After the London bombing: an exercise in avoiding the truth: cultural self-reflection is desperately needed to grasp the crisis of meaning that typifies our world today.

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 array of soul-searching accounts and inquiries about the terror seem an exercise in double standards. Or does this preoccupation arise out of an unease still to be articulated? Is there a sense in which the bombing confirms a new order of threat comparable only with that of September 11, not just a threat to the Western way but, more significantly, touching doubts about the viability of that way of life? While there is good reason to make this argument, if the analysis and interpretation in the press is motivated by deep unease it only concentrates upon the immediately present anguish inseparable from the disruption of everyday life. It leaves in the background the more extended processes of history, international power relations and cultural transformation that can contribute to an understanding of, as distinct from a reaction to, the experience of a terrorist assault.

In the round most people have only a rudimentary sense of the way 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 frequently carries over into the subordination of other people. Often enough, as the whole history of conquest demonstrates, it entails the disruption of their taken-for-granted way of living, including their religious beliefs.

When some among a minority drawn from a subordinated people seek to hit back by terrorist means, as in the case of the bombing in London, or earlier in Spain, the sense of outrage and injustice of people who simply take for granted their own established way of living is readily understood. 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 UK the Queen's declaration that our 'Western way of life will not be affected' also depends on a hypocritical self-righteousness which can provide ground for a totalitarian shift. A changing relation of the state to citizens begins to take shape, as illustrated in policies of shoot first and ask questions later.

These attempts aside, the more considered concern in the press has reflected on the new reality that these terrorists, while mostly--if not entirely--Islamic, were 'homegrown'. What could be the reasons for these British-born citizens to make such an attack on the heart of their own land? Several arguments have been marshalled for this

The first suggests that we do not need to delve into the deeper meanings of this terror but see it in straightforwardly political terms. That is, the terrorists are simply seeking political strategies, in particular to force a withdrawal of the 'coalition of the willing' from Iraq or some such. One researcher, Robert Pape (Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Scribe, 2005) has argued this relatively secular view, acknowledging the fact of Islamic fundamentalism but dismissing its significance in the whole terror strategy. If this terrorist strategy (forcing a withdrawal from Iraq) were to succeed, in his view, the growing tendency towards terror events would dissipate and go away. That these terrorists are born and bred in England does not cut across them adopting political strategies that are 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. They seek to affect the outcome as best they can. Having an Islamic background generates fellow feeling and solidarity. But given the imperatives of asymmetrical warfare, they go beyond conventional political means--terror.

The second strand of interpretation addressing the reality of home-grown bombers emphasises the nature of Islam itself. Contrary to Pape, they argue that Islam has been hijacked or given an extreme interpretation and this motivates the bombers wherever they are from. In a long piece in the Sunday Age (17 July) Peter Khalil (an analyst with the Eurasia Group in New York) argues this case in a relatively developed form against Pape. In his view, Al-Qaeda has developed a general world view that rejects Western modernity and 'decadence' and seeks a pure state of Islam including the reinstatement of the historic caliphate that has not existed since the end of the Ottoman Empire. It is this end that motivates them and justifies their more particular terror strategies aimed at achieving a withdrawal from Iraq. In the view of Khalil, the diaspora of Islamic youth in the west--relatively affluent as they may be--are engaged by this end more than the ideologies associated with the Western Way.

The conclusion of Pape is that the west should withdraw from their interventionist positions--although for him this means simply to go offshore. The conclusion of Khalil is for moderate Islam to develop a positive view of the modern so it can find a way forward that gives meaning to its youth. This is the approach now adopted by Blair who seeks a new crusade amongst moderate Muslims to convince them, and those inclined to stray, of the distortions in bin Laden's version of Islam. Both views contain partial truths but completely ignore the nature of 'the West'. They screen from us the possibility that terror may be becoming endemic for quite different reasons. They ignore the social conditions of the home-grown terrorists and how these contribute to their support for terroristic strategies.

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, is a great multicultural complex that draws people to its centre from all corners of the globe, people who love it and the freedom it allows. The terrorists have attacked this way of life by means of an attack on its working-class citizens who merely seek to go their own way to their places of work. They will never be subdued and will defend its values .

Many, no doubt, agree with Livingstone's defence of the cosmopolitan Global City. Nothing in the contemporary era could seem more natural to people--including such luminaries of New Labor as Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair. But as a way of life it needs to be probed and evaluated. Indeed, contrary to Livingstone, it should be at the centre of any debate about terror because arguably the Global City and Terror will gradually come to be seen as two sides of the same coin. Certainly Global Cities generally, and London in particular, are not neutral objects or pawns in the 'game' of global 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 here to create an uncritical unity against 'evil' and to deny the validity of a focus on our own social order as a necessary aspect of the struggle against terror. For example, the growing social stress that arises out of the way our society seeks to conquer nature needs to be at the centre of an antiterrorist strategy in the course of the century.

The Global City, as it has unfolded during the twentieth century, acts as a great maw, sucking in--emptying out--populations from the countryside on a scale never seen in history. In other words, it needs to be seen in its relations with a socially thinned out and increasingly poverty-stricken regional life that is stage by stage turned into a welfare haven. Los Angeles is the original model of this Global City idea. The relation of Los Angeles to adjacent societies such as Mexico and Columbia--where the latter are overwhelmed by criminality and the hold of drug barons who service the 'needs' of the 'fortunate' and those not so fortunate in the Global City--is a relation to ponder.

The Global City is a core object of processes of globalisation that now shapes much of what we do today. Some who see this process simply in terms of 'economic globalisation' emphasise that today's world is little different to that of the late nineteenth 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 globalisation' the contemporary market is not comparable with that of the nineteenth century. It gains its distinctive character from the way that a twentieth-century development--high technology made possible by that intellectual practice called the information revolution--supercharges and transforms the modern economic market.

Moreover, the transformation of the market is only one instance of a sweeping change affecting a range of institutions that emerge with the new relation of intellectual practice to the social world. Contrary to those who can only see in globalisation changed economic exchanges, this is a profound cultural transformation composed of quite special social relations. A much more abstract set of social relations come to characterise social life, allowing fleeting interchange between people--often taking the form of radical mobility. They weaken, even destroy, structures of kin and community that till now have lent stability as well as being a major source of meaning for citizens within every social order. It is this form of globalisation that remakes the world and finds one crucial expression in the Global City.

There can be no doubt that many experience fleeting interchange and unlimited choice as exhilarating. This is, indeed, the freedom referred to by Livingstone: a freedom to be differentiated from earlier liberal freedoms that were always partial relative to ever-present social institutions of kin and community. Now what seems like total freedom characterises the social order. Yet on the other side of this 'freedom' are contradictions. These are not usually given as the reasons for terror because they are usually not understood as arising within an overall context of cultural change and global power relations. Nevertheless--at the level of direct experience--they affect us all while leaving some predisposed to the non-solution of terror. I will comment briefly on four of these.

The first is the cause of deep resentment and insecurity because a social order built around the global market produces inequalities of a new order. In addition to the inequalities of class there is now also a radical marginalising process that places growing numbers of people outside of society as such. These inequalities do not only gain expression in this or that nation but globally and between nations. At their core they reflect the fact that high technology has the potential to eliminate work in the economy as never before. This is why the high-tech entrepreneurs look to what they call the 80-20 society. When 80 per cent of the population is no longer needed for productive work a background of anxiety feeds into a disposition towards terror as well as ready overreaction to the threat of terror.

The second refers to how the new freedom requires, as a matter of necessity, institutions of surveillance. The quite stunning success in identifying the suicide bombers in London has been made possible by up to 500,000 cameras 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 (excuse the pun) of the significance of surveillance in this world of freedom. More so, it illustrates how familiar social structures that relied upon individuals being present with each other are now supplanted by a social order composed of mediating (high) technologies. For some, this is the price of freedom in the Global City. And every time a new crisis emerges these forms of surveillance--cameras today, identity cards tomorrow, yet new levels of security the next day--are strengthened relative to the individual and the rapidly receding relations of community. As the theorists of mass society argued a couple of generations ago, all mediating institutions between the State and the individual are radically attenuated. Not so long ago this was called Totalitarianism, but the word is increasingly avoided. It is too discomforting when measured against what composes development today. Individuals experience fragmentation. And development calls for a far more active subordination of the way of life of others. For some, both of these outcomes can trigger terror responses.

The third contradiction is touched upon by Greg Sheridan, surprising because of his love of heroes such as G.W. Bush and obsessions about security generally:

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.

Here Sheridan intuits that our Western Way may increasingly amount to 'nothing', although he appears to have no insight into why it might be so. Usually for Sheridan 'something' amounts to taking a strong line a la G.W. Bush. But however that may be, he is touching on a crisis of meaning that typifies our world today. This is a crisis that will relentlessly emerge and re-emerge when social relations are recomposed along the lines found in the Global City. In this city there is plenty of consumption and movement, but 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 community structures are not the main-game of how the city develops over time. Sections of society become disillusioned. Some become hate-filled and hit back as they can.

The fourth area of contradiction that challenges this global surge to urban life is the crisis of the environment. Large cities have always placed enormous environmental pressure on their surrounding regions, pressure which has eventually undermined the city itself. These issues have been brilliantly explored by Ronald Wright in the Massey Lectures (See his A Short History of Progress). This relation between the City and the Region is now writ large globally with consequences that are quite general for the world as a whole. The dependence of the Global City upon high-energy use and the primal struggles this 'need' is about to 'legitimate'--whether over struggles for the supply of oil or nuclear power--is one kind of example. The incapacity to make any serious response towards the profound impacts of global warming is another. There is nothing quite so destabilising as the practical coming apart of deep environmental assumptions of a society. As the city falters under environmental pressure, some who have been brutalised or profoundly disaffected will hit out, others will seek the difficult road to establish a counter path. The terrorists do not 'win', for at best they symbolise a deep problem. They have no solutions. But sooner or later the Global City--in this respect not all that unlike its ancient forbear, the city of Rome--will come apart at the seams.

There is good reason to believe that secular political strategies are pursued by terrorists. There is also good reason to believe (see Rohan Gunaratna's Inside Al Qaeda for an account of the historic struggle within Al Qaeda) that Islam has been reshaped by a few to justify the slaughter of innocents for political ends--just as the ethics of war in the west were re-shaped to justify the slaughter of civilians in the twentieth century to accommodate high-tech weapons that work at a distance--culminating in The Bomb. Both shifts--within Islam and within the western ethic of warfare--seek to legitimate terror in order to achieve an end. Both are implicated in the contemporary stand-off between Islam and the west. But in addition, standing behind the secular political strategy and the openness to terror as a strategy, is a deeper motivating force--the tensions, frustrations and profound inadequacies associated with a social order that is sweeping the world and can only offer superficial meaning to its members.

Only such an order will produce the circumstances that lead to 'solutions' by relatively affluent home-grown bombers. In the foreground of their mind may well be Iraq, but the invasion of Iraq was not a matter of political whim but rather a reflection of a social order unable to solve its internal contradictions. And those same contradictions profoundly impact on the cultural makeup of its citizens, producing 'fault-lines' that in certain circumstances lead individuals to transgress those ethical limits that constrain 'anything goes' as an attitude to 'warfare' and politics. While we can hardly ignore that the terror genie is out of the bottle, it is even more important to grasp why and to respond practically while avoiding that transparent denial that sets us on the road to becoming a totalitarian fortress.

John Hinkson is an Arena Publications Editor