Ian Loader On The Pathologies of Modern Security
In Civilising Society, Ian Loader not only describes what we can call the ‘good of security’, but also highlights four pathologies of modern security that prevent it from realising the virtue of public good.
These pathologies take the security responses further away from the virtues of the state tradition:
‘It is security understood and configured not as a form of perpetual striving, but as a state of well being — a state in which we are able to live — and live together — securely with risk.’
The first of these pathologies is Paternalism. This pathology involves overreliance on the professional expertise of police officers, bureaucrats, and intelligence agencies in determining decisions concerning security:
‘It is thus a position which privileges not popular sovereignty — whether in the form of unmediated (or, rather, mass mediated) public demands or the will of elected political actors — but that of detached, relatively autonomous and apparently impartial bureaucratic expertise.’
He argues that after 9/11 attacks, rising popular demand for stringent security measures to address the magnifying threat overemphasised reliance on the technical expertise of police and intelligence agencies. He argues:
‘Here, we should remind ourselves of how acting paternalistically in the security interests of others may nonetheless be to meddle illegitimately and without proper cause with individual rights and interests.We should note that professional security interests may not necessarily equate with the public good but act, rather, as a mask for the pursuit of factional inter- ests. We should remain alive to the propensity of police actors to seek to impose cultural uniformity whether in the name of formal bureaucratic equality or professionally constituted security imperatives.’
The second pathology that Loader identifies is consumerism — when the state takes a decision on policing and punishment on the basis of popular desires on order. The citizens then are seen as consumers of security who demand a particular style of policing and security. As security decisions are subjected to populism, governments refrain from participating in rehabilitative discourse such as reducing incarceration, promoting restorative justice, as they are ‘hard to sell’ to hostile consumers.
Loader goes on to identify certain problems with the growing trend of liberal democracies to see electorate as choice-conscious consumer-citizens:
First, it misconstrues every public decision as benign or beneficial; they can be motivated by emotions or situated in narratives about the trajectory of one’s personal biography.
Second, the unrealistic assessment that public desires of security can be attained.
Third, the majoritarian view doesn’t really reflect the concerns of those who are routinely targeted by the police. He says:
‘In their efforts to remodel the state along market lines, and to subject it to competitive pressures, proponents of the new consumerism have tended to neglect the vices that flow from the state’s capacity to act as meddling, or partisan, or intolerant, or idiotic — bully… how disadvantaged groups are policed, have somehow been settled, or ceased to matter.’
Fourth, it misconstrues the contribution of police to citizen security in a democracy, of how shallow but widely spread policing is.
It is in this context that ‘Authoritarianism’ is identified as the fourth pathology. Loader talks about an ‘insecurity vicious cycle’ where the states keep on strengthening the clampdown on perceived insecurity without doing addressing as to what causes that insecurity in the first place. He says:
‘When security becomes pervasive it generally coincides with a sense of impatience and urgency; with calls for the unhindered, speedy hand, and visible display, of executive authority; with deepening levels of intolerance towards minority groups and practices; with evident frustration at, and calls for the curtailment of, basic rights and liberties.’
Loader argues that authoritarian approach towards security creates this democracy-liberty-eroding spiral where it becomes impossible to slow down the security measures and there’s a constant movement towards more policing, incarceration, and restrictions on liberty. Security politics, thus, is practised at the expense of other public goods such as liberty, rights, and democratic practices. He says:
‘Authoritarian spirals tend, in other words, to involve elements of relatively untutored lay anxiety, fantasy and cries for action and the mobilization, utilization and reinforcement of public sensibilities by political, professional and media actors for specific political ends.’
The last pathology identified by Loader is what he called Fragmentation. It refers to a situation where citizens, communities, and corporates define and manage their own security risks, giving only the residual regulatory power to the government.
The perils of how insecure individuals or communities choose to manage their own perception of risks lead to a scenario which Loader describes as:
‘The more widespread these practices become the less willing such individuals and groups are to support, fund and engage in dialogue about general forms of policing and security provision. This results in social fragmentation in so far as it erodes people’s sense of being participants in an ongoing collective project whose members are committed to putting and pursuing security in common, which, in turn, undermines the ‘architecture of sympathy’ through which this shared purpose takes practical shape.’
Complement this with Bernard Yack on Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism, and Jonathan Simon on Governing Through Crime.
