Back Into The Fray Of History

By Roger Rosenblatt

There comes a terrible moment to many souls," George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda, "when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their lives." Tell me about it. But something more fundamental and revealing has happened since Sept. 11 as well. For many years--12 since the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet threat; 27 since Watergate, depending on how one is counting--the country has been living outside history. By this I mean living not only with little regard for the larger destinies of mankind but also outside the stories, lessons and issues that locate a people within significant patterns of human thought. Now a group of savage zealots has flung us back into history, and however unjust the impetus, we could make use of the experience.

Observers have been lamenting that had the country only been more alert to world conditions (Islam, Afghanistan, international terrorism) and less enthralled with surface nonsense (O.J., Elian Gonzalez, Monica, Gary Condit), we might have avoided our current troubles. This is to imply that a few canny geopolitical decisions here and there would be all it would take to make America safe and snug.

But history demands that one be aware of the deeper world as well as the wider. For the period in question, America has been hydroplaning on the present, creating and devouring a culture consisting of relentless ephemera. The intellectual so-called life became deconstructionist game playing, politics became claptrap, "globalization" became internationalism for shoppers. Our superpowerhood fed feelings of omnipotence and self-righteousness (remember the "City on a Hill"?), which in turn created a false sense of immunity. On Sept. 11, airplanes crashed into two cities on a hill.

What went unacknowledged was that everyone occupies a position in the great stream of events and ideas, even in a time of rampant vapidity, and to forget that was to lose one's bearings, along with one's soul. Moby Dick begins with Ishmael seeing his voyage as an interlude squeezed between more significant events, which he presents as newspaper headlines (you'll smile at his choices):

Grand Contested Election for the Presidency Of the United States Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael Bloody Battle in Affghanistan [sic]

Had he not believed that every individual belongs to history, his story would not have been worth telling.

America is the original original country. It came into being when the burden of the past had already grown too heavy for 18th century Europe, so it has always been assumed that the country is uncomfortable with history. In fact, however, until recently, America has lived happily with the past--ours and the world's. How could we not? The Constitution itself continues to be a remarkably workable compilation of historical references that swing from the moderate Enlightenment stability of Swift, Hume and Locke to the wildest dreams of Blake, Wordsworth and Rousseau. The American solution to the stifling and compromising balances of the Enlightenment was the risky (and Romantic) extension of the Bill of Rights.

To rejoin history suggests more, though, than a reacquaintance with intellectual movements and principles. It requires every life to see itself as part of every other life. The history one feels is not only national and political but also the history of grief, unity, companionship; the history of fear, invasion and sacrifice. In these shaky days, one looks to the history of Britain during the Blitz, or to the history of the Jews who held history dear because it depended on time without place. All the past stories that apply to whatever one experiences these days are suddenly unearthed, and one is rushed back into the story of the entire species, in every dimension, the crucible of all of history's messages, even if those messages are sometimes scrambled.

On everyone's back is everyone else, which evokes the most important kind of history America can connect with: the history of doing the right thing. In spite of some lulus of international blunders, the country has still done more to benefit the rest of the world than any in history. We went into Bosnia for no other purpose than doing the right thing--something Muslim states might recall when railing against the Great Satan. And the history of doing the right thing will keep us fighting the good fight.

Of all the American characteristics cast off in recent years, the most essential was that of searching for a more noble expression of existence. America had pretty much cornered the market on that search, and when it was abandoned, the country lost its way. History is reorienting, but it is more than that. It enhances a life by extending it beyond its temporal limits. What the events of Sept. 11 may wind up doing is not just alert the country to what it is, but to what it was and could be again one of these days.