any World Trade Center memorial might simply mean a nice place to sit and escape the city bustle. Designed differently, it might mean “wow, this is a big space,” in the way the cathedrals of Europe do to many visitors.

This might seem offensive to us, but the reality is that generations who did not live through those moments will never experience a World Trade Center memorial the way we do, anymore than I feel the way about a World War I memorial the way a surviving veteran might. Alice Greenwald, the director of the planned World Trade Center Memorial Museum, notes in the AP article that what objects are used in the memorial will depend on what story the memorial is designed to tell. There is already a great deal of struggle over that issue, but no matter what vision wins out, the long-term meaning of a memorial is anyone’s guess. The builders of the Lincoln Memorial had no idea it would become an iconic background with a million different meanings in countless movies and TV shows, and we don’t know what the future will think of the World Trade Center memorial until we get there.