The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were horrifying. We should never forget the murdered civilians and sacrificed lives of the police officers, firefighters, Flight 93 passengers, and other brave men and women. And it’s likely we as a nation won’t forget, thanks to the work of the national memory system–Hollywood–in depicting for various fictional accounts the events of 9/11.

Unfortunately our more substantial responses are disappointing. Even the war in Afghanistan, mostly a success, has put into power a government so cowed by Islamist tribal leaders that it doesn’t grant its own citizens even basic liberties such as the freedom of religion. And the invasion of Iraq–almost completely irrelevant to achieving the goals of the “war on terror”–has overextended U.S. military resources, sapped international good will, and created greater instability and danger.

Unlike many of his detractors, I think President Bush means well–I don’t believe he’s principally motivated by potential oil profits or other such cynical explanations offered by leftist critics. However, he and his policy advisers have made a number of naive assumptions about Iraq, most especially the assumption that freedom from tyranny is sufficient for democracy to flourish. The opposition party hasn’t countered with any ideas of substance.

What we lack in our foreign policy is realism. Instead we have conflicting and unrealistic ideologies. The political right doesn’t seem to recognize how important are cultural characteristics (as opposed to innate human qualities). The political left seems unwilling to condemn as inferior (and in need of change) those same cultural characteristics that breed violent Jihad. The right holds to an ideology of the innate goodness of mankind: just provide the right conditions, and people will naturally gravitate towards a just society. The left holds to an ideology of cultural relativism: no culture or religion is better than another, so we should just live and let live.

A realistic foreign policy would acknowledge that important cultural differences keep e.g. Iraqis and Afghanis from creating a just, democratic society on their own; it would acknowledge that although the United States has a responsibility to promote peace in the world, its policing powers are finite; it would note that wars with vaguely defined goals usually go badly; it would also admit that while the U.S. as a superpower can do many things independently of other countries, it has always been most effective in addressing serious international problems when working multilaterally. These aren’t new lessons–we learned them in the mid-Twentieth Century. Why haven’t we applied them in the Twenty-first Century?

The us-them divide that conservative Christians maintain holds that, historically, they have Christian morality on their side while others have only their Enlightenment gods of science and reason. And some of their opponents like to believe this as well.

But it’s a false divide. Both the Puritans who settled New England and who bequeathed to American politics much of their dogma, and the Dutch founders of New York based their societies on Christian principles. They just had different approaches to theology. The Puritans were more typical of their era, when religious intolerance was official policy in most nations. (It’s true the Puritans themselves fled intolerance, but once they established themselves in America, they set up their own brutally intolerant regime.) Dutch Protestants, however, had experienced horrific violence at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and many had had enough of religious absolutism. Tolerance became codified into Dutch law, and Dutch cities, which had high concentrations of minorities, flourished. As a result, when the Dutch founded their New World colony centered on Manhattan Island, it, too, was a mixed society, and it, too, had as its social glue this notion of tolerance.

The point is that tolerance was at the time seen most fundamentally as a theological issue. The Puritans’ righteousness came from the conviction – common to all absolutists – that their faith was the only correct one, so that God compelled them to uphold it and to vanquish others. Those who argued for tolerance did so from a more humble, but equally theological, stance. In the words of one early advocate of tolerance, “Many will be damned on Judgment Day because they killed innocent people, but nobody will be damned because he killed nobody.”

Looking all the way back, then, New York’s mixed society, and with it America’s, owes its origins not to accident or geography but at least in part to a Christian conviction, won by the experience of slaughter and mayhem, that we – whoever we are at the moment – may not be smart enough to know God’s mind. The unlikeliest notion in the world therefore follows: that New York’s cultural mosh pit is built on a foundation of humility.

The attacks of 9/11, with their apocalyptic overtones, were pure protein for the Puritan impulse, with its conviction of America’s God-ordained role in history. Those who would stand up to the Puritan strain, which many people believe has reached the stage of posing an unprecedented danger, might want to exploit the fact that their tradition, just as much as the Puritans’, sits on a religious foundation. Pluralism and morality aren’t two separate things but are joined, and it’s from that juncture that much of what we call American comes. After Frances Perkins served as F.D.R.’s secretary of labor, she was able to say, referring to the New Deal, “I came to Washington to work for God, F.D.R. and the millions of forgotten, plain, common working men.” Nobody saw a conflict of interest.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect Shorto might be confusing humility with political expedience. When New York politicians appear “tolerant” regarding a particular issue, it’s usually an attempt to get votes by appealing to a wider political base. But their “tolerance” won’t encompass views that are statistically insignificant within that base. For example, New York Senator Clinton may seem “tolerant” when she supports gay rights, a winning strategy in New York, but ask her to confirm an obviously qualified judicial nominee, and her “tolerance” is hard to find. That’s why “tolerance” is such a hollow word. Those who are “tolerant” are doing so because they’re already committed to other principles, principles usually far from humility.

We visited New York recently and on the advice of JRC walked the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk. The experience inspired me to pick up David McCullough’s book The Great Bridge. McCullough, who won a Pulitzer for his biography of Truman and whose book about the Adams was a best-seller, knows how to tell a story.

The book’s heroes are John and Washington Roebling, the father and son who oversaw the design and construction of the bridge. When John died from lockjaw after a job injury, Washington took his position of Chief Engineer and saw the bridge to completion. But mostly from a distance; he ruined his health working in the caissons during the first stages of the construction.

While the bridge’s towers attract attention today (as they did at its completion in 1883, when at 280 feet they dominated the New York skyline), I think the most dramatic part of the bridge’s construction was hidden from view, in the giant caissons beneath them.

Imagine flipping a cake pan upside-down and pushing it underwater. It could hold a pocket of air inside of it, so that if you held it against a river bed, inside the cake pan the dirt would be “dry.” Enlarge that cake pan so that it’s the size of four tennis courts, and make it out of wood plated with metal, and you have the Brooklyn Bridge caissons. Men inside the caisson dug away at the river bed, and as they sunk lower into the earth beneath the river the towers rose on its back.

The problem is that the deeper one goes underwater, the greater the water pressure. And the only thing keeping the water out of the caisson was the air inside; the air also was chiefly responsible for keeping the caisson itself from being crushed by the tons of masonry above it. So Roebling increased the air pressure the lower the men dug, producing some interesting effects. The men could shovel debris underneath a shaft leading to the surface, and the air would blast rocks and sand up and out of the caisson, like a giant vacuum cleaner. Fire was a greater risk, so that after battling for hours one bit of flame that worked itself deep into the planks of the caisson, Roebling gave up and had the structure flooded with water. While in the caissons, workmen’s voices became higher-pitched, and they couldn’t compress their lungs enough to blow out a candle. And some, after returning to the surface, began experiencing excruciating pains they called “Grecian bends” or “caisson disease”–what today we usually term “decompression sickness.”

The technology necessary to produce caisson disease on a large scale hadn’t existed until recently before Roebling built the Brooklyn Bridge, so little was known about its causes and its treatments. Shortly before and during the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction, caisson disease caused the deaths of a number of men working on the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi. Roebling had even visited the caissons for the Eads Bridge to compare them to his plans, but Eads was equally in the dark about decompression sickness.

From the hindsight of history, it’s almost painful to watch Andrew H. Smith, the physician for the construction workers, try to figure out how to treat the malady. He was correct that symptoms worsened the longer one spent in compressed air, so he had the men take shorter shifts. He suspected that it was important how long one took to decompress, but his prescribed time of a few minutes was insufficient (it needed to be about 20 minutes), and the men, impatient to head to the pubs and leave behind the disagreeable caisson work, probably didn’t even heed that amount of time.

When Roebling decided to halt the descent of the New York caisson at seventy-eight feet even though it hadn’t yet reached bedrock, his decision was influenced in part by his concern that caisson disease not kill numerous workers. And he had already begun to suffer from terrible bouts of the bends himself.

Already [physician Andrew H.] Smith had recorded more cases of the bends than Jaminet had in St. Louis. And whereas Eads had not suffered a single fatality until his first caisson was down ninety-four feet and the pressure was at forty-four pounds, Roebling, for some unknown reason, had already lost two men. So at this rate the New York caisson might take even more lives than the thirteen the St. Louis foundations had cost by the time they were in place.

The Great Bridge pages 315-16

The rest of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge makes for fascinating reading as well. Roebling, his health broken by caisson sickness, supervised the construction from afar (and only crossed the bridge himself after it had already been open for a while), while dealing with the machinations of various politicians. But the bridge opened to almost unimaginable fanfare: after a day filled with speeches and parties (the President was Guest of Honor), a non-stop fireworks show lasted for an hour.

In another time and in what would seem another world, on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen “on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.”

The Great Bridge page 542

Like most Americans, the events of that day horrified me and still do. I wish I could adequately express my respect for the men and women who died trying to save others’ lives, whether as first responders in Manhattan or passengers aboard Flight 93.

I found these entries from blogs in my feed reader helpful in commemoration:

• JRC at e-ink recalls his perspective from Brooklyn
• Stephen at Cogitations has a useful round-up of special news coverage
• Wittingshire and John Donne remind us that someday “death shall be no more”

Betcha didn’t know that John Roebling, father in the father-son team that designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge, was a student of Hegel’s: (from David McCullough’s The Great Bridge p. 42)

In Berlin, [John Roebling] had studied architecture, bridge construction, and hydraulics. He also studied philosophy under Hegel, who, according to one biographical memoir, “avowed that John Roebling was his favorite pupil.” The renowned philosopher had been preaching a powerful doctrine of self-realization and the supremacy of reason to a generation of ardent young liberals hemmed in by an autocratic Prussian regime. The effect was pronounced, and not the least on Roebling. The contact with Hegel was a privilege and a calamity for Roebling, according to an old family friend in Trenton. Hegel had taught Roebling to think independently, he said, and to rely on the validity of his own conclusions, but the experience was a calamity “because it begat a pride and arrogance of opinion and a frigid intellectuality that came near putting the heart of him into cold storage.” But according to family tradition, it was Hegel who started the young man thinking about America. “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe,” Hegel taught. There the future would be built. There in all that “immeasurable space” a man might determine his own destiny.”

As an example of Roebling’s “frigid intellectuality,” see how his family life suffered because of his dedication to work: (ibid. p. 53)

On New Year’s Day, 1855, his wife had been delivered of still another child, but this apparently came as a great surprise to the bridgebuilder when the news reached him at Niagara Falls. “Your letters of the 2nd and the 3rd came to hand,” he wrote quite formally to Swan. “You say in the last that Mrs. Roebling and the child are pretty well. This takes me by surprise, not having been informed at all of the delivery of Mrs. R. Or what do you mean? Please answer by return mail.” Swan was to waste no money on a telegram, in other words.

I can’t help wondering if Roebling was (consciously or unconsciously) trading off the ambiguity of Hegel’s “Geist,” when in his later years he became obsessed with contacting the dead, holding numerous séances.

I saw this on the PATH train that runs between New Jersey and Manhattan.