Freedom and duty: Pericles and our times.

• Author: Kimball, Roger
• Position: Terrorism and war in Afghanistan

MID WAY through the long article on Afghanistan in the eleventh edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, one comes across this description of the inhabitants of that ancient mountain country:

The Afghans, inured to bloodshed from childhood, are familiar with death, and audacious in attack, but easily discouraged by failure; excessively turbulent and unsubmissive to law or discipline; apparently frank and affable in manner, especially when they hope to gain some object, but capable of the grossest brutality when that hope ceases. They are unscrupulous in perjury, treacherous, vain and insatiable, passionate in vindictiveness, which they will satisfy at the cost of their own lives and in the most cruel manner. Nowhere is crime committed on such trifling grounds, or with such general impunity, though when it is punished the punishment is atrocious. Among themselves the Afghans are quarrelsome, intriguing and distrustful; estrangements and affrays are of constant occurrence.

This refreshingly frank passage, by Colonel Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, was published in 1910. I was put in mind of Sir Thomas's commentary just before Christmas, when the New York Times took its quote of the day from one Faqir Muhammad, an officer in one of the many squabbling anti-Taliban armies: "This is what Afghanistan is", he said. "We kill each other." Indeed. And not only each other, so the American and British troops now enjoying the hospitality of the Afghans would do well to acquaint themselves with this travel advisory. It is as pertinent today as it was a century ago.

Sir Thomas's remarks are valuable not only because of their contemporaneiry but also because they help us set today's issues in historical context. "The farther backward you can look", Winston Churchill once observed, "the farther forward you are likely to see", and, indeed, as the shock of September 11 gives way to the reality of America at war, it is particularly useful to ponder Churchill's remark. The pressure of contemporary events crowds us into the impatient confines of the present, rendering us insensible to the lessons of history--not least the lesson that tomorrow's dramas are typically unforeseen in the scripts we abide by today. Indeed, language itself conspires to keep us in the dark.

Consider that marvelous phrase "the foreseeable future." With what cheery abandon we employ it! Yet what a nugget of unfounded optimism those three words encompass. How much of the future, really, do we foresee? A month? A day? A minute? "In a minute", as T S. Eliot said in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." So much of life is a juggling with probabilities, a conjuring with uncertainties, that we often forget upon what stupendous acts of faith even the prudent conduct of life depends. On September 10, 2001, none of us imagined that New York's twin towers would not continue standing for "the foreseeable future." Yet today, the events of September 11 can seem almost inevitable. Reasons have been furnished for every detail. Pundits have rehearsed knowing genealogies for all the actors. Plausible itineraries have been repeated until they seem like predictions. A look at the literature shows that all of those reasons and explanations were available on September 10; indeed, some had been propounded for years, but they lacked the traction that events give to hindsight. They were not part of the foreseeable future until that future, unforeseen, overtook us.

Such homely incapacities can provide a kind of signpost for us all. Even the extraordinary circumstance of wartime begets its anesthetizing versions of the ordinary. Our complacency exposed us to surprise on September 11; but new complacencies now compete for our allegiance. In part, this results from the pressure of familiarity. Sooner or later, a state of permanent emergency comes to seem like a normal state of affairs. Ceaseless vigilance by nature ceases to be vigilant. But there are other ingredients involved in the return of complacency. Already one senses impatience on the part of the media. From the very beginning of this conflict, President Bush warned that the struggle against terrorism would be measured in years, not weeks or months, but a protracted battle does not accord well with a 24-hour news cycle, with its demand for screaming headlines, new developments, clear victories.

While there is no single antidote to these liabilities, Churchill was right about history providing the best corrective to our myopia. We need to look backward if we are to relax the constrictions of the present. The "relevance" sought for the present time is best acquired from guideposts that have outlived the hectoring gabble of contemporary fashion. We are often asked if our "values" have kept pace, have "evolved", with the dramatic changes our political and social reality has seen in the past several decades. But values do not so much "evolve" as change keys. Our underlying humanity--with its essential moral needs and aspirations-- remains constant, which is why, for example, the emotional and psychological taxonomy that Aristotle provides in his Ethics and Rhetoric is as fresh to humanity today as it was two and a half millennia ago.

A Funeral's Inspiration

WHICH BRINGS me to Pericles. Early in the Peloponnesian War, a plague swept through Athens, killing thousands and demoralizing the survivors. In a rallying speech, Pericles (himself soon to die) noted that, "When things happen suddenly, unexpectedly, and against all calculation, it takes the heart out of a man." Against the temptations of apathy and...