No impact to biopolitics – their critique ignores how governments act rationally, and provide security while assuaging anxiety

That said, I want to close by suggesting that biopolitics, while perhaps not necessarily good, is at least not wholly bad. Absent realistic alternatives, this claim is certainly worth considering. Foucault, for example, never charted a way out of biopolitics beyond developing an individual aesthetic of selfdiscipline and regulation—the “care of the self.”94 Other writers speak of achieving something like a “new politics,” which usually means some combination of personal freedom that includes the substance—but often not the legal baggage—of individual human rights, combined with an ideal of community that fits uneasily with the ideal of personal freedom (thus the “politics,” which are likely to be anything but new), as well as a more egalitarian economic arrangement and the social safety net of the modern welfare state, but without the modern state itself. Even assuming this vision is desirable, no one has any practical idea how to make it happen.95 My basic assertions are that the ills laid at the feet of biopolitics are not entirely its fault and that they are in any event the costs of “progress.” Consider, first, the charges. Critics point out that in the modern, centralized, biopolitical state, our individuality is suppressed to the larger goal of managing the population. As a result, we become detached and alienated, even as we are disciplined and regulated. At best we can resort to coping strategies, but larger transformation of our social environment is impossible.96The flaw in this diagnosis is that it treats the alienated individual as problematic, as if there were an acontextual, dehistoricized thing known as “an individual” that is capable of being alienated or not, with the result that we should try to make it less, rather than more, alienated. Far more likely is that the idea of the individual developed in the modern period along with the modern state and that alienation is part of what defines an individual. To the extent the “problem” of the alienated individual has significance in the contemporary world, in other words, it is a direct consequence of the enlightenment and can only be solved through biopolitics. Indeed, biopolitics simply reflects the enlightenment project of promoting reason in place of “superstition” and arbitrary power. Social structures have become rationalized, so that governments are more likely to operate by articulated policy instead of fiat, the rule of law instead of whim, and democracy instead of hereditary rule or warlordism. The creation of the individual—a rational, rights-bearing but also alienated entity—is critical to all of these developments. Importantly, under this account, these changes may not be liberating in any objective sense, because the freedoms they create come with real costs—the costs of being free in this way as well as the consequences of being part of a power structure in which these particular freedoms are defined, managed, and subject to suspension. Still, this process leads not only to centralization and state violence but also to rights that channel the exercise of state power, to pervasive regulation of our lives and environment but also to a significant amount of predictability and security for many people. Our modern anxiety can be imperfectly assuaged by the comforts that flow from management and technology, and there is no reason to believe we are any less happy than people were in the past—although neither is it clear that we are any happier.