The despair of discovering humanity does not change

Remember the mantra: nothing would ever be the same again. Before our eyes – before our televisual eyes, that half-real, half-phantasmagoric place where we fancy we participate as one in history – the world had, in 10 minutes, become another place.

Except that it hadn't. One year on we confront a more terrible truth: not that the world will never be the same again, but that it is stubbornly incapable of change. Instead of apocalypse, stasis. Not with a bang will we go, as the Hollywood in our hearts would prefer. Not with one last big show. No, we will rot away with sameness.

You can't blame events for this. Events do their best by us. It's our natures that lag behind. One year on I read in this very paper Noam Chomsky answering the question "Why do they hate us?" with the same old answer. Because we are hatable. Empire, heartlessness, heedlessness, greed. Action, reaction. We do this, they do that. Or rather, we do this, they do this back – for there is no room for qualitative difference in Chomsky's politics.

"For the first time in modern history," he writes, "Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere". Run that by me again, Noam. Were those aeroplanes of malign intent, piloted to kill and agonise the innocent, really just a replay of what the West has done? Do we routinely – routinely! – foster bloody martyrdom, hijack civilian aeroplanes and fly them into crowded public buildings?

To which the answer comes that events do not have to be the same to be similar.

Equalise, equalise. A familiar tactic in our time, recalling Dr Johnson's description of the excesses of metaphysical poetry, discovering "occult resemblances in things apparently unlike", though with a view less to show off cleverness, which was Johnson's complaint, as to demonstrate a sort of cultivated dispatriotism, refusing to feel one's own pain exceptionally. The trouble is, some actions are exceptional and demand exceptional outrage. Where everything is equally bad, nothing is that bad at all.

Whatever happened to evil, Baudrillard asked. See the events of 11 September as an exercise in atrocity tit-for-tat and that's evil shelved. Who wants evil as a concept, anyway, when it can be employed as Bush employs it, merely as a synonym for enemies?

But a little theology goes a long way in a world whose first language is the political. Not in every instance, but in some, the answer to "Why do they hate us" is not to be found causally. Hatred needs no reason. Or its reason resides in its own engine-room: because hatred is energy, and energy fills a vacuum.

In no other sphere of human life does hatred justify itself; nowhere else is it assumed that whoever hates immoderately must have good reason to. Take the idea of Islamophobia of which much has been spoken in the past 12 months. The very word implies derangement. A phobia. We know the sickness of the homophobe. There is no Americanophobia. There is Anti-Americanism, which has the ring of reason to it. He who fears and hates America has thought about it; he who fears and hates Islam needs treatment.

And so Chomsky retreats further into his hatred of empire, appalled only by what his country does to others, while those of the opposite political persuasion retreat further into patriotism, appalled only by what others do to them. And neither side can say the only thing worth saying, which is that the more right I think I am, the more ill I have become.

America didn't only lose a rival when communism fell, it lost the vitality of being in an argument with itself. By definition, the terrorist has already forgone any interest in debate, either with the world or with himself. Thus two implacable forces face each other down, each the expression of a pathology, each a mirror image of the other.

So what did we expect? World peace? It turns out it was wishful thinking, all that nothing will ever be the same again. We hoped we could be outraged into being an improved species. Maybe it's the best that can be said of us, that we forget and stay the same. As in Hardy's poem – the old man harrowing clods, the thin smoke without flame, the whispering lovers...

War's annals will cloud into night

Ere their story die.