Richard Rorty fears the possible emergence in the West of some sort of neo-feudal despotism - albeit 'relatively benevolent' - as the outcome of the security response to the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks. He writes:
If terrorists do get their hands on nuclear weapons, the most momentous result will not be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It will be the fact that all the democracies will have to place themselves on a permanent war footing.And:
[T]he end of the rule of law could come about almost inadvertently through the sheer momentum of the institutional changes that are likely to be made in the name of the war on terrorism.As a way of opposing this development, Rorty suggests: that we should challenge the culture of government secrecy and work towards greater political openness; and that efforts should be made 'to update the laws of war, and to create something like a code of international criminal justice'.
I don't know whether or not the prospect he sketches here is unduly alarmist. For one thing, I'm not sure why a 'war footing', if it should come to that, couldn't be temporary rather than permanent. But an element in Rorty's article that scares the hell out of me is the thinking behind his statement that 'the most momentous result will not be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people'. It's not an accidental formulation. Rorty elaborates it in describing the views of others:
The actions of the Bush Administration since September 11 have caused many Americans to think of the war on terrorism as potentially more dangerous than terrorism itself, even if it entailed nuclear explosions in many Western cities. If the direct effects of terrorism were all we had to worry about, their thinking goes, there would be no reason to fear that democratic institutions would not survive. After all, equivalent amounts of death and destruction caused by natural disasters would not threaten those institutions. If there were a sudden shift of tectonic plates that caused skyscrapers to collapse all around the Pacific Rim, hundreds of thousands of people would die within minutes. But the emergency powers claimed by governments would be temporary and local. [Italics and bold all mine.]If there are a lot of people in the West who are thinking in this way about the threat of terrorism, then we're in worse trouble than I previously assumed. I hope Rorty's wrong about how many there are. (Via Wind Rose Hotel.)