FEAR

FEAR

I “fear” that at the core of our fears is the fear that we have lost control of the variables by which we have traditionally understood politics/society/economics and culture in general. The pace of change and events has become incrementally faster with each passing month. In many ways the last 200 years of human society, when we grew from a population of about 1B to 6.6B has been unprecedented in human history. We are in the middle of a rapidly moving current and have no idea where it is going.

What are the driving forces of this current? Academics increasingly are discovering that the old methodological paradigms just don’t work. Politicians run for easy answers and quick fixes. “Wars” have been waged against tyrants, poverty, etc., so it was the most convenient political metaphor (never mind that we have not really “won” a war since 1945). Sooner or later we will learn that the issues we face are so much greater than can be fit into the old “box” of “war” language. There is no precedent or easy analogue for where we are. And that IS frightening. Perhaps we cannot control the future any longer.

We really need to take a good look at those factors that are truly different and thus perhaps driving this current. One major factor must be technology. In the past few decades the cost of creating, possessing and using technology for destructive purposes has dropped dramatically. Now a small group of individuals can inflict the kind of catastrophic damage to a society than previously was possible only by other nation states or natural disasters. So we live in a mode of perpetual fear that no national state can truly protect us anymore. So in a state of first shock we run to the easy solutions: religion, isolationism, patriotism, better technology, etc. We fear that the homeland can never really be secure again. We cannot “fix” it.

Finally, I fear most the driving force of technology itself. There seems to be inevitability about the fact that new technologies “demand” to be tested. The old adage that “we will use it if we have it” seems to be the rule. Thus new military technologies demand to be “real world” tested, and real battles are the final reality testing grounds. So it is with communications technology. If we have the capacity to monitor massive amounts of data transmissions, then we will do it. The constitution really does seem to be showing its age and 18^th century irrelevance. Are we any longer a “nation of law”? I fear we are not.

Merle