I have been thinking principally about the various kinds of security we all want and the various kinds of insecurity we face. Upon reflection, these turn out to be much broader than the way the concepts of security and insecurity are usually understood.
When we think of security in all its senses, it seems to me that the importance of global justice for security simply cannot be stated too. And secondly, it seems to me that public goods are essential for justice and hence for security—both here in the United States and around the world.
But first let us consider how security is commonly understood.
As it is usually talked about these days, as in “Office of Homeland Security,” “our national security,” “the conflict between civil liberties and security considerations,” “security was tightened,” or, more mundanely, “security guards,” the threats to our security are always intentional threats to our safety and well being, which of course means they are threats by people, whether individuals, groups, or nations.
Not so long ago, Communists were said to pose the biggest threat, now it is “terrorists” and “rogue nations.”
Security is a major growth business here and in many other parts of the world and an increasingly ‘high tech’ one. While we used to worry about intentional threats only from criminals, now our daily lives have been transformed by far more serious security concerns. More and more people have to carry, even to wear ID cards, big concrete blocks line the sidewalks of many of our streets and our access to countless public buildings is tightly controlled by phalanxes of security guards and video monitors. But most people pay little attention; the possibility of terrorist attacks has been normalized.
Intentional Threats
Generally speaking, most Americans’ concern about security today that is posed in terms of the word “security” is about intentional threats by people. We pay much less attention to threats to our safety and well being that are from nature rather than people, or are only indirectly from people, as unintentional consequences of human action. Though we read all the time about the dangers of global warming—a threat from nature that is an unintended result of human action—that is not what is usually intended by a “security” threat and it does not grip our imagination and fears in any way proportional to its severity. Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said, “I’m more worried about global warming than about war.” But even for those of us who share his assessment of the severity of the threat of global warming, I think that such threats do not grip our imagination and fear in any way proportional to their seriousness.