Light and Dark

The firefighters in the World Trade Center's north tower had 29 minutes to get out or die. But almost none of them realized how urgent it had become to leave.

They had no idea that less than 200 feet away, the south tower had already collapsed in a life-crushing, earth-shaking heap. Nor did the firefighters know that their commanders on the street, and police helicopter pilots in the sky, were warning that the north tower was on the edge of the same fate.

Until last month, the extent of their isolation from critical information in the final 29 minutes had officially been a secret. For three and a half years, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg refused to release the Fire Department's oral histories of Sept. 11, 2001. Under court order, however, 12,000 pages were made public last month.

Those accounts give a bleaker version of events than either Mayor Bloomberg or former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani presented to the 9/11 Commission. Both had said that many of the firefighters who perished in the north tower realized the terrible danger of the moment but chose to stay in the building to rescue civilians.

They made no mention of what one oral history after another starkly relates: that firefighters in the building said they were "clueless" and knew "absolutely nothing" about the reality of the gathering crisis.

Of 58 firefighters who escaped the building and gave oral histories, only four said they knew the south tower had already fallen. Just three said they had heard radio warnings that the north tower was also in danger of collapse.

The calamity next door - the collapse of one of the biggest buildings in the world - was heard but not seen; felt but not understood. The staircases had no windows. Radio communication was erratic. Few firefighters even knew a second plane had struck the other building.

Three court officers reported seeing as many as 100 firefighters resting on the 19th floor minutes before the building fell, but they were not questioned by the Fire Department.

Mayor Bloomberg, in a letter to the 9/11 Commission, wrote: "We know for a fact that many firefighters continued their rescue work despite hearing Maydays and evacuation orders and knowing the south tower had fallen."

Asked to reconcile this statement with the oral histories, the city Law Department cited the accounts of eight firefighters and said that each of them surely had spread the word about the collapse of the other tower. In fact, in six of those oral histories, the firefighters specifically said they did not know the other building had fallen.

In the lobby, just yards from safety, survivors said that uncertainty doomed many firefighters. Roy Chelsen of Engine 28 said, "There were probably 20 or 30 guys down in the lobby mulling around."

The interviewer asked, "They weren't trying to get out?"

"They were just - no, no," Firefighter Chelsen recalled.

[Edited excerpt from "9/11 Firefighters Told of Isolation Amid Disaster," New York Times, September 9, 2005.]

People hate truth. Elected officials, knowing what the people want, produce false tales of heroism -- tales protected by official secrecy -- then rebuff questions with new lies when the truth emerges. The superpower's citizenry want their reality filtered -- even where one of the nation's most momentous experiences is concerned.

Similarly, in the banal context of the Cambridge summer school, many students were determined to meet parents', teachers' or peers' expectations that their visit to this highly prestigious, 800-year-old centre of learning, a university boasting more Nobels than any other in the world -- a visit which also was rather expensive -- be fascinating, transformative, and intellectually and culturally enthralling.

I discussed this over breakfast one morning with a University of Hawaii professor who was visiting St. Catherine's for a few days. He was a car buff, he said, and he'd seen the same thing with owners of prestige, high-priced automobiles. Although quality standards had plummeted and owners suffered horrible inconvenience and expense due to high maintenance, they nonetheless swore they loved their cars. They were committed. Their own prestige was on the line.

Thus Maureen insisted she loved lectures that she (and I) didn't understand. Thus the Christina/Sarah/Bianka cabal protested a violation of their "privacy" rights when "inflammatory" ideas deviating from their positive view of Cambridge invaded their hearing.

Let's reflect for a moment on this tendency of shunning truth in preference for comfortable falsehoods. Yes, it's widespread, and I knew that before Cambridge. But what was impressive about Cambridge -- and here I'm returning to my beginning in letter #1 (Uriel at Cambridge) -- was that this predilection was out front, in the open, unabashedly declared.

A fundamental insight seemed to be missing: Choosing falsehood over truth is weak; dishonest; ignoble. It marks a lack of maturity, a failure of integrity.

Cambridge University's motto is, "From here, light and sacred draughts." But light is not needed to see and explore one's own preferences, wishes and dreams. The purpose of light is to illumine the world outside oneself -- as it exists, for better or worse, irrespective of one's desires, independent of one's perspective. When light appears, it permits different individuals to see and agree on the common reality around them.

The Cambridge I saw was a place of darkness, where people were presumed to be attached to distinct visions of reality, visions constructed according to their personal fears and aspirations. Jill Paton-Walsh's uncontroversial declaration that all autobiography is deceit could mean little else: It was futile to seek light. The shadows, and the phantasms they harbored, could not be eradicated.

Dr. Fred Parker's response (see #3, Polls versus Thought) to my objection about our unclear plenary lectures was in the same vein. I'd contended that few audience members would agree about what the speakers had said. The speakers had not, in other words, conveyed a common meaning to audience members, and audience members were left in the dark, with their own imaginings of what the speakers intended. But what was wrong with darkness? Parker's reply conveyed. The Tower of Babel represented the normal condition.

Similarly with Sarah Ormrod and her apparent unfamiliarity with the idea that some objective standard of sensibility might apply to the lectures. She was perfectly prepared to receive one person's opinion. And she would be pleased to mix it into the brew with other people's opinions. Ultimately she would form an opinion of her own, once she tasted the outcome.

Christina's message featured the classic formulation: "I am allowed to have my opinion just as you are allowed to have yours."

What happened in 1975? For everyone born since, it seems, the conviction that opinions are sacrosanct and inviolable has a power and potency on par with the sex drive. Hence the great disinclination to debate -- a disinclination Cambridge had no inclination to challenge. Why should some know-it-all intrude upon your space, threaten your self-esteem, and discourage opinions to which you're perfectly entitled? It's virtually an act of assault.

Perhaps some centre of learning, somewhere, is roiling these placid waters. Not Cambridge. But after all, this new religion possessing the young contradicts a basic tenet of the societies they inhabit -- at least the U.S. and other modern democracies. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it:

[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.... That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.

That there is a truth is implicit here. So is the idea that this truth can serve as a standard against which opinions contend with one another; and that it might be legitimate to judge opinions, even deem some to be wrong....

No no no no, stop here. I am being inflammatory.

(Continued....)