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.

... contd.