Essay: The Inevitable Limits of Security

As soon as there is life," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "there is danger." Likewise, as soon as there is danger, there is the urge to ward it off. This most fundamental of human impulses is not really remarkable, except when it turns into a compulsive wish for absolute safety. The question is whether the widespread preoccupation with security is on the verge of leaving reasonableness behind.

Today's popular feelings of insecurity often resemble an obsession. "As a result of our fear," says one major study of American attitudes toward crime, "we may soon be living in armed for tresses—both at home and within ourselves." Government and private efforts to guard against violence are steadily becoming more elaborate and conspicuous, especially in the U.S. Not every principality has gone to the extremes of Chicago, where Mayor Jane Byrne has more personal bodyguards (17) than most national heads of state, and yet evidences of extraordinary concern have been steadily multiplying.

The signs range from the universal electronic frisking that is now so familiar at all airports to the continual expansion of civil-police systems. The craving for safety also accounts for the swift growth of the private-guard industry, the spread of restrictive cautions like visitor-monitoring in apartment buildings, the proliferation of courses in self-defense and antiterrorism tactics, the preoccupation in households with locks and alarms, the deployment of attack dogs and the epidemic sales of private handguns. Actor Roy Rogers was only typical when he recently took a stand against handgun restrictions in California: "They'll have to shoot me first to take my gun. I wouldn't feel safe if I didn't have a gun in my house." Increasingly, corporations, and especially multinationals whose executives travel to turbulent countries, do not feel safe without security experts on their payrolls.