A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Terrorism ]
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[Less open or naked, that's the dilemma
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Dec. 27, 2001, 6:23PM
Think about it. If everybody flew naked, not only would you never have to worry about the passenger next to you carrying box cutters or exploding shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe would ever be caught dead flying nude, or in the presence of nude women, and that alone would keep many potential hijackers out of the skies. It's much more civilized than racial profiling. Well, you get the point: if the terrorists are just going to keep using technology to become better and better, how do we protect against that, while maintaining an open society - without stripping everyone naked? I mean, what good is it to have a free and open America when someone can easily get on an airplane in Paris and bring a bomb over in the heel of his shoe or plot a suicide attack on the World Trade Center from a cave in Kandahar and then pop over and carry it out?
This is America's core problem today: A free society is based on openness and on certain shared ethics and honor codes to maintain order, and we are now intimately connected to too many societies that do not have governments that can maintain order and to peoples who have no respect for our ethics or our honor codes.
Remember the electronic ticket machines that were used for the Boston-New York-Washington shuttles? Ever use one? Not only were you automatically issued your ticket with a credit card by pressing a touch-screen, but they asked you - electronically - "Did you pack your bags yourself?" and "Did any strangers give you anything?" And you answered those security questions by touching a screen! Think about the naive trust and honor code underlying those machines.
We're not alone. I just flew in and out of Moscow, where you now have to fill out a detailed customs form. But there was one box that unnerved me a bit. It asked: Are you carrying any "radioactive materials?" Hmm, I wondered, how many people (i.e. smugglers) are going to check that box? Can you imagine going through Moscow customs and the couple in front of you turning to each other and asking: "Dear, did we pack the nuclear waste in your suitcase or mine?" Or, "Honey, is the plutonium in your purse or the black duffel?"
Which is why we are entering a highly problematic era, one that we are just beginning to get our minds around. For America to stay America, a free and open society, intimately connected to the world, the world has to become a much more ordered and controlled place. And order emerges in two ways: It is either grown from the bottom up, by societies slowly developing good democratic governance and shared ethics and values, or it is imposed from the top down, by nondemocratic, authoritarian regimes rigidly controlling their people. But in today's post-Cold War world, many, many countries to which we are connected are in a transition between the two - between a rigid authoritarian order that was imposed and voluntary self-government that is being home-grown.
It makes for a very messy world, especially as some countries - Afghanistan being the most extreme example - are not able to make the transition. "The problem with top-down control is that more governments around the world are fragmenting today, rather than consolidating," said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "At the same time, America's technologies are being universalized - planes that go faster and faster and electronics that are smaller and smaller - but the American values and honor system that those technologies assume have not been universalized. In the hands of the wrong people they become weapons of mass destruction."
So there you have our dilemma: Either we become less open as a society, or the world to which we are now so connected has to become more controlled - by us and by others - or we simply learn to live with much higher levels of risk than we've ever been used to before.
Or, we all fly naked.
Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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