In Albert Camus’ The Fall, Jean-Baptiste Clamence describes tortures of the body and the soul. The enduring image is of “the little-ease”: A Medieval dungeon cell of such dimensions that one trapped there had no ability to stand upright or lay down comfortably. The experience is excruciating. In it, Camus finds a parallel for the absurdity and capriciousness of life. We can neither stand fully as independent selves nor lay down our individual perspective to be in the world. To be human is to experience a rich inner life, to feel an inarticulable sense of being a soul. But we know from observing the world the toll that entropy takes, that things die, decay, decompose. Someday you will die and somehow something’s going to steal your carbon. The facts of our lives and deaths put us all in a cramped hole in the ground, unable to find peace in an insecure world.
I am a person of little ease. I’ve rarely felt comfortable or safe or secure. Since I was little, I’ve been fearful and flighty. Aristotle posited that we feel afraid when we imagine some future violence or dread or catastrophe. I grew up in a world of color-coded terror warnings, where 24-hour cable news drummed up some nebulous threat that hovered vaguely over my formative teenage years. I’m anxious. I worry. I worry about climate change, about bear attacks, about geopolitics. I fret over disappearing honeybees and global surveillance states. I spend an inordinate amount of time imagining my actions in plane crashes or ninja attacks; two things I have never and will never experience. I worry perpetually about the lights going out, about when and how my experience of this universe will end. A quote that has always struck me as profound, though coming from a very silly place, is that one real day in the future you will die, and on that day, you will face either non-existence or something far stranger.
It's a scary world and a precarious existence, is what I’m saying here. I’m sorry you had to hear it from me. You may have suspected this or known this. Maybe life is what distracts us from death, and most of our time is spent trying to project security where there is none to be found. And maybe I’m just rubbing your face in it now. It would be fair of you to ask why.
A corollary to my fearful nature is that I do not want to be this way. Being scared of things sucks, and it is no way to live your life. As such, I’ve been working on this for a while, using whatever tools I can grasp: mental tricks, martial arts, meditation. And over time, I began to feel a little ease from the Little Ease. In fact, I became fascinated by security, personal and otherwise. Eventually this came to overlap with my career in cloud computing, and I found myself with a rewarding task: to become certified in Information Security.
And because I’m completely normal and not a crazy person, I did what anyone would do: found the best book I could on the philosophical notion of security, Frédéric Gros’ The Security Principle: From Serenity to Regulation. The work was staggering and difficult and dense, and I have had a lot of thoughts about the book and what it posited about security over time.
This is why I’ve gathered you here and reminded you about your one fragile existence. Let’s talk about security and what that means.
Four Theories of Security
The bulk of Gros’ work covers four notions of security and tracks them roughly across four different stages of the history and development of Western Philosophy:
1. Security as Serenity: The Psychological Tools of the Ancient World
2. Security as Absence of Danger: Christianity and the Promise of Utopia
3. Security as Social Contract: Secular States and Political Philosophy
4. Security as Flow: Preserving the Process (Can Never Stop The Signal)
It is important to note that no one theory is mutually exclusive to others; they overlap, compete, exist in harmony and in tension with one another. They can all be applied broadly, but each consists of a different dimension. Broadly speaking, I would relate them to the following:
1. Security as a subjective state of mind.
2. Security as an objective state of being.
3. Security as a social/political agreement.
4. Security as a knowledge technology.
I will summarize to the best of my ability these security frameworks before moving to a broader discussion of security.
Security as Serenity
The first notion of security is the oldest, truest line of defense against a chaotic world: a serene mind steeled by philosophical and psychological training. It is the domain of the Ancients. There were many competing schools of philosophy, and each school had different routes but they all shared a destination – a mind free from external troubles. This frequently includes a great deal of training and re-framing of the normal experience of life. Serenity is not a natural state of mind. Seneca is quoted, “securitas autem proprium bonum sapientis est” – “Security is the peculiar blessing of the wise.”
The Ancients existed in a precarious and capricious world[1]. There was war and famine and plague and pestilence. I’d say things were biblical, but they were pre-biblical. As such, to survive and to thrive, they created mental strategies to steel themselves against an indifferent reality.
The most famous of these toolkits is the Stoics. They held that, “Admist the generalized insecurity of the world, it was necessary to maintain an absolute inner security.” (Gros, 9) The famous rule was to determine what was or was not in one’s control, and vehemently focusing on what one can. It was a means of focusing judgements, emotions, and actions towards the appropriate ends.
Another frequent practice included ‘the premeditation of evils’ – a mental review of the worst-case scenarios. Premeditation of Evils is when you hold your child close and know that someday he will die. He was only given as a gift and will someday be taken back. On that day, the Stoic says, “he was not taken, but returned.”
Perhaps my favorite of the Stoic tools was to take what I call ‘the cosmic perspective.’ As Gros puts it, this is,
“…to adopt the perspective of death within life itself. This allows us to watch over the world from above, to observe ourselves with death’s eyes, absolutely serenely and clearly, and from this spectacle to obtain a definitive serenity. What we here call ‘the perspective of death’ is achieved by learning the sciences of the immense and the infinite…Here, we need to make use of the cosmic sciences, of the knowledge of infinite spaces and the eternities between the stars. Once we have studied these sciences at length, learned about the formation of the oceans and the mountains, grasped the genesis of the universe, studied the eternal dance of the stars, we will then have penetrated into an inhuman time: that of the ageless cycle of suns and astral revolutions beyond any memory. To experience this time is to feel one’s own existence as a floating grain of dust that will soon disappear, and the history of mankind as the blink of an eye.” (Gros, 23, emphasis added)
Through these practices of extreme ownership, presumption of ills, and cosmic perspective taking, Stoics were able to craft a mental space that was serene and secure, even in tumultuous times. This peace of mind is a security of its own, the first, most Ancient security humans ever found.[2]
Security as the Absence of Dangers
This was a fascinating section of the book, because it was at once the simplest notion in the book and also the one that is most alien to me. I can’t put it more succinctly than the title section: one notion of security is an objective state where there are no dangers. Earlier, we talked about how fear is a function of danger. If there are no dangers, there are no fears, and one is secure. Simple enough, right? But, without signposting and giving too much away, it seems outlandish, impossible to imagine a world without dangers.
Gros perhaps agrees. In his intro to the chapter, he states,
“This is security as an objective situation characterized by the absence of dangers, the definitive wiping-away of the perils one might face. This is not, then, serenity of the soul, or even as the establishment of an active protection against dangers or a technique for preventing an anticipating risk, but rather the disappearance of any kind of nature. This radical sense of security bears the traits of a utopia, a myth: the projection of an absolutely harmonious state of humanity in which all violence, all aggression, all hatred has disappeared. A world without suffering or unhappiness, a cloudless world of joy. A perfect world.” (Gros, 39)
Pie in the sky stuff, right?
Enter Christianity.
As mentioned earlier, Gros’ work tracks the general history of philosophy in the West, and this chapter of his work covers the Christianity-infused Middle Ages and specifically the Millenarian traditions that predicted the end of history in a glorious golden age in the Kingdom of Christ.
This is the Biblical promise that the goats will walk with wolves and the swords will be beaten into ploughshares. “These images would be taken up and embroidered into millenarian beliefs, as the symbol of that definitive security that comes with the end of times in which all races, all species live in one vast concord…. They will provide us with a definitive protection…. In the Vulgate translation, what Isaiah heralded is securitas usque in sempiternum: an eternal security.” (Gros, 43).
So once Jesus returns and beats up Satan, we can all live in peace. It sounds ridiculous, even simplistic. But this section was oddly fascinating, including examinations of the Children’s Crusade and the Anabaptists at Münster[3]. People believed in this utopian vision fervently, and in chasing this belief, changed the world we live in.
This parallels another utopian project: perfect equality of Communism. Indeed, many of the millenarian theologies that Gros examines were primordial examples of Communism:
“The first state of Nature, in the theological sense, is not what preceded the social contract but what preceded original sin. In this state of earthly paradise, in this first state, there did not exist rich or poor, master or slaves, property-owners or villains. In the beginning, there was neither rivalry, violence, theft, or claims of ownership. There was a state of perfect security and equality. Everything in this state was absolutely common to all. There was security, equality, and a community of goods.” (Gros, 57)
In recreating these conditions, whether through millenarian or secular communism, the idea was that, “…security was to be established through equality and sharing… that security depended on sharing everything in common, without reservation. It was private property that introduced violence, rivalry, and trouble.” (Gros, 60).
Another example is the historical race to be the King of Christendom. This king would get to bring in this new glorious Kingdom of Christ, a single flock under a single pastor. Much of European geopolitics in the Middle Ages consisted of this type of politico-spiritual jockeying for position. Ultimately, the failures of this system unleashed the horrors of sectarian violence upon Europe and led to the Westphalian State and modern political theory. This is the theory of security that we will examine next.
Security as Social Contract
As mentioned, this book is a romp through Western Philosophy. Now we transition away from the dark ages, into the Renaissance and to modern political theory with the social contract method of security. This may be familiar to you from your Intro to Poli-Sci; it’s where you get your Lockes, your Russeaus, your Hobbeses, your Montesquieus.
“The third meaning of security (public, police, military, and collective security, and so on) constructs a close-knit synthesis between the state and security. What is at issue, here? Well, it means posing a perfect and total equivalence between the state and security, making the state the guarantor, the subject, and the object of security, making security the state’s primary objective, purpose and function.” (Gros, 73)
This is long enough, so I won’t recap Poli-Sci 101 for you; there’s a lot of well-trod ground here. What I found particularly illuminating was Gros’ exploration of state power following three primary archetypes of state power: The Judge, The Policeman, and The Soldier
The Judge
The Judge’s responsibility is to protect the rights of individual citizens. This is the promise of equal equality under the law. This is the Formal Principle of Justice:[4] That similar cases are treated similarly. The following paragraph is a fantastic summary of what took me many quarters of education in high-level legal and moral philosophy to learn:
“If the law is to become the instrument of security, it must have seven characteristics. Firstly, its content must be entirely determined by the common good and the public interest. Security demands that the law remains deaf to particular interest, partisan pressure and particular passions. Secondly, the law must also be general, for it is impossible for it to foresee every particular case – the exclusive quest for the common good prevents it from entering into the details of which particular interest should or should not be favoured. It is up to the judge to correct this general character of the law, by the criterion of ‘fairness’, adjusting the law to particular situations. Thirdly, the law must apply to all, without exception (and that is the criterion of universality). No one should be able to exempt them. Fourthly, it must be known to all and clearly stated. Each person should be able to consult and see them. This condition – its public character – furthermore entails a condition of clarity (the fifth). Since it should be understandable to all, it should not risk abstruseness or over-complication. It is a matter for everyone, not just for experts. To this end, it must also be concise (the sixth condition): any multiplication of laws is harmful to security. And, lastly, the law should remain stable. A constant storm of revision to the established laws will only bring confusion.” (Gros, 88-89)
The Judge is all about the relation between Citizen and State. It is the Social Contract and the Theory of Rights. It is a beautiful conception and framework that was hard-fought. It’s also assumed to be way things are in Western democracies[5]. To that purpose, philosophically speaking, this is the water we swim in. I won’t belabor the point further. Stated simply, one part of the State as a Guarantor of Security is the promises that it makes to citizens to protect their rights.
The Policeman
Once the framework of juridical justice is established and rights are defined, the State must actually protect its citizens. The mechanism for this is policing. Policing serves two main roles:
“the conservation of goods and persons (police as a public force that prevents and combats theft and crime); and the maintenance of public order against any attempt at destabilization (combatting subversive movements, revolutionary circles, and enemies of the state, but also imposing limits and controls on any demonstration or gathering that could represent a threat to the established government or the public calm).” (Gros, 111)
Gros distinguishes the second of these goals as ‘political police’. Indeed, a fascinating part of his book is an exploration of a “…radical type of this political police, when its task is not only to protect state institutions but to ensure the victory of a Movement that declares itself to be realizing a mission set by History itself: this is the totalitarian police… ‘secret police’.” (Gros, 112). My piece is running far too long already, and so I will skip over that subject with no further comment, other than that it is a fascinating exploration. If I have piqued your interest, “pique” up the book[6]. For our purposes, I want to focus on policing definitions one and two.
The first concept is of the police as guaranteeing security in person and property. Gros states that the key concept to this type of policing is surveillance: “To the simple formal guarantee of property (juridical security) the police add an effective protection of property realized through surveillance measures. From the first police regiments that walked through dark streets carrying torches to today’s night patrols, surveillance is a primary function of the police.” (Gros, 114)
What are they looking for?
“The threat comes from criminals, thieves, deviants – or rather, criminals as deviants…If we are all equal before the law, the norm itself draws dividing lines. And abnormality is soon established as the root of illegality. In other words, once the equality among citizens has been guaranteed as a juridical foundation, the police’s role (with the advent of social sciences in the nineteenth century such as criminology) is to draw the dividing lines of morality. To uncover criminals, identify suspects or uphold good mores (as in the case of the Brigade mondaine) the police call on a wide-ranging but profound body of knowledge to do with the normal and the abnormal, which assist it in their work of identification…The police rapidly construction a vision of what they judge to be abnormal behaviour (contrary to good mores, social conventions and usual behavior) as potentially criminal.” (Gros, 115)
While this is the policing that most of us experience - where police enforce norms through surveillance - Gros also considers a second dimension of policing, the preservation of public order:
“Here, ensuring security is a matter not of guaranteeing individual rights but of preserving the government against attempts at destabilization. What needs maintaining, conserving and saving is order itself. In the first instance, the idea of security as the state’s own safety plays out in the concept of the ‘state of exception’. The state of exception is justified by the safety of the public authorities alone. It is the concept of the primacy of police security over juridical security…” (Gros, 117)
This is where, in order to ‘preserve the system itself’, we make an exception. For example, you have rights to due process. But you find yourself involved in a World War or Two and maybe we get some Japanese internment camps.
“We take these concepts to mean the fact of the state, faced with particular conditions, no longer absolutely guaranteeing individuals’ fundamental rights and no longer taking account of public laws, the traditional separation of powers or the legitimacy of counter-powers. No longer does right rule through the force of the law; the police instead imposes its own ‘law’… As Carl Schmitt put it, he who decides the exception is sovereign. The sovereign state founds its own political character precisely at the point where it exceeds its juridical dimension.” (Gros, 118-119, emphasis added)
The state of exception is a key concept in political theory because it shows how state security takes primacy over the guarantees that the state makes to its citizens. On one hand, this is deeply disturbing, for it means we have no rights, only privileges. On the other hand, in certain sense, this is understandable, because the state cannot guarantee anyone’s rights unless it can ensure its existence. As such, the state employs a particular type of police, the political police. Whereas common police use conspicuous surveillance whose visibility is part of the point, political police use secret methods of intelligence gathering: “The state needs to provide itself with tools so that it can know what certain brains or dwellings may contain, what they are hiding. When the state’s security is in question, the barrier of private property no longer holds.” (Gros, 122)
We will see a similar realpolitik at play as we turn to examine the final figure in State Security, The Soldier.
The Soldier
As we saw with political policing, the State cannot act as a guarantor of any citizen’s rights to security unless it exists. As obvious as that seems, it introduces The Soldier as a primary and primordial state actor. The Soldier’s role is to protect and preserve the State from external threats. In this, we enter the realm of geopolitics and the relations of states to one another. Gros identifies several key concepts in this discussion of security at the intra-state level.
The first is the right to wage war: “Fundamentally, then, the state’s freedom lies in its ability to make its self-perpetuation dependent on its strength alone. This capacity translates into a right to war against whatever other political unity in a juridical neutrality detached from any moral consideration.” (Gros, 99). Traditionally, this right is used for maintaining territorial integrity, but States may also jockey for position and glory; “… for profit and glory can themselves be considered factors in the increase of a state’s security…The freedom of the state is the absolute freedom to decide what may threaten or bolster its security.” (Gros, 99).
This takes us to some of Gros’ other key concepts, which, to me seemed a bit redundant. He calls them ‘states interests’ and the ‘raison d’état.’
State or Princely Interests mean that “Each state must calculate, organize, manage and defend its own interests as best it can.” Gros quotes Henri de Rohan: ‘Princes command peoples and interests command Princes.’
The Raison d’état holds that since all states have the same reason for being and the same right to pursue its interests, there is a rough equality between states: “They are like pawns on a chessboard, each with an equal opportunity to make a move.” (Gros, 101)
This is the basic framework of the Rights of States and international relations. As you can see, this is not stable, but a fluid system that is always in motion. Gros observes that
“…this balance is not automatic. It is moving, dynamic and unstable. Each [state] feels hindered by the other and wants a more comfortable position. Each sees the other as doing better than itself, feels disappointed about its lot, and thinks that its own self-aggrandizement will contribute to overall harmony and general justice…The problem with the balance is that each claims to have the right measure of things and checks the general equilibrium with its own yardstick.” (Gros, 103)
Gros is tracking these developments roughly historically, and about this time we enter the Nuclear Age and the Cold War, which has been a unique time for international geopolitics. We here see notions of collective security, spheres of influence, and ideological alignments. In recent times, we have seen States move toward subterfuge and war by economic means rather than violence, which risks escalating into global war. It is in some sense an unprecedented state of affairs, and we are still finding our footing. The previous prevailing security theory may not be suited to our current age, as we will examine when we get to Gros’ fourth dimension of security, the emerging concept of security as a process, and particularly in what Gros calls ‘biosecurity.’
Security as Flow
Settle in, team, this one gets complicated. In fact, I set out on this journey because I wanted to engage with the ideas in this chapter, because they are the most relevant to security in a modern age. In the intro this chapter, Gros defines this type of security as,
“Whatever allows the normal functioning of some activity, or for a process to play out in the normal way… it designates the continuity of a process. This sense of security can concern material flows (of data or food, for instance) which must be secure in order to prevent sudden blockages or abrupt interruptions (energy, road, food security) or else concern a sorting, selection and filtering that forbids access to harmful elements (IT security, health security)” (Gros, 135)
When I think about this, I am reminded of the movie Serenity and Mr. Universe: “You can’t stop the signal, Mal. You can never stop the signal.”
This is also the part of the book most applicable to my original mission statement of better understanding Information Security. InfoSec is a series of processes and practices that are designed to provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information systems. Information Security, like other types of security, can be seen as a process. But ultimately, Gros is not that interested in Information Security – rather, he is interested in the security of another type of process – biological processes.
“Here, man will be seen as a living subject, a vital core, a biological individuality, a flow of life… the final principle of security inspired mechanisms, arrangements and techniques for securing the individual’s vital core. This securing of vital processes includes three dimensions, namely protection, control and regulation. These three concepts mark out the contours of what we will here call ‘biosecurity’… Here, we will give this term a specific meaning: the set of measures for protecting, controlling and regulating the individual considered in the light of her biological finiteness.” (Gros, 135-136)
What does all this mean? To simplify, it is a recognition that every life is:
1. Finite and Fragile
2. Unique
3. A Continuous Process
To put it another way, you are a set of biological processes – blood circulates, brains fire electrical signals. If your blood stops churning or your brain stops sparking, you will die. Your one, unique existence will cease. “Here, security means the protection of a fragile life…To live is to constantly restore a balance: the continual self-regulation of the living being.” (Gros, 137)
The Security of Processes concerns itself with three main verbs: protect, control, and regulate. “In general, wherever a flow (of life, but equally of images, information or merchandise) is protected, controlled and regulated, it determines a domain of security.” (Gros, 137)
Protection
Protection is easy enough: life is fragile, and we need to protect it. Gros offers three fundamental images of protection:
“the permeable organism, the fragile child, and vulnerable populations… The permeable organism poses the problem of what might degrade or alter it through contact… The delicate child needs protecting from hostile environments and reassuring in her learning experiences…Vulnerable populations, the victims of political, social and humanitarian crises, must be assisted, supported, aided.” (Gros, 138)
Taken as a whole, these add up to ‘the doctrine of human security.’ Quoting from the UN Human Development Report of 1994, ‘human security is a child who did not die, a disease which did not spread, a job that was not cut, an ethnic tension did not explode in violence, a dissident who was not silenced. Human security is not a concern with weapons – it is a concern with human life and dignity.’ As Mary Kaldor summarizes, “Human security consists of protecting individuals’ lives… these principles must simultaneously provide ‘freedom from fear’, which is the goal of all public security, and ‘freedom from want’, which is the goal of human development.” (Gros, 145-146)
“Freedom from want and fear. Want and fear are, indeed, the two fundamental passions of the living being. Human security addresses man’s most elementary biological substrate: it is necessary that he should eat and no longer tremble in fear, that his health is protected and his confidence upheld. Human security is, indeed, a biosecurity… The postulate of human security would be something like: we are all capable of feeling burning hunger, the exhaustion of indefinite wanderings (the problem for refugees), the suffering that goes with grief and the trauma of violence – they have an echo in our own flesh, and that is the reason why we feel akin to victims and a feeling of substantial universalism can arise. The reference to life, in its elementary dimension of suffering, is what produces meaning and can create a community. Not the political community of citizens, but a great feeling community of vulnerable subjects. On this basis, we can construct the difference between humanity and the humanitarian.” (Gros, 150-151)
Through a common understanding of the fragility of life, we can create a universal bond with our fellow humans, and build a global community based on the fact of shared vulnerability. With this humanitarianism at the center, by understanding life as a vital process, we can build a more secure and more just world.
Control
The modern world has brought about new technologies, and, in doing so, new mechanisms of control. Modern control is “continually following a process, a total traceability.” (Gros, 153) It does so by methods of identification, location, and information compilation.
The first step in securing something is to identify it - if we do not know what it is, how do we know how to treat it? Does it go in the vault, or do we throw it into a junk drawer in the kitchen? – and we live in a world increasingly good at identification.
“Life as a biological substrate, our body as physiological data, makes each of us identifiable…From anthropometry to biometry, from Bertillon in the nineteenth century at least, the means were developed to identify each person by way of their natural characteristics, their biological markers, without having to ask their name. Besides, the person being interrogated could always lie about their identity, tell false stories, and make up fictional genealogies for themselves. But the mute body does not lie. The dimensions of the body or the skull, digital fingerprints, DNA: the identity of each person is established by unique biological traits considered irreducible, unfalsifiable and unalterable.” (Gros, 152)
One example is a biometric or RFID passport used at a border for identification. Indeed, these types of biometrics are frequently used in security frameworks, such as fingerprint or iris scans. This identification comes with significant advantages: “The generalized scanning of humans and objects allows for certification to be certain and for movement to be made more fluid. It provides for an automatic recognition.” (Gros, 154) Identification allows for processes to proceed smoothly and efficiently, and modern security is all about the flow of processes.
Once we know who or what everything is, once identification is complete, the next technology of control is location. This aspect of our life is so pervasive as to need no comment; indeed, in this absurdly dense, detailed book, Gros spends only one paragraph on this subject. The satellites know where you are, and we’ve all known that the satellites know where we are.
By tying together identification and location, we come closer to the total traceability of something or someone through a process. The last piece in our technological, securitarian dystopia is comprehensive digital recordkeeping; the big data tools for information to be collated and compared. This “allows an answer to the question: who is doing, or has done, what?” (Gros, 154) In the modern world, everything we do is etched into digital stone. Our digital selves, our ‘data doubles’ operate similarly to how our unique biological fingerprints leave traces of our activity in a physical world:
“Whenever they require the use of modern technology, the vast share of the operations we carry out leave traces on the file… The files we are talking about here are more like records of the everyday, the ordinary, and are for the most part the property of private operators (transport firms and banks, to name but two). Yet the traces can be brought up again for anyone at any moment – and the justice system can itself lay hold of them. The existence of these files transforms each of us into ‘objective subjects’… We are ‘objective subjects’ because the memory of our acts and of our communications is conserved indefinitely and is accessible to judicial requests: it is set in stone, far from us, and could be revived at any future point.” (Gros, 155)
In this system of control, security “is no longer symbolized by closing something off, but by the ability to trace it. The important thing is no longer to put up borders, walls and fortresses, but to follow each person’s trajectory, to have access to a digital copy of their movements, words, and acts. Security is no longer made up of gates but of pixels, not of doors, but of immaterial files.” (Gros, 156-158).
Taken together, new technologies of identification, location, and big data collection/comparison lead to new means of control, which aren’t quite Big Brother surveillance, but are no less troubling:
“The modern forms of control are much more democratic, networked, participatory and privatized. It is anxiety-ridden parents, inquisitive husbands and unscrupulous employers who are buying digital trackers. It is informed consumers who are delighted to turn their phone cases into ‘readers’ to activated RFID chips. It is enlightened citizens who ease the way for the advance of biometrics in the bid to prevent identity fraud… Control is thus participatory, mutualized and even commodified.” (Gros, 159, emphasis added)
If you’re like me, you find this vaguely ominous, even if you can’t articulate fully why. Do we not want the convenience or the security that such technology can provide? This tension is a uniquely modern aspect of our technological world, and it seems here to stay: “…These automatic control systems reject, as too much a factor for insecurity: secrets, doubt, delay. To secure the world is to deliver it from the hesitations, the opaque, the doubts of conscience and of speech.” (Gros, 158)
Can’t stop the signal. You can only control it.
Regulation
When we think of regulation, we typically think of governmental actions. However what Gros means is more of a natural self-regulation of a system that tries to achieve equilibrium and homeostasis. Regulation “also designates the spontaneous production of a balance…. Regulation thus involves the notions of ‘flows,’ ‘circulation,’ ‘climate,’ and ‘balance.’” (Gros, 164-165)
Not to say that there are not government regulations, but rather that regulation is a particular type of power that is designed to deal with individual citizens, “but realities and natural phenomena…Here what we call reality could equally be called. A natural phenomenon. By this we mean a series of facts, of events, endowed with their own dynamic, which are simply to be given some kind of inflexion. Nothing is imposed upon them.” (Gros, 165)
One example provided is crime prevention; a state may desire increased crime rates, but this cannot be established by “…physical force, nor a code of prohibitions, nor behavioural norms.” (Gros,166) Rather,
“Regulation is the arrangement of an environment. For example, a penal regulation policy would consist of arranging the social environment in such a way as to make crime less profitable. This is not a matter of seeking. To get rid of crimes or offences through more or less harsh or pedagogical law or opposing criminal wills with a public will for social peace. Rather, the objective of a regulating penal security is to bring down the crime rate by arranging elements of reality that are suitable to bringing down the supply of crime. This means a bid to discourage crime as a tendency, rather than to block it outright. Regulation, as an instrument, is an evaluation of costs, an economic calculation (actuarial justice).” (Gros, 166)
Regulation in this sense, then, “finds a basis in the desires, in the natural movements of each person, and then inflects them in one sense of another – but they freely engage in the proposed activity through their own movement… Indeed, a system reaches perfection when each of its parts participates in maintaining it, rather than imposing itself on them.” (Gros, 167)
These environmental nudges can come from the government, surely, but also from other forces in our society. Indeed, markets and economic systems operate under similar incentive structures, rather than explicitly coercive force. Whether regulation by governmental or economic means, regulatory schemas have two characteristics: “The first characteristic of the regulable living world is its reactivity to its surroundings. The second is its capacity to make all its internal elements contribute in producing an equilibrium. This spontaneous contribution is precisely what makes it a ‘self-regulation’. (Gros, 167)
Again, this type of system is familiar to most of us from markets, which are held to be reactive systems that naturally seek an equilibrium. However, Gros is more forward looking than this: he offers the example of the Internet of Things as a regulatory structure that would be reactive to the environment and would be networked to achieve equilibrium across the system.
“The utopia of a self-regulated system that offers security is again found in the technological utopia of the Internet of Things…This is a world in which the shutters will open and close to suit the weather, cars will automatically regulate their speed in correspondence with other vehicles, lights in empty rooms will turn off, fridges will order products that run out, and so on. This would mean a generalized, regulating interaction among things themselves – among things and their environment – with the effect that they communicate among themselves and authorize each other to act without human intervention… But so, too, in this world, will the cigarette you smoke be reported to your cardiologist and your car will refuse to park in a space where you are not allowed to leave it. If, as we are told, in the Internet of Things ‘objects become subjects’, then subject also become objects. Everything self-regulates automatically: there is no need to fear any nasty surprise, but nor will there be any chance encounters.” (Gros,169)
Here, we reach the ultimate conclusion of this type of Security as Process. By understanding human life as a process; by controlling processes through identity, location, and big data; by allowing these information systems to build their own interactive equilibriums, we are entering a new age of security:
“From the new modes of control to market competition and the Internet of Things, we are building security on the basis of dehumanization: anything resembling human will is rejected as a parasitic indulgence of arbitrary choice, an unbearable contingency, a disruptive force that undermines security. Regulation is both a utopia in which things spontaneously adjust to one another, and a denunciation of the disruptive nature of human will. The true science is in things, and not in the consciousness of things.” (Gros, 169, emphasis added)
In the end, this is perhaps what is most frightening about the Security as Process shift: it treats humans as objects, not subjects. The human becomes just a cog in a larger system, in which all things are known, tracked, and compared. Just another piece of information to be processed. How secure do you feel about that?
Logan’s Thoughts: Security as Story – The ‘Lies’ We Tell Ourselves
Yuval Noah Harari holds that the use of fictive language – the ability to believe in and communicate about things that have no bearing on the objective state of the world – is what makes Homo Sapiens a unique animal. As I finish my reflections on this book and what I have learned about security, I can’t stop thinking about that, about the stories we tell ourselves. We live our lives in narratives, and we propel ourselves through life with stories. Sometimes these are outright fictions, sometimes they are benign delusions. Sometimes they are personal stories, sometimes they are intersubjective truths negotiated in a larger social context. The stories serve to make sense of a chaotic lived experience, and to coordinate interpersonal behavior.
You see a similar example of using lies to get us through the day in The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. We create stories that allow us to put psychological distance between us and the fact of our certain, impending deaths.
I saw a similar tension at work, at varying levels, in all of these philosophical frameworks of security. They all appear to me, in matters of degrees, to be stories we tell ourselves to hide what deep down, we all know to be the truth: At least from the perspective of an individual human, there is no security to be found.
We are monkeys made of decaying meat on a planet hurtling through an inky oblivion.
Security a story we tell ourselves – individually and collectively – so as not to deal with that fact.
Let’s examine Gros’ Four Security Principles in this light.
First, and easiest, is the Security as Serenity. Security as Story is built directly into this. These Ancient philosophical frameworks were designed to provide better stories and mental frameworks so as to deal with danger and death. Indeed, the whole point is to instill new patterns of thinking so that you can more easily mentally manage the facts of existence. Better stories lead to serenity, lead to security.
Security as an Objective State is also clearly a story; not just in how it was used in Christianity in the Middle Ages, but in general. Assuming you don’t use the God Dodge and put your hopes in a world of magic comity between wolves and sheep, Security as an Objective State seems an obvious lie. Where in the objective world could this security come from? I posit that if you feel objectively secure in a given state, that stems from a lack of imagination. There are no shortages of possible calamities.[7] As long as we remain mortal beings, there is no “objective safety.”
When we move into the realm of Political Philosophy, into Security as Social Contract, we move from the subjective stories we tell ourselves as individuals into the realm of intersubjective “truths” that we share among a society. These larger fictions include the theory of rights, and even the notion of the state itself. But the shared nature of these stories does not bring added security. In Gros’ examination, we saw how The Soldier and The Political Police are more than willing to suspend any types of security guarantee for the sake of maintaining the system. And these systems themselves can be broken down and recomposed into new security narratives, as in the breakup of the Soviet Union into smaller state units. The security guaranteed you by the State, while a more durable fiction than some others, is still a mental framework that gives a deluded sense of how stable the ground beneath us really is. Further, Gros points out that,
“For the twentieth century he [Rudolf J. Rummel] counts around 35 million direct victims of war between states, but 165-170 million victims massacred by their own states. Which means, all in all, that the greatest source of insecurity for populations in the twentieth century was not external enemies or foreign armies, but the state itself… The upshot of this is that, in the twentieth century, state security really meant a generalized insecurity over populations and a constant death threat hanging over individuals.” (Gros, 147)
The notion that the state is a security guarantor thus appears to be another fiction, designed to keep us calm and comfortable, even though we may be far from security.
The Fourth Kind of Security, the most modern, Security as Process, fits less neatly into my box. Indeed, the main challenge with Security as Process is that it seems perhaps too objective, too flattening. As Gros states, it is a security through commodification and dehumanization. In this, I think the story that we tell ourselves is that information technologies will make our lives more convenient and secure, without realizing how we have created a security apparatus that works under market conditions.
Rather than being forced into surveillance, we participate in the market to purchase the security and convenience that these technologies provide. This is a privatization of security: “In this view, there is a demand for and a supply of security, and the state does not want, or can no longer keep, a monopoly on this service to individuals. Ultimately, security is no longer presented as an indivisible public service. It is a commodity. And as such, to work at the optimal level, it ought to be traded on a free market.” (Gros, 183)
It is important to know that this is not a security guarantee, but a security evaluation: “When the market model is extended indefinitely, then the identity of beings and things depends ever more on a repeated series of evaluations (the ones by superiors and inferiors, self-evaluations) determining patterns of performance. Evaluation replaces guarantees… even the simplest identities must tremble.”
This is what happens when we treat people as market commodities, or as a simple part of a process. In trying to gain our security, we have traded away humanity and made our subjective selves and our identities fluid based on market pressures. We have told ourselves a fiction about how technology will save our lives, but at the price of our souls. Does that seem like security to you?
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, first, congratulations, and thank you. This is the longest thing I’ve ever written for no reason. The ideas from Frédéric Gros’ The Security Principle will stick with me for a long time.
“Security,” Gros writes, “is always a matter of keeping a grip on catastrophe.” I hold that as long as there are humans, catastrophe will be at hand. We can lie to ourselves about it: about if we are in danger, about our psychological ability to manage the danger, that the state or our technologies will save us.
It may sound like I am using lies as a morally pejorative term. I am not. Sometimes, we have to tell ourselves whatever we need to hear. It’s easier than admitting that, try as we might to deny it, we’re all fragile beings that will someday perish. There is no real security.
I’m more than willing to lie about that, though. Aren’t you?
[1] Which is to say that they existed in a world. I joke, of course, their world was one even harsher and colder than ours. Time travel to the past would not be fun.
[2] Please note, Gros goes into great detail about other Ancient philosophies: Skeptics and Epicureans. I have excluded them here, for reasons of space and interest. I personally favor the Stoics, and what you get here is filtered through the “Lens of Logan’s Likes.” For more details, read some fucking books, you rubes, I ain’t an intro to philosophy course.
[3] Plug for Dan Carlin’s “Prophets of Doom” episode of Hardcore History.
[4] Thank you, Dr. Nelson. I will never, ever forget the Formal Principle of Justice. This is just one of the many lessons you taught me at Santa Clara University. Go Broncos.
[5] In theory, on paper, and in the marketing materials, our system is one of equal justice under the law. In practice, however, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, the rich and powerful seem to live under a different set of rules.
[6] I’m sorry. So sorry.
[7] Pandemics. Asteroids. Super-volcanoes. Murder Hornets. Global Thermonuclear War. Ninja Attacks. Strokes. I could go on forever; I have myriad flaws, but lack of imagination is not one of them.
