I started university—studying Classics in London—in September 2001, just a few weeks after 9/11. I remember distinctly wondering, as I entered this new world, whether any of my peers would be talking about the recent horrors on the US East Coast. But, as far as I can recall, the terrorist attacks did not come up once in conversations that autumn, and rarely afterwards.
This silence certainly was not due to ignorance: UK media talked incessantly about 9/11. The attacks dominated all news and commentary. For all that they had happened three thousand miles away, they seemed to be the main event in UK politics, and the drumbeat of war was growing louder. One would have had to be a hermit not to know about 9/11, and even Classics students were not hermits.
9/11 seemed to be the main event in UK politics, and the drumbeat of war was growing louder.
Nor did we fail to discuss 9/11 because we were callous. Had the attacks come up, I am sure my peers would all have agreed they were an awful crime. Rabid “anti-imperialism”, of the sort that seeks to justify mass killings of Americans minding their own business, was not a powerful current among students in London in the early 2000s.
Rather, the reason we did not discuss 9/11 was that it was a thing on The News, not something of real import within our lives. Certainly The News was shouting that it did matter to us, to all British people, to all Westerners—that our way of life and civilization were under attack, and so forth. But nothing in our immediate experience justified all this frenzy. Other than the ramping up of security and security theater, England seemed much the same after 9/11 as before. There were no smoking ruins to match the scar in the Manhattan skyline. As for Western Civilization, we were studying Homer and Virgil, and it hardly seemed plausible that Islamic terrorists were going to stop us.
We were studying Homer and Virgil, and it hardly seemed plausible that Islamic terrorists were going to stop us.
9/11 was something, indeed everything, on The News, but The News did not back then have the capacity to lay claim to one’s every waking moment. There were no smartphones. The internet was marginal, and usually sluggish. The News was TV news and radio news and newspapers, none of them much geared toward students. The News seemed a product for people older than us, and with drabber lives, as indeed was evidenced by its strident insistence that 9/11 ought to occupy the central place in its consumers’ world.
A new student in 2001 had no need for such mediated stimulation. University on its own was quite enough. Many were away from home for the first time. Everyone had to make friends within this great mass of strangers. Most were eager to fall in love. Then there were our actual studies: intellectual challenge and excitement for some, and new seas to navigate for all. What did our lecturers want from us, and were we able and willing to deliver it? Did we actually care about this discipline to which we had chosen to devote the next three years? Were we any good at it?
All of this had to be faced without the smartphone’s uncut umbilical cord. In 2001, many students did already have mobile phones, but these were not yet the omnipresent omni-device. One was not engaged in incessant electronic chatter with one’s family and friends back home. University largely meant freedom and independence—certainly in a controlled and somewhat artificial environment, but still, one was significantly, often scarily, on one’s own. That was a lot to think about and to handle, without being preoccupied with The News.
Could students today remain equally uninvolved in another 9/11? Perhaps. University remains a rite of passage, and no amount of new technology can utterly dull the intensity of new experiences in one’s late teens and early twenties. Still, nearly every student now comes to university enmeshed since birth in a great digital web, where they are infinitely poked and prodded by content—of which The News is only a small part—turning their minds away from the world in front of them. If students, and indeed their lecturers, are more steeped in politics than they were twenty years ago, it’s less because those who declared 9/11, and each subsequent crisis, to be world-shattering have been proven right, than because political crisis is such a rich seam of instant digital matter.
The perpetrators of 9/11 emerged from a milieu where politics had devoured their souls: for politics, tainted with a deformed faith, they were prepared to kill and die. In turn, the hysterical reaction to 9/11 by Western media and politicians, and above all the wars started in its wake, pushed Westerners closer to a state where politics is everything. In the meantime, the internet spread itself into every corner of our lives, dissolving ever more the boundary between action and mediated reaction. That would have happened without 9/11, and that, at least as much as terror or wars on terror, has emerged as the great threat to freedom of the twenty-first century.
