Teaching Sept. 11: The view from then, and now

This fall we again face the test of making sense of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. Educators confront this problem with some immediacy, even nine years later. The memorials, television coverage and public remorse make ignoring the anniversary of the attacks impossible. But, more importantly, teachers have a professional responsibility to offer students tools for ordering and understanding the world.

Some have undoubtedly decided that this is a fool's errand. In this view, one of the rude reminders of Sept. 11 is that the academy is ill-equipped for real-world problems of the most pressing, wrenching sort. The ivory tower affords little protection and little insight in the strange new world we now inhabit.

But this fall, I find myself coming to the opposite conclusion, just as I did when I faced my disoriented, shocked students in the days after the World Trade Center attacks.

On Sept. 12, 2001, I asked a deceptively naïve question of my students: "What is politics?" Over the course of an hour, together we tried to answer this question and considered whether three classical accounts of political life still provided leverage on the problems we confronted.

First, we examined the perspective that politics was fundamentally about identifying friends and foes of the state. To my students, many of whom could see smoke from the Word Trade Center from their classrooms, the power of this view was raw and accessible.

Today, of course, the "friend-foe" question remains central as well. American troops across the globe continue to make strategic and tactical decisions, sometimes erroneously, about which targets and citizens represent threats. President Obama's decisions to withdraw from Iraq, and to increase our military presence in Afghanistan, were both premised on assessments about threats to our national security. The "War on Terror" is supposed to be a battle against those who have declared, through words and deeds, that the Unites States and its allies are foes to be vanquished.

My class turned from the "friend-foe" distinction to next consider whether politics was instead about "who gets what, when, and how" a viewpoint famously proposed by political scientist Harold Laswell. Some of my students resisted the idea that distributing "goodies" was linked with our national security and battlefield decisions.

But nine years ago, even while emotions remained jagged, public officials quickly and ceaselessly raised these issues. Who would fund the recovery and cleanup in lower Manhattan? What institutions should guide the nation's anti-terrorism efforts, and how much authority would they have? How should we alter our foreign aid and military policies in light of the "new" threat of terror? Many of these questions remain vivid today, reminding us that a vital feature of politics is its capacity to distribute our abundant, but finite, resources.

Finally, we turned to an understanding of politics from ancient Greece. The quizzical looks on my students suggested they were dubious that we might learn much about combating terrorists sophisticated enough to turn planes into missiles by consulting philosophy from the 4th century B.C. But by looking to the distant past, I argued, we could reacquaint ourselves with a vital, if somewhat unfamiliar conception of public affairs, based on promoting a particular vision of what is good for citizens.

We worry today about threats to soldiers and civilians and the costs of war. But as we scan the horizons of the future, it is this last image of politics that may become the most important of all: Ongoing discontent with U.S. policies in the Arabic world suggest that the nation has considerable work to do in articulating, and rendering attractive, its conception of justice across the globe.

With the continuing threat of terrorism as a backdrop, how do we distribute our bountiful but still limited resources to promote the interests of our nation and allies? Is our understanding of living well on a collision course with the values of other nations, and if so, how can we avert a wreck?

The questions are complex, unavoidable and as old as the study of politics.