Know Your Enemy - Quareness Series (36th "Lecture").
For a long time it has been a source of mystery to me (and perhaps to many) why some norms of personal morality (e.g. thou shalt not kill) do not appear to apply when it comes to much political/military action by the "International Community". I've concluded rightly or wrongly that the explanation must lie within the mindset of the "perpetrators". And I've also concluded that this is a systems "problem" rather than an individually driven one i.e. the individuals are primarily driven by what they perceive as the requirements of the systems within which they operate rather than by any personal malice or principles. More cynically perhaps I think the citing of moralistic principles as justification for "forceful" action is a form of rationalisation indulged in to ease the conscience.
To have some hope of understanding the what/where/how/why of today's "international relations" a degree of insight into such mindsets is called for.....hence the main theme of this "talk".
The "righteous" paranoid mindset of the "Western Elite":
A core belief is that the artificial separation between the civilian and military command structures that has been a feature of contemporary democracies must continue to dissolve, with a reversion to the unified leaderships of the ancient and early-modern worlds. It's asserted that this is a basic truth of all political systems whatever their labels.
This trend has to be magnified by the commingling of military and civilian high-technology systems, which increasingly puts the military at the mercy of civilian experts and vice versa. The likely short limited wars and rescue operations which we'll be engaged in will mostly have to go unsanctioned by Parliament or citizens, as will pre-emptive strikes against the computer networks of our adversaries and other defence-related measures that in many instances must be kept secret. A growing collaboration between say the Pentagon and Corporate America is necessary, and going to war is gonna be less and less a democratic decision.
In a time when combat brigades can be inserted anywhere in the world within just 96 hours and entire divisions within 120 hours, and with the majority of our military actions comprising lightning air and computer strikes, the decision to use force must be made autocratically by small groups of civilians and general officers. And as time goes on the differences between these personnel will fade.
The boundaries between peace and war are often unclear, and international agreements are kept only if the power and self-interest are there to sustain them. Of course the West cannot maintain a monopoly over new military technologies, many of which are not expensive (and are less dependent on manpower) and can be acquired by our adversaries through free trade.
In addition war is becoming increasingly unconventional and undeclared, and fought within states rather than between them. The enemies we are likely to face will not be soldiers with the discipline and professionalism which that word implies here in the West, but warriors - erratic primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order.
Globalisation means economic survival of the fittest in that those groups and individuals which are disciplined, dynamic and ingenious rise to the top, while cultures that do not compete technologically produce an inordinate number of "warriors".
And nationalism in our age is simply a secular form of fundamentalism. Both arise from a sense of collective grievance and historical failure, real or imaginary, and preach a lost golden age. Both dehumanise their adversaries and equate mercy with weakness. Our responses to the outrages of these warriors are inconceivable without the element of surprise, making democratic consultation an afterthought.
War is subject to democratic control only when it is a condition distinctly separate from peace. In Cold War confrontations popular opinion played a major role, but a protracted state of quasi-conflict marked by commando raids and electronic strikes on enemy computer systems - in which the swiftness of our reaction is the "killer variable" - cannot be guided by public opinion to the same extent. Such conflict will feature warriors on one side, motivated by grievance and rapine, and an aristocracy of statesmen, military officers and technocrats on the other, motivated by ancient virtue. And because the West (led by the US a peaceful, commercial republic that has usually tried to eschew war!) is militarily superior, we should expect to be attacked at our weakest points, beyond the boundaries of international law.
Since the Enlightenment western leaders have exempted themselves from retribution and have sought to punish each other indirectly, by destroying each other's armies and making the civilian population suffer as well. Now we will reinvent ancient war - it will soon be possible to kill or capture the perpetrators of great cruelties rather than harm their subject populations, which in many cases are also their victims. Many of our future enemies may not inhabit a tecnologically developed country and there may be no suitable targets like electrical and water-treatment plants to bomb. The only target may be the offending chief or warrior himself. Therefore the earlier "prohibition" against assassinations will increasingly have to be sidestepped.
When military actions are cost-free, democratic restraints on the resort to force will be considerably weakened. Today it is often only the spectre of casualties that engages the public, sparking a debate that has democratic significance because it reaches beyond the media and intellectual communities. For example the US could bomb any place in the world for weeks, and the American public might not object provided there were no American casualties and the stock market was not adversely affected.
When the media finds a cause it can rally around, it can both shape and replace public opinion e.g. when the media was overwhelmingly for intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo while the public remained unenthused. Faced with an indifferent public, this quasi-aristocracy may shape the views of western leaders much as the ancient nobles did of their emperors. And the media's arguments can be difficult for politicians to resist.
The western media generally embodies classical liberal values, which concern themselves with individuals and their well-being, whereas foreign policy is often concerned with the relationships between states and other large groups. Thus the media is more likely to be militaristic when individual rights and suffering are concerned, rather than when a state's vital interests are threatened. Statesmanship, on the other hand, is about distinguishing between what is just and what is sanctimonious or impractical. Interventions in anarchic territories may compel a ruthlessness on our part that the very people demanding intervention cannot bear.
Prudence dictates that we approach casualty-free war as a myth. Despite technological advances, war is uncertainty, characterised by friction, chance and disorder.
As more information accumulates, the difference between information and real knowledge could widen. Exclusive reliance on technology, at once naive and arrogant, takes little account of local history, traditions, terrain and other factors that are essential for making wise judgments.
We should not expect warriors, with very few material possessions at risk, to be so fragile as to admit defeat after some infrastructural damage. No doubt the enemy will take hostages and place critical supplies susceptible to our precision bombing beneath schools and hospitals. For such adversaries, our moral values - our fear of collateral damage - represent our worst vulnerabilities. Sadly we have to admit the sincere and heartbreaking truth of the vast gulf that separates political-military virtue from individual moral perfection. It is such a truth that may help to define the 21st century, as we are forced to chose in the midst of high-tech war between what is right and what is unfortunately necessary.
Because of technology and the consolidation of news organisations, the media is a growing world power in its own right. And this power is willful and dangerous because it can dramatically affect western policy while bearing no responsibility for the outcome. Indeed the media's moral perfectionism is possible only because it is politically unaccountable.
A statesman's primary responsibility is to his country, while the media thinks in universal terms. In a world of constant crisis, policymakers must be very selective about where and when they believe it worthwhile to get engulfed in the "uncertainty" of conflict. In a world without a universal arbiter of justice, discussions of war as "just" or "unjust" carry little meaning beyond the intellectual and legal circles in which such discussions take place. States and other entities will go to war when they decide it is in their interests (strategic, moral or both) and will be unconcerned if others view their aggression as unjust.
In the 21st century, as in the 19th, we will iniate hostilities - whether in the form of Special Forces operations or computer viruses directed at enemy command centres - whenever it is absolutely necessary and we see a clear advantage in doing so, and we will justify it morally after the fact.
In primitive societies, lawless frontier towns, and the world of organised crime, injustice has always been redressed by the injured themselves, or by their powerful protectors; thus the safety of the weak rests upon the willingness of their protectors to wield power. Indeed feudal relationships between stronger and weaker states have marked world politics since time immemorial. Even today civilian economic powers (Germany, Japan, Kuwait, etc.) have specific functions in a western world order, in which the US provides military security.
In places where the rule of law does prevail, one is expected to suffer insults without resorting to violence. But in a lawless society, a willingness to suffer insults indicates weakness that in turn may invite attack. A world without a Leviathan is somewhat similar: an alliance leader must play the role of barbarian chieftain. The code may not be Judeo-Christian, yet it is moral just the same.
If we are weak militarily - if we aren't able to meet the rising challenge of warriors - our political values may be eclipsed worldwide. The future of warfare is already behind us in ancient times. And so is the future of global governance.
Why this defensive/protective mindset is an enemy:
As we can see much of this mindset is well thought through and at a surface level appears quite reasonable and realistic. However, for the sake of a sane future for mankind there is a much wider context within which we need to evaluate.
Science and technology placed at the service of war and the market, put us at their service. We have become the instruments of our instruments. Forces have been unleashed which we can neither comprehend nor contain. Over the course of the past century, means have been divorced from ends by the same system of power that divorces the human hand from the fruits of its labour, enforces the perpetual separation of words and deeds, drains reality of memory and turns everyone into the opponent of everyone else. And stripped of roots and links, reality becomes a realm of count and discount, where price determines the value of things, of people and of countries.
The ideologues of fog, the pontificators of the obscurantism now in fashion, tell us reality can't be deciphered which really means reality can't be changed. Globalisation reduces international relations to a series of humiliations, while our model citizens live reality as fatality....if that's how it is it's because that's how it was, and if that's how it was it's because that's how it will be.
During the Cold War, half the world could find in the other half an alibi for its crimes and a justification for its horrors, and vice versa. Each claimed to be better because the other was worse. Now orphaned of its old enemy, capitalism can celebrate its unhampered hegemony to use and abuse.
Solidarity is still considered a useless waste of energy and critical consciousness as but a passing phase of stupidity in human life. Nevertheless the powers that be have decided to alternate the carrot with the stick and so they now preach social assistance, which is the only form of social justice allowed. Charity consoles but does not question. "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. And when I ask why they have no food, they call me a Communist" (Bishop Helder Cámara of Brazil).
Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations. In truth charity doesn't worry injustice, it just tries to hide it.
Despite much evidence to the contrary, the assumption "when things go wrong" is that the West (and especially the US) is "peace-loving" and consists of true democracies that have been betrayed by their own leaders, economic elites and a military apparatus gone rogue. How can this be in our socalled "open" societies? Whilst to some degree we are subject to obvious propaganda and the distorting of truth, the western world now operates much more so under a new form of censorship which functions by making everything known and naked to a paralysing degree.
The Clinton Administration emerged unscathed from its crime against the people of Sudan (attacking a pharmaceutical lab with 85 cruise missiles) because of (a) racism with the unspoken assumption being that it's okay to bomb little brown people - it happens so often they ought to be used to it by now, it's rather like the weather for them, (b) the unacknowledged understanding that American military activities really do support our western privileges such as those are, and (c) the stupefying effects of this new censorship. It's obvious that the leaders are liars (if not indeed criminals) and that government is really run by and for the benefit of wealthy corporate and political elites. The remarkable thing is that this new "censoring" works through the obscenity of absolute openness e.g. Iraq-gate wasn't a secret. The real secret is that it wasn't a secret, and certainly wasn't a scandal. It was business as usual.
It's all a part of the daily routine. The media make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our "entertainment" and because we suspect in some dim way that even though bad, it is working in our interests in the long run. In fact we have in the main bought into a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped as a sellable commodity!
And the truth-function of say Noam Chomsky's critical work is neutralised because there are people who will participate in actions leading to death and worse all over the world and then tell you about it.... in great detail. In a sense everything is now known and its revelation is grotesquely vivid.
By any traditional standard the "West" is corrupt because it refuses to be responsible before ethical facts it knows perfectly well. Perhaps truth without consequences is a good working definition of corruption. But the "excuse" for this derives from the "necessary evil" argument which declares that any state, even an imperialist one with no plausible claim to innocence, has the right and obligation to defend its citizens. And therefore it's regarded as a good thing to live in scary Leviathan, as Thomas Hobbes conceived it....Leviathan protects you from other Leviathans.
Total war was about logistics, not battlefield tactics. The American Civil War manufactured total war, and the two world wars fulfilled it. It was industrial capacity and transportation, not brilliant military tactics, that allowed the North to win.
Beyond total war is pure war where the state is on an implied war footing even in times of peace e.g. the "war against terror" (the task that never ends). Technology, the media, industrial production, the economy, and politics are now first and foremost about a war so diffuse and ubiquitous that few people even recognise it for what it is. This of course means that we are now asked to believe we are still citizens of the 19th century and that the campaigns against Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were/are purely tactical. But what this really amounts to is a description of a poverty of imagination with the most dire consequences, because it commits us to continue on a course that all but ensures that there will be future terrorist tragedies on our own ground.
Another example - the head of Mitsubishi had no idea how to change its practices (e.g. to disavow its program of global destruction for short-term profit) because the logic that drove the company was both systemic and autonomous. This system at which even CEOs must look with apocalyptic horror is part of the ecology of pure war and is not available for political discussion, let alone democratic debate. In short it is not responsive to the will or the interests of the human beings living within it.
In the end, unconsciousness is the aim of pure war. Marx argued in the Grundrisse that one of the most conspicuous products of capitalism is stupidity. More accurately perhaps this might be regarded as an unconscious state of mind (rather than a stupid one) in that Americans (representative of the most advanced form of capitalism today) are not speaking to their culture, but rather being spoken to by it - a curious sort of unconsciousness which functions in the context of a lurid revelation of all, the brutal exposure of everything. The better way of thinking of it might be the unconsciousness of the pure and passive spectator who sees all but takes responsibility for nothing. And the media too has become a function of the war effort, foreclosing on all deviant perspectives, constantly reaffirming the orthodox rubbish we think we already know.
We in the "West" are blithely irresponsive to, if not unaware of, the fact that our "lifestyle" has for the last half century or so been the equivalent of a state of war between ourselves and those folks who will provide for us cheap natural resources and more recently cheap consumer goods, or pay the price. This is emphatically true of people in the Middle East, who have been told essentially they will suffer the injustice and indignity of a military-client-state-of-last-resort (Israel) established in their midst by Western fiat. And that they will suffer and live in poverty in spite of the opulence of their rulers, who will rule at least in part because we guarantee them. And they are told they will give us cheap oil so that our big companies can continue to profit, we can drive any sort of steel nightmare we like, and our metropolitan areas can be organised around the great suburban principle of "get in your car or stay home".
These attitudes of course are not that far removed from those cited to uphold "freedom" and "democratic" values in the not-too-distant past. Here's that much admired (in the West) statesman of yesteryear Churchill on the rights of Palestinians (and by implication those of all "outsiders") - "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the red indian of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place".
Nowadays the military class is turning into an internal super-police. In the strategy of deterrence, military institutions no longer fighting among themselves, tend to fight only civilian societies (apart from a few skirmishes in the Third World). And this of course "facilitates" another critical aspect of our perpetual war-readiness....the idea that our patriotic citizens are themselves enduring victims of "endo-colonisation". We have internalised the military and its imperatives....we police ourselves....the vitality of the human world has been conquered by the internalisation of technology as an extension of the military. Movement is now a handicap. A man in a car piloted by a driver is motor-handicapped. A man watching the "live" soccer on TV is seeing-handicapped. The prostheses of automotive-audio-visual movement create a subliminal (beyond consciousness) comfort, allowing a kind of visual and physical hallucination which tends to strip us of our consciousness e.g. the "I run for you" of automobile technology or an "I see for you" creation.
These technological prostheses are at the heart of what our involvement in the Middle East is really about. One could put the perverse truth of the matter in these crude terms - we must make war to ensure the continuation of a social and economic system that dehumanises people by making them dependent upon machines.
In order to have a moral and peaceful relationship with the rest of the world, especially the Third World, we'd have to radically reimagine urban and suburban space so that it is not all about
accommodating the automobile. We'd also need to accept less prosperity in the form of discretionary income to purchase consumer items so that more of the wealth generated by the work of people in the Third World would stay there. We'd need to radically reduce our dependence on our cars, and for the US to stop thinking of itself as the one great military and nuclear exception in world relations. And finally we'd all need to do the work of wresting political authority over our own societies and culture from corporations, the military and their international allies. If these are not things we are willing to accept....if we like the life that corporate culture, international capital and the military class provide for us....we must be willing to accept as the price for these privileges the understanding that a significant percentage of the rest of the world will see us as something satanic and/or imperialist who derive for ourselves the periodic obligation of dropping bombs, killing a few civilians in the process, and "accidently" destroying the occasional pharmaceutical lab in poor far-away places, thereby obliging our political leaders to behave like state terrorists.
Although largely an "unconscious" one (i.e. not accessible to responsible ethical reason), our communal decision in the West to date in this regard has been clear....we accept the premise of pure war. We understand that the maintenance of our privilege is dependent on others' misery, and we're willing to suffer the occasional terrorist attack and consequent military policing to maintain it. And we're also willing that in the name of homeland security a dominant part of civilian life be war in the form of an eternal declaration of our willingness to make war. It's in this sense that we are already "citizen soldiers". The success of the techno-military is in the fact that people don't recognise their own militarisation. Our commitment to technological rationality as "progress" is in reality a commitment to the techno-military as fate.
Given the habits of mind required in order to live in accord with my car, my television and my computer, it appears necessary that we live a life substantially mediated by technology of one sort or another, and such is to live in a world that has no endurance, that is always "disappearing". The images on tv do not linger - they disappear. The world outside your car window does not linger - it vanishes. It is the opposite of what the Buddhists call "meditative equipoise". One does not live in the moment - one is always being slung into a constantly accelerating future. We must think that faster is better, just as every military general since time immemorial has thought. Velocity is the common term between daily life and the logic of military need. At the centre of our society now is an absolute weapon.
It is not fanciful to regard modern terrorism's deterritorialisation as a negative reflection of our own economic and political tendencies e.g. the European and North American Unions engaged in making nation states irrelevant and antique. As part of the same "progress" agenda it's revealing that though planes might deliberately target buildings the idea that we should shy away from jets because they have always had a tendency to plunge to the ground in a statistically predictable manner has not been depicted by the media as at all reasonable. On the contrary such accidents have been managed in the media through expressions of faith in the calculations of actuarial science and cost/benefit analyses, and by faith in the new ideology of technical progress. It also seems obvious that the "cure" for the "epidemic" of automated deaths is to design communities so that people are not obliged to get in cars and drive in maniacal conditions in order to live. But this bucks the current wisdom where we are told in the interests of "helping your country" to bury our silly fears and to fly or drive somewhere and go shopping. Somewhat alarmingly this pure war, understood as the techno-militarisation of the human world, is an ongoing enterprise in many ways being actively pushed toward where it may have been headed all along....techno-military apocalypse.
The "everyday" fear factor:
The pressure today is to dismantle the habits of permanent, round-the-clock, steady and regular work. Labour can conceivably become truly "flexible" (i) only if present and prospective employees lose their trained habits of day-in-day-out work, daily shifts, a permanent workplace and steady workmates' company, (ii) only if they do not become habituated to any job, (iii) only if they abstain from (or are prevented from) developing vocational attitudes to any job currently performed, and (iv) give up the morbid inclination to fantisise about job-ownership rights and responsibilities.
At their annual meeting of September 1997 in Hong Kong, the managers of the IMF and World Bank severely criticised German and French methods to get more people back to work. They saw such efforts as going against the grain of "flexibility of the labour market". What the latter requires, they said, is the revocation of "too-favourable" job-and-wages-protecting laws, the dismantling of all "distortions" which stand in the way of unalloyed competitiveness, and breaking the resistance of existing labour to the withdrawal of their acquired "privileges" - i.e. of everything concerned with the stability of their employment and the protection of their jobs and incomes. In this view Labour must unlearn its hard-trained dedication to work and its hard-won emotional attachment to the workplace as well as the personal involvement in its wellbeing.
What the inmates of a prison do inside their solitary cells increasingly no longer matters. What does matter now is that they stay there. The mark of the excluded in the era of time/space compression is immobility. If the concentration camps served as laboratories of a totalitarian society where the limits of human submission and serfdom were explored, and if the workhouses served as the laboratories of industrial society where the limits of routinisation of human action were experimented with - the prison now is a laboratory of the "globalised" society where the techniques of space-confinement of the rejects and the "waste" of globalisation are tested and their limits explored.
It's debatable whether Sigmund Freud was right or wrong in suggesting that the trading-off of a
consideranble part of personal liberty for some measure of collectively guaranteed security was the main cause of psychical afflictions and sufferings in the "classic" period of modern civilisation. Today, however, in the late or postmodern stage of modernity it is the opposite tendency (i.e. the inclination to trade off a lot of security in exchange for removing more and more constraints cramping the exercise of free choice) which may generate the widespread sentiments of fear and anxiety. It is these sentiments which seek their outlet (or are being channelled) in the concerns with law and order.
To comprehend fully this remarkable "transfer of anxiety" one needs to reunite what the language, in its sometimes excessive zeal to divide and circumscribe, has separated.
The German word sicherheit grasps all three experiences of safety, security and certainty thus refusing to accept their mutual autonomy, which English speakers are linguistically trained to take for granted. Sicherheit is the prime victim of the late-modern career of individual freedom. And since we would hardly be able to tell apart the three kinds of unease were it not for the three words that suggest three semantic objects, there is little wonder that the dearth of risk-free (i.e. secure) choices and the growing lack of clarity of the game-rules which renders uncertain most of the moves and even more the outcomes of the moves, tend to rebound as perceptions of threats to safety - first to the body, and then to property (the body-space extension). In an ever more uncertain and insecure world the withdrawal into the safe haven of territoriality is an intense temptation, and so the defence of the territory - the "safe home" - becomes the pass-key to all doors which we feel must be locked to stave off the triple threat to spiritual and material comfort.
A lot of tension accumulates around the quest for safety. And where there is a tension, political capital will surely be spotted by bright investors and expedient stock-brokers. Appeals to safety- related fears are both supra-class and cross-party, as are the fears themselves. It is perhaps a happy coincidence for political operators and hopefuls that the genuine problems of insecurity and uncertainty have condensed into the anxiety about safety - politicians can be supposed to be doing something about the first two just because they're being seen to be vociferous and vigorous about the third.
Governments though cannot now seriously promise anything but more "flexibility of labour" - i.e. in the ultimate account, ever more painful and incapacitating insecurity. Neither can they promise certainty because it is almost universally a foregone conclusion these days that they must concede freedom to notoriously erratic and unpredictable "market forces" which having won their exterritoriality, are far beyond the reach of anything the hopelessly "local" governments can do. However, doing something (or being seen to be doing something) about fighting crime threatening personal safety is a realistic option for them, and one containing a lot of electoral potential. Sicherheit will gain little as a result, but the ranks of voters swell.
If one judged (as most of us do whether or not we are ready to admit it to others and to ourselves) the state of society after its dramatised representations by well-aware producers and script-writers, not only would the proportion of criminals to "ordinary folk" appear to far exceed the proportion of the population already kept in jail, and not only would the world as a whole seem to be divided primarily into criminals and the guardians of order, but the whole of human life would seem to navigate the narrow gorge between the threat of physical assault and fighting back the potential attackers. The overall effect is the self-propelling of fear. The preoccupation with personal safety, inflated and overloaded with meaning beyond its capacity due to the tributaries of existential insecurity and psychological uncertainty, towers yet higher over all other articualted fears, casting all other reasons for anxiety into deep shade.
No one would accuse governments of remaining idle and doing nothing of relevance to human anxieties when watching daily documentaries, dramas, docudramas and carefully staged dramas disguised as documentaries, which tell the story of new and improved police weapons, high-tech prison locks and burglar and car-theft alarms, short sharp shocks administered to the criminals, and valiant security officers and detectives risking their lives so that the rest of us may sleep in peace.
Building new prisons, writing up new statutes which multiply the number of breaches of the law punishable with imprisonment, and making the lengthening of sentences mandatory - all these measures increase the popularity of governments which are then perceived as tough, resourceful, determined and "doing something" about the personal safety of citizens (and by implication about their security and certainty as well) and doing it in a highly dramatic, tangible and visibly convincing fashion. Thus the spectacularity - the versatility, harshness and promptness - of punitive operations comes to matter more than their effectiveness, which is seldom tested anyway given the listlessness of public attention and the short life-span of public memory.
All of this helps to keep the public mind on the dangers rooted in crime and criminals, and prevents the public from reflecting on why they still feel unsure and lost and frightened, despite all that policing promised to bring the coveted sicherheit about.
To focus locally on the "safe environment" and everything it may genuinely or putatively entail, is exactly what the by now global and so exterritorial "market forces" want the nation-state governments to do (indeed effectively barring them from doing anything else). In the world of global finances with state governments allotted the role of little else than oversized police precincts, the quantity and quality of the policemen on the beat, sweeping the streets clean of beggars, pesterers and pilferers, and the tightness of the jail walls loom large among the factors of "investors' confidence", and so among the items calculated when the decisions to invest or de-invest are made.
Today's existence is stretched along the hierarchy of the global and the local, with global freedom of movement signalling social promotion, advancement and success, and immobility exuding the repugnant odour of defeat, failed life and being left behind. Increasingly, globality and locality acquire the character of contrary values (and paramount values at that), values most hotly coveted or resented and placed in the very centre of life dreams, nightmares and struggles. Life ambitions are more often than not expressed in terms of mobility, the free choice of place, travelling, seeing the world. Life fears, on the contrary, are talked about in terms of confinement, lack of change, being barred from places which others traverse easily, explore and enjoy. The "good life" is life on the move, or more precisely the comfort of being confident of the facility with which one can move in case staying on no longer satisfies. Freedom has come to mean above all freedom of choice, and choice has conspicuously acquired a spatial dimension.
In the era of time/space compression and with so many wonderful and untried sensations beckoning from afar, "home" (though as always attractive) tends to be enjoyed most in the bitter-sweet emotion of homesickness. In its solid, brick-and-mortar embodiment "home" breeds resentment and rebellion. If locked from outside, if getting out is a distant prospect or not a feasible prospect at all, the home turns into jail. Enforced immobility, the condition of being tied to a place and not allowed to move elsewhere, seems a most abominable, cruel and repulsive state. It is the prohibition of movement, rather than the frustration of a felt wish to move, which renders that condition especially offensive. Being prohibited from moving is a most potent symbol of impotence, incapacitation - and pain. Immobilisation is the fate which people haunted with the fear of their own immobilisation would naturally wish and demand to be visited upon those whom they fear and consider deserving of a harsh and cruel punishment.
In comparison other forms of deterrence and retribution seem woefully lenient, inadequate, ineffective and painless. Imprisonment means protracted (perhaps permanent) exclusion which meaning also strikes a highly sensitive chord. The slogan is to "make our streets safe again" and what else promises better to fulfil this slogan than the removal of the danger-carriers into spaces out of sight and out of touch, spaces they cannot escape.
The ambient insecurity focuses on the fear for personal safety that in turn sharpens further on the ambivalent, unpredictable figure of the stranger. Stranger in the street, prowler around the home, burglar alarms, the watched and patrolled neighbourhood, the guarded condominium gates - they all serve the same purpose i.e. keeping the strangers away. Prison is but the most radical among many measures - different from the rest in the assumed degree of effectiveness but not in kind. People brought up in the culture of burlar alarms and anti-theft devices tend to be the natural enthusiasts of prison sentences.
It all ties together very nicely with logic being restored to the chaos of existence. In truth the intentions of the lawgivers are somewhat selective, concerned with the preservation of a certain specific kind of order. The actions most likely to be committed by people that order has no room for (the underdog and the downtrodden) stand the best chance of appearing in the criminal code. Robbing whole nations of their resources is called "promotion of free trade", and robbing whole families and communities of their livelihood is called "downsizing" or just "rationalisation". Neither of the two is ever listed among criminal and punishable deeds.
Moreover, as every police unit dedicated to "serious crime" will have found out, illegal acts committed at the "top" are exceedingly difficult to disentangle from the dense network of daily "ordinary" company dealings. When it comes to activity which openly pursues personal gain at the expense of others, the borderline between moves that are allowed and disallowed is necessarily poorly defined and always contentious - nothing to compare with the comforting unambiguity of the act of safebreaking or forcing a lock. Poorly defined, crimes "at the top" are also awfully difficult to detect. They are perpetuated inside a close circle of people united by mutual complicity, loyalty to the organisation and esprit de corps, people who usually take effective measures to detect, silence or eliminate potential whistle-blowers. Such crimes have "no body", no physical substance. They "exist" in the ethereal, imaginary space of pure abstraction, they are literally invisible - it takes an imagination on a par with that of the perpetrators to spy out a substance in the elusive form. And as far as crimes "at the top" are concerned the vigilance of the public is at best erratic and sporadic, at worst non-existent. It takes a truly spectacular fraud, a fraud with a "human touch" where the victims (e.g. pensioners or small savers) can be personally named (and even then it takes in addition all the imaginative and persuasive gifts of a small army of popular press journalists), to arouse public attention and keep it aroused for longer than a day or two. What is going on during the trials of high-level fraudsters defies the intellectual abilities of ordinary newspaper readers, not to mention being abominably short of the drama which makes the trials of simple thieves and murderers such a fascinating spectacle.
Most importantly though, crime "at the top" (usually an extraterritorial "top") may be in the last account a principal or contributing cause of existential insecurity, and so directly relevant to that vexing anxiety which haunts the deinizens of late-modern society and makes them so obsessed with personal safety. But....by no stretch of imagination can it be conceived of as itself a threat to that safety.
And then there is that tremenduous advantage the new global elite enjoys when facing the guardians of order - orders are local, while the elite and the free market laws it obeys are translocal. If the wardens of a local order get too obtrusive and obnoxious, there is always the possibility of appealing to the global laws to change the local concepts of order and the local rules of the game. And of course there is the possibility of moving away if things locally get too hot for comfort. The "globality" of the elite means mobility, and mobility means the ability to escape and evade.
All these factors taken together converge on a common effect - the identification of crime with the (always local) "underclass" or, which amounts to much the same, the criminalisation of poverty.
The Antidote:
What's now urgently needed to confront all this madness is a principles-based pacifism that returns us to our identity as mortal beings e.g. where death and destruction would stimulate a turning away from the superficial happiness of consumption and on an ongoing basis make us much more aware of the frailty and vulnerability of all humanity. To socialise the imagination in the way we have socialised fear would be to take up not only creativity but also compassion. There is no such thing as a fascist, repressive, or even a dominating imagination. That's a contradiction in terms. A fascist imagination could only be one seeking the death of imagination. Repression is the social imagination committing suicide. The imagination's only true concept is freedom - the freedom for humans to create their own world. The mutual recognition that this is what we should all be free to do requires compassion for what others need in their turn. A socialised imagination requires justice.
In the capitalist system change is necessary in order for enterpises and the system itself to survive, and this it has certainly done time and time again without ever losing sight of its fundamental logic of profit and privilege. We need to learn from capitalism that change is very real. It would be best that an independent social imagination learned to think change on its own, proactively, before the complete collapse of the currently dominant social and political violence, militarism and corporate logic.
In today's repressive cultural climate we are free to say what we like, as long as what we say doesn't matter. Perhaps all the idea of incorporating the work of the imagination into the social sphere means is that we need to try to say something so that it matters. This is no simple undertaking in a political state that is both diffuse and highly controlled. We will know we have succeeded in saying something that matters when we are told that it won't be tolerated i.e. when we have succeeded in reviving the social imagination, we will know by the reaction of those who have most to fear from it.
Of course those attempting to create an alternative social imagination will fail in the short run but they will experience the imagination's state of grace in the process. They will feel very much alive. The feeling of being alive where others are "dead" may the imagination's only and best wine. You could even say that the only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose until one day, somebody who believes as you do wins.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
November, 2013.