Vertigo and the global Merton

Vertigo is the malaise of late modernity: a sense of insecurity, of insubstantiality,

and of uncertainty, a whiff of chaos and a fear of falling. The signs of giddiness are

everywhere, some serious, some banal; once acknowledged, a series of separate

seemingly disparate facts begin to fall into place. The obsession with rules, an insistence

on clear uncompromising lines of demarcation between correct and incorrect

behaviour, the decreased tolerance of deviance, a disproportionate response to

rule-breaking, an easy resort to punitiveness and a point at which simple punishment

begins to verge on the vindictive. Some of these things are quite blatant, they

are the major signposts of our times, the rise in the United States of a vast Gulag

of 2.2 million people in prison and 1 in 34 of the population in prison, on probation

or parole at any one time, the draconian drug laws, the use of terrorist legislation

to control everything from juvenile gangs to freedom of speech. Some are

quite banal, the obsession with the politically correct, the policies of zero-tolerance,

the shenanigans of New Labour over the control of undesirable behaviour, ASBOs

enters the English language (even becoming a verb: ‘to be ASBO’d’), and a British

Home Secretary stands up at the 2005 Labour Party Conference and announces

his intention ‘to eliminate anti-social behaviour’ by 2010 (a statement of Canutelike

munificence). Moral panics abound …