And yet a lot of people seem to be drawing another lesson entirely. Since we've survived it all, since the world hasn't come to an end, they ask, who needs government at all? Who needs a competent, capable sovereign? Who cares about a sovereign default?
Thus you have a serious candidate for the presidency of the United States telling voters that his objective is to make Washington “irrelevant” in the lives of Americans. He is saying what a lot of Americans want to hear.
This is the politics you get when a country has lived through a decade of sovereign failure (and two decades of ideological fantasy before that).
Instead of learning, as catastrophe sometimes teaches, that we are all in this together, many of us (and Americans in particular) seem to have learned that we are each on our own.
The response of governments has become part of the problem. Environmental regulation is sacrificed on the altar of jobs. Government watchdogs are put down in obedience to the ideology of deregulation. As government weakens in these dimensions, it becomes more coercive in others.
To turn back terror, our institutions have become more ruthless and more vigilant, yet we do not trust them more. A secret war on terror is waged, without foreseeable end, in our name, beyond our ken and beyond our control.
America defends its democracy now with drone strikes and targeted assassinations, with computerized surveillance of the incoming and outgoing chatter on phones and servers. Governments now pay thousands of secret operators to detect warning signals amid the noise.
But a decade into this secret war, no one really knows what price democracy pays, in freedom and self-respect, for the way it defends itself now.
If terror challenges democracy, the answer is more democracy, not less; more accountability and openness, not less. The question is whether the secret power we have allowed to spring up in our name is under any kind of democratic control. Do our elected representatives keep our secret agencies under sufficient scrutiny? Does the press know what is being done in our name?
We have paid for sovereign failure with secret government. Most people accept this, because our enemies have not prevailed. The mastermind is dead, his remains scattered at sea. His followers are in hiding and know they will be pursued to the ends of the earth.
But they created the apocalyptic standard, and the risk now is not just al-Qaeda but any group with the desire and capacity to emulate it.
The price of freedom is vigilance, but we also know that eternal vigilance is impossible. Some day, somehow, someone will get through. Sovereigns will do their best, but, against someone in search of apocalyptic martyrdom, all bets are off.
We can live with this knowledge, because we prefer it to the innocence that blinded us a decade ago. We cannot live without faith in others, so we draw inspiration from the courage shown by rescuers and survivors. But we cannot take consolation from the decade we have lived since.
In fact, though, we are not in need of consolation. We are in need of good politics, of democratic systems that are more than reality-TV shows driven by attack ads, and of democratic debate that allows the people to talk about what actually matters and then to elect politicians who will do what must be done.
We are not short of good ideas about what to do. We are not short of dedicated public servants. Most people, apart from those in the grip of ideological fantasy, know that we need competent sovereigns.
But truth be told, a decade later, sovereigns are failing us still. And until they stop failing us, we will not be safe, and our prosperity will not be secure.
Michael Ignatieff is a Senior Resident at Massey College, University of Toronto.
