There’s been a change in my mail at The Globe and Mail since September 11. What I’ve often valued most in reader responses has been a kind of detached interest in the process of thinking issues through, rather than the results of that process. Anyone can have opinions; it doesn’t take much.

What’s more interesting is how people reach their views, and it’s gratifying to learn that many readers concur. Their letters often say, I don’t always (or often, or ever) agree with what you think, but I appreciate the way you lay it out.

That jibes with my notion of public discourse in a democracy: you offer your take in order to help your fellow citizens work out theirs, and the end result comes when we all put our heads together. Not how the real world works, I know, but a nice model to measure the real world against.

The change in the letters since September 11 hasn’t been just more visceral, vehement and sometimes vituperative. Those shadings weren’t absent, though they’ve grown more pervasive.

I’m thinking rather about a sense of loss of the space in which people can stand back and reason issues through without taking a firm position in advance; a feeling now that you must adopt a side quickly, know whether you agree or disagree, focus on outcome far more than process. “Thanks for saying what I’ve been screaming at the TV for weeks,” wrote one reader, and that was in agreement. Many hit a harsher note in dispute.

Someone suggested this is good because it means things matter more now. That could be, but it’s problematic. What bothers me is how the rush to take sides makes it harder to reason together. An openness to other ideas and exploring them gets shut off when everything has been pre-decided. And in a time of danger and uncertainty, openness is crucial.

Why? Because danger is magnified by whatever uncertainty accompanies it (everyone keeps quoting Roosevelt about having nothing to fear except fear), but to deal with uncertainty you must take the time to acknowledge and overcome it.

Democracy’s strength, I’d say, lies in the acceptance that no individual has all the answers, not even the geniuses among us. Collective wisdom and common sense are the best route to solutions.

The point isn’t just that each individual opinion counts, but that we pool and refine our separate opinions. If everyone knows what they think, the whole is merely the sum of the parts. You might as well just proceed to a vote.I can hear some readers grinding their teeth and saying through them: You can’t sit around having philosophical discussions while our society is being bombed and infected. You have to act — fast! But the questions remain: What action? How fast?

I’d say some of what we’ve seen so far is action for the sake of action, which may relieve tension but not solve problems.

At the moment, it could be the Afghan people who will pay the price for that, if the result of overthrowing the oppressive Taliban is their replacement by the same chaos and brutality that led to the rise of the Taliban in the first place.

Let me digress a moment to consider how this relates to some of our Canadian dilemmas. In Globe columnist Jeffrey Simpson’s new book, The Friendly Dictatorship, he critiques our political system. He looks at the immense power of the Prime Minister, the decline in voting and so forth. He proposes giving Members of Parliament more responsibility, a system of weighted voting, Senate reform etc.

But he accepts without question that the central act of citizenship is casting an individual vote for your representative, thus remaining isolated from your fellow citizens at the defining political moment, then dropping out of the political action altogether while the MPs and pros take over to govern for four or five years before the next vote.

I’m arguing that, especially in a time of crisis, when political creativity and consensus are both needed, it would be helpful if democracy meant more than just holding a vote and living with the results.

A final point. Was there anything particular in September 11 that caused these changes and sense of panic? Many people have said it’s the awareness that terror can happen here.

But I’d say, looking back, that it’s something else. What haunts me is not the spectacular image of the planes crashing into the towers, which have been replayed so often. It’s another image, shown less often, perhaps because it’s more disturbing: the towers collapsing, just like that.

They were the pyramids of our age (and the pyramids still stand), but they went in seconds: the people, equipment, the information in them. They didn’t crumble, like the pyramids; they vanished. They didn’t just lose their massive bulk, but their very dimensionality.

They weren’t only destroyed — it seemed as if they were reduced from three to two dimensions, flattened like a kid’s pop-up book when you turn a page, that fast and flimsy; all they contained, gone, as it were, to another realm.

Nothing will ever seem solid again.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.