Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist, improvised two concepts to understand the transition to modernity and industrialism. He postulated a distinction between mechanical and organic societies. A mechanical society is based on likeliness, an organic society, on difference. Organic societies are based on the division of labour, on specialization, on differentiation. Mechanical societies respond homogenously to violence by asking for revenge, valuing a head for a head, an eye for an eye. Organic societies thriving on difference move from physicality to a rule of law which is actually a celebration of difference.

The solidarities that thrive on each are radically different.

However, there are times when an organic society behaves in terms of mechanical solidarity. Security and times of terror create such occasions. At that moment, any form of dissent becomes threatening and is immediately read as a security threat. Like feels at home on likeliness, feeding on it. Often what is seen as a temporary crisis becomes a perpetual regime, abbreviating the very rights and values we hold as fundamental.

The first casualty of terror is human rights. The second victim is everydayness, the third target, diversity. But these are three things that make a society livable, create the forms of well being we cherish. We face an apparent paradox. To protect the society and the social order we have created, we destroy the very things we value. What creates this rite of passage or this reversal from peace to a simpler form of order is security as a response to terror. It transforms a protean society celebrating diversity, fluidity and border crossing to a procrustean one, with monolithic centers and monolingual definitions. Terror destroys the dialects of difference which make dialogue possible. Society speaks in a single voice and without a hearing aid. Between the megaphone and silence, there is no possibility for the worlds we call noise.

Security militarises civil society into a set of disciplinary structures. It sees no major differences between controlling traffic and controlling thought. To put it differently, it wants to see thought as mere traffic so its channels could be easily blocked. In emphasisng order, stability, control, it revalidates authoritarianism in the name of democracy, a syllogism that the middle class in particular is susceptible to. Finally human rights become a luxury, a conspicuous consumption we can ill afford.

Rights are not merely a set of protective devices against harassments or a set of entitlements guaranteeing access to forms of competence. They make spaces for forms of life, forms of thought, forms of difference. Rights protect difference against threat. Security protects monolithic order against the right to be different. But rights are only a guarantee of a framework of plural thoughts. Rights to survive against the pressures of security or terror needs to be animated by dissent.

Dissent is a label that includes a variety of celebrations of difference. Dissent includes the radical rebel, the eccentric, the deviant, the pluralist and the seeker of alternatives. Terror and security need all of them as an antidote to the very instability or false stability they create. Eccentricity is a question of style, a way of doing things differently. It focuses more on the odd or the quixotic. It is individual. Amplified to the level of collectivity, we confront ethnicity. Meanwhile, the rebel challenges authority, especially its authoritarianism or corruption. Whistle-blowing is one well known form of rebellion. Radicalism demands system transformation. NGOs can be rebellious while Naxalities can threaten a radical alteration of the social structure. Dissent involves a critique of society at every level of texture. It differs in thought and in action because a way of thinking is frequently accompanied with a change in lifestyle. It can move from suspicion and scepticism to an advocacy of more differences within the frame or an alternate frame. Unless security, rights, sustainability play themselves out within the tenor of life, they will remain un-nuanced. Security then will set the stage for that worst of tyrannies, the monoculture of the mind.

The writer is a social scientist