After the London bombings: global terror, the west and indiscriminate violence.

Hinkson, John

In the midst of carnage and outrage in many parts of the world, and with daily body counts in Iraq often in excess of the loss of life in the London bombings, the endless soul-searching accounts into that particular terrorist attack often seemed an exercise in double standards. But there is another possibility. Perhaps this preoccupation arose out of an unease still to be articulated. In this article I will argue that the London bombing confirms a new order of threat comparable only with that of September 11, not just a threat to the 'Western way of life' but, more significantly, touching on doubts about its very viability. Nevertheless, analysis in the press concentrates on the immediate anguish generated by the death of innocent people and terror's deep disruption of everyday life. It leaves in the background the larger processes of history, international power relations and cultural transformation that can provide a perspective on the experience of a terrorist assault.

Most people have only a rudimentary sense of the way that the external relations of their governments affect the way they live. It is one thing to depend on ready access to oil, to take a relevant example, but quite another to grasp that its taken-for-granted availability is frequently implicated in the subordination of other peoples. Often enough, as the history of conquest demonstrates, it entails the disruption of those peoples' taken-for-granted ways of living, including their religious beliefs.

When some seek to hit back by terrorist means, as in the case of the London and Madrid bombings, the sense of outrage and injustice of those who simply take for granted their own established way of living is understandable. And at least in the short term it is a simple matter for their political figures to play on their sense of outrage, to speak to their emotions rather than to enlarge their understanding of the overall international context. In Australia, Beazley's denunciation of 'sub-human filth' was a clear example. In the United Kingdon, the Queen's declaration that our 'Western way of life will not be affected' also depended upon a hypocritical self-righteousness blind to the growing association of that way of life with militarized, if not totalitarian, policy shifts. A changed relation of the state to citizens begins to take shape, as illustrated in policies of shoot first and ask questions later.

A number of more considered articles in the press have reflected upon the new reality that the London terrorists were 'homegrown'. What could be the reasons for British-born citizens making such attacks at the heart of their own country? Several arguments have been marshalled.

The first suggests that we do not need to delve into the deeper meanings of this terror; that we can see it in straightforwardly political terms. These terrorists are simply enacting political strategies, for instance to force a withdrawal of the 'coalition of the willing' from Iraq. Robert Pape has argued this view, acknowledging the fact of Islamic fundamentalism but dismissing its significance in the larger terror strategy. (1) For him, if this terrorist strategy were to succeed in forcing a withdrawal from Iraq, the growing tendency towards terror would dissipate. That these terrorists are born and bred in England does not cut across them adopting political strategies supported by fellow terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere. They know what has to be opposed: they see the outrages in the Middle East and attribute blame to the coalition. For Pape, having an Islamic background generates fellow feeling and solidarity, but that is all. Given the imperatives of asymmetrical warfare, in their own terms they have little choice but to go beyond conventional political means and engage in terror.

The second strand of interpretation emphasizes the nature of Islam itself. Contrary to Pape, it argues that Islam has been hijacked, or given an extreme interpretation, motivating potential terrorists wherever they happen to be born. In a long article in The Sunday Age, Peter Khalil, an analyst with the Eurasia Group in New York, argues this case, against Pape, in a relatively developed form. (2) In his view, Al-Qaeda has developed a general world-view that rejects Western modernity and its 'decadence' and is seeking to build a pure Islamic state, including the reinstatement of the historic caliphate that collapsed with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It is this world-view that motivates the terrorist, justifying terror strategies aimed at achieving withdrawal from Iraq. In Khalil's view, diasporic Islamic youth in the West, relatively affluent as they may be, are drawn into action in rejection of the ideologies associated with the Western way of life.

Pape's conclusion is that the West should withdraw from their interventionist positions, although for him this means simply withdrawing off-shore and remaining in close proximity. Khalil, however, believes that moderate Islam should develop a positive view of the modern so it can find a way forward that gives meaning to its youth. This is the approach adopted by Tony Blair who has campaigned amongst moderate Muslims to convince them, along with those inclined to stray, of the distortions in bin Laden's version of Islam.

The views of Pape and Khalil contain partial truths but neither offers an analysis of the West. While they are more complex than those drawn directly from commonsense--those grounding assumptions of everyday life that we live by and barely know--both accounts remain continuous with it. In this response, terror is understood as a threat to the given social order and as such the natural question becomes how it might be possible to defend ourselves and our institutions. Of course, this response easily transmutes into reactions that will call out unintended consequences that will make their mark for generations. As a commonsense approach it is understandable, but it also illustrates the limits of commonsense in some situations of threat.

The limitations of commonsense are even more problematic when they pervade intellectual perspectives on terror. Far from the contribution that might be made by analysis and interpretation to developing new ways of understanding the immediate phenomenon of terror, commonsense notions are implicitly reinforced. (3)

The question is whether a given approach works only within the terms of the apparent objects of investigation--the terror organization, the particular state or society--or whether it can illuminate these while also reflexively delving into their grounding assumptions. Empiricist approaches screen out such grounding assumptions, occluding the possibility that terror may now be endemic for reasons quite different from those that Pape and Khalil canvass. Firstly, such accounts ignore the social and cultural conditions of the home-grown terrorist and how these contribute to support for terrorist strategies. Secondly, these accounts are not able to make sense of the focus of terror today on innocent people beyond making uninformative claims about 'extremists'.

Having a broader perspective than Pape's and Khalil's is a first step, a very important one, if terror is to be set within a changing social context. Recognition of such change is crucial. It can help to break down conflicts operative in contexts which have lost or are losing their force and make new coalitions possible. Offering important insights and making new connections between events, Walter Laqueur's No End to War illustrates this point. (4) Yet here, too, there is a problem of method, one related to the use of conventional concepts.

It will be argued that Laqueur does engage with the changed nature of terror in the last quarter century. He does so by adopting a perspective that allows him to step well beyond the relations of Islam with the West by taking up the broad question of technology and the formation of social movements concerned with the varied impacts of technology. In doing so he throws light upon the phenomenon of home-grown terrorism, as well as the rise of indiscriminate terror that targets innocent people.

Even so, Laqueur achieves this with his hands tied: while he generates new insights, he is unable to elaborate the change in Western societies that he identifies by his reference to 'technology'. I will argue that the transformation in the nature of terror demands that we grapple with the changed character of intellectual practices over the last two generations and related changes in the character of the social. Without investigating this development, Laqueur cannot elucidate the emergent social basis of the new movements he identifies or the reasons for the indiscriminate nature of contemporary violence. It is not surprising that for Laqueur the threat of terror emanates from what he considers the 'a-social fanatic'.

Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century

In No End to War Laqueur seeks to interpret the waves of terror that have swept the world over the last twenty-five years. He approaches this task through, firstly, a brief general history of terror and, secondly, a special focus on Islamic terror in its various forms and manifestations. These two elements alone do not make for a novel account of the contemporary phenomenon. However a third element--the articulation of the prospect of a global terror more comprehensive than the limited expressions of Islamic terror, a terror that takes its point of departure from 'technological civilization' in its own right--brings the reader up against the larger meanings of contemporary terrorism. These qualify any tendency to see this terror simply as a manifestation of a clash of civilizations, or as arising out of particular conflicts, such as the war in Iraq or the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Over half of Laqueur's book is taken up with an account of the Islamist movement's rise to prominence, from its early emergence in Egypt following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the secular strategy established by Ataturk. There is also a sustained consideration of suicide bombings, especially in contrast with a similar, yet secular, phenomenon in Sri Lanka, as well as some analysis of the historic incapacity of Middle Eastern Muslim countries, even when they are oil-rich, to develop economically. Uncontrolled demographic growth coupled with high levels of youth unemployment is said to generate a deep dissatisfaction, fanning an attraction to organizations open to terror strategies.

For Laqueur, the growing interest in terrorism is supported by a distinctive change in the social landscape. The burgeoning demographic of young Mulsims who experience deep unease is complemented by a loss of alternative organizations that dissatisfied young people might once have joined. In the past there were the fascist and communist movements. Both of these had social agendas, and the communist movement was highly critical of terror as a strategy. While Fascism was definitely open to the terror option, Laqueur identifies one crucial difference in terror over the last twenty-five years that sets contemporary organizations apart (with the important exception of the Nazis): an increasing tendency to engage in indiscriminate violence. If at an earlier time terror was predominantly strategic--directed against hated leaders, with some indiscriminate violence--it is now predominantly indiscriminate, directed against the innocent to achieve a defined, or even undefined, end. The balance has shifted from terrorism pointed to 'positive' ends towards indiscriminate destruction.

 The reason might have been, in part, that it is usually more
 difficult to assassinate a leading political figure who is often
 well guarded. But mainly the change in strategy was caused
 by the growing fanaticism, the beliefs 1) that not just a few
 figures but the whole enemy society was a legitimate target,
 2) that the aim was not to propagate an idea but to destroy,
 and 3) that the murder of children, women, elderly people,
 and other noncombatants would spread even more fear and
 panic than attacks against soldiers and security forces. (5)

This is not an outline of 'good' and 'bad' terror, but in Laqueur's view the change in the character of terror is significant; it requires interpretation. For him it is a new kind of fanaticism, one no longer 'bound by certain conventions'. He is wary of attempts to give it a sociological interpretation and argues instead that it requires a developed psychology, even if he quickly falls back onto the importance of religious and nationalist fanaticism.

For Laqueur, the emergence of fanatical 'catastrophic' terror has a much broader context than the concerns of the Islamist movements. This is conveyed in his focus on the significance of technology in the contemporary situation. This is not merely a matter of high technology or weapons of mass destruction being available for terrorist movements as the means of terror. It is just as much a matter of how technology calls into being its own kind of terrorists. Importantly, they are not necessarily organized and, crucially, they may be radically individualistic.

 In the past, terrorism was based almost always on easily
 identifiable political groups, national or social, but
 technological developments have made carrying out
 terrorist campaigns possible for tiny sects, for local
 groupuscules, and eventually for individuals on the pattern
 of the Unabomber or the individual who sent out the
 anthrax letters in the United States.

The Unabomber could identify with the Left or the Right, but essentially, he or she has stepped beyond such categories. Indeed, for Laqueur, they have stepped beyond the ethical call of the social as such. Once such ethical considerations are put aside, a variety of forms of destructive terror move into the realm of the possible. Various umbrella categories are used to attempt to make sense of these fragmented groupings. The main one Laqueur uses is 'anti-globalism'.

'Anti-globalism' is a grab-all for a diverse range of movements and oppositional stances: eco-movements against the West; leftist critiques of 'market fundamentalism'; opposition to abortion; the devoted readers of the Turner Diaries (the fictional bible of the 'far right, including Timothy McVeigh'). Out of these emerges what is known as the 'Third Position'.

 In the words of a close observer of the terrorist scene, the
 extreme right considered the whole counterculture
 generation (antiglobalism, anti-WTO protests, ecowarriors,
 fighters for animal rights) as a potential constituency: 'They
 push fascism as a revolutionary movement of the left'.

 The Unabomber was not a man of the left, but thought that
 the enemy was modern, large-scale technology which had to
 be destroyed; capitalism was not his target, but modern
 technological civilization. (6)

Laqueur is not saying that the anti-global movements of the Left or Right are terror organizations, although he is awkward on this matter and may well have mixed views. At an explicit level he is reflecting on two things. Firstly, he identifies the incapacity of social arguments to account for terror and notes the demise of social organizations that have a predictable support base within given social structures. For example, working-class movements have reduced impact today compared to a generation ago, and actual contemporary terrorists--whether Islamists or groupings disaffected with modernity--are by and large educated (often in the sciences) and middle-class. Secondly, in the absence of oppositional groups with clear social agendas, radical, disaffected individuals are typically attracted to these movements against the given social order. Broadly speaking, there is a growing tendency towards social fragmentation amongst oppositional groups that makes them socially unpredictable. This unpredictability is combined with a potential for unprecedented destruction.

 There is much reason to believe that if such attacks should be
 carried out in the near future many, perhaps the great
 majority, will fail or will have a smaller effect than
 anticipated. But it should also be clear that if only one out of
 ten, one out of hundred such attempts succeeds, the damage
 caused, the number of victims will be infinitely higher than
 at any time in the past. (7)

It is 'technological civilization' that is the target of this form of terror and the contradiction is that it is this civilization's technology that will be used against it.

Globalization and the Global City

Laqueur's account of contemporary terrorism entails an outline of new social movements and arguments about the emergence of 'destructive' terror. It illuminates the broad base of the threat that emanates from the homelands. Yet there is a serious absence in his account of how the contemporary world generates such threats. He makes no effort to go beyond a recognition of the new movements' relatively dissociated form and reduces contemporary Western society to 'technological civilization', a notion he does not fill out. He also comes close to tarring oppositional movements with the same brush as the marginal 'fanatic'. (8) Not unlike the other interpreters of contemporary terror considered in this article, he takes the present social order for granted. Ultimately his position rests on the delineation of terror's superficial phenomena.

I believe we need a closer examination of the social setting of the movements that Laqueur describes. To this end I will outline how contemporary Western ways of life are implicated in the form terrorism now takes, suggesting that a much broader politics is required than the one-dimensional versions he and others offer. Firstly, I will challenge Laqueur's wish to substitute a psychology of terror for a sociology of terror. While a psychology of terror is no doubt important, it is worth persevering with a social account, one that may be fundamental to psychological understanding as well. Laqueur is dismissive of sociological accounts because he relies on conventional views of the social, those preoccupied with long-received accounts of the social structure, especially social classes. I agree that these have limited force in the interpretation of the new forms of global terror and the rise of new social movements, but they do not represent the limit of social understanding.

If we are to come to terms with these new developments we must grapple with the emergence of a new social principle at work today, one that is not disclosed by the conventional categories of society or sociality assumed by Laqueur. This new form of sociality is invisible to Laqueur, but analysis of it would help to fill out his unexamined notion of 'technological society'. This requires analysis of the intellectual practices that have come to the fore in recent times--how they constitute a dominant form of interaction and personal formation in contemporary conditions. A first step is to ask why intellectual practices are generally assumed to be mere amalgams of individual effort rather than to be socially formed. A second is the delineation of the form of sociality generated by these practices, which necessitates new conceptual distinctions that break from the received sociological accounts of social structure. Examination of the intellectual practices suggests an interplay between two fundamental forms of constitutive social relation: those that are relatively direct and interactive (and relatively concrete), as against those that are relatively indirect and extended (and increasingly abstract). (9) While they have co-existed throughout history and are interpenetrative, in the 20th century the abstract-extended social relations associated with intellectual practice have come to dominate. While their contribution to the establishment of society-wide institutions--law, religion, politics, systems of unified meaning--has always been crucial, there has been no social account of these practices in their own right. Their visibility has been restricted to the work of individuals.

With the emergence of high technology--a practical outcome of intellectual practice indispensable to the information revolution--the subordinate principle becomes the dominant one, and the practical social world takes on a new form. An explosion of abstract social relations moves towards the making over of all social institutions. For the economy, media, politics, family, the everyday, the structured presence of others is no longer the dominant principle. Interactive presence is displaced by abstract extension. This cultural revolution culminates in what is called globalization, on the one hand, and radical individualization, on the other. And with the emergence of high technology there is also a qualitative shift in the level of assault contemporary societies make on the natural world. Seeing sociality in this way has profound implications for understanding the new terror.

In the hours immediately after the London bombing Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, made an impassioned speech in defence of his city. Here, to paraphrase him, was a great multicultural complex that has drawn people to its centre from all the corners of the globe, people who love it and the freedom it allows. Terrorists have attacked this way of life by means of an attack on its citizens who merely seek to go about their usual business, making their way to their places of work. They will never be subdued and will defend its values ...

Many no doubt agree with Ken Livingstone's defence of the cosmopolitan global city. Nothing in the contemporary era could seem more natural, including to such luminaries of New Labor as Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair. But as a way of life it needs to be analyzed and evaluated. Indeed, contrary to Livingstone, it should be at the centre of any debate about terror for the global city and terror can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Certainly global cities generally, and London in particular, are not neutral objects, mere pawns in the game of terror. They are social forces in their own right that call out opposition in a variety of forms. The almost universal unacceptability of terror is being used to promote an uncritical unity against a simplistic notion of evil, and this denies the validity of a focus on our own social order as a necessary aspect of the struggle against terror.

The global city, as it has unfolded during the 20th century, is a great maw sucking in and emptying out regional populations on a scale never seen before. It needs to be understood in relation to the socially thinned-out and increasingly poverty-stricken modes of life in regions, and among certain social sectors, that are stage by stage being turned into dependent, dysfunctional satellites of the metropolitan centres. Los Angeles is the original model of the global city. It cannot be understood without an examination of its relation to adjacent societies such as Mexico and Columbia, which are overwhelmed by criminality and the hold of drug barons who service the 'needs' of the 'fortunate' and not so fortunate in the global city.

The global city is a core site of globalization that shapes much of what we do today. Some, who see this process simply in terms of 'economic globalization', emphasize that today's world is little different to that of the late 19th century. This is to see economic markets (that stretch around the world) as the prime institution of the global world. But even from within the terms of economic globalization the contemporary market is not comparable with that of the 19th century. It gains its distinctive character from the way that late 20th-century high technology supercharges and transforms the modern economic market. It not only extends its reach horizontally but, more importantly, via the interpenetration of the media and advertising, it reaches into social life and community, shaping social relations and personal formation in radically new ways.

The transformation of the market is only one instance of the sweeping change that has shaped the range of institutions that have emerged with the new relation of intellectual practice to the social world. Contrary to those who can only see in globalization changed economic exchanges, this is a profound cultural transformation. A more abstract set of social relations comes to characterize social life, engendering fleeting interchange between people. These fleeting relations, characterized by constant movement, undermine our socially constituted capacity to commit to and empathize with social others. They weaken, even destroy, structures of kin and forms of face-to-face community that until the end of the 20th century lent stability to, as well as being a major source of meaning for, citizens within every social order. It is globalization in this sense--a cultural transformation that remakes social life and constitutes a newly dominant form of social life and subjective experience--that finds expression in the Global City.

Fleeting interchange and unlimited choice are represented as an exhilarating liberation. This is the freedom referred to by Livingstone: a freedom considerably changed from earlier liberal freedoms that were always relative to enduring institutions of kin and community. (10) The new 'freedom' is only possible in the context of a social development whereby 'others' are increasingly abstracted: where radical new 'means' to break free from earlier forms of human association have emerged as a consequence of the social relations of intellectual practice. (11) Globalization, after all, is only possible in a postmodern cyber world, one in which 'information' and its specific forms of interconnection, is the guiding principle, whether we are speaking of economic processes or bio-technological projects that push toward a post-human future.

This historic process has already experienced some early forms of opposition, intimating what I believe is destined to become a social struggle of vast proportions. One way to register that all is not well with this cyber world is that on the other side of the freedom it offers are contradictions. Of course these are not usually given as the reasons for terror because it is not understood as arising within an overall context of cultural change and global power relations. Nevertheless they affect us all, driving some to oppose the emerging order and others to be predisposed to the non-solution of terror. I will comment briefly on four such contradictions: firstly, the new forms of social division and marginalization; secondly, the structured role played by surveillance in socially abstract worlds; thirdly, the crisis of meaning and value at the core of the contemporary West; and lastly, social abstraction and the crisis of nature.

Societies built around the global market produce inequalities of a different order to those of the past. In addition to the inequalities of class there is now also a radical marginalizing process that places growing numbers of people outside of society as such. This is a cause of deep resentment and insecurity. One small example of this process was recently revealed in the catastrophe in New Orleans where a significant proportion of the population was abandoned in a situation of crisis. These inequalities do not only gain expression in particular nations but globally and between nations. At their core they reflect the fact that high technology has the potential to eliminate work in the economy in ways never before experienced. High-tech entrepreneurs therefore look to what they call the 80/20 society. Moving to a situation where eighty per cent of the population is no longer needed for productive work produces a background anxiety that can feed into a disposition towards terror. It also feeds into an uneasiness that produces a ready overreaction to the threat of terror.

My second example relates to how the new freedom requires, as a matter of structural necessity, new forms of surveillance. The quite stunning success in identifying the suicide bombers in London was made possible by up to 500,000 cameras installed across the country, a large proportion of which are concentrated in the global city. According to some reports, the average Londoner is snapped 300 times a day by these means. This is a graphic illustration of the role of surveillance in the new freedom. It also illustrates how familiar social structures that once relied upon forms of social interaction in which individuals were present to each other have been supplanted by a range of mediating high technologies. For some, this is a taken-for-granted price of freedom in the global city. Every time a new crisis emerges these forms of surveillance--cameras, identity cards, new levels of security--are strengthened relative to the individual and pre-existing forms of constraint contained within the relations of community.

The theorists of 'mass society' argued a couple of generations ago that all mediating institutions between the state and the individual were becoming radically attenuated. Once, this attenuation of the forms of social interaction, especially when combined with a social context in flux and unpredictability, was called totalitarianism. But that notion, so well developed as part of the mid-20th century critique of power by Hannah Arendt, (12) is avoided. It is too discomforting when measured against what counts today as 'development'. For what was a negative potentiality of the possible effects of political power in the mid-20th century now takes a more structural, and less visible, form. Rather than the political flux and unpredictability within the everyday world that undermined social resistance to a dominant political centre, today power takes a wide-reaching cultural form, which builds more brittle social connections and undermines forms of structured social presence within the life of communities. Individuals experience fragmentation and bewilderment. And 'development' calls for a far more active surveillance of the way of life of both citizens and society's outcasts. Surveillance and terror are family terms: they both step beyond the familiar forms of sociality. Where they emerge as part of a structural development that includes the breakup of those familiar forms, their significance is multiplied.

The third contradiction is touched upon by the conservative Australian journalist Greg Sheridan. (13) Given his hero worship of George W. Bush and his obsession with security generally, it is a surprising reference. But his words are telling:

 The war on terror is going to be with us for a long time. The
 underlying challenge is neither religious nor sociological but
 ideological. Ideologies answer basic human needs--the
 need to know right from wrong, the need to feel part of a
 functioning group, the need to feel that life has a purpose ...
 In the end you can't beat something with nothing.

Sheridan seems to be intuiting that our Western Way may increasingly amount to 'nothing'. Usually for Sheridan 'something' amounts to taking an intransigent stand, in the mode of George Bush. But here he is touching on the crisis of meaning that many worry typifies our world today. This is a crisis that will relentlessly emerge and re-emerge when social relations are re-composed along the socially abstract lines found in the global city. While there is plenty of consumption and movement in the global city, there is little purpose. A good proportion of citizens hold this implication at bay by the maintenance of limited community structures, but we will be disillusioned sooner or later if we rely upon this crutch: these remnant community structures are not the main-game of the global city and will increasingly be under pressure. The forms of reciprocal co-operation that previous societies have taken for granted can no longer be assumed. For those already feeling undermined and disoriented, resentment and disillusion can lead them to hit back.

The fourth area of contradiction that challenges the global city is the crisis of the environment. Large cities have always placed enormous environmental pressure on their surrounding regions, pressure which has often undermined the city itself. These issues have been brilliantly explored by Ronald Wright in the Massey Lectures. (14) This relation between the city and the region is now writ large globally, with general consequences for the world as a whole. The dependence of the global city on high energy use and the conflicts this 'need' legitimates--whether over the supply of oil or nuclear power--is one example. The incapacity to respond effectively to the profound impacts of global warming is another. More generally, the assault upon nature that is implicitly demanded by a society defined by the rise of the intellectual practices and embodied in high technology, repeats many times over the environmental strains generated by cities in the past. Yet leaders and the general public are blind to the environmental cataclysm and consequent social effects that are now a definite prospect.

Terror in past eras in circumstances of environmental collapse is now being documented. (15) There is nothing as destabilizing as the practical undoing of a society's deep environmental assumptions. As the city falters under environmental pressure, some who have been brutalized or profoundly disaffected will hit out. While there is no doubt that terrorists do not 'win', they often symbolize deep-seated problems.

Globalization and Destructive Terror

Contrary to Laqueur, the interpretation of catastrophic or destructive terror cannot be solved by a psychology of the fanatic. Destructive terror is now a widespread phenomenon relative to terrorism a generation ago. It could be argued that this is a function of massively destructive means being available to a coterie of psychologically deformed individuals. But there is no example yet of destructive terror employing weapons of mass destruction, with the exception of the anthrax letters sent in the United States after September 11. There is a real feeling of vulnerability to their potential use but much of this relates to a sense that individuals and groups are more disposed to destructive terror than they were. Only a social interpretation can identify whether society in its changed form itself contributes to the attraction and possibility of destructive terror. In addition to this, weapons of mass destruction need to be seen not merely as technologies but rather as cultural means now extant in contemporary social life.

'Destructive' terror takes two main forms. The first, the more familiar, is where terrorists target innocents in order to achieve an end. This may entail suicide bombing. The second form is clearly related to the first and is not easily distinguished, yet in this case there is nothing that could resemble a rational end, just an ending. In this case the act of terror is grounded in a generalized hatred or even more significantly, a generalized lack of concern for, or feeling for, others. The first type of destructive terror can be said to turn upon society as a whole by targeting innocents to achieve an end. The second type seeks the destruction of the society as a whole. The embrace of oblivion, of ending things for everyone, is the principal attraction and, needless to say, it is made more practical by the existence of weapons of mass destruction. But the causes are much more complex than the simple accessibility of destructive means. I will argue that both these forms of destructive terror are structural; that they emerge from an underlying social development.

If we understand the emergence of global society not merely in terms of global interrelations or a globalized setting in which terror happens, but rather as a society composed of forms of social relations, and in the current period, as defined by the dominance of abstract social relations, how does this flesh out the meaning of destructive terror? The critical point here is that abstract social relations are extended relations, relations technologically mediated in very particular ways. Abstract social relations are distance relations. They do not necessitate the presence of the other, even though others may be present in particular circumstances. As society increasingly takes this form it can be said to have become a distance society.

There are various instances that can be pointed to. Politics, for example, becomes media politics, that is, politics at a distance mediated by the mass media. Media image becomes the currency of successful political activity. The family, too, is penetrated by media and the individual is increasingly formed through the management of image, producing highly individualistic or structurally autonomous persons. The economy increasingly loses its substantial connection to local conditions as it is made over by information, while production is lost to distant shores. And of course there are the contradictions discussed above.

Directly relevant to the questions of terror are the changes that follow from 'legitimate' state-sanctioned warfare and weaponry when distance society, or a society defined by extended social relations, comes into being. Weapons and conflicts that work at a distance appeal to the structure of emotions and sensibilities formed in this context. To wreak havoc by the push of a button, to manage conflict with minimal direct engagement of persons, or to avoid endangering one's own forces, is deeply attractive. But in following this logic, high-technology warfare moves beyond the very concept of war as conflict between combatants. Historically, the ethics of war were largely related to the question of the allowable limits of action, one significant concern being how to protect non-combatants and social life beyond the war zone. Now, high-technology war targets the means of life, not combatants. This is obvious in the case of nuclear weaponry, so too biological and chemical weapons. In other words, high-technology and global society herald the coming of age of total war, by which is meant war without limits, war that acknowledges no ethic of appropriate and inappropriate action. 'Anything goes' is substituted for an ethics of war, and in the age of global warfare, society as such is the target. (16)

The targeting of society as a whole, and thus innocent people, by terrorists therefore mirrors an attitude that has emerged with the rise of global society. Global society, a form of social life dominated by intellectual practice, has legitimated destructive terror by a notion of total war, or war that knows no limits. This is the attitude that Laqueur identifies in contemporary terrorism, yet he does not see that it has a mirror image in global society itself. But if this is so, it is hard to see Laqueur's 'destructive terrorism' as a social aberration related to individual deformation (fanaticism). Similarly, while some ethicists regard the treatment of innocents in war as an outrage, they do not reflect on the more general principle emerging in social life. This emergent attitude towards innocents relates to deep structures within a society increasingly composed of socially abstract interconnections, or relations that work at a distance.

If the primary tendency in contemporary development is towards the dominance of post-human abstract interconnection, lived social reality remains composed of intersecting social forms. Face-to-face interaction continues to carry meanings and associations that have deep roots in our collective, embodied history. While a dominant tendency to abstraction can be identified, social reality is a composite of and site of struggle between tendencies. Nevertheless we can glimpse the implications of life lived through abstract interconnection for destructive terror in certain key examples where feeling and empathy for others appears to be completely absent.

Geoff Sharp has taken up related themes in a discussion of the social logic of what he terms the 'autonomous mass killer'. (17) His immediate focus was the 1996 killing at the Dunblane primary school in Scotland of seventeen people, sixteen of whom were pupils, by a lone gunman, and the killing at Port Arthur, Tasmania, of thirty-five people, including young children, also by a lone gunman.

 Unlike the killing of enemies in warfare, unlike communal or
 inter-ethnic massacres and dissimilar again to the state-sponsored
 extermination of those held to be of an inferior
 type, the Dunblane and Port Arthur killings appeared to be
 directed at social life generally. (18)

He identifies three characteristics in these killings: firstly, there is an autonomous orientation whereby the killer is ready to act against those responsible for his anguish and distress. Secondly, those who are to be answerable are 'defined randomly as if any or all other beings are answerable'. Thirdly, there is a calculated effort to engage in slaughter in anticipation of a media event--seeking 'a place in social memory as a star performer'--that the mass killer may not personally witness.

As Sharp goes on, in mass killings of this kind the full implications of globalization composed of socially abstract relations come to the fore. The killings are indiscriminate. The victims exist in a social world 'which has largely stripped away the social supports within which people confront the prospect of their own death'. The killer is solitary and completely without mercy. He seeks retribution. Self-focused anguish and recognition are the remaining human characteristics, recognition being sought via those defining institutions of global society: the mass media and the media personality. Once again, rather than needing a psychology of the fanatic to grasp the meaning of this manifestation of destructive terror, we need to see that the 'solitary mass killer is a new figure within social life'.

Conclusion

While political and psychological approaches to terror have some merit, they fail to touch on the broader contradictions that now underscore the Western way of life. These contradictions, grounded in the abstract-extended relations that govern high-technology society, create a climate of radical insecurity both at home and abroad. Such conditions are likely to promote an increase in terror and a response that can be described as perpetual war. They erode the social and cultural claims of the liberal society that Western leaders speak of defending. And they contribute to a crisis in the natural world with profound environmental and social consequences.

Any response to the terror that is now a reality of life in the West needs to be considered rather than merely reactive. This means that while Islam may have been reshaped by a few to justify the slaughter of innocents for political ends, (19) conclusions relating to this should not be drawn hastily. A considered approach to terrorism needs to be set within a broader understanding of core ethical shifts in Western warfare that have set the stage for treating innocents as pawns, and this shift, far from being incidental, needs to be seen as an aspect of the globalization process. Both shifts--within rebellious Islam and within the Western ethic of warfare--seek to legitimate terror to achieve their ends. But these are not mere conflicts, for, standing behind the openness to terror as a strategy are deeper motivating forces: the tensions, frustrations and profound inadequacies associated with an emergent form of social life, one that can only offer superficial meaning.

We can look here for answers as to why relatively affluent homegrown bombers have sought solutions in terrorist acts. The invasion of Iraq was no mere political strategy, but rather a reflection of a social order in the grip of globalization's internal contradictions. Those same contradictions profoundly impact on the cultural make-up of citizens, producing fault-lines that in certain circumstances lead individuals to transgress the ethical limits that constrain an 'anything goes' attitude. While we cannot ignore terrorist atrocities, it is even more important to grasp why they occur and to respond broadly through an examination of the West's culpability in setting us on the road to a new totalitarianism.

Destructive terror emerges from a recent development in social life the implications of which we barely have the practical concepts to comprehend. The attractions that have legitimated this development, largely an enormous flow of consumer goods and related lifestyles, continue to fascinate even as the environmental and social limits of this way of life are beginning to confront us. The core development for understanding these relationships is not globalization in the first instance but rather the social relations that shape globalization: the socially abstract interconnections that displace the need for interactive presence in the basic reciprocal associations that make up community life.

There will be no solution to the varied expressions of these contradictions without a reorientation of development that is able to renew forms of reciprocity and institutional supports to interactive presence. To achieve this it is not sufficient to look towards a mere decentralization of social life as a counter to the global city. Decentralized solutions alone often depend on the same over-dominance of intellectual practices. While there is no worthwhile future environmentally or socially that is not decentralized, it needs to be combined with a re-balancing of socially abstract interconnections and socially concrete associations. This will entail a re-balancing of the relations of the mind and body in productive and everyday life. Building a core of reciprocal relations together with other social institutions, including institutions of exchange, that stand against the dominance of global markets will appear much more possible once we see that high-technology futures are not futures at all.

(1.) R. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Melbourne, Scribe, 2005.

(2.) P. Khalil, 'Is This Our Unwinnable War?', The Sunday Age, 17 July 2005.

(3.) There is a lot at stake here. The present hysteria against 'external' threats needs only to be extrapolated in circumstances of the possible use by terrorists of weapons of mass destruction to glimpse the implications. In fact, no one really believes that weapons of mass destruction will be used. But such innocence about the depth of the latent hostilities within global culture is a problem. If such weapons are used, these unrealistic attitudes will almost certainly call into being an uncontrollable hysteria more destructive of Western values than any terrorist is likely to be. The world has entered a period of extreme danger on many levels, one that first emerged with the atomic bomb and continues to unfold.

(4.) W. Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, New York, Continuum, 2004.

(5.) Laqueur, p. 14.

(6.) Laqueur, pp. 220, 223.

(7.) Laqueur, p. 227.

(8.) In this article I am treating this ambiguity as a problem of method. This is to say that these tendencies and absences in Laqueur's work can be seen to arise out of an inadequate approach to and conceptualization of the new movements and the social order more generally. Politics can be grounded in deficient method and a broadened approach can open new lines of argument. But I am fully aware that these tendencies, as well as method, are likely in practice to derive from politics, where political commitments limit one's conceptual outlook, blinding one to other ways of seeing. While this is likely in the case of Laqueur's work, there is still a broader readership I wish to address who are open to seeing things differently.

(9.) I draw here from Geoff Sharp's work on the significance of extended relations of sociality. See 'Extended Forms of the Social', Arena Journal, no. 1, 1993, pp. 221-237. High technology works by way of the extension of social relations, especially in the new means of communication--print is supplemented by electronic means, from television to the Internet. The technological mediation of relations becomes central to social life in the global age.

(10.) See J. Hinkson, 'Good Times in the History of Freedom', Arena Journal, no. 20, 2003.

(11.) These 'abstract others' stand at the centre of what Slavoj Zizek argues is the new definition of human rights: 'the right not to be "harassed", that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others'. See 'Against Human Rights', New Left Review, no. 34, July-August, 2005, p. 126. I would not expect Zizek to agree with my interpretation of the meaning of such rights, that is, that the right to 'safe distance' is naturalized within social relations that are technologically mediated.

(12.) H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1967.

(13.) Greg Sheridan is a journalist with The Australian newspaper and long-time commentator on foreign affairs.

(14.) R. Wright, A Short History of Progress, Melbourne, Text Publishing, 2004.

(15.) See Wright, and also J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, London, Allen Lane, 2005.

(16.) 'The Second World War, in particular, did much to eliminate any distinction between combatant and non-combatant by legitimating the deliberate massacre of civilians. To that extent, the horrific threats and actions by terrorists against innocent passengers ... are symptomatic of attitudes toward violence which the West itself has sanctioned, in principle at least': N. O'Sullivan (ed.), Terrorism, Ideology and Revolution, Sussex, Wheatsheaf Books, 1986, p. 16.

(17.) G. Sharp, 'The Autonomous Mass Killer', Arena Journal, no. 6, pp. 1-7.

(18.) Sharp, p . 1.

(19.) See R. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, London, Hurst and Coy, 2002, p. 22 for an account of the struggle within Al-Qaeda. Laqueur makes it clear that there were similar themes in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 20th century.