From September 11 to the Arab Spring.

I.

MY ROLE ON September 11 was to be a reporter for The New Republic. I was in downtown Brooklyn, and from my rooftop I watched the first tower crumble, and then I ran downstairs to the street with pen and notebook and plunged into the crowds fleeing over the bridges. I spoke with one person after another, asking what they had seen. They told me. I compiled my report. It ran a few days later in the issue dated September 24, 2001, with under the title “Under the Bridge: Brooklyn Dispatch.”

But what strikes me now, in glancing back at my little article, are a couple of non-reportorial ruminations that appear in the final paragraphs. These are comments on the philosopher Plotinus and his theory of evil, and on the poet Baudelaire and his theory of landscape. A lot of readers’ eyebrows must have arched. But I was trying to take in the event, and the ruminations pushed me to work up some thoughts. I went on scribbling notes, and a couple of weeks later I published the results in The American Prospect under the title “Terror and Liberalism,” illustrated with marvelous photographs of Italian fascists from Mussolini’s time, dressed in ridiculous uniforms, and other parading fantasists. Eventually I brought out a book under the same title, unfortunately without illustrations—my contribution, for better or for worse, to the literature of 9/11.

I am a little ashamed to admit that, ten years later, my thinking has advanced only in matters of detail beyond what I thought in those first hours. I am ashamed because, among any of us who consider ourselves journalists, it is a point of honor to update hourly and to self-correct twice a month. Only fanatics and street signs point forever in the same direction, and I have never wanted to be a fanatic or a street sign. But then, I did not picture my ideas as a policy manual. Nor was I in the business of promoting the Bush administration. On the contrary! In that earliest of pieces in The American Prospect, I was already worrying out loud about the administration’s spirit of “cowboy ruthlessness” and the danger of loosening the legal restraints on the CIA. But mostly I wanted to leave aside the politics and the particulars. I wanted to construct a kind of lookout perch and go stand on it, as I had stood on my roof, and survey the scene. And so I put together a few ideas from books I had been reading and from essays I had already written, and, by climbing upward from one idea to another, I found myself contemplating a landscape made of liberal societies and of the animosities that liberal societies sometimes arouse.

By liberal societies, I meant societies of the kind that encourage people to think rationally and creatively for themselves, and try to protect everyone’s right to do so, instead of demanding, as non-liberal societies do, that everyone adhere to the venerable and bow to the hierarchical. Liberal societies have been growing for the last couple of centuries, and liberal principles have been spreading around the world, and this has been, on balance, more than wonderful. But liberalism’s progress has also turned out to be, for a great many people, humiliating and terrifying, not to mention disastrous, on occasion. The liberal enterprise has kept on swelling, even so—and among the people who have felt outraged or frightened, the dynamism and the evident attractiveness of liberal principles around the world have sometimes generated panic, too, along with a suspicion that gigantic and sinister conspiracies must be at work. And the frightened people have rebelled. Sometimes they rebelled in the hope of preserving the past, a theme for peasants and artisans; and sometimes in the hope of merely expressing themselves, a theme for poets.