As time is passed and we have drawn further and further away from the cataclysmic events of 11 September 2001 I've been given more and more to reflect on the idea that those events would catapult us into a new world; a new order of things.
Yesterday, 28 April 2002, came news of a second mass killing in Germany: the situation in the Middle East continued to lurch about its set pattern: it being a Sunday sporting events carried on in the usual fashion: and the usual fare "graced" our television screens; a combination of sport, light drama, so-called "reality TV" and the action movies, with a smattering of news, current affair is, and documentaries. What's new?
It seems that there's nothing new under the sun. Below I quote C. G. Jung speaking in 1941 about how wartime would affect the Swiss. His reflections then seem to me profoundly relevant now, to Australia, the USA, and the world at large.
"In sober scepticism as opposed propaganda talk, in sure instinct and closeness to nature, in self limitation grounded in self-knowledge, I see more health for our father land than in fervent speeches about regeneration and hysterical attempts at reorientation. Sooner or later it will be found that nothing really "new" happens in history. There could be talk of something really novel only if the unimaginable happened: if reason, humanity, and love won lasting victory."
(C G. Jung, from "Return to the Simple Life" (1941). Commenting on the effects of war on the Swiss during World War II.)
If such a profoundly cataclysmic event as World War II with millions of dead, the Holocaust and the atom bomb could provoke the world to so little change and Jung to his comments above what should we really have expected in the aftermath of 11 September 2001? Maybe all that we heard then falls into the category of what Jung called "…fervent speeches about regeneration and hysterical attempts at reorientation."
In my own state of sober scepticism I look around me and see that very little it any thing has changed. And, I'm not really surprised. Of course C. G. Jung was not the first to reflect that nothing really "new" happens in history.
There has been all too little "sober scepticism", "sure instinct and closeness to nature" or "self limitation grounded in self-knowledge" in the recent past; in fact, I would venture to say even less than one usually sees in world affairs. A little of any one of these three ways of looking at things would have quickly brought the fervent proclamations of a new world order, couched in the rhetoric of war, into perspective. A healthy dose of all of them might well have moved as a little in the direction of a real change. Alas, that was not to be.
As Jung reflected so succinctly, "there could be talk of something really novel only if the unimaginable happened.." Unfortunately the majority of people seemed to think that the events of 11 September 2001 were the unimaginable. However, as I've reflected elsewhere, (See Jung and the War Within) they had been, were, and are entirely imaginable. Hollywood along with countless other parts of the so-called entertainment industry had been imagining just such catastrophes for decades. That, as it seems, security and intelligence services had not, merely goes to show how lacking in imagination they are. The events such as those of 11 September had been part of the imagining of popular culture in films, comic trips and computer games, at the very least, for a long time prior to their arriving in the actual world of New York on that fatal day. Imagination is virtual reality without the hardware. What is frightening about that is that it really can escape into the real world.
I recently had the good (or mis-) fortune to stumble across the film “Independence Day” again on commercial television. It is instructive in its evocation of all that the American (and dare I say it, whole Western world's) imagination has come up with about attacks on civilisation as we know it. In the end civilisation is “Us” and the alien attackers are “them” The words “alien to our values/way of life/civilisation” abounded in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 And in the end the West's response to 11 September 2001 was right out of “Independence Day”; “lets go and whip ET's (read those alien terrorists) arse.” Never did it in occur to us, either in the film or in the worldly situation, to look at what those “aliens” were doing and see how often we ourselves have acted and continue to act in just the way they do. The tendence to deny the shadow is a powerful force.
What would be all the more surprising if we really had imagined something new is that these images continue to appear post 11 September 2001 as part of our day-to-day and week to week “entertainment”. Maybe that's why I don't find that fact so surprising. THE WORLD SIMPLY HAS NOT CHANGED.
So now I continue Jung's quote about the effect of the unimaginable happening.
"There could be talk of something really novel only if the unimaginable happened: if reason, humanity, and love won lasting victory." (emphasis added)
That we have not imagined anything new is, I think, self-evident: we need only look around ourselves to see that the world goes on as it did before. We have been unable to imagine the "unimaginable" and so we remain in the world we do imagine, the one full of hatred, fear and insecurity, the one in which effective solutions seems as far away as ever. And all our "fervent speeches about regeneration”, our rhetoric of change and a new world order seem like nothing more than words that the wind blows away, not a wind of change but that old wind we all know so well, the ill wind blows no one any good.
It was Albert Einstein who said”
"You cannot solve problems with the consciousness that created them."
Most of what was said and continues to be said post 11 September 2001 is very much from the consciousness out of which the problem arose; the rhetoric of warfare and conflict, of sectional interests and a narrow view of self preservation.
Until the unimaginable happens and we imagine a world where and reason, humanity and love at least find a place on the agenda it seems we are condemned to live in the world we have already imagined.