More than any particular map or narrative we might develop, we need to retain the crucial awareness that any and all of these narratives are mere models for behavioural, social, economic or political success. Though provisionally functional, none of them are absolutely true. To mistake any of them for reality would be to mistake the map for the territory. This, more than anything, is the terrible lesson of the 20th century. Many people, institutions and nations have yet to adopt strategies that take this lesson into account.
The oil industry and its representatives (some now elected in government) are, for example, incapable of understanding a profit model that does not involve the exploitation of a fixed and limited resources. They continue to push the rest of the industrialised world toward the unnecessary bolstering of cooperative, if oppressive dictatorships, as well as the wars these policies invariably produce. The chemical and agriculture industries, incapable of envisioning a particular crop as anything but a drug-addicted, genetically altered species, cannot conceive of the impact of their innovations on the planet's topsoil or ecosystems. In more readily appreciated examples, the Church of England is still consumed with its defence of the literal interpretation of Biblical events and many fundamentalists sects in the United States still fight, quite successfully, to prevent the theory of evolution from being taught in State schools.
Although the terrorist attacks on the United States can find their roots, at least partially, in a legacy of misguided American foreign and energy policy decisions, they have also increased our awareness of a great chasm between peoples with seemingly irreconcilable stories about the world and humankind's role within it. And the lines between these worldviews are anything but clear.
Hours after the attacks, two of America's own fundamentalist ministers, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were quick to fit the tragic events into their own concrete narrative for God's relationship to humankind. Unable, or unwilling, to understand the apocalyptic moment as anything but the wrath of God, they blamed the feminists, homosexuals and civil libertarians of New York City for having brought this terrible but heavenly decree on themselves.
In a less strident but equally fundamentalist impulse, many American patriots interpreted the attacks as the beginning of a war against our nation's sacred values. This was to be seen as a war against capitalism and a free society. As American flags were raised in defiance of our Middle Eastern antagonists, just as many American freedoms were sacrificed to the new war on terrorism. Our nationalism overshadowed our national values, but our collective story was saved from deconstruction.
Meanwhile, free-market capitalism's stalwarts, who had already suffered the collapse of the dot.com bubble and the faith-challenging reality of an economic recession, were also reeling from the attack on their most visible symbol of global trade. With its dependence on perpetual expansion, the story of global capitalism was not helped by this sure sign of resistance. Might the world not really be ready to embrace the World Trade Organisation's gifts? With a utopian future of global economic prosperity as central to its basic premise as any fundamentalist vision of a perfect past era in harmony with God, believers in the capitalist narrative responded the only way they could. They sought a war to defend their story.
The most injurious rupture, of course, was to the narrative we use to feel safe and protected in an increasingly global society. The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, pinpointed, devastating, and worst of all perfectly executed, challenged the notion that we were the world's singularly invincible nation. The people we appointed to protect us had proved their inability to do so. President Bush's quick rise to an over 90 percent popularity rating shows just how much we needed to believe in his ability to provide us with the omnipotent fatherly protection that his rhetoric commanded. But like a child realising that his parents can't save him from the bully at school, Americans were forced to consider that our leaders, our weapons and our wealth offer only so much insulation from a big bad world.
Our nurtured complacency and our sense of absolute security had always been unfounded, of course. But waking up to the great existential dilemma as suddenly as we did was a traumatic experience. It led us to revert to old habits. Anti-Semites (and latent anti-Semites) around the world used the catastrophe as new evidence of the 'Jewish problem'. Tsarist and Nazi propaganda books, such as Protocols of the Elders of Zion, hit the bestseller lists in countries like Saudi Arabia where they are still being published by official government presses. Newspaper stories revived blood libel (that Jews drink the blood of murdered non-Jewish teens) and spread the disinformation that Jews were warned about the attacks by their rabbis through special radios they keep in their homes. Indeed, such informational treachery is nothing new. But in the destabilised atmosphere of disrupted narrative, it spread faster, wider and with greater effect than it otherwise would have.
Efforts to package America's New War on news channels like CNN further alienated the more cynical viewers from the mainstream account of what had happened. Conspiracy theorists, web activists and open-minded leftists, already suspicious of the narratives presented through television, found themselves falling prey to a falsified email letter from a Brazilian schoolteacher, claiming that video footage of Palestinians celebrating the attacks had actually been shot years earlier during the Gulf War. Like any other narrative, the extreme counterculture's saga of a 'new world order', directed by the Bush family, had to be wrapped around the new data.
Meanwhile, many Jews and Christians who hadn't even thought about their religion or their ethnicity for years found themselves instinctively asking: "how will this impact Israel?" or "is the Armageddon upon us?" They bought memberships in religious institutions for the first time in decades, and packed into their churches and synagogues looking for reassurance, for a way to fit these catastrophes into a bigger story. Like everyone else, they hoped to reconstruct the narrative that had been shattered.