9/10

The world did not know it was ending on September 10, 2001, which is what makes the photographs unbearable.

There are men drinking coffee beneath the towers, tourists squinting upward into the late-summer light, children being dragged through airports by tired parents, businessmen arriving at gates without removing their shoes, belts, jackets, dignity, liquids, and whatever else the security state would eventually require from them. People are worrying about mortgages and marriages, baseball and office politics, who has called and who has not called, while somewhere outside the picture nineteen men are moving quietly toward history.

It is tempting, looking backward across twenty-five years, to call this innocence. But America was not innocent in 2001. It had already seen the first World Trade Center bombing, Oklahoma City, the embassy bombings in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, Columbine, ethnic cleansing in Europe, and the accumulating evidence that history, after briefly being pronounced dead, had declined to cooperate. What America possessed was something more peculiar than innocence and perhaps more valuable: the assumption that catastrophe was an interruption. Normal life was the thing that happened most of the time.

The airplane was transportation rather than a possible weapon; the stranger beside you was mostly irritating rather than potentially dangerous; government did not yet insist on knowing quite so much about your movements, your communications, your associations, your face. The internet was a destination instead of an atmosphere. A person could vanish for an afternoon without generating a small forensic mystery. There was, compared with today, an enormous amount of unrecorded life.

Then came September 11, and America discovered emergency as a form of government. Some of what followed was obviously necessary. The country had been attacked by an organized jihadist network that understood American openness as an exploitable weakness, and the fantasy that oceans, prosperity, or good intentions could insulate the United States from the hatreds of the wider world was permanently destroyed. Intelligence agencies began sharing information they should already have been sharing. Terrorist financing was attacked. Airports became harder targets. Networks were dismantled. Men planning mass murder were killed before they could carry it out.

It worked, in important ways. There has been no second September 11. But successful emergency measures possess a dangerous magic: once the catastrophe does not recur, it becomes difficult to know which precautions saved you and which merely survived alongside the precautions that did.

So America accumulated powers, procedures, databases, wars, acronyms and small humiliations, each individually explicable and collectively transformative. We became a country that was simultaneously the strongest military power on Earth and terrified of shampoo bottles; a nation confident enough to imagine it could reorganize Afghanistan and Iraq, yet nervous enough to treat every airport concourse as the opening scene of a disaster movie. Twenty-five years later, much of that particular fear has faded, and this is mostly good.

Americans no longer instinctively regard every Muslim neighbor as a potential fifth column, nor should they. One of the uglier failures of the immediate post-9/11 atmosphere was the ease with which distinctions collapsed: Muslim became Islamist, Islamist became jihadist, Arab became foreign, and foreign became suspect. A country with any confidence in its own principles should be able to defend a Muslim citizen against discrimination while also saying, without euphemism or apology, that jihadism is a murderous political theology and that Islamist movements hostile to liberal society should be treated as such.

The later error has sometimes been the mirror image of the first. Having learned that crude suspicion was shameful, parts of respectable society became embarrassed by suspicion itself, as though acknowledging the existence of radical Islam somehow implicated every Muslim in it, or as though questions about assimilation, illiberal religious movements, immigration policy and extremist networks could only be asked by people with impure motives.

This is yet another refusal to discriminate, only now dressed in nicer clothes.

A mature society should be capable of distinctions. It should be able to say that peaceful Muslims are fellow citizens and that jihadists are enemies; that religious liberty is sacred and that political Islam can be profoundly illiberal; that borders matter without pretending every immigrant is dangerous; that surveillance sometimes prevents murder without concluding that therefore the state should be permitted to watch everyone forever.

We have, in other words, become less alarmed about the thing that frightened us on September 11 without necessarily becoming less alarmed people.

The War on Terror receded and the machinery of emergency simply found new objects. Financial collapse, pandemics, riots, political violence, climate catastrophe, cyberattack, artificial intelligence: each arrived with its own red banners, expert panels, extraordinary measures and demand that normal political hesitation be suspended because this time, uniquely, everything was at stake.

The television once interrupted ordinary life to announce disaster. Now disaster is ordinary life, replenished every few minutes by the device in your hand.

This may be the deepest difference between September 10 and today. The old America assumed that normalcy was the natural condition and emergency the exception. The new America has become increasingly comfortable with the opposite proposition: that danger is the permanent climate and normal life merely a suspicious lull between alerts.

Conservatives should resist the temptation to make the lesson of September 11 too easy. It did prove that enemies are real, borders matter, military strength matters, and civilization can be wounded by people who hate it. But the next quarter-century proved other conservative truths that were less convenient at the time: bureaucracies expand, temporary powers become permanent, experts can be catastrophically wrong, military strength is not the same thing as political wisdom, and governments frightened enough can persuade citizens to surrender liberties that would have seemed extraordinary a generation earlier.

The post-9/11 mistake was therefore not simply that America became frightened. Fear was rational; the mistake was allowing fear to become a governing habit.

And the correction cannot be to become incapable of fear, because some things should frighten us. A country that responds to past overreaction by refusing to recognize new threats has learned exactly the wrong lesson. The world of September 10 was not better because Americans understood less, nor worse because they trusted more. It was simply a world in which millions of people still believed, without ever articulating the belief, that ordinary life had some claim to permanence.

They were wrong. Every generation eventually discovers that the scenery surrounding it is temporary. The buildings are permanent until they fall, the institutions are stable until they fail, the political consensus is obvious until nobody remembers believing it.

At 8:45 on the morning of September 11, America was one country. A minute later, it was beginning to become another.

Twenty-five years later, the question is not whether we can somehow return to September 10. We cannot, and much of what we believed then deserved to die with it. The question is whether a country can remember danger without worshipping it: strong enough to identify its enemies without inventing them everywhere, confident enough to welcome people who wish to belong without pretending every culture or ideology is harmless, and secure enough that emergency can once again become an interruption rather than a way of life.