What do we mean by ‘security’?

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We Need Robust Accounts of Security & Freedom

In the history of Western political philosophy, security and freedom are always linked. That’s pretty intuitive: You need to be safe in order to best pursue your goals. From the Enlightenment onward in the Western political imagination, security became not just the government’s central task, but the whole reason it was formed in the first place as well as its source of legitimacy. The U.S. Declaration of Independence, for instance, has two basic tasks to justify: the rebellion of the colonists and their formation of a new government. The fulcrum that the preamble hinges upon is this relationship of security to freedom: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…” Without this ability, a government was no longer legitimate.  

Even figures like Thomas Hobbes, who argued for maximal state power, said revolutions could be justified if the state could no longer keep its citizens safe. “Safe” here really means from undue physical harm done by others. In the Western canon, security as a governmental function is mostly limited to this martial framework, excluding other basic human needs that freedom depends upon such as safe and dignified shelter, food, and medical care. That’s one important reason why our governmental budgets look the way they do, with extreme spending on police and military.  

That is the subject of the essay I would like to share from philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Who gets to feel secure?” In it, he demonstrates the shortcomings of this notion of what he calls “antagonistic security,” and the very limited notions of freedom and unfreedom it produces. He opts instead for a “collaborative security” that focuses on meeting basic human needs that promote our flourishing. It’s a simple but important broadening of the aperture. Can we really speak of the robust political freedom of someone who struggles to find enough food to eat? That would entail such an impoverished account of politics, of life together.

I don’t think about the world in wholly moralistic terms. Still, politics does need moral reflection, and virtue ethics is helpful here. (I’m still begrudgingly, spitefully, Catholic after all.) Virtue ethics, broadly speaking, try to provide accounts of how one should live well in accordance with the best of what it means to be human. One of the aims of political life has to be how do we create a world that makes it easier for people to be good. 

Even without hashing out the finer points of what “good” means here or granting the assumptions about human nature baked into this account, there are broadly agreeable outcomes that remain out of reach for many. A basic point of agreement for coalition building, particularly for faith communities that haven’t aligned with fascists looking for new goals in public life, could be creating a world in which it is easier for all people to do things like participate in our institutions, to shape and care for their communities.