(Just a note before I start: Every time I paste my text into this it alters some of the formatting - spacing, font, font size and so on - and I can't seem to change it. That explains I hope, the sometimes odd formatting here. Sorry)
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Something I want to write about. I don't know why I bother actually, it will make not one iota of difference and no one reads my ramblings. But, I guess, it is mainly for me anyway.
I am an older white European male. I will be 65 years old in 3 months and I am already retired. And I know that the older generation has always been critical of the younger generation, that is as old as the hills. I know about Socrates remark:
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
Applies just as well today. However, and I speculate somewhat, I think that it is possible that the generations since about 1990 have had a different experience to those that came before and this may have had an adverse effect. They have grown up in one of the most stable and one of the wealthiest periods ever in the history of the world, particularly those that have been lucky enough to have been born in the West. They have grown up with no oppression, without the threat or experience of war, and to whom the Cold War (if they know about it at all) is history. They have experienced a culture that can meet all their material needs without problems. Many have grown up in a parenting culture that treats them like fragile beings who must be shielded from negative experiences at all costs and always have their demands met.
There is more, but I think this gives one the idea.
I think that in earlier periods the bad mannered and disrespectful youth eventually grew up into well-adjusted citizens of their respective societies, who then went on to complain about youth when they were older. They grew up!
I doubt that that is true any more in the West. We appear to be living in a culture of perpetual childhood.
And it is concerning that many of their ‘elders and betters’, like, for example, university ‘professors’ are just as deluded as the young are. There is little sign of maturation into adulthood.
Sad.
I know that I have a psychiatric disorder (‘Mental illness’), I suffer (and I mean suffer), from bipolar disorder. But that doesn’t mean that I am insane, in fact, many of the greatest thinkers and most creative individuals have suffered from bipolar, or other mental conditions. I don’t for one moment think that I am a particularly great thinker or creative genius, but I am just pointing it out.
Anyway, paranoia is not a symptom of bipolar disorder. However, you know what the man said:
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
I want to talk about the ‘panopicisation’ and ‘synopticisation’ of society and, particularly, some of the effects of that.
First, then, a little history and definition:
PANOPTICON
“The Panopticon Is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The scheme of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are incentivized to act as though they are being watched at all times. This scheme effectively compels the inmates to constantly control their own behaviour. The name is also a reference to Panoptes from Greek mythology; he was a giant with a hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very effective watchman.
The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its centre, from which the manager or staff of the institution is able to watch the inmates. The inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter of the structure, are unable to see through their cells. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison. It is his prison that is now most widely meant by the term "panopticon".
Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example". Elsewhere, in a letter, he described the Panopticon prison as "a mill for grinding rogues honest"."
“Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the Gordian Knot of the poor-law not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture!”
Bentham, Jeremy (1843d), The Work
Jeremy Bentham (1748 [O.S. 1747] – 1832)
Ideal design of Bentham’s Panopticon as a prison
An example of a prison built on panopticon principles – Millbank Prison, Pimlico, London
(Opened in 1816 and closed in 1890.)
It was seen as a machine, a technology, to watch, measure, shape and control behaviour. A technology of control to watch, measure and produce ‘ideal’, reformed, human beings. In fact, no perfect example of the panopticon was ever built, but it had an influence on prison building, mental hospitals, hospitals and even on schools and factories. It was not so much the physical design that was utilised, although there are examples of that, but the idea of discipline, control, observation and social engineering, the central philosophy behind Bentham’s idea (1).
The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) is, possibly, the most recent and well-known writer on this subject.
Paul-Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
His book Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison (Éditions Gallimard, 1975) dealt thoroughly with the subject (from his particular perspective of course) and when the English translation was published (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison - Allen Lane, Penguin 1977; The French title is more accurate than the English translation by the way – Monitor and Punish) I immediately bought a copy and devoured it. I still have it. I have to report that at that time I was a huge fan of Foucault having read everything he had written up to that point and many of the secondary commentaries and critiques as well. I am not such a big fan of him now, in fact, I began to lose my passion for his work shortly after I read this book, and I have read nothing by him since. He was a pre-post structuralist/modernist post-structuralist/modernist, a precursor to the manure storm that was to come. (2)
Foucault describes the panopticon not so much as a physical structure but as a set of techniques for, obviously, observing, measuring, and manipulating/controlling a population of individuals who do not know when, or if, they are being so observed.
Pre-modern power structures cannot be understood as ‘states’ in the modern sense. there were ‘centres of power’, and they were not always that powerful in reality. Think kings, aristocracy, chieftains, emperors and so on. They were almost certainly interested in watching some people, but usually those closest to the centre of power. The vast majority of people were living at the ‘default setting’ level of human existence – hard lives and hard struggles, like the vast majority of human beings for just about all of history until very recently, and generally not of much interest to the rulers unless they caused trouble or didn't produce food.
Various Roman emperors, for example, from time to time used spy networks to watch the aristocracy. The Venetian Republic had, I believe, a quite sophisticated system. In late 16th Century England Sir Francis Walsingham had a spy network across most of Western Europe, but this, again, was an intelligence gathering network. There was no intention to measure and control so these spy networks cannot be called panopticons. The available technology was also a serious limiting factor.
But, today, I do not think that there is any doubt that we live in a panopticon society, at least in the West and China. We are watched and monitored everywhere and in almost everything we do. From CCTV to facial recognition software, from car registration number recognition software to algorithms that continually sweep and filter internet activity, and so on. And most people don’t really care about it if they are even aware of it.
Also, since the turn of this century, there has been massive growth of ‘internet companies’ that also carry out monitoring, measuring and censoring. They have also been known to cooperate with states in these activities.
You know who the usual suspects are in this regard.
However, this produces a massive, unbelievable, flood of data. And states consist of many different groups and networks of people (I prefer the word ‘crowds’ by the way) who have varying goals and agendas, varying resources, and often competing interests. I may be wrong, but I do not think that there is (yet anyway) a huge central pool of data from which information is extracted. I suspect that most of the data is never used.
As I said, I may be wrong.
Just a brief comment on why this panopticon society grew. This is a fascinating subject in its own right, and I can only sketch it in here. The modern nation-state really appears in the 18th Century in Europe. There are, of course, roots and strands going back into history, but the centralised state with a bureaucracy is a product of the 18th Century. With the rise of the nation-state came the need for the rulers to keep a closer eye on their populations. The science of statistics, for example, although having precursors, was formalised in Prussia in the 18th Century in order to count, categorise and analyse the population, particularly to know how many men were of suitable military age and where they were. Starting in the 18th Century, but taking off at exponential speed in the 19th Century, was the growth of industrial production. This created a need for a more disciplined workforce and the need for a more educated and trained workforce. During the 19th Century also, the populations in Western Europe exploded, creating a need for the state to watch ‘the people’ more closely and producing a much more diverse population, as the range and kinds of employment expanded demanding different skills and attitudes. Then, during the 20th Century, the technology began to be available, exploding in range and quality in the 21st Century. The technology was now available.
These developments, of course, had massive positive effects on peoples lives. For the first time in history, the lifestyles of people were lifted out of the default setting of existence and rocketed to heights that would not have been dreamed of by our ancestors. The material quality of life became better, and continued to improve, and continues to improve to this day on a global scale. The expansion in quantity and kinds of jobs also gave people opportunities they had never had, especially with the need for better education. The majority of the European population had, for the first time, really meaningful spare resources and time to invest in activities other than work and survival.
If the population were prepared to more or less conform and more or less obey, the rewards were fantastic. That is the price of modern civilisation.
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We most definitely live in a panopticon society.
But there is also another, related, concept that I wish to discuss. And that is the concept of the synopticon.
SYNOPTICON “The concept of Surveillance of the few by the many, as identified by sociologist Thomas Mathiesen.”(3)
Wikipedia
Zygmunt Bauman has also written on this (4)
I agree with the following writer on this issue by the way.
“Some have argued about whether the panopticon or the synopticon have a role in our society but, … , it seems to me that both are at play. Both metaphors exist and feed into one another, especially when looking at the media and the internet.”
https://paigearnold.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/panopticon-and-synopticon/
Where many people watch, measure and judge a few. This phenomenon is linked, I would argue, to the massive increase in the availability and use of social media. Social media has become an arena where the many watch the few. And they judge them.
The basis of this judgement in these enlightened times is usually what I will call the ‘progressive narrative’. This consists of a ragbag of 3rd/4th wave feminism, Social Justice Warriors, the new puritans, the alphabet soup of various gender identities (and even racial, age and species identities). Now, I am aware that this is a tiny minority, but they seem to have acquired a massive amount of influence. Where this narrative came from is a fascinating question, which I will not use much time on here. I think its roots are long. Even in my University days, 40 years ago, there were some very feeble foreshadowing of the storm of idiocy to come, especially amongst some wings of the feminist movement. There was also a feeble foreshadowing of the post-modernist movement and a growing interest in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Social constructionism was also fairly strongly present, especially in sociological schools like symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and so on. I, myself, will confess to being taken with symbolic interactionism at that time. It still interests me, but in a very modified form.
One thing that strikes me, and others, about the majority of Progressive Narrative believers, is the depth, apparently bottomless, of their ignorance. They have no knowledge of or understanding of history, the historical context or the many shades of grey, the complexities, of history. They have no knowledge of, understanding of, or appreciation of culture and the cultural context. The utter ignorance astounds me. And many of them are University educated. It demonstrates to me how utterly useless a University education has become, especially in the ‘clown quarter’ subjects. Finally, there is also an astounding ignorance of, and total misunderstanding of, science. This, I think, stems from social constructionism – if everything is a social construction then scientific method is meaningless, reality is meaningless, biology is meaningless. This is utter nonsense.
So the roots of this narrative are not recent. I would suggest that it has exploded due, in part, to the extremely privileged position in society that most of its advocates occupy. They are the most privileged generation that has ever lived on this planet. They benefit from the products of advanced capitalism, from the general stability in the West (for now, deteriorating quickly I fear) and the decline in Western societies of acts of violence, despite the highlighted events that do happen.
However, as interesting as this question is, I will leave that brief outline and move on – the Synopticon.
My claim here is that social media has created a space where people can ignore the normal rules of civilised discourse. Information can be spread around the world in minutes and people react to it instantly, emotionally, abandoning reason altogether. The reaction can then explode over the internet, creating more emotional reactions. A more rational and considered understanding takes a long time and if it ever is produced it is much later and many of the ‘triggered’ apparently have no attention span at all, everything is judged based on slogans and very simple black-and-white thinking. And a storm is created. The anonymity of social media and the lack of face-to-face contact seems to have created a space where people can descend back into the most basic, selfish, childish and even violent depths of human nature. Yes, I said human nature. More on this later.
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”
The Examiner No. XIV (Thursday, November 9th, 1710)
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
This has always been true, but today electronic media have turned this process into an instant phenomenon.
A couple of results of this phenomena has been to resurrect to aspects of human nature that have always been present but were greatly diminished by the rise of modern civilisation. These are the Charivari and the Witch hunt.
CHARIVARI:
“Charivari (or shivaree or chivaree) or Skimmington (or skimmington ride; England) (German: Katzenmusik) are terms for a folk custom in which a mock parade was staged through a community accompanied by a discordant mock serenade. Since the crowd aimed to make as much noise as possible by beating on pots and pans or anything that came to hand these parades are often referred to as rough music … a wrongdoer or wrongdoers might be dragged from their home or place of work and paraded by force through a community. In the process they were subject to the derision of the crowd, they might be pelted and frequently a victim or victims were ducked at the end of the proceedings … Women seem to have been particularly prominent in both organising and participating such events which usually began with the crowd gathering (pubs or taverns were a common meeting point) and then marching to the homes of the accused.”
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charivari
We can see this in a so-called Twitter storm. Individuals are dragged out and humiliated and a great deal of noise is made about it. I find it interesting that women seem to have been pretty central to this event. I don’t know what that may mean if anything.
The Witchhunt is, of course, a well-known phenomenon at certain periods in human history. Again, the rise of modern civilisation, the rule of law and due process helped to bring this under control. However, modern social media seems to have encouraged the return of the Witch hunt.
There is no Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) to give guidance today, but the Progressive Narrative serves as one. But this narrative is very fluid and can change rapidly, making the target of witch hunts shift all the time, creating anxiety and unpredictability.
There are no Witch Finders today, just a screaming mob of many, self-appointed, Witch Finders.
A social media witchhunt in action
Witch Hunts
Witch Trials: Stage #1 -- The Accusation
by Jenny Gibbons
“The first step in any Witch trial was the accusation -- the point when some individual was charged with Witchcraft. There were three different ways that you could end up on trial: complaint, rumour, or denunciation.
Most Witch trials began when a person thought he'd been bewitched and complained to the authorities. Usually this didn't happen overnight. Studies of English trials show that a village often brooded for decades before launching an accusation. People noted sudden deaths and strange illnesses, "signs" of Witchcraft. Gradually one or two people fell under suspicion. Each odd event increased pressure in the town, until some final straw precipitated a trial. This is one of the reasons that Witches were often elderly. A Witch may have been suspected all her adult life, but it frequently took years for the "pressure" in the town to build to a boil.
A Witch could also be accused because of "general fame" or rumour. In some areas, an inquisitor or judge was allowed to arrest a person if s/he was commonly said to be a Witch. Many modern people assume that this was the "normal" way of starting a Witch trial, that there were professional Witch hunters scouring the land for Witches and forcing the peasantry to betray their wise women. In fact, rumour accusations were quite rare. Very few Witch hunters went out looking for Witches -- the populace were happy to accuse more than they could try.
The third type of accusation -- denunciation -- caused thousands of deaths. It's the legal "innovation" that allowed the great Witch crazes to occur. Denunciations are when one "Witch" accused another. When a suspected Witch was questioned, she was usually asked to name other Witches. Under torture, many did indeed "denounce" other "Witches." Simple maths shows the horror of this. Say one Witch denounces five others. Each of them is tortured, each accuses another five. Now 25 more "Witches" are dragged to jail, and the process continues. Denunciations are the driving force behind the enormous crazes where hundreds of Witches died.”
http://www.summerlands.com/crossroads/remembrance/_remembrance/accusation.htm#The Accusation
“ The accuser had to provide evidence to support his accusation, and the authorities were required to test it. If he said that a Witch made him sick, doctors were summoned to examine him. If they felt there might be natural causes for the illness, the charge of Witchcraft was dropped without trial. Only if the evidence seemed solid did the court proceed to the next stage, examining the accused. Or, that was the theory. In reality, this stage disappeared ..
… it was one of the first legal safeguards dropped. Lawyers claimed that it was "reasonable" to assume that anyone accused of Witchcraft was guilty. Why would everyone say a person was a Witch if they really weren't? Religious leaders supported the lawyers.”
http://www.summerlands.com/crossroads/remembrance/_remembrance/examination.htm#The Examination of the Accuser
There are several elements to note here. The accusation could be decades old. Rumour and ‘common belief’ was enough to accuse. Signs were looked for – today that could be something said decades ago, patterns of behaviour or off the cuff statements today and so on. And, most interesting, all due process was dropped. It was simply assumed that to be accused meant the person so accused was guilty. That is seen all the time today – ‘just believe her’, for example. It has even been suggested by an actual lawyer that this should be done today!
Why does social media encourage this madness? I think that there are many reasons for this but I would like to focus on one important theme. And here I, reluctantly, draw on the work of Sigmund Freud. I say ‘reluctantly’ because I am not a fan of the man. I think in his early work he was a charlatan and a liar. I also believe that psychoanalysis has done more harm than good in the world.
But, in one book I think he hit on a theme that is very, very important. By no means a new argument, but one that he presents simply and clearly. The book is:
Civilisation and its Discontents, written in 1929 and published (in German) in 1930.
“...it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....”
“I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and I return to my view that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization”
“. . . the two urges, the one towards personal happiness and the other towards union with other human beings must struggle with each other in every individual”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Basically, the argument here is that a civilised structure can only arise by the suppression of the more basic elements of human nature. If the structures of civilisation are torn down then a space is created where the basic, childish, animal, elements of human nature can begin to flourish. There are, of course, many positive benefits to this suppression, the fruits of civilisation which help to lift mankind from the basic life of the human default setting.
And I say basic elements of human nature because there is a human nature, there can be no doubt about it. All the contemporary scientific evidence shows this. Below the civilised veneer, human nature is rooted in biology, in nature, in its chthonic roots. Not everything is ‘socially constructed’, most of our human nature and biological drives are given by our animal nature. Freud would, of course, call this the Id. I recommend the book The Blank Slate, The modern denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (2002) for a much more detailed examination of this issue.
This means that the elements of civilised society evaporate, and people revert to the ‘Id’ or childishness, becoming totally and utterly selfish, the world revolves around them and must be arranged to suit their needs. They want gratification and they want it now. Everything is very simple to the Id, I get it and I get it now or I will throw a tantrum. I think that we see it all the time on social media and of course this has leaked into the real world and is having a disastrous impact on civilisation. One thing that the ‘Progressives’ fail to understand is that modern civilisation created the very world that allows them to have the lifestyle that they have. There are massive spare resources to allow an ‘education’ system to exist, there is an unbelievable luxury, compared to the default setting of human life. They are in the process of undermining that, pulling the rug out from under their own feet. Maybe they will realise that one day.
There are some feeble signs that things might be going to change, with more and more ‘Progressives’ being ‘red pilled’ as they say today. And in the social world change can come suddenly and quickly, as a small movement out on the fringes gets amplified into a larger social movement. So who knows. But I am not optimistic myself.
I think that I agree with Orwell when, in 1984, Winston Smith muses:
“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” (5)
Part 1, Chapter. 7
Of course, Orwell means the Marxist definition of the proletariat, those who do not own the means of production. And, without wanting to be condescending, I tend to agree with Smith here. The bearers of the ‘Progressive narrative’ are, as I have said, a small minority with excessive influence. They have little or no effect on the mass of people, those who do the hard work that keeps civilised society running. And, thank god, these ‘proles’ reject the whole ‘Progressive narrative’, as can be seen, maybe, by the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016. There lies some hope. They live their lives without reference to the ‘narrative’, except to ridicule it.
There still exists, I fear, a real chance of the emergence of a totalitarian state, maybe a totalitarian theocracy in Europe, or a ‘Soviet’ style dictatorship. I certainly hope not, but the possibility is real.
So, my claim is that we now live in a panopticon state and social media has unleashed:
“Monsters. Monsters from the id” Lt. ‘Doc’ Ostrow, Forbidden Planet, 1956
Postscript:
One of my favourite short stories by Isaac Asimov touches on some of these themes. I recommend it:
The Dead Past Isaac Asimov,
Published in April 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
Footnotes:
(1) In the City of Lincoln, which is the administrative centre of my home county of Lincolnshire in England, the old Victorian prison stands in the grounds of the castle. It is now a museum. Within this old prison, there is a chapel. This chapel is built exactly after the idea of the panopticon. It is the embodiment of the Panopticon in miniature.
Prison Chapel, Lincoln, England.
(2) Daniel Dennet tells an interesting story about Foucault, which, of course, I cannot actually trace or verify now. But I did see him tell this story on a YouTube clip. Apparently, while in France Dennet and Foucault met and had a long chat. Dennet was somewhat surprised to find that Foucault could, verbally, present his arguments quite logically and clearly. He asked Foucault why he didn’t write as clearly as he spoke. Foucault replied that in order to get published in France one had to include at least 25% bullshit.
(3) The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault's 'Panopticon' revisited (1997)
(5) “The proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens owning little or no property. The origin of the name is presumably linked with the census, which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a register of citizens and their property from which their military duties and voting privileges could be determined. For citizens with property valued 11,000 asses or less, which was below the lowest census for military service, their children—proles (from Latin prōlēs, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring". The only contribution of a proletarius to the Roman society was seen in his ability to raise children, the future Roman citizens who can colonize new territories conquered by the Roman Republic and later by the Roman Empire. The citizens who had no property of significance were called capite censi because they were "persons registered not as to their property...but simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads (caput) of a family."”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat
