Recently the word transparency has been a major driving factor behind much in the political world. Transparency demands that the Lords be reformed to lay its power before democracy. Transparency demands the boardroom must engage with democracy in its dealings. And transparency is blowing the winds against journalism's rather mysteriously clouded world.
But why all of this focus upon pulling back the curtain that shields these dark deals devised over dirty dinners from the public gaze?
So as the first round of charges are levelled over phone hacking (Greenslade, 2012) and the government tries to clean up politics and open it up to greater scrutiny, it would seem that battle is being won.
Yet as the veil that shrouds the transactions and interactions of people in public life has been further and further the rolled back, it has been met - step by step - with a similar demand for encroachment upon the lives of individuals.
Why should that warrant a note aside - especially in a world rolling on with full disclosure - you may well ask?
Consider again the quote above.
If a government knows everything there is about you - because it is all there for easy and palatable consumption - what more is there for a government to worry about from its people?
If a government, or its officials, do not even need a court order to investigate your most personal habits, or even your person - since that information has become free - what more is there for a government to worry about from its people?
The great personal freedom of individual privacy is the final bastion against the power of the collective will.
But the power it wields, and a government should fear, is not sedition. Nor terrorism. Nor a chequered past, nor religious affiliations - and certainly not your sexual habits.
The great power of personal freedom is in diversity. Specifically: the ability and safety of all individuals to think freely - free from the pressures of conformity, that weigh so heavily upon the human mind when in the light of public disclosure.
For much the same reason that public actions face greater calls for transparency, we should not be so quick in the repeal of individual privacy. Disclosure of public acts and the privacy of the individual combine to protect the individual liberty - through the assurance that individuals will be able to make up their own minds with all of the facts at their disposal.
'Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But... when society is itself the tyrant its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute 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 practises 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.' (Mill, 1859)
==========
References:
==========
+ Roy Greenslade's 'Rebekah Brooks charges take the phone-hacking scandal to a new level'; in The Guardian; 15 May 2012.
+ John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'; 1859.
No comments:
Post a Comment