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The Argentinian-American writer Ariel Dorfman recently asked, “Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?” If the statements and memos issuing from the current administration are taken simply at face-value, the answer is “yes.” But what further costs are exacted in the pursuit of security by such means? Dorfman’s question, and its consequences, are explored in this issue of PROK on “Securities”: what are the tradeoffs-monetary, psychological, and social-being made in order to obtain security today? What counts, and what doesn’t, as a threat? Is American democracy being decisively reshaped?

What is security? What is this elusive object-always shadowed by its opposite, insecurity and fear-toward which the American government (as all governments) devotes so much of its administrative and military machinery? One of the many disturbing and discomfiting pictures to emerge from the recent Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon was of an empty swimming pool under a cloud of smoke, smoke from burning oil depots and infrastructure. That swimming pool seems to stand for a certain promise of “normal” life, quotidian pursuits; in short, happiness, which might be one meaning of security in modern times, explored in this issue by Daniel Kahneman (Innovations).

How is security secured? We in fact desire a certain kind of security, but whether or not Americans-both the government and general population-are pursuing it in any rational manner is open to question. On the one hand, the United States has a new massive state bureaucracy devoted to the protection of “Homeland Security”-narrowly construed as defending our borders, policing our populations, and protecting our transportation infrastructure, as discussed in this issue by Stanley Corngold, Zia Mian, Robert Kaster (Forum). On the other hand, Americans seem themselves to lack the political will to take collective action to protect personal and financial security, much less the security of our ecosystem. The “American Way” of promoting personal (financial and emotional) security through “gated communities,” private charity, and private insurance, especially for health, has obtained a new ideological dominance. Personal security has been redefined in uniquely narrow, non-social terms, and now each of us can only ask that the government protect us from violent death. For our other insecurities, we must turn to markets, or to private solutions. And when violent death does irrupt in cities, citizens employ new communication technologies like textmessaging in the absence of reliable civil defence-an experience Gyan Prakash had when bombs exploded on the commuter railways in Mumbai this past summer (this issue, Accidental Knowledge in Comptes Rendus).

The present state of American security seems quite precarious-ecologically unsustainable, socially irresponsible, weakened by insistent denial. Refusing to lead or even join the worldwide attempts to limit emission of the fossil fuels that contribute to global warming, instead the U.S. spends its considerable resources and prestige fighting a “global war on terror” and pursuing a global mission to replace tyranny with democracy-beginning with Iraq! Partly this is done to secure access to oil fields, partly as part of an effort to sustain control over our own democratic machinery (including access to the vote). But that war and mission have only increased American insecurity, not to speak of deferring a reckoning with its dependence on foreign oil, and abdicating the assumption of leadership, which presently only the United States could provide, necessary to mediate a solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict in Palestine. Meanwhile, on the homefront, the effects of Hurricane Katrina, a foreseen natural disaster, were exacerbated by a history of under-investment in critical flood-control infrastructure and compounded by corrupt and inefficient recovery efforts, leaving some 1,900 people dead in New Orleans alone, and as many as a million people displaced. Ill-prepared attempts to combat insecurity seem instead to compound it. Unable to confront squarely our knowledge of these insecurities, the American government as well as many institutions in the civilian domain instead have turned to the production of fear, which then becomes the dominant means to legitimate their work of promoting self-help strategies, ostensibly to produce security. Stock up on duct tape; save for a rainy day; beware of your neighbor; be vigilant on aircraft; patrol your borders. And, as anthropologists might predict, the production of fear is paralleled by new forms of magic-promulgating taboos and prohibitions, proposing technical fixes to social problems, extending military conflict to outer space, all major elements in the emotional economy of contemporary security.

Torture, its uses and permissability, has emerged as a lynch-pin around which discussions of security revolve; this is characteristic of the present character of insecurity-debates emerge around hypotheticals and limit-cases, seldom the terrain on which policy should be shaped. In this issue, constitutional scholar Kim Lane Scheppele writes on the torture memos, and discusses with authority and insight the lack of empirical basis to hypothetical arguments for torture, and the immeasurable impact the legal justifications of torture are having on the shape of American government (Innovations).

Thus, our main question: Given the pervasiveness of fear, the infinite means by which it can be nurtured, and the elusiveness of security, is there a new proliferation of the selling and buying of securities? What are these promised securities, and are any of them likely to make the world more secure?

AND MORE:

On the international parameters of these new insecurities, see former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (Interview). On the retranslation of Dante’s Divine Comeday, see Robert Hollander (Translations in Comptes Rendus).

On the security of Biblical interpretation after the discover of the Gospel of Judas, see Philippa Townsend, Eduard Iricinschi, and Lance Jenott (Comptes Rendus) On the apocalypse, security blankets, and teaching as a threat to order, see Cass Sunstein, Gayle Salamon, and Daniel Garber (4Q+4A).