The Guardian’s release today of ostensibly new footage of the World Trade Center collapse provides us with yet another impotent reminder that the earth shattering, potentially paradigm shifting spectacle we witnessed almost 10 years ago still lingers. Two major wars in the interim have created their own horrors, and elicited ‘appropriate’ media and wider social responses, yet they have not succeeded in quelling the many questions that remain unanswered from that uncannily strange day in early September, 2001. Sadly though, the event historicised simply as ’9/11′ has receded from the critical gaze of many of us, even those of us who know deep down that something incommensurable happened that day – something that has not yet been reconciled.
The new footage made me think to check the page of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a movement of people who still dispute the official line on 9/11 – namely that the twin towers collapsed as a result of being struck by aircraft. In a nutshell, the argument of the movement centres on the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center site, which went down some hours after the twin towers, despite not having been hit by any aircraft, and having sustained only superficial damage from the fallout of the collapses of buildings 1 and 2. Of course, there’s no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding ’9/11′, many of which are as outlandish and misguided as they are purported to be. What makes this movement stand out, however, is that it espouses the critical and rigorous views of literally thousands of experts in fields of architecture, engineering, building design, demolition, and many other professionalisms where a rigorous scientific approach is demanded. Nevertheless, an open mind is needed to consider the possibility that 9/11 is not what we commonly accept it to be; even those of us with a normally critical take on states and governments find such a proposition uncomfortable and disturbing. However, sufficient evidence exists to suggest that all three WTC buildings were brought down using carefully planned and controlled demolition techniques, though adherents to such ideas are still routinely branded as conspiracy theorists and nut jobs. As a human geographer operating very much within the ‘mainstream’ I have read and thought widely about how societies are put together, how accepted doctrine takes hold, how facts are defined as such, and I am interested in why, given such persuasive evidence, so few people are prepared to question the official line on 9/11.
To understand why, we need to acknowledge that our personal and social identities, and the wider social norms that we inhabit in our everyday lives are neither as immutable nor stable as we often like to think. Everything we think we know about the world comes about as a result of a continuous process of flux and conflict; structure and fixity. It is within these negotiations, within these processes that rights and wrongs, facts and fictions, and everything else we think of as ‘knowledge’ is forged. The same is true of the practice of science – an institution we turn to for certainty, stability and immutability. In his seminal 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn developed a wide ranging theory to explain how and why scientific revolutions take place. He noticed that besides the commonly accepted idea that scientific knowledge is developed by building upon the theories of past scientific studies in a scientific paradigm (meaning an era, and the ideas and knowledge that characterises it), once in a while scientific discovery undergoes a crisis – typically when a new discovery is not supported by, or contradicts, the body of knowledge that precedes it:-
A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn’s view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. (Wikipedia article)
The important part of this proposition is that it indicates that scientific progress is made not against an external backdrop of cold, hard facts, but rather upon the need to maintain an internal logic, in accordance with a ‘world view’ or paradigm. There is nothing heretical or outlandish about these ideas; they are widely accepted by scientists (apart from a few zealots). Although Kuhn was writing about scientific discovery there is nothing in his ideas that makes them the exclusive domain of formal or professional scientific endeavour – this is not how science works, per se, but how society works. Society undergoes paradigm shifts all of the time, though these are usually very minor and relatively inconsequential by their nature. Think of fashions that change year on year in clothing, consumer goods and social customs, and the way in which we shun or poke fun at those which no longer conform or ‘make sense’ at the present time, in the present paradigm. Throughout history however, much bigger events have happened, though less frequently, such as the twin discoveries that led to the acceptance of the knowledge that the earth is neither flat, nor the centre of the universe.
What all this indicates is that the likelihood of a paradigm shift is inversely proportional to the sum (roughly speaking) of the weight of accepted doctrine and magnitude of the disruption or anomaly. In other words, small anomalies against a relatively flexible body of knowledge, or world view, is likely to result in a fairly swift and undisruptive paradigm shift, whereas a big anomaly, especially if it occurs against a backdrop of a highly accepted world view is less likely to happen. So it is with the event we know of as ’9/11′. It’s big, because it calls into question so much of our iterative, layered knowledge – knowledge of essential (though flawed) goodness and honesty of the governments of the developed, free world – upon which we build meaning in our individual lives. Despite the healthy distain most of us have for our governments and their processes, the possibility that these authorities are so starkly at odds with our espoused moralities is difficult to comprehend, and deeply frightening.
The key question for me is whether 9/11 will ever cause a paradigm shift. Nine years on, it seems the overwhelming consensus is still denial, and acceptance. If the event ever is seriously reappraised, it seems to me that this is likely to take place safely in a historical frame some time in the future; when historians will be enthralled and fascinated by the fact that two of the tallest buildings on this earth, complete with their occupants, were felled for political reasons, and that very few people took any notice.
[this is an incomplete article written in a hurry. Comments and suggestions are always welcome]