Notes
The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between
Privacy and Freedom? (1999) by David Brin
“Transparent” Monoculture
I made some notes on an March 20, 1997 draft of The Transparent
Society by David Brin and posted them on the Extropian mailing
list on March 19, 1998. Mr. Brin kindly acknowledged my, admittedly
rather tart, comments in his final edition.
________
There have been several recent references on the E-list to David
Brin’s utopian call for the end of privacy through social
engineering a “Transparent Society.” Such an idea works
very well within a common moral consensual polity, indeed the idea is
ancient. It is at base a renaming of “Holy Watchfulness” as
practiced in monasteries around the world and in early Puritan
villages in colonial America. It is a monkish ideal.
There are no visible surface problems with it in this monkish
context, the benefits within the polity are substantial. However,
there are serious, even intractable problems with it when it is
proposed to be extended across polities that have conflicting ideals
and worldviews at their core. In particular, you cannot extend
“Holy Watchfulness” across the boundary between extropic
and entropic worldviews, i.e., between the culture of life and the
culture of death.
John Stuart Mills wrote in On Liberty (1859):
“Society can and does issue its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
The Transparent Society certainly penetrates deeply into “the
details of life,” and can easily be seen as a “social
tyranny” worse than “political oppression.” When
democratic society imposes the wrong mandates of the culture of death
(taxpayer-supported murder of unborn children and the sick and
elderly) on those who are opposed to it, how does it escape
“enslaving the soul” by coercively making us party to such
brutality? If your neighbors want to strengthen the culture of death,
then they must be stopped by political action, action which must
begin with secret plotting. With transparency, you wouldn’t be
able to meet and plot about political agendas in any sphere of
institutional life, your enemies would see your opening moves in
advance, a recipe for tyranny. The advantage goes to those who see
the formulation of the first move prior to implementation, not to
those who see the responses.
As I have written in Extropy, “irreducible first-person
subjectivity, with its private inner life and moral autonomy, is
central to the concept of an individual.” The fundamental
mechanism in nature is to close off the flow of information outward.
We must reach out on our own terms. The Transparent Society
would have us surrender this private subjectivity to complete
visibility and the potential scientifically-sanctioned manipulation
of our conceptual environment.
Not only must we have control of what information flows outward, but
growing up and maturing is learning to select which patterns our
attention should be focused on by progressively blocking out more and
more of our environment. The Transparent Society sends us back to
infancy, a cacophony of environmental input. As you mature, you want
your door locked, you want isolation, you want time and space to
formulate and test unique thoughts, then control of which thoughts
are released into the open. The Transparent Society is immature. It
appears as though it could develop into something akin to the
unreflective oral society, all surface and immediacy, the stagnant
‘soaking up existence’ of primitivism, not deep and
long-term thought characteristic of the literate, ascending society.
Private thought itself, i.e., the idea of thinking privately, as
opposed to rhetorical discourse in the public square, developed in
monasteries protected from being transparent to the outside
world as they preserved literate culture, and in private libraries
after Gutenberg’s invention. It is difficult to see how private
thought, which leads to cultural diversity, is fostered when
we’re never alone and never protected from our enemies within
the culture of death.
The Transparent Society can only foster a monoculture as it spreads
across the world. Isaiah Berlin, in The Crooked Timber of
Humanity (1990), writes of the intractable conflict between one
world universalism of rational tolerance, and the promotion of true
individual liberty, true freedom which can only arise from within a
“culture” or moral consensual polity:
“If free creation, spontaneous development along one’s own native lines, not inhibited or suppressed by the dogmatic pronouncements of an élite of self-appointed arbiters, insensitive to history, is to be accorded supreme value; if authenticity and variety are not to be sacrificed to authority, organization, centralization, which inexorably tend to uniformity and the destruction of what men hold dearest - their language, their institutions, their habits, their form of life, all that has made them what they are - then the establishment of one world, organized on universally accepted rational principles - the ideal society - is not acceptable.”
This one world ideal is opposed by the formulation of freedom by Johann Gottfried Herder:
“‘the will to live one’s own regional, local life, to develop one’s own eigentümlich values, to sing one’s own songs, to be governed by one’s own laws in one’s own home, not to be assimilated to a form of life that belongs to all and therefore to no one.’ Freedom, Hegel once observed, is bey sich selbst seyn - to be at home, not to be impinged upon by what is not one’s own, by alien obstacles to self-realization whether on the part of individuals or civilizations.”
This formulation of freedom within a consensual moral polity would
work wonderfully in the Transparent Society, but not at all
between different polities. This difficulty is insoluble short
of establishing a worldwide monoculture. The culture of life is
inherently polycentric, the culture of death is the default
monoculture.
Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order (1996) has written:
“At the end of the twentieth century the concept of a universal civilization helps justify Western cultural dominance of other societies and the need for those societies to ape Western practices and institutions. The non-Wests see as Western what the West sees as universal. What Westerners herald as benign global integration, such as the proliferation of worldwide media, non-Westerners denounce as nefarious Western imperialism. To the extent that non-Westerners see the world as one, they see it as a threat. In 1913… international trade was at record highs and in the next few years nations slaughtered each other in unprecedented numbers. If international commerce at that level could not prevent war, when can it? The evidence simply does not support the liberal, internationalist assumption that commerce promotes peace.... In Muslim eyes Western secularism, irreligiosity, and hence immorality are worse evils than the Western Christianity that produced them. Why Americans believe that conflict is good within their own society and yet bad between societies is a fascinating question which, to the best of my knowledge, no one has seriously studied.”
Non-Western civilizations do not want to be transparent to the
West in any way, shape or form. Criticism of sacred Islamic or Hindu
texts which give meaning and direction to life is destructive. Those
cultures properly recognize it as such and resist it strenuously.
Efforts to persuade them to open themselves to the Transparent
Society will result in world conflict.
The argument for extending “Holy Watchfulness” across
disparate moral polities is actually no argument at all, but rather a
simple displacement of whatever used to be on the altar, in favor of
“criticism” which will lead us all to the mystical end of
“accountability.”
Why should accountability be the end of this utopian social
engineering? Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly: From Troy to
Vietnam (1984) wrote: “Persistence in error is the problem.
Practitioners of government continue down the wrong road as if in
thrall to some Merlin with magic power to direct their steps. Yet to
recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course, is the most
repugnant option in government.” Her answer to this fact of
history was not the end of the Transparent Society, accountability,
rather the moral society: “Aware of the controlling power of
ambition, corruption and emotion, it may be that in the search for
wiser government we should look for the test of character first. And
the test should be moral courage.” The moral society is, in
fact, the only possible answer, for where does the will to hold
accountable come from?
The moral society must aim at peace, not accountability, if it is to
secure liberty. Santayana wrote in Dominations and Powers
(1951):
“Liberty requires peace. War would impose the most terrible slavery, and you would never be free if you were always compelled to fight for your freedom. This circumstance is ominous: by it the whole sky of liberty is at once clouded over. We are drawn away violently from irresponsible play to a painful study of facts and to the endless labor of coping with probable enemies.”
So peace is the fundamental ingredient on which liberty thrives,
not accountability. And how will the Transparent Society protect us
from our very real and menacing external probable enemies, when they
can peer into our private lives with unbelievable levels of detail?
This is a gaping hole in utopia, that international agreements,
global trade and creeping world governance will do nothing to help.
Accountability never is a permanent guarantee of minority rights nor
is it a protection against “frog-in-a-pot” style tyranny.
Individual freedom, that is, guaranteed minority rights and
protection from tyranny, depends on the right to secede from polities
gone bad, that have sunk into the culture of death.
The end of the Transparent Society is bogus and so is the means to
that end, criticism to reduce error. Criticism erodes the will,
lowers risk taking, leads to conformity. Criticism to reduce error is
a small subset compared to criticism to change direction, to break
down cultural worldviews. Certainty of direction in a leader is
infectious to the whole society, it overrides the utility of
criticism. The critical society is not vital absent certainty of
leadership. Also, the passion of abolition, which is never absent
amongst a large enough population, is criticism for
destruction’s sake. Criticism blunts intimacy and trust.
Self-selected criticism is all the rage, shallow credentialism begets
smugness begets a high-walled ego. People who think they can take
criticism generally are ignoring it, the will is sapped if it reaches
the heart. It’s not blunders, but direction that counts.
It’s the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
Criticism doesn’t breed affection, it destroys friendship. From
an evolutionarily adaptive standpoint, asking for criticism is simply
finding out who your friends are. Scientific criticism these days has
devolved to swiping dwindling grant money and fleeting fame from each
other.
There is another fatal flaw in the ability to make a transition to
the Transparent Society. The flaw involves the idea that the masters
of the world will altruistically roll over and play dead for the
benefit of the masses.
James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg offer this master-rich
scenario in The Sovereign Individual (1997):
“The good news about individual liberation and autonomy will seem to be bad news to many who are not among the cognitive elite.... Many of the assurances of equality that Western people have grown to take for granted in the twentieth century are destined to die with it.... Markets always place the greatest pressures on the weakest holders. Indeed, that is part of their virtue. They promote efficiency by removing assets from weak hands.... Increasing amounts of wealth will find their way into the hands of the ablest entrepreneurs and venture capitalists worldwide. Globalization, along with other characteristics of the information economy, will tend to increase the income earned by the most talented individuals in each field. The Sovereign Individuals of the information economy will not be warlords but masters of specialized skills, including entrepreneurship and investment. Yet the feudal hundred-to-one ratio [of peasants to knights] seems set to return.... Business relations will gravitate toward reliance upon ‘circles of trust.’ Due to encryption, which gives individuals an ability to steal undetected, honesty will be a more highly valued characteristic of business associates.”
"Protection will become increasingly technological rather than juridical. The lower classes will be walled out. The move to gated communities is all but inevitable. Walling out troublemakers is an effective as well as traditional way of minimizing criminal violence in times of weak central authority.... New survival strategies for persons of lower intelligence will evolve, involving greater concentration on development of leisure skills, sports abilities, and crime, as well as service to the growing numbers of Sovereign Individuals as income inequality within jurisdictions rises.... We expect increasing numbers of low-income persons in Western countries who previously would have depended upon transfer payments from the state to affiliate with wealthy households as retainers.... In the next century we shall witness the creation of a world superclass, perhaps of 500 million very rich people, with 100 million being rich enough to emerge as Sovereign Individuals [out of 7 billion - 70 to 1 ratio of servants to masters].”
Such a scenario, based almost entirely on the acknowledged need
for strong encryption of financial transactions, makes one question
the possible acquiescence of the master-rich to the proposed
Transparent Society, which would allow their servant-poor to observe
them in total detail. Such a prospect seems ludicrous on the face of
it.
Thomas Aquinas wrote: “For those among them who excel by their
intellect naturally dominate the others; as to those who do not shine
by their intellect, but whose body is robust, they seem to be
destined by nature to servitude.” This is an eternal verity, and
cannot be changed by the Transparent Society or any form of
organization whatsoever. In our technologically oriented society, the
highest intellects able to manipulate matter to whatever ends they
desire will dominate all, no matter what. It is foolish,
self-delusional and dangerously destructive to presume otherwise. The
utopian nature of the Transparent Society is clearly on display
here.
Lastly, the greatest flaw in any lasting achievements the Transparent
Society might produce if it were possible to be successfully
installed worldwide, has to do with human nature, with the
destructiveness of self-love. The flaw is not a visible surface flaw
but a deep flaw, not easily seen.
In The New Criterion (June 1996), an article by Joseph Epstein
about La Rochefoucauld takes the position that only a true gentleman
can live in the Transparent Society:
“This être vrai, or true being or genuine person, is someone who attains as much lucidity about his own motives and those of people he deals with as possible - no easy achievement when everything in society encourages the perpetuation of falsehoods, the exchange of lies, and the proliferation of illusions. L’être vrai combines in La Rochefoucauld with l’honnête homme, the true gentlemen, who lives without pretension. Such a man has no need of pretension. ‘It is a sign of true goodness to be willing to live always in the sight of good’ - just as ‘the truly honest man is without conceit’ and ‘lives in public as he does in private.’”
But, and this is crucial to the success of the Transparent Society:
“Still, make no mistake, to live with such lucidity and in such harmony is all but impossible. What with the maelstrom of self-love and self-interest in which we live, the added force of the passions that addle our minds, the banging about that the winds of fortune subject us to... nothing is more difficult, in La Rochefoucauld’s view, than correct judgment.”
This self-love, or amour-propre, which torpedoes correct judgment, is the Transparent Society’s greatest difficulty, even given a common moral polity.
“‘Amour-propre,’ as La Rochefoucauld notes, is like ‘the eye that can see everything but itself.’ In the first of his supplementary maxims, La Rochefoucauld describes it, in part, thus: ‘Amour-propre is the love of oneself and of all other things for one’s own sake; it makes men idolize themselves and would cause them to tyrannize over their neighbors had they the opportunity.... Nothing equals the impetuosity of its desires, the depths of its schemes, or the ingenuity of its methods.... It is impossible to fathom the depths or pierce the gloom the abyss in which it dwells.... There it conceives, breeds, and rears, unknowingly, a vast number of appetites and dislikes - some of so monstrous a shape that it fails to recognize them when exposed to the light of day, or cannot bring itself to own them. Out of the night that covers it are born the absurd ideas it entertains of itself; thence come its errors, its ignorance, its clumsiness, and its fatuous beliefs about itself - its notion that its feelings are dead when they are but asleep, that it has lost its activity when once it is at rest, and that it has got rid of the appetites it has for the moment appeased.’ To be human is to have amour-propre; to have amour-propre is to be imprisoned by it; yet to understand that one is in fact imprisoned does not ever quite set one free.”
Even in the Transparent Society, as on the E-list, we will fail to
see our monstrous appetites and desires, or fail to own them. Our
Puritan villages and monasteries with their “Holy
Watchfulness” will break up and give way to privacy once again.
It is human nature that individuals do not bear scrutiny. The
Transparent Society, like all utopias, is an immature revolt against
nature.
Reilly Jones
© 2001