Securing the future.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Hinkson, John
• Date: 22 March 2007

In the main, we do not think about security in everyday life. It is simply taken for granted--until it comes under threat. When security is lacking, it is as though the world has come apart: trust, truth and integrity between people suffers. Indeed, serious insecurity can lead to desperation and opportunism, placing empathy and compassion, not to mention any more general desire to live ethically, under strain. While calls for security can be rhetorical and ideological, it is significant that they are usually made in the name of children. After all, security is a precondition for the flourishing of social relations between the generations, which is one of the conditions of the possibility of meaning. The significance of a secure life-world can hardly be underestimated.

Of course, the world today is far from secure. Security is the catch-cry of government, and governments everywhere seek it while watching it dissolve in reality. The Middle East provides graphic examples. In Iraq the shameful onslaught of the West upon the Islamic world has metamorphosed into a hell on earth. No one is safe, and the prospect of security has never been more distant. And this localized hell now shows signs of generalizing itself through terror in the western heartlands, as recent events in Europe indicate. At the same time, in the West preoccupations with security have allowed the narrowest of minds and the glib specialists of media spin to gravitate towards and occupy the political stage.

Closely associated with this failure of policy is another that brings growing insecurity, also largely centred on the Middle East: the growing threat of the failure of oil supplies. We are becoming aware of just how profoundly dependent the last seventy years of western development have been on the availability of cheap oil and, for that matter, the availability of oil per se. The formerly marginalized theory of peak oil is now gaining credibility: oil companies have failed to locate significant new fields for some thirty years. The bonanza of the large fields of the past is fading into a nostalgic memory of 'the good old days'.

But to point to the demise of the era of oil as a policy failure allows a crucial matter to slip from view. Clearly, the West's oil fetish is no mere policy issue. It goes far deeper, into those background cultural assumptions that shape how most people think it is desirable to live today, as citizens of the new global reality, engaged in fleeting movement from place to place, identity to identity. In respect of everyday transportation, but also the many commodities we now regard as essential, including the provision of basic agricultural necessities, we have gone out on an evolutionary limb, dependent upon the availability of oil and...