Age of Adventure

Age of Adventure
Alan Greenspan, September 11, and "The Lord of the Rings."
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, January 10, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST

Reading the mind of Alan Greenspan is a feat I'm rarely tempted to try. But there's an odd little thing the august head of the Federal Reserve did recently that I'm guessing I know something about--having just done the same myself. He went to see "The Lord of the Rings."

I was intrigued enough to phone the Fed yesterday and ask what precisely drew Mr. Greenspan to this saga of wizards, elves and hobbits. A spokesman declined to comment, so I'll offer my own theory. The deepest appeal of J.R.R. Tolkien's saga--especially if you've read the books on which this movie is based--is the mythic sweep of mission and mighty adventure. "The Lord of the Rings" is at core the tale of a rather ordinary fellow who gets suddenly handed the task of saving the free world.

Maybe a lot of faithful readers would have come to see the film no matter what. But I think what's vaulted this movie to No. 1 at the box office is not only the fantasy and splendid special effects, but that its story resonates neatly with an America rediscovering that there are still genuine and serious adventures required of us.

That's not necessarily a delight. Saving the world, or even a small piece of it, is rarely romantic up close. It can be a miserable, gritty, dangerous and even lethal job. The country should never have suffered the attacks of Sept. 11, and the continuing threats are plain ugly.

But there is a level on which human nature craves adventure--important adventure, in which risks are taken for good and necessary reasons. And in the aftermath of the attacks, as we have fought back and begun to recover, we have had a chance to draw on the best part of ourselves. That's a big switch from the 1990s, when opportunities for genuine courage seemed to be pretty much drying up. Given the end of the Cold War and the boom in technology, there was a general sense--false, but pervasive--that there just weren't a lot of dangerous places left.

We had emerged as the lone superpower, intervening here and there as if the world were a smorgasbord of conflicts--Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo--all desperately sad, but none a direct threat to our own way of life. Our television networks cut back on foreign coverage. Our president kept the news occupied with his peace palaver and his penchant for pulchritude. We poured our energies into wandering our own internal landscapes--our traumas, disorders and lifestyles. As far as it seemed to matter, we felt increasingly in control of our universe.

In some ways we were. At stunning speed we were developing marvelous, ever more efficient new technologies. We were flush with profits, awash in information, wired in ever more cheaply to everything and everybody. Where we fell short was in understanding what a lot of it actually meant, and what really mattered. Instead of asking what might still be out there that we didn't know about, we were too often busy worrying that the world was getting too homogeneous, that everyone was speaking English, eating hamburgers and leaving no place to go for spontaneous, culturally diverse thrills.

One product of this tame new world was a rather peculiar market in ersatz adventure. When I moved back to New York in 1997 after a long stint overseas, I was baffled by the abundance of large, rugged sport-utility vehicles on the streets of Manhattan. Even given the New York potholes, there was no obvious reason for so many people to be cruising around in four-wheel-drive souped-up jumbo jeeps. These vehicles were too big to park and unwieldy to maneuver in Manhattan's cramped streets. They would have been much better suited to, say, the wretched roads of Moscow, where I had been watching Russians for the previous couple of years buying precisely the delicate urban luxury cars that would have made a lot more sense in New York. Therein lay the key. Russians, who had perhaps a surfeit of rugged adventure in their daily lives, were snapping up symbols of a smoothly paved society. Americans, bored out of their gourds, were buying vehicles that suggested adventure while sitting in traffic.

We saw the rise of entire industries and entertainment genres devoted to the manufacturing of adventure. There was adventure tourism, in which you could pay for carefully planned and packaged thrilling travel. There were video games, ever more virtually "real." By 2000, the big fad was "reality television," a game-show universe immersed in the trivia of ever more contrived excitement--Americans starving on tropical islands, racing through scavenger hunts in Africa and France, roaming around Mongolia without maps or any evident benefit of geography classes--which in our enlightened school system they'd probably never had to take.

A fair amount of this was silly, and much of it was simply not very satisfying to the more profound instincts of the human soul. Right now we may be looking back at that era as a time of ease and contentment, but in the autumn of 2000, the newspapers and professional journals were full of reports that for all the country's wealth and progress, stress levels were at an all-time high.

Then came Sept. 11. There was nothing about the terrorist attacks that I would call an adventure. It was a nightmare, raw and terrible. But in the aftermath, as we have gone about dealing with genuine threats and danger, and despite all the immediate anxiety and upheaval, a kind of deep relief has come over America. It is part of what people talk about when they say there is a new seriousness; that life matters more. We are, as a rule, a nation of pioneers, of people who perform best when faced with new challenges. That's not just a matter of having long ago settled the Wild West. Many Americans can claim families that immigrated here within living memory; for them, the entire country was a new frontier. Struggle and adventure were a way of life. It's something we do well.

And in recent months we have been rediscovering that the world is much bigger and more complex than we had over the past decade assumed. We are seeing that there are still opportunities for deeds of valor, there are still chances to be daring not for a TV cash prize, but for the lives of fellow countrymen and the cause of freedom. And it is not merely a children's story these days that we still have some vital part to play in the mighty history of defending the free world.

Anyway, that's my thinking on why a personage like Mr. Greenspan would spend three hours watching a film about Frodo Baggins. It's a good story for all ages.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."