(if I were the) King of the Forest

If this only mattered for screening on airliners it would probably amount to no more than an inconvenience and a small incremental danger to a few passengers. But it seems to represent a more general trend: increased control and centralized security measures superseding distributed security measures; more trust in authorities to keep everyone safe and less trust in individuals to shoulder some responsibility (and to be allowed the tools to implement that responsibility) for their own security – security in the broadest sense, including not only personal safety but financial, social, and interpersonal security as well. It is consistent with much of modern political and social practice: we will cede our responsibility along with our freedom to some authority, which will promise in return to keep us safe and happy.

If a state chooses to live up to the more modern understanding of its obligation to fairness and equality under the law by creating a gender-neutral form of civil union, that is certainly just and arguably wise. If a same-sex couple, having been properly joined by such a state-sanctioned civil union, chooses to call themselves “married” some may contradict them but no one can or should stop them. If a church chooses to sanctify their union and call it “marriage” in the eyes of God, that is their right. If members of their community choose to honor the union with the same designation, then the communal sense of marriage will begin to evolve. If enough people in enough communities defer to the new usage then the traditional concept of marriage will begin to lose its name and, our ability to conceptualize it thereby undermined, will slowly fade from our cultural memory, just as gayness did decades ago. And we will be culturally poorer for that even as we are culturally more inclusive.

But that is a transformation that should be decided individual by individual in a cultural dialog over years or generations, in which some are free to preserve the old concepts and others to embrace the new until the weight of cultural consensus removes the last holdouts – or never does. It is not a transformation that should be enforced by political power.

Periodically in discussing issues surrounding nuclear non-proliferation someone – typically but not always someone from some Islamic country – will assert that we have no right to deny the likes of Saddam Hussein or the Iranian Ayatollahs access to nuclear weapons – that such a demand amounts to imperialism, that it interferes with the self-determination of their peoples and usurps their legitimate sovereignty. Inevitably the need for nuclear weapons in the hands of such countries is rationalized by the need to “counter the threat” from Israeli nuclear weapons or from our own. And inevitably attempts to limit the number of nuclear nations in the world are classified as arrogance, the presumption that only members of the nuclear club are sophisticated and moral enough to be trusted with such power.

There is some validity to the issue of the usurpation of sovereignty – although if we wish to be so solicitous of sovereignty we really should have a debate over what constitutes legitimate sovereignty in the modern era of human rights and ascendant democracy. But where nuclear weapons are concerned basic survival, not sovereignty, is really the most fundamental consideration. And if our desire that Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il not have nuclear weapons represents a presumption that they are not sophisticated and moral enough to be trusted with such capabilities, that presumption is not arrogant but prudent.

A friend of mine, Ira Goldman, is the inventor of the KneeDefender™, a small plastic device that fits on the tray table in an airplane and limits the ability of the seat in front of you to recline. His reason for creating such a device was the number of times his knees had been crushed by a sudden recline while penned within the claustrophobic confines of a coach class seat (and I thought “cruel and unusual punishment” had been outlawed by the Constitution).

The KneeDefender™ is one of those items about which no one seems to be neutral. To some it is their salvation; to others it is an outrage; to many it is a horrible sign of moral degeneracy and social decay – but one that they nonetheless find too useful to forswear.

Mandatory seatbelt (and helmet) laws do not generally arouse my passion, for two reasons. First, although I consider them paternalistic invasions of my autonomy they also have no immediate or practical effect on me: I use seatbelts and helmets by choice, as do most people I know. Second, given the very real benefits they provide and the relatively low costs they entail – and given that on such bases only one state in the Union currently does not mandate the use of seatbelts – I consider them largely a fait accompli. That doesn’t make me agree with such laws or embrace them; it merely makes worrying about them a poor use of my time and energy.

That said, I happen now to live in that one state (New Hampshire), and when the issue arises – as it does from time to time – proponents of such laws tend to be particularly dismissive of any concerns about civil liberties, to characterize those who raise such concerns as egocentric simpletons, and to trivialize their opposition as merely a childish and irrational reaction to “being told what to do.” That dismissive and disrespectful tone does stir my passion.

In an age when charity was the primary means for providing a social safety net and cultural enrichment charity was a matter of moral obligation. We would like to think that is still the case, but according to the CBO such endeavors now consume somewhere between 55% and 75% of the federal budget, and anyone in the top quintile of income distribution is already providing at least 15%-20% of their income as taxes to various governments in direct support of that. Perhaps direct giving to charity is only 2% of income, but if you add the 15% or more of indirect contribution to the same causes via the channel of government I’d say we’re doing pretty well.

Notwithstanding their characterization by opponents of the war in Iraq, arguments in favor of war were never as simplistic or one-dimensional as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, imminent or otherwise, and never presumed any direct link between Iraq and the attacks on the World Trade Center.

I fear that in the modern cultural/social/political climate, Mr. Schneier’s plea for more distributed solutions to security problems will, except in the narrowest technical realms where logic and experience generally prevail, fall on deaf ears. Social and political biases of the public aside, our political and cultural leaders benefit from the increased power with which centralized systems endow them, and such systems will continue to be the preferred solutions to most problems which fall, however unproductively, into the political realm.

Sometimes, it just seems the world has gone mad. At times like those, I write things like this, and hope it makes things better. So far it hasn’t.

I was in the process of preparing this for submission to Newsweek for their ‘My Turn’ section when the attack on the World Trade Center made the topic page one news everywhere. Submitting it suddenly seemed pointless….

Another week, another killing spree, or so it seems.

This comes back to the fundamental questions that are rarely addressed in any straightforward way: Who should we accept as immigrants? Who should we reject? What commitments, to civil behavior and to our national best interest, ought we require of those we accept? And what commitments, to civil behavior, to our national best interest, and to duty to our society and respect for our culture, ought we demand of those who would claim citizenship in our nation?