Innocence Lost

SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, AMERICANS HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR the return of lost innocence and the security that was associated with it. This will not happen.

The impact of these traumatic events on our national psyche will be profound and long lasting. Terror and death are real, and they announce themselves with astonishing abruptness. None of us is as unthinkingly secure as we felt before September 11. We have lost our assumed security and with it our composure and a portion of our national identity.

Excepting the possibility of future attacks, the degree to which people wake up in the morning and think about terrorism should eventually diminish. But the concern is always going to be there. The return to calm won't be a straight line that declines to zero over time. It is far more likely to resemble the jagged lines of an oscilloscope, reflecting our national pulse that will rise every time there is a bomb threat and every time a plane goes down, even if by accident. Anxiety will also be aroused by "strange evocations. Months or even years from now, you could be walking down the stairs between two floors of an office building and suddenly, for no apparent reason, you may be reminded of the evacuation of the World Trade Center.

As a group, the American public will react to the loss of innocence by looking inward for security, not the sort typified by the bomb-shelter mentality of the Cold War era, but the kind where one feels at comfort and at ease. You'll see people going for rural rather than urban, and domestic rather than public. Parents will be thinking about how they can provide their children with the skills required to survive in an uncertain world. At the peak of the Internet boom, the key to security was money. But money is the solution only when you can count on the system in which money is the operator Now we are beginning to doubt that system. Those publicly highlighted trappings of our society, like clothing and pop music, will ultimately seem frivolous to some. Many will respond to their new insecurities by reaffirming basic family values and traditional elements of American culture.

Despite the emphasis on traditional values, people will surrender freedom and privacy in order to feel more secure. One needs only to study the aftermath of the tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado to see this. Since the killings, a number of schools have installed transparent lockers and now require see-through book bags. The attacks of September 11 ratcheted up the conflict between security and freedom to a higher level. Some of the security proposals, such as better means of identification at airports, make very good sense. How about ground surveillance cameras in public areas? Or national identification cards? That kind of incremental security creep could ultimately change this country greatly.

Simultaneously we'll also see an increasing ability to take the trivial very seriously, in no small part because the trivial is understandable and not a threat. (Just how many of us will queue up for the next Star Wars film? Good guys, bad guys and no ambiguities!) People will seek out simple answers that they can easily understand, relate to and control. Expect to see an upswing in religion, especially Christian fundamentalism.IThese sects supply nice, simple answers, as well as perceived control, for the true believers. The kind of thinking that underlies the Taliban can underlie any fundamentalist religious sect. It is a very black-and-white worldview. It is also, as we are sadly aware, very dangerous.

The long-term issues facing our country begin with accepting the fact that even a superpower has limits. The fuel crisis of the 1970s demonstrated for the first time that our resources were not limitless, and many people had serious difficulties dealing with that simple alteration of our worldview. Similarly, the innocence that was lost on September 11 was one of complacency, born largely from ignorance. While we could sometimes comprehend that something was amiss in the world, precious few of us were able to apprehend how the global system was changing.

As a nation we have to re-conceptualize our place in the world. Leaders of government and business will come to understand that our nation is just a node, albeit an important node, in the global cybernetic system. Cybernetic systems are complex entities, characterized by self-regulating processes that strive to maintain a degree of balance and integration. Think of your circulation, respiration and metabolism. These systems are interactive, and one node of the system can affect, to a greater or lesser degree, all others.

We have to take a systems approach seriously, which we have not yet done. The religious and political extremism that has characterized many of the governments in the Middle East is largely a response to failed Western economic policies and to an increasing sense of political and cultural identity on the part of the indigenous peoples who labored under rather repressive regimes that were supported by external forces, largely the United States and the U.S.S.R. Many of us knew about this state of affairs intellectually, but these indigenous peoples weren't recognized in most of our policies.

Part of the innocence that we lost on September 11 was our opacity to our connections with others. And that is a good thing. America has tended to reap the benefits of globalization, yet those riches have usually not been fairly shared with those from whom they were derived. Leaders of government and business must increase their awareness that our own welfare depends in no small part on the well-being of others. There are signs that the business community is becoming aware of this and behaving more like part of a system. This alteration was under way even before the terrorist attacks. Perhaps the most notable example is Ted Turner's 1998 pledge of a billion dollars to the United Nations. The loss of innocence has prompted a greater interest in world affairs by Americans in general—the young in particular that could result in a greater sensitivity on the part of governmental agencies and private businesses concerning the impact of the United States on the developing nations.

Eventually the psyche that recovers from the loss of innocence will be more mature, more sensitive and profoundly more pessimistic than the psyche that has, for generations, characterized us. We will become closer to the world at large and less insensitive to its pain. The innocence isn't coming back, but the result may well be an even grander nation.

The innocence that was lost on was one of complacency, born lagebly ignorance.

Douglas Raybeck is a professor of anthropology and a futurist at HamiltonCollege in Clinton, New York. His most recent book is Looking Down the Road (Waveland Press, 2000).