Tragedy inspires
helpful reality check

Unthinking emancipation brought us a world of cares

It's curious what one misses when one leaves the country for a time. When I spent four years in the late 1970s studying in England I missed the entire North American fascination with disco. That entire gaudy era of extravagance, glitter and rhythm has no place in my memory; I know it only second-hand. (I received, however, perhaps in compensation, a double dosage of punk music, experiencing that cacophony in its London infancy and then in its later North American manifestation when I returned to Canada.)

Similarly, I missed the events of September 11 and their immediate aftermath, being on the high seas steaming toward Japan when the terrorists struck. I did not have to endure the constant television replays of the doomed jets striking the towers nor was I caught up in the media hysteria that dominated the next few months.

Returning to North America mid-December, I looked about for the changes that commentators were speaking of in that constantly recurring phrase, "After September 11 everything has changed."

At first I couldn't see any significant social alterations (although I did notice that at some point while I was gone young men started wearing baseball caps with no logos or writing on them–a startling break with decades of message-bearing head gear. How can I make snap judgments about my students if I can't read their hats?).

Something shocking

Then, while watching CBC television, I saw something shocking. An apologist for Islam was decrying the notion that Middle Eastern males attempting to enter Canada ought to be scrutinized with no more vigour than anyone else. This is racial profiling, she asserted, and has no place in our country.

To my astonishment the show's host challenged this truism of multiculturalism! My mind raced and I began to think if a member of the nation's left-winged literati was prepared to argue for the tiniest shred of common-sense restriction on individual liberty, that perhaps something fundamental had changed after all.

The more I looked for this, the more evidence I found. Travelers waited patiently during the kind of intense airport security that would have been unthinkable months before. Newspaper editorials, call-in show hosts, columnists–talking heads of all kinds–were forced by September 11 to consider that perhaps the world was sometimes a dark and dangerous place and limitations on our actions were perhaps occasionally acceptable.

This seemed to be true not just in matters of national security but in social issues as well–a rough and ready pragmatism was now the order of the day with harsh measures called for against law-breakers, drunks, unwed mothers and other menaces to society.

Are we seeing the end of the Age of Emancipation? One of the great themes of the last 250 years of history has been a drive for more personal freedom: In politics, religious matters and personal relationships. Artists have struggled to break free of the chains of reason, morality and beauty; sexual revolutionaries have greatly expanded the limits of the permissible; social reformers have taught us to view criminals as pathetic victims and deviants as brave pioneers.

Will this rosy view of the innate goodness of human nature and the evils of social restrictions withstand the massacre in New York?

Limits are good

The fact is, of course, that limits on behaviour are good for humans. Unless we are constrained in a multitude of ways we are all capable of shameless and dark deeds. Consider the words of George Herbert, the seventeenth-century poet who knew a thing or two about human nature:

Lord, with what care hast Thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us; then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears:
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.

Unthinking emancipation has brought us a world of cares: AIDS, divorce, gambling addiction, and an abysmal naivete about the human condition. Maybe a few more of "these fences and their whole array" will return us to reality.

Gerry Bowler is a Winnipeg writer, historian and culture critic–a veritable mother lode of arcane and useful information.