Ideas Animate Democracy

Keith Tidman 

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once advised, ‘Life can only be understood backwards … but it must be lived forward’ — that is, life understood with one eye turned to history, and presaged with the other eye turned to competing future prospects. An observation about understanding and living life that applies across the board, to individuals, communities, and nations. Another way of putting it is that ideas are the grist for thinking not only about ideals but about the richness of learnable history and the alternative futures from which society asserts agency in freely choosing its way ahead. 

As of late, though, we seem to have lost sight that one way for democracy to wilt is to shunt aside ideas that might otherwise inspire minds to think, imagine, solve, create, discover and innovate — the source of democracy’s intellectual muscularity. For reflexively rebuffing ideas and their sources is really about constraining inquiry and debate in the public square. Instead, there has been much chatter about democracies facing existential grudge matches against exploitative autocratic regimes that issue their triumphalist narrative and view democracy as weak-kneed.  

In mirroring the decrees of the Ministry of Truth in the dystopian world of George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four — where two plus two equals five, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength — unbridled censorship and historical revisionism begin and end with the fear of ideas. Ideas snubbed by authoritarians’ heavy hand. The short of it is that prohibitions on ideas end up a jumbled net, a capricious exercise in power and control. Accordingly, much exertion is put into shaping society’s sanctioned norms, where dissent isn’t brooked. A point to which philosopher Hannah Arendt cautioned, ‘Totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorising human beings from within’. Where trodden-upon voting and ardent circulation of propagandistic themes, both of which torque reality, hamper free expression.

 

This tale about prospective prohibitions on ideas is about choices between the resulting richness of thought or the poverty of thought — a choice we must get right, and can do so only by making it possible for new intellectual shoots to sprout from the raked seedbed. The optimistic expectation from this is that we get to understand and act on firmer notions of what’s real and true. But which reality? One reality is that each idea that’s arbitrarily embargoed delivers yet another kink to democracy’s armour; a very different reality is that each idea, however provocative, allows democracy to flourish.

 

Only a small part of the grappling over ideas is for dominion over which ideas will reasonably prevail long term. The larger motive is to honour the openness of ideas’ free flow, to be celebrated. This exercise brims with questions about knowledge. Like these: What do we know, how do we know it, with what certainty or uncertainty do we know it, how do we confirm or refute it, how do we use it for constructive purposes, and how do we allow for change? Such fundamental questions crisscross all fields of study. New knowledge ferments to improve insight into what’s true. Emboldened by this essential exercise, an informed democracy is steadfastly enabled to resist the siren songs of autocracy.

 

Ideas are accelerants in the public forum. Ideas are what undergird democracy’s resilience and rootedness, on which standards and norms are founded. Democracy at its best allows for the unobstructed flow of different social and political thought, side by side. As Benjamin Franklin, polymath and statesman, prophetically said: ‘Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government’. A lead worth following. In this churn, ideas soar or flop by virtue of the quality of their content and the strength of their persuasion. Democracy allows its citizens to pick which ideas normalise standards — through debate and subjecting ideas to scrutiny, leading to their acceptance or refutation. Acid tests, in other words, of the cohesion and sustainability of ideas. At its best, debate arouses actionable policy and meaningful change.

 

Despite society being buffeted daily by roiling politics and social unrest, democracy’s institutions are resilient. Our institutions might flex under stress, but they are capable of enduring the broadsides of ideological competitiveness as society makes policy. The democratic republic is not existentially imperiled. It’s not fragilely brittle. America’s Founding Fathers set in place hardy institutions, which, despite public handwringing, have endured challenges over the last two-and-a-half centuries. Historical tests of our institutions’ mettle have inflicted only superficial scratches — well within institutions’ ability to rebound again and again, eventually as robust as ever.

 

Yet, as Aristotle importantly pointed out by way of a caveat to democracy’s sovereignty and survivability, 

‘If liberty and equality . . . are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be attained when all persons share in the government to the utmost.’

A tall order, as many have found, but one that’s worthy and essential, teed up for democracies to assiduously pursue. Democracy might seem scruffy at times. But at its best, democracy ought not fear ideas. Fear that commonly bubbles up from overwrought narrative and unreasoned parochialism, in the form of ham-handed constraints on thought and expression.

 

The fear of ideas is often more injurious than the content of ideas, especially in the shadows of disagreeableness intended to cause fissures in society. Ideas are thus to be hallowed, not hollowed. To countenance contesting ideas — majority and minority opinions alike, forged on the anvil of rationalism, pluralism, and critical thinking — is essential to the origination of constructive policies and, ultimately, how democracy is constitutionally braced.

 

 

What Place for Privacy in a Digital World?

C. S. Lewis, serene at his desk...

Posted by Keith Tidman

When Albert Camus offered this soothing advice in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘Opt for privacy. . . . You need to breathe. And you need to be’, life was still uncomplicated by digital technology. Since then, we have become just so many cogwheels in the global machinery that makes up the ‘Internet of things’ — the multifarious devices that simultaneously empower us and make us vulnerable.

We are alternately thrilled with the power that these devices shower on us — providing an interactive window onto the world, and giving us voice — even as we are dismayed to see our personal information scooped up, stowed, scrutinised for nuggets, reassembled, duplicated, and given up to others. That we may not see this too, that our lives are shared without our being aware, without our freely choosing, and without our being able to prevent their commodification and monetisation only makes it much worse.

Can a human right to privacy, assumed by Camus, still fit within this digitised reality?

Louis Brandeis, a former justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, defined the ‘right to be left alone’ as the ‘most comprehensive of rights, and the right most prized by civilised people’. But that was proffered some ninety years ago. If individuals and societies still value that principle, then today they are challenged to figure out how to balance the intrusively ubiquitous connectivity of digital technology, and the sanctity of personal information implicit in the ‘right to be left alone’. That is, the fundamental human right articulated by the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence’.

It’s safe to assume that we’re not about to scrap our digital devices and nostalgically return to analog lives. To the contrary, inevitable shifts in society will require more dependence on increasingly sophisticated digital technology for a widening range of purposes. Participation in civic life will call for more and different devices, and greater vacuuming and moving around of information. Whether the latter will translate into further loss of the human right to privacy, as is risked, or that society manages change in order to preserve or even recover lost personal privacy, the draft of that narrative is still being written.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that intervention — by policymakers, regulators, technologists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and ethicists, among others — may coalesce to avoid the erosion of personal privacy taking a straight upward trajectory. Urgency, and a commitment to avoid and even reverse further erosion, will be key.

Some contemporary philosophers have argued that claims to a human right to privacy are redundant, for various reasons. An example is when privacy is presumed embedded in other human rights, such as personal property — distinguished from property held in common — and protection of our personal being. But this seems dubious; in fact, one might flip the argument on its head — that is, our founding other rights on the right of privacy, the latter being more fundamentally based in human dignity and moral values. It’s a more nuanced, ethics-based position that makes the one-dimensional assertion that ‘If you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear’ all the more specious.

Furthermore, without a right to privacy being carved out in concrete terms, such as codified in law and constitutions, it may simply get ignored, rendering it non-defendable. For all that, we value privacy, and with it to prevent other people’s intrusion and meddling in our lives. We cling to the notion of what has been dubbed the ‘inviolate personality’ — the quintessence of being a person. In endorsing this belief in individual interests, one is subscribing to Noam Chomsky’s caution that ‘It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy’. To Chomsky’s point, the informed, ‘willing’ acceptance of social media’s mining and monetising of our personal data provides a contrast.

One parallel factor is the push-pull between what may become normalised governmental access to our personal information and individuals’ assertion of confidentiality and the ‘reasonable expectation’ of privacy. The style of government — from liberal democracies to authoritarianism — matters to government access to personal information: whether for benign use or malign abuse. ‘In good conscience’ is a reasonable guiding principle in establishing the what, when, and how of government access. And in turn, it matters to a fundamental human right to privacy. Meantime, governments may see a need for tools to combat crime and terrorism, allowing surveillance and intelligence gathering through wiretaps and Internet monitoring.

Two and a half centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin foreshadowed this tension between the liberty implied in personal privacy and the safety implied in government’s interest in self-protection. He cautioned: 

‘Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety’. 

Yet, however amorphous these contrary claims to rights might be, as a practical matter society has to resolve the risk-benefit equation and choose how to play its hand. What we conclude is the best solution will likely keep shifting, based on norms and emerging technology.

And the notions of a human right to privacy differ as markedly among cultures as they do among individuals. The definition of privacy and its value may differ both among and within cultures. It would perhaps prove unsurprising if a culture situated in Asia, a culture situated in Africa, a culture situated in Europe, and a culture situated in South or Central America were to frame personal privacy rights differently. But only insofar as both the burgeoning of digital technology and the nature of government influence the privacy-rights landscape.

The reflex may be to anticipate that privacy and human rights will take a straight, if thorny, path. The relentless and quickening emergence of digital technologies drives this impulse. The British writer and philosopher C. S. Lewis provides social context for this impulse, saying:

‘We live … in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private.’

Despite the invasion of people’s privacy, by white-hatted parties (with benign intent) and black-hatted parties (with malign intent), I believe our record thus far represents only an embryonic, inelegant attempt to explore — with perfunctory legal, regulatory, or principled restraint — the rich utility of digital technology.

Nonetheless, if we are to steer clear of the potentially unbridled erosion of privacy rights — to uphold the human right to privacy, however measured — then it will require repeatedly revisiting what one might call the ‘digital social contract’ the community adopts: and resolving the contradiction behind being both ‘citizen-creators’ and ‘citizen-users’ of digital technologies.