ABSTRACT
Let’s begin by breaking up this question into its two constituent questions. We can ask: ‘Why are things dangerous?’ But we can also ask: ‘How do things become dangerous?’
Every time you ask a why question you run the danger of ending up lost in a kind of essentialism. What that means is that you become committed to a process of regressing backwards to the foundation or origin of things in the hope of finding a point beyond which you need regress no further. Asking questions of the world in this way – the world of politics especially – launches you on a kind of quest; the quest to get to the essence of things. Once you have found the holy grail (of the essence of things), the quest resolves itself into a mere technical business of showing how, because the essence of things is essentially like this (whatever that might be), then life is the way that it is: in this instance dangerous. Asking why is a time honoured way of proceeding. But I think there is a better one. The better one is to ask the how question.
