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Thank you Martin Warner for sending this to me.

I’ve always seen myself as non-political, so it has come as a bit of a shock to see just how political I am. I have, in the past, sat back, with a “don’t care, can’t change anything” attitude. And then I thought back to the Six Day War in Israel and came to the conclusion that the reason for being in the Middle East in 1967 was, as I thought, out of loyalty. However, eventually, I realized that not to be the truth. It was a political decision. I disagreed with another man’s point of view and took that disagreement as far as I could under the circumstances. I was never a person that stood outside the American or the Russian Embassy, protesting about the outbreak of a Nuclear war, or some other protest; being, as I saw it, nothing more than a sheer waste of time. That so called big picture is still within me, and tells me that no matter what is protested about, the outcome will always remain the outcome.

But, just of late, I have realized that there must also be a small picture, and that is where I have found this political James. He is not interested in saving the world for whatever reason. However, he does somehow like to have a stage from which he can express the disagreements that emote him. And as far as he can tell, he has found no better way than joining the thousands of voices from around the world, and from all walks of life, that simply say to certain people: “We don’t agree with you.”

And, if that simple act can change something for the better, then I’ve no alternative than to except that I am – for better or worse……………. Political.

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“Roy’s idea is that India and Africa are full of people with skills, knowledge and resourcefulness who are not recognised as engineers, architects or water experts but who can bring more to communities than governments or big businesses.”
Guardian

It is not clear that the West has successfully met the challenge of 9/11. Worse: it is not clear that the West yet fully understands what the challenge is.

To understand 2001 we have to go back to 1989, the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was an historic moment that few had expected. What did it mean? It was then that two stories were born, with one of which we are familiar, the other of which we seem hardly to know or understand at all.

The first narrative was that the West had won. Communism had imploded. In the end, it failed to deliver the goods. People wanted freedom. They sought affluence. The Soviet Union had delivered neither. Politically it was repressive. Economically it was inefficient. For freedom you need liberal democracy. For affluence you need the market economy. 1989 marked the victory of both. From here on democratic capitalism would spread slowly but surely across the world. To adapt Francis Fukuyama’s phrase of the time, it was the beginning of the end of history.

The other narrative was quite different but has the advantage of so far being proved correct. Unlike Fukuyama’s, it was based not on Hegel but on the 14th-century Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun. We don’t know much about Ibn Khaldun in the West but we should. He was one of the truly great thinkers of the Middle Ages. He has every claim to be called the world’s first sociologist. Not for another 300 years would the West produce a figure of comparable originality: Giambattista Vico. Both produced compelling accounts of the rise and fall of civilizations. Both knew what most people most of the time forget: that the greatest civilizations eventually fall. The reason they do so is not necessarily the rise of a stronger power. It is their own internal decay.

Most accounts of al-Qaeda focus on the intellectual influence of the 20th-century thinker and critic of the West, Sayyid Qutb. That influence was real. But the deeper story the leaders of al-Qaeda told in 1989, without which 9/11 is unintelligible, had less to do with Qutb and hatred of the West and its freedoms; and much more to do with the key precipitating event of the fall of Communism: the withdrawal, in 1989, of the Soviet army from Afghanistan.

People no longer think in terms of the common good. They are no longer willing to make sacrifices for one another.
It was that event that set in motion the rapid collapse of one of the world’s two superpowers. It was achieved not by the United States and its military might, but by a small group of religiously inspired fighters, the mujahideen and their helpers. Ibn Khaldun’s theory was that every urban civilization becomes vulnerable when it grows decadent from within. People live in towns and get used to luxuries. The rich grow indolent, the poor resentful. There is a loss of asabiyah, a keyword for Khaldun. Nowadays we would probably translate it as “social cohesion”. People no longer think in terms of the common good. They are no longer willing to make sacrifices for one another. Essentially they lose the will to defend themselves. They then become easy prey for the desert dwellers, the people used to fighting to stay alive.

That, so it seemed to those who read history that way, is what happened in Afghanistan. It was never possible for a small group to defeat a superpower by conventional means. But it could go on endlessly inflicting casualty after casualty until eventually the superpower — more like a lumbering elephant than a wounded lion — withdrew. The desert dwellers are hungrier, tougher and more ruthless than the city dwellers who long more than anything for a quiet life.

That was the calculation. The odd thing is, it worked. And those who had fought the Soviet Union looked on in wonder at the effect of their victory. For not only did the Russians withdraw. Within an extraordinarily short time their whole empire collapsed. Ibn Khaldun was right. The society had grown rotten from within. It had lost its asabiyah, its cohesion. It had lost the will to fight.
If that is what a small group of highly motivated religious fighters could do to one superpower, why not the other, America and the West? America could not be defeated on its own ground. But what if it could be tempted, provoked, into occupying the very same ground that had seen the humiliating withdrawal of the Soviet army, namely Afghanistan itself? To do so would require a truly massive provocation, one so shocking that it would make the Americans forget what everyone knew, that Afghanistan is a death trap that ultimately defeats all invading armies. That is when 9/11 was born.

The theory was that the Americans and the Russians might be unalike in every other respect, but this they shared: that they were advanced urban civilizations in which the social bond, asabiyah, had grown weak. They were no longer lean and hungry. They were overweight and lacked the capacity for sustained sacrifice. If America could be provoked into occupying Afghanistan, it could be defeated exactly as the Soviets had been, not by any decisive battle but by sustained asymmetric warfare. The proof was that American troops had withdrawn from Lebanon in 1984 and Somalia in 1994 under just such circumstances. They had no more staying power than the Russians. Like the Russians, within a decade they would be looking for an exit strategy. 9/11 was the attempt to lure the United States into Afghanistan, and it worked.

The aim of al-Qaeda never was the collapse of the West. It was the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia, together with larger aspirations for the revival of the Caliphate and the reemergence of the Umma as a world power. But the collapse of the West was foreseen. It was not an aim but a consequence, and it followed from Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the decline and fall of civilizations.

Has it happened? Not yet. But ten years on, the United States has been humiliated into renegotiating its trillions of dollars of debt. Western economies, almost all of them, are ailing. The European Union is under strain, its future in doubt. There have been riots and looting on the streets of London and Manchester, just as there have been in recent years in France, Greece and Spain. The global economy looks far less stable than it did before the collapse of 2008. In Europe, following a series of scandals, bankers, politicians, journalists and even the police have been tried and found wanting. Those who read the runes of the future are turning their eyes eastward to India, China, and the fast-growing economies of south-east Asia. The West no longer looks invincible. As a narrative, the “end of history” has proved less predictive than the “decline of civilizations”. So far, Hegel 0, Ibn Khaldun 1.

The real challenge is the underlying moral health of Western liberal democracies, their collective responsibility, and to the ideals that brought them into being. The real challenge of 9/11 is not what it seemed at the time: Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb and radical Islam. These were real and present threats, to be sure, but they were symptoms, not cause. The challenge was the underlying moral health of Western liberal democracies, their asabiyah, their sense of identity and collective responsibility, their commitment to one another and to the ideals that brought them into being. The counter-narrative of 1989 and the fall of Soviet Communism saw it not as a victory for the West but as part of a law of history that says: all great civilizations eventually decline, and the West will be the next to go.

That view is not limited to enemies of the West. It was most recently stated by the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson in his Civilization: The West and the Rest. It was most powerfully formulated by Alasdair MacIntyre in his masterwork, After Virtue. My favourite version of it comes from Bertrand Russell in the introduction to his History of Western Philosophy, speaking about the tendency of the most creative civilizations to self-destruct:

What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy. Traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion.

Social cohesion is what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyah. And Russell’s description of Renaissance Italy fits precisely the postmodern, late capitalist West, with its urge to spend and its failure to save, its moral relativism and hyper-individualism, its political culture of rights without responsibilities, its aggressive secularism and resentment of any morality of self-restraint, and its failure to inculcate the habits of instinctual deferral that Sigmund Freud saw as the very basis of civilization. Sayyid Qutb hated the West. Ibn Khaldun would have pitied the West. The pity is more serious than the hate.

There is a simple choice before us. Will we continue to act in ignorance of this other narrative? If so, we will replicate the fate of Greece in the second pre-Christian century as described by Polybius (“the people of Hellas had entered on the false path of ostentation, avarice and laziness”), and that of Rome two centuries later, when Livy wrote about “how, with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first subsided, as it were, then sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to our present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.” If we carry on as we are going, the West will decline and fall.
There is, to my mind, only one sane alternative. That is to do what England and America did in the 1820s. Those two societies, deeply secularized after the rationalist 18th century, scarred and fractured by the problems of industrialization, calmly set about remoralising themselves, thereby renewing themselves.

The three decades, 1820-1850, saw an unprecedented proliferation of groups dedicated to social, political and educational reform-building schools, YMCAs, orphanages, starting temperance groups, charities, friendly societies, campaigning for the abolition of slavery, corporal punishment and inhumane working conditions, and working for the extension of voting rights. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished by what he saw in America and the same process was happening at the same time in Britain.

People did not leave it to government or the market. They did it themselves in communities, congregations, groups of every shape and size. They understood the connection between morality and morale. They knew that only a society held together by a strong moral bond, by asabiyah, has any chance of succeeding in the long run. That collective effort of remoralization eventually made Britain the greatest world power in the 19th century and America in the 20th.

None of us should be in any doubt as to the seriousness of what is at stake.

It is a peculiarity of the Abrahamic monotheisms that they see, at the heart of society, the idea of covenant. Covenantal politics are politics with a purpose, driven by high ideals, among them the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the rule of justice and compassion, and concern for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger. G.K. Chesterton called America a “nation with the soul of a church”. Britain used to be like that too. In the 1950s there was no television at certain hours on Sunday so as not to deter churchgoing. Sundays helped keep families together, families helped keep communities together, and communities helped keep society together. I, a Jew growing up in a Christian nation, did not feel threatened by this. I felt supported by it — much more than I do now in an ostensibly more tolerant but actually far more abrasive, rude and aggressive society.

What is unique about covenant is its seemingly endless possibility of renewal. It happened in the Bible in the days of Joshua, Josiah and Ezra. It happened in America between 1820 and 1850 in the Second Great Awakening. It happened in Britain at the same time through the great Victorian social reformers and philanthropists. Covenant defeats the law of entropy that says that all systems lose energy over time. It creates renewable energy. It has the power to arrest, even reverse, the decline and fall of nations.
None of us should be in any doubt as to the seriousness of what is at stake. Europe today is pursuing the chimera of societies without a shared moral code, nations without a collective identity, cultures without a respect for tradition, groups without a concern for the common good, and politics without the slightest sense of history. Ibn Khaldun, were he alive, would tell them precisely where that leads.

The question is not radical Islam but, does the West believe in itself any more? Is it capable of renewing itself as it did two centuries ago? Or will it crumble as did the Soviet Union from internal decay. “We have met the enemy,” said the cartoon character Pogo, “and he is us.” That is the challenge of 9/11. It’s about time we came together to meet it.

This article originally appeared in Standpoint Magazine.
Published: Sunday, September 11, 2011

I’ve been through what my through was to be
I did what I could and couldn’t
I was never sure how I would get there

I nourished an ardor for thresholds
for stepping stones and for ladders
I discovered detour and ditch

I swam in the high tides of greed
I built sandcastles to house my dreams
I survived the sunburns of love

No longer do I hunt for targets
I’ve climbed all the summits I need to
and I’ve eaten my share of lotus

Now I give praise and thanks
for what could not be avoided
and for every foolhardy choice

I cherish my wounds and their cures
and the sweet enervations of bliss
My book is an open life

I wave goodbye to the absolutes
and send my regards to infinity
I’d rather be blithe than correct

Until something transcendent turns up
I splash in my poetry puddle
and try to keep God amused.

~ James Broughton ~

(Packing Up For Pardise: New and Selected Poems 1946-1996)
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“Hello Persephone, I’m sorry but I can’t wait any longer, I fully subscribe to the fact that silence is as good as the spoken word, but this has gone beyond all reasonable time frames. Love maybe in the air but that’s about all that is in the air, not even a letter to say, farewell, goodbye, see you soon, be back in five, or even gone to lunch open again at 1 o’clock. I have looked at the same postings for weeks now, hoping that some sort of movement would be forthcoming, but alas – zilch, nada, nothing. Are you still with us? I do hope so, I miss you. All my love and best wishes, your very good friend James.”

As many of you know James Bonsor has been a consistent reader and contributor to this news letter almost from the beginning. I have been increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge that over the past two months I have not posted anything at all – let alone sent out another newsletter! Then this evening dear James just reminded me of what I already knew – but had chosen to ignore! I immediately posted ‘My Munich Experience’ which had been written whilst I was in Germany.

Apart from that trip, my dear partner Jack has moved in with me. Trying to fit two homes into one rather small one is still proving chaotic – I don’t do chaos very well I’m afraid. However, we seem to be weathering any threatening storms very well indeed. It is a joy to have him here and feel his dedication and committment to creating a home here with me. I have lived on my own for about twenty-eight years, and he also for a considerable time. However, it became crystal clear that at our age (we are both seventy-eight), we wanted to make the most of what time we have left – together. And, seven weeks prior to my German trip I had my second knee replacement which has proved more troublesome than the first one. Also a new kitchen, sofa-bed (for guests) and many white Billy Bookcases have been bought. The latter to house what remains of Jack’s enormous collection of books, at the moment all tucked away in 15 large banana boxes in the sitting room!

So to all of you who read my posts and/or receive my newsletter . . . I am really sorry for my absence and hope to meet you all again in a newsletter sometime in November. Before that I go my first Discworld conference – yes, the world of Terry Pratchett is now open to me – much to learn and experience there. Jack and his co-writer Ian Stewart have written three of the Science of Discworld books with Terry – and are now involved in number 4! I will give a report on my return.

So, now to post this letter . . . any new readers may be somewhat bemused – but those who read my newsletters will now have been kept up to date. Thanks must go to dear James for chivvying me in his inimitable way!

Munich is a beautiful city, wide streets, many trees and green spaces and elegant buildings. And, the talk went very well indeed – it was fun! My kind and energetic hostess who invited me, and in whose flat I stayed, emailed me afterwards writing:

“I spoke to 2 of my friends, both were very impressed and inspired by you: What an alive woman !!!!!!!!!!!! One climbed up a mountain in the alps the next day, something she thought she would never do again – but this time she followed the invitation. She has muscle pain all over but feels very good.”

That felt like a huge affirmation, and encapsulated for me what can happen when we understand fully about taking responsibility (as far as possible) for our own aliveness. And, it doesn’t matter too much which country and conditioning you come from. Our feelings, and responses are very similar. Any response can be as simple as following, rather than refusing an invitation! Or remaining open, rather than closed to a fresh suggestion.

Of course this made me very happy, as did the smiling faces that grew in number as the talk progressed. The story about meeting my partner even brought a round of applause! I knew in that moment that my visit to Munich had been worth the gamble – even ‘though the two other events booked, had not filled.

The next day I was whisked down here into, and enveloped by, such beauty. Magnificent scenery outside and the loveliest country apartment that you could wish to see. A gentle, stately boat ride round a lake, delicious food and best of all – the company of my much loved friend and his wife, are making this a brief but so welcome break in my, sometimes, too busy life – pause for thought!

Last night I was woken by the wail of a warning siren, a sound I had not heard for about forty-seven years. My immediate reaction was fear. After all these years, it still had the power to alert the eleven year old child, still inside this seventy-eight year old woman! It only lasted for a few seconds, but was definitely there. Of course, in this very efficient country, all small communities have such a warning system as a very necessary part of living away from the large towns, and particularly in a mountainous area. Within five minutes there was a fire engine, police vehicle and sundry cars all on their way to what must have been a quite serious road accident. And, the heart of this ‘eleven year old girl’ had stopped racing!

Now I am back in Munich, and will fly home tomorrow – a very happy and contented woman. Of course it would be nice to be invited back again – but that is almost irrelevant in the discovery that whether in my own country or not . . .I do have something to say and represent, that many older people are now ready to acknowledge. The unexpectedly high number of people who turned up – proved that. Life can be fulfilling, interesting and alive – yes alive, after the age of 60 – and onwards.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A FEW days ago, before the bombing here and the shootings on Utoya Island, a friend and I were talking about how the joy of being alive always seems to go hand in hand with the sorrow that things change. Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before — to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.

There is no road back to the scent of the Julys when I was young and leapt from a boulder into the ice-cold meltwater of a Norwegian fjord. No road back to when I stood, 17 years old with 10 francs in my pocket, by the harbor in Cannes, France, and watched two grown men in idiotic white uniforms row a woman and her poodle ashore from a yacht. I realized then for the first time that the egalitarian society I came from was the exception and not the rule. No road back to the first time I looked, wide-eyed, at the guards with automatic weapons surrounding another country’s parliament building — a sight that made me shake my head with a mixture of resignation and self-satisfaction, thinking, we don’t need that sort of thing where I come from.

For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d’état, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle. It was a country where everyone’s material needs were provided for. Political consensus was overwhelming, the debates focused primarily on how to achieve the goals that everyone had already agreed on. Ideological disagreements arose only when the reality of the rest of the world began to encroach, when a nation that until the 1970s had consisted largely of people of the same ethnic and cultural background had to decide whether its new citizens should be allowed to wear the hijab and build mosques.

Still, until Friday, we thought of our country as a virgin — unsullied by the ills of society. An exaggeration, of course. And yet.

In June I was bicycling with the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, and a mutual friend through Oslo, setting out for a hike on a forested mountain slope in this big yet little city. Two bodyguards followed us, also on bicycles. As we stopped at an intersection for a red light, a car drove up beside the prime minister. The driver called out through the open window: “Jens! There’s a little boy here who thinks it would be cool to say hello to you.”

The prime minister smiled and shook hands with the little boy in the passenger seat. “Hi, I’m Jens.”

The prime minister wearing his bike helmet; the boy wearing his seat belt; both of them stopped for a red light. The bodyguards had stopped a discreet distance behind. Smiling. It’s an image of safety and mutual trust. Of the ordinary, idyllic society that we all took for granted. How could anything go wrong? We had bike helmets and seat belts, and we were obeying the traffic rules.

Of course something could go wrong. Something can always go wrong.

On Monday night, more than 100,000 citizens gathered in the streets to mourn the victims of the attack. The image was striking. In Norway, “keeping a cool head” is a national virtue, but “keeping a warm heart” is not. Even for those of us who have an automatic aversion to national self-glorification, flags, grandiose words and large and expressive crowds, it makes an indelible impression when people demonstrate that they do mean something, these ideas and values of the society we have inherited and more or less take for granted. The gathering said that Norwegians refuse to let anyone take away our sense of security and trust. That we refuse to lose this battle against fear.

And yet there is no road back to the way it was before.

Yesterday, on the train, I heard a man shouting in fury. Before Friday, my automatic response would have been to turn around, maybe even move a little closer. After all, this could be an interesting disagreement that might entice me to take one side or the other. But now my automatic reaction was to look at my 11-year-old daughter to see whether she was safe, to look for an escape route in case the man was dangerous. I would like to believe that this new response will become tempered over time. But I already know that it will never disappear entirely.

After the bomb went off — an explosion I felt in my home over a mile away — and reports of the shootings out on the island of Utoya began to come in, I asked my daughter whether she was scared. She replied by quoting something I had once said to her: “Yes, but if you’re not scared, you can’t be brave.”

So if there is no road back to how things used to be, to the naïve fearlessness of what was untouched, there is a road forward. To be brave. To keep on as before. To turn the other cheek as we ask: “Is that all you’ve got?” To refuse to let fear change the way we build our society.

Jo Nesbo is the author of the novel “The Snowman.” This article was translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 27, 2011, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Past Is a Foreign Country.