A failure of intelligence?

Never before in the field of human conflict has so much been written so quickly about the events of a single day. Boyd Tonkin trawls through oceans of 11 September literature in search of insight and wisdom - and finds rather too little for comfort

Everyone knows one thing about the Swiss psychiatrist Hans Rorschach. He devised a test that, supposedly, tells you the truth about yourself. Look at a standardised ink-blot, black and apparently shapeless. What do you see? A beast? A cushion? A fire? A cloud? That nothing, that absence, has power to show you who you are.

Since 11 September 2001, more than 600 books prompted in some way by the events of the day have appeared. By the time of Wednesday's anniversary, it is quite feasible that the total will amount to two volumes for every 24 hours since the attacks. I hardly need mention that this vast tide of print encompasses works wise and stupid, scholarly and superficial, heartfelt and cynical, lustrously sane and barking mad. Although not, to my knowledge, as mad in any British case as the French bestseller which argued that no plane had ever hit the Pentagon, and that US intelligence fabricated all the relevant evidence.

Not even the paranoid fantasist who dreamed that book denied the existence of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. And Ground Zero, it now seems plain, has functioned as a 16-acre Rorschach blot for journalists, historians, travellers, clerics, theologians, political analysts, media monitors, photographers and philosophers. They gazed into those 260,000 tonnes of ashen debris and came across themselves, and their previous convictions. Nietzsche once said that, if you look into the abyss for long enough, it will eventually stare back at you. And, perhaps, through you. Ground Zero, the ultimate abyss for millennial Western culture, has scrutinised our intellectual class with unsparing objectivity. Within a few years, a handful of the 9/11 books produced during the past 12 months will stand as reliable works of witness or explanation. Most will survive just as specimens. They will themselves crumble into historical debris: curious Rorschach-test results that reveal all the obsessions, the desires, the terrors of their times.

Most literature of 9/11 signally fails to address the "Other": a fashionable philosophical term among its writers, often used to mean the Islamic or Third World values and experiences that the suicide aircraft compelled the rich West to notice. Quite the opposite: nearly all the books deliver more of the same, familiar patterns of thought traced by orthodox Western minds, for orthodox Western minds. Orthodox faith; and orthodox scepticism. Orthodox conservatism; and orthodox liberalism. Orthodox rage; and orthodox compassion. If the published reactions to 9/11 were meant in some way to show the "individualism" of contemporary Western culture, they have largely failed.

If words fail, how about pictures? An album such as Stepping through the Ashes by photographer Eugene Richards and interviewer Janine Altongy (Aperture, £28) moves away from the four-square heroic reportage of the earliest documentary books. Instead, these images and text about the rescue effort and its workers choose surprising angles: sidelong, unexpected, unsettling. The effect is open-ended, provisional; it leaves us space to think.

In contrast, the vast collection of interviews with firefighters in Dennis Smith's Report from Ground Zero (Corgi, £5.99) accumulates pathos, courage and grief in a smoking mountain that overawes, and finally silences, the reader. Smith ends with praise for "our Judaeo-Christian philosophy" and a tribute to "the voice of America". Not plural voices, even after 600 tear-stained pages: just voice.

Mark Hertsgaard loves his plural America; he feels anguish when Bush and his media allies simplify its all-embracing spirit. The Eagle's Shadow: why America fascinates and infuriates the world (Bloomsbury, £12.99) predictably quotes Walt Whitman: "I contain multitudes." For such a generous liberal, the planes hit the wrong target: a false America of bullying and plunder, but one that today's war-mongering conformity threatens to conjure into reality. Hertsgaard spends a lot of time blaming myopic media coverage. This is a popular motif. The events (and their origins, and aftermath) slip into the eerie, airless parallel universe of media studies. Even an old pro such as John Simpson (in News from No Man's Land; Macmillan, £20) tends to treat the Afghan winter war, which he reported, as some sort of deadly Central Asian extension of a BBC in-house squabble over budgets and priorities.

Among academic media analysts, Rorschach shows up their customary tale of bad faith, vested interests and ideological distortion in newsroom and studio. Yet the disabling paradox that scuppers a book such as Journalism after September 11 (edited by Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, Routledge, £14.99) is that these self-righteous scourges of lazy, narrow journalism end up producing just that: lazy, narrow (and tardy) op-ed pieces, commentaries upon commentaries, fleshed out with academic conceit and academic vagueness. One listing of post-9/11 contributors to a British broadsheet (on p222) manages to spell four well-known names incorrectly. What sort of "expertise" can such sloppy pedantry transmit?

And so to the (would-be) profound thinkers. Liveliest among a trio of famous postmodernist theorists published by Verso (the others are Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio) is Slavoj Zizek. His plump pamphlet Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Verso, £8) fizzes with bright ideas and even squeezes a grim kind of fun out of its scorn for the "war on terrorism". Yet Rorschach prevails again, exposing in the end only the fixed mindset of the European intellectual leftist: against "American hegemony", furious at capitalist "globalisation", touchingly devoted to an idealised, unified Europe and its "emancipatory legacy". Thus Ground Zero swallows up even this nimblest of modern minds.

Back firmly in the British moral mainstream, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks factors 9/11 into his long-standing quest to reconcile orthodox biblical belief with orthodox liberal multi-culturalism. The Dignity of Difference (Continuum, £10.99), an agnostic might say, is trying to square the circle – as any monotheist with this tolerant agenda would. Somehow, goodwill and understanding will reconcile competitive, absolutist faiths, cutting through "thickets of hate" to "the open spaces of co-existence". Which here resemble nothing so much as a well-groomed English suburban lawn.

Is this Rorschach effect inevitable? Not if writers can balance the weight of what they knew and thought beforehand, against what 9/11 newly illuminated in flames and tears. In The Heart of War: on power, conflict and obligation in the 21st century (Routledge, £14.99), security strategist Gwyn Prins does precisely that. Prins knows, and can explain, our old, industrial wars. He can foresee their new, shape-shifting, open-ended, "re-animated medieval forms". His international reach is vast; his ethical compass firm. And he sounds deeply pessimistic. Behind the post-9/11 Rorschach blot of rival prejudice and orthodoxy, Prins can glimpse a cloud. It may be a mushroom cloud.