Reflection 10

I normally don't care about getting in the last word, but on Friday I was hoping I could conclude the discussion. I wanted to bridge last week's topic -- insecurity -- to next week's topic -- prosperity -- by proposing a simple hypothesis: at a national level, security is inversely related to prosperity. The more prosperous we become, the less securer we are as a nation. 

At an individual level, the relationship between security is fairly strong but direct. The more resources an individual has -- in other words, the more prosperous he or she is -- the more likely it is that the individual will be able to satisfy the conditions of survival regardless of external circumstances. If I have ten loaves of bread, it is less likely that mold, rats, or robbery will leave me without enough food to survive; furthermore, I am less susceptible to externalities because I can feed the fire department or trade my bread for water. It does seem logical that, because personal security and personal prosperity are related in a particular manner, that the relationship will apply in the same manner on a larger scale. But if we recognize that a nation or state is constituted by a particular arrangement of social relations, not merely a collection of isolated individuals, the logic does not necessarily apply; states and people are not analogous. An increase in productive capacity creates a surplus of resources which are exchanged rather than directly and immediately consumed, thereby creating more flexible and dynamic social interactions and power relations. The security of crystallized relationships that constitute an institution are eroded by exchange and interaction.

It is a common axiom that technological advancement has created all kinds of new and horrific methods of destruction -- automatic firearms, land mines, nuclear weapons -- that have elevated the scale of war. This may be true, but it is incidental. The casualties and fatalities that result from the application of destructive technology, John Mueller notes, are ultimately marginal; they do not approach such a scale that the security of the state is threatened by the insecurity of individuals.

Bovice has criticized Mueller’s thesis as shortsighted because it treats national security as the sum of constituent individual securities. Mueller recognizes terrorism only as a threat to the security of the person, articulated through the destructive technologies of guns, bombs, and airplanes; he does not consider the threat to the security of the social order, articulated through constructive production and communications technologies. The modern institutions of the market and the media amplify the level of social interaction – which is critical in efficiently distributing resources and realizing prosperity – but the amplification leads to a feedback effect. Large but diffused threats to the individual security – disease, for instance – are muted and cancelled out by means of the sheer number of interactions that take place in the contemporary world. Relatively small but concentrated threats – terrorism, in Mueller’s view – reach a certain critical threshold and begin to color the overall social discourse. While tragic, the actual 9/11 attacks influenced a small proportion of American society – however, they influenced a small proportion of American society in a sudden, unexpected, and immediate way. The flaming, smoking towers of the World Trade Center were no longer located in New York, but on virtually every TV network and newspaper across the planet. It could very much be seen like an epidemic plague, leaping from person to person in the confines of the crowded metropolis until reaching the point of saturation.