Twenty Five Years Later

Twenty-five years after September 11, America still remembers where it was when the world changed. But remembrance carries a harder question: Have we learned anything from what followed? In his new book, Toward the Turning: Rethinking the Meaning of 9/11, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Postmodern World, psychotherapist Scott Gibbs asks readers to look past the familiar language of heroes and villains and toward the deeper forces that harden identity, reward division and keep nations — and neighbors — locked in conflict.

In Toward the Turning, psychotherapist and author Scott Gibbs looks beyond blame to the identity, fear and reaction that keep conflict alive.

Gibbs, a California-licensed psychotherapist, board member of the Existential-Humanistic Institute and independent scholar, spent two decades on the book. His inquiry began in the stunned aftermath of the attacks, when the question was both universal and intensely personal: How could this happen?

“At one level, it’s about 9/11 and what led to it and then what followed from it,” Gibbs told Hollywood on the Potomac. “But at a deeper level, it explores why we do such terrible things like 9/11 in the name of our groups — apartheid, genocide, war. Why do those things happen in our group participation?”

His answer is not that ordinary people suddenly become extremists. The danger, he argues, begins earlier and more quietly, when a threatened identity starts to harden and the world is sorted into allies, enemies and obstacles.

“It doesn’t begin with extremists. It begins with our normal identities hardening in response to something, usually a threat,” he said. “And if you’re not [part of us], you’re an enemy, you’re an obstacle, you’re something that’s in the way. And that’s when you enter a world of dehumanization.”

“I’d like us to frankly pause and listen more when we’re talking to folks particularly of different identities or with different ideas.”

That framework gives Toward the Turning its contemporary urgency. The book uses 9/11 and the War on Terror as its central case study, but its argument reaches directly into an America split by political identity. Gibbs describes conflict as an “iterative dance”: one side acts, the other reacts, and each response confirms the other side’s fear.

“Something we do triggers something in someone else, and they respond, and that triggers something back in us, and around and round we go,” he said. The pattern can flare into violence or settle into a temporary calm, but calm is not the same as resolution. “Sometimes it calms down and we think, well, maybe we’re fine, but it’s just a lull. The fundamental issues have not been resolved.”

For Gibbs, the first lesson of 9/11 is that unity can be real — and fragile. He remembers the country coming together and much of the world rallying in support. Yet that solidarity soon gave way to the language of invincibility, competing civilizations and “us against them.” The United States, he said, is no more immune than any other society to the hardening of identity toward extremism.

The day also altered the course of his own life. Gibbs was living in San Francisco and heading to work when the attacks occurred. A call from the woman from whom he was separated — now his wife — brought them back together. “It was so profound in so many different ways and impactful for so many lives,” he said. The same day set him on the intellectual path that became the book.

The manuscript began as a paper for a course. A professor encouraged Gibbs to publish it, which led him to widen the inquiry. “The book took 20 years,” he said. “It just happened to come up around this 25th anniversary, but it wasn’t intended that way. The timing worked out that way.”

Photo credit: Ken Lund

A quarter-century later, Gibbs believes Americans are still living inside what he calls the “blast wave” of 9/11. The trauma of an attack at home was followed by a financial crisis, a pandemic and the rise of China as a major competitor. Together, he argues, those shocks deepened a national sense of vulnerability — even as the country continued to project extraordinary power.

“At some level, all of this is a feeling,” Gibbs said. “What’s going on today and pushing on our allies and other people and our trade partners is a response to a feeling of vulnerability that people feel around where America is, and 9/11 played a part in that and is in our psyche.”

That point matters especially for younger Americans who were not alive in 2001. They may not remember the fear or the remarkable displays of solidarity, but they inherited the political and psychological aftermath. They are living with wars, institutions and divisions shaped by an event they never witnessed.

So how does a nation bridge its divides? Gibbs does not offer a slogan or a demand that everyone simply agree. His prescription begins closer to home: slow the reflex to categorize, recognize the humanity obscured by group identity and listen before responding.

American flag at Fort McHenry’s 9/11 memorial — Credit: Pfc. Stephanie Cervantes/U.S. Marine Corps.

“As it relates to just you and me every day,” he said, “I’d like us to frankly pause and listen more when we’re talking to folks particularly of different identities or with different ideas.”

That pause is small, but not passive. It interrupts the dance. It creates enough distance to ask whether a response will solve a problem or simply produce the next grievance. Gibbs applies the same discipline to war: before fighting, leaders should consider whether the action will contain extremism or generate more of it.

Remembering those who died, he said, should mean more than repeating the rituals of mourning. “To really do honor to them, we ought to think more deeply about what’s going on so that we can minimize more people having to go to war and having to sacrifice.”

Toward the Turning ultimately asks readers to exchange certainty for curiosity — not to abandon conviction, but to understand how quickly conviction can become identity and identity can become a weapon. Twenty-five years later, perhaps the most meaningful memorial is not only to remember the day America came together, but to practice the harder art of coming together now.