War—along with whatever it is in us that brings war—is still with us, is already very much a 21st century thing, as it was a 20th century thing, a 19th century thing, and so on.

After 5,000 years of barbarism interrupted by brief periods of civilization, what can we possibly say that has not already been said? Has anything changed that might justify more wasted words on the topic of human violence?

Maybe.

Consider again the events of September 11, 2001.

On the scale of human violence those events, in terms both of the number of people killed and the amount of destruction, were minuscule.

Yet they do tarry in the mind, don’t they?

Past massive violences came and went, entered the historical record, and stayed there. A few had obvious long-term effects (Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Holocaust), but most more or less vanished (Cambodia, Rwanda, the Cultural Revolution, the Stalinist purges… the list is very long).

What was different about the events of 9-11—and it is possibly a crucial difference—is their unmediated, global in-your-faceness.

Wherever you were, whatever you were doing on September 11, there was the World Trade Center collapsing over and over again, there was the Pentagon going up in flames, there was the smoking crater in Pennsylvania.

The events of 9-11 comprised the first large-scale human violence that 1) got onto global TV and 2) stayed there, in saturating repetition for several days.

Compare that to, say, the fire-bombing of Dresden (which killed many more people and did far more damage). There were headlines. There was grainy newsreel footage of the aftermath. Otherwise, nothing, until Kurt Vonnegut recreated the disaster in Slaughterhouse Five.

Because of the novel, the future will retain a pretty vivid memory of the Dresden nightmare. But that memory will be nothing compared to the indelible imprint on most of humanity of the television images of 9-11.

That’s what’s different.

Does this difference matter?

Given humanity’s propensity for violence, the knee-jerk response to that question—even an informed knee-jerk response—is simply: No!

But let’s hold off a moment, take a look at human behavior—which has been more than a little bit odd—since 9-11 and see if that behavior indicates anything other than more of the same old same old violence-to-come.

Two views of the events of 9-11 are worth considering, the local, and the global.

1. The Local: Unexpected Hatred
9-11 commentators have been fond of the comparison to the surprise attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Certainly 12-7 had immediate and long-term effects, but it was a different kettle of bombs: though a surprise, it was a military attack on a military target. And, of course, the way we found out about 12-7 was through the radio, through newspaper headlines, and eventually grainy newsreel footage.

Pearl Harbor was seen, in the ancient tradition of human belligerence, as an act of war and was responded to as such.

Hawkish Americans and their leaders have tried to see 9-11 also as an act of war and to respond to it as such (the "war on terrorism"). That view has to some extent prevailed. But the division of opinion within America and abroad shows that it is far from being the prevalent interpretation that the hawks convince themselves that it is.

Beneath the highly visible surface response of Americans and their government there lurks another, possibly far stronger, response: incomprehension and disbelief.

How could 19 young men hate us so much that they would sacrifice themselves and 3,000 innocents to express their hatred?

Rather than face this incomprehensible reality and try to figure out what went wrong, the hawk-controlled American government struck back with the full, sustained wrath of its awesome military power. "They" (whoever "they" are, and never mind why "they" did it) caught us with a sucker punch. "They" took advantage of our trust, our good will, our open society and hit us while we were looking the other way—so the argument goes.

We hit back, bigtime—and, in military terms, successfully.

No matter how hard we hit back, how often, and how successfully, that does nothing, nothing to eradicate the incomprehensible reality just below the surface: How could "they" hate us so much?

That terrible, unanswered question is still there, simmering, festering. Flags may proliferate. Wars little and big will be "won." But the reality remains: "they" hated us, "they" still hate us, and apparently "they" will continue to hate us. Yet we are acting as if hatred can be eradicated through our own over-powering violence.

It’s worked before (we think): World War I, World War II. It’ll work again (we think): we’ll fight "them," defeat "them", and then win "them" over to our side as we pour out our traditional American generosity on the defeated enemy.

Nothing, obviously, in those actions, addresses the real problem. The in-your-face hatred of America implied by those indelible 9-11 images remains.

2. The Global: Unexpected Insanity
Anyone who studies history see incontrovertible evidence of the suppurating wound of human existence: we are incessantly violent. Humanity’s curve of self-inflicted deaths reached a new peak in the 20th century: 200,000,000 people killed in wars, revolutions, purges, etc.

Most human beings have no time to study history, to think about all those deaths, to contemplate the persistent outbreaks of group insanity that characterize our stay on this planet. Most of us spend our time either eking out a subsistent life or working hard to maintain a life of some safety and leisure for ourselves and our families.

What 9-11 did, because of the television pictures, was to engrave on the minds of all those non-students of history FOR THE FIRST TIME the unavoidable, totally convincing reality of human insanity.

We watched:

1. The planes, like any planes, on which many human beings have flown,
2. strike the buildings, like buildings in all large cities around the world, but
3. these huge buildings burned and people jumped or fell from them, and then
4. The buildings fell down, and
5. part of New York City burned for days.

We saw all that, but, like the subversive, immense power of Greek tragedy: the worst violence happened off-stage.

Sure, we saw the planes, we saw them hit the buildings. We saw the buildings burn. We even saw a few tiny flailing dots hurl themselves from the buildings. We saw the buildings collapse and burn.

But there were no cameras in the planes, no cameras in the buildings. We did NOT see the reality of 3,000 deaths.

That, as in Greek tragedy, was left to our very active imaginations. And of course our imaginations were only too happy to do what they do best, which is, simply, imagine.

Not once. Not twice. But, in the first days after 9-11, countless times, over and over as global TV played and re-played the images. We watched. We imagined.

That was something new in human history: in-your-face insanity.

A lesson we didn’t want to learn was repeated again and again so that even the slowest learners would, on some level, get it: the truth about—not 19 young Arabs, no, the truth about us. All of us. The truth about human beings.

In armchairs, offices, bars around the world, watching, watching, watching. Imprinting: this, this insanity, is what people under duress do, and have done for millennia.

The Americans had to face indelible proof of human hatred.

Everybody had to face indelible proof of human insanity.

3. Aftermath
What happened next?

We know how the belligerent humans running the American government reacted. That was tragically predictable, as predictable as their irrational rejoicing over present and future "victories" by violence.

But go back and look again and what you find is that the 9-11 images pretty much disappeared. Not because of any government censorship, not because the TV people got together and decided not to show them anymore.

By mutual unspoken consent, humanity repressed the pictures.

We couldn’t handle the truth about ourselves.

Repression, denial.

And now a variety of compensatory behaviors: governments do crazy things. Leaders divide the world into "us" and "them." The "good" vs. the "evil."

People do crazy compensatory things. Those who can afford to, wrap themselves and their families in huge, gas-guzzling vehicles. Others wrap themselves in flags and vote for the most jingoistic candidates.

All in denial about what those vanished but indelibly imprinted images meant and—whether we admit it or not—mean about us, all of us.

Again, to any student of history, human "badness" is nothing new. It has expressed itself time and from the beginning in the bloody panoply of the last 5,000 years.

Religions have tried to account for it and deal with it in various ways (‘original sin," the world as illusion, etc.). Thinkers have wrestled with it: Kierkegaard’s "sickness unto death", Nietzsche’s "disease called Man", Freud’s battle between Eros (love) and Thanatos (death).

All to no avail.

In a sense, that protester’s sign is right, but maybe we should change it to read: "War is so last centuries."

This American government is, once again, fighting the last war, unaware that something has truly changed, unaware that global humanity—ALL of its divided and divisive factions—are harboring, deep within, those indelible 9-11 images. This government is trying to fight (again) one of the old us vs. them wars in which, lacking visual proof to the contrary, it was easy for each side to view the other as (as the current president is fond of saying) evil.

If you compare George W. Bush's statements with Osama bin Laden's, there's not much to choose between them. The only significant difference is in the term used for the deity (God/Allah). Otherwise it's the old good vs. evil argument all over again.

The truth that we all saw on 9-11, and saw, and saw, and saw was the truth that, given our proclivities, our easy resort to violence when under duress, any war is NOT us vs. them.

Every war is us vs. us.

That truth embedded itself—FOR THE FIRST TIME—in all humanity on 9-11. No matter how much we deny on a conscious level what happened, that reality is present still, now, in all of us.

What happens as a result, no one can say, because we’ve never been in such a place of forced, unvarnished self-honesty.

More of the old trouble lies ahead, for sure. But for me the final, now-hidden reality that comes out of 9-11 is hope—shaky hope, bruised hope, hope with a limp, but hope nonetheless.

Perhaps, as the great pessimists have argued, the disease called man is incurable. Still, for all our problems, for all our impulsive violence, we are a clever race. Can we learn now? Can we change?