Reflecting on terror and crisis of faith in America

Where do you place your trust? In Cipro? In surgical strikes? In our commander in chief? From news anchors and presidents to workers in factories, stores and emergency rooms, Americans now seek to reaffirm a sense of closure and control. Implicit in many public displays is a desire to return to the good old days, when America’s political might and technological prowess seemed to assure a stable social and natural order. Yet what if the good old days were not as orderly as we imagine?

And what if the very quest for a totally ordered world may paradoxically occasion ever-growing disorder? Perhaps we would be better off acknowledging that all our military and technological fixes leave some unwanted remainders. Providing political space to redress grievances and respond to unexpected consequences may be the surest medicine.

Anthrax is mysterious and often lethal. Nonetheless, why is there no crash program to eliminate environmental carcinogens and polluted air? These act in poorly understood ways to take vastly more of us each year than Anthrax has thus far claimed.

Much of our history can be read as a romance with technology and an insistent quest to still doubts about its darker sides. Anthrax anxiety and our relative indifference to more “established” risks reflect this pattern. Anthrax expresses and symbolizes the darker sides of a technological revolution in which most Americans still yearn to place an uncontested faith. On some level, we now suspect that the biological revolution that gives us designer drugs will inevitably yield designer pathogens, the future course of which appears utterly unpredictable.

These pathogens observe no institutional or architectural borders. Their existence adds to growing concerns about the permeability of our political borders. Anthrax and its perpetrators must be eradicated not merely to save lives but to reassure us that both our technological and political futures are secure.

The history of nuclear energy provides timely lessons about the consequences of this insistent faith in technology. During the Eisenhower era fall-out from weapons tests led to widespread fears. In part as rejoinder to these fears, government fashioned a “civilian” offshoot of nuclear weapons. “Atoms for Peace” was to provide electricity that would be “too cheap to meter” and would power the world economic development needed to counter the appeal of Communism. Today, nuclear plants around the world are both sources of ongoing environmental risk and potential targets of terrorists.

Yet we continue to introduce new products and technologies with promises of unprecedented human freedom, control, and predictability. Talk of risk is banished as ideological, anti-technology, “Luddite,” and parochial. As if to reflect, but also to sustain such faith, little attempt is made to assess unintended consequences. When deaths are charged, these are often denied or extenuating circumstances cited. Numbers are challenged and downplayed. When tragedy is undeniable, it is acknowledged only in the context of promises that better versions of the technology will eliminate the problem. As technologies manage to survive over a generation, their inescapable downsides are domesticated not merely by familiarity but also through the continued reassurance that risks are rare, now fully quantified, declining, and but a small price to pay for necessary forms of progress.

Cipro is being asked not merely to cure a disease but to serve as therapy for a culture. “In Cipro we trust,” Tom Brokaw’s memorable line, encapsulates the quasi- religious faith in technology. Nonetheless, the self-mocking play on religious rhetoric may also reveal some well-founded inner doubts. If millions of our citizens begin taking prophylactic Cipro, their actions may themselves occasion another public health crisis.

Marc Siegel, a physician at New York University, points out that prolonged use of this drug, without a reasonable treatment target, may cause diarrhea, colitis, gastrointestinal bleeding and insomnia in many citizens. In addition, its indiscriminate use, like the widespread practice of administering antibiotics to sustain industrial livestock culture, will exacerbate the already significant but underreported phenomenon of drug resistance.

It may be a utopian fantasy to expect political strategies to address the demonization, millennial hopes, and real and imagined grievances that underlie terrorism. Yet is there no fantasy in the notion that our police, our perfectly targeted bombs, our medical technologies can seal us off from unpredictable harm?

Anthrax may indeed become a new pandemic. Law should be enforced, epidemiological investigation pursued, and reasonable legal and medical precautions taken. As for me, however, I will place at least as much faith in a domestic and international politics that countenances challenges to our faith in technology and unregulated corporate markets.

The political ethic in which I place my trust assumes the possibility of widespread failure and is ever vigilant to acknowledge, measure, and allow for it. Most importantly, it affords multiple political venues perpetually to create and amend a framework of law. In the process it strives to assuage and address the critics and victims of our progress.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.