Shutterstock/ patrice6000. All rights reserved.Deluged in data
for more than a decade, our reflex has been to articulate our fears and
anxieties in the language of privacy.
But it may be
more appropriate – and useful – to think in terms of conscience. Etymologically,
conscience is, of course, the “knowledge with” which we act, on which we are
judged, and through which we achieve self-awareness. Today, this knowledge is
produced in part through the steady streams of information we cede, emit and
receive in the ceaseless data-flux that we now inhabit.
We might call
this new reality “life in the datasphere”, extending the old ideal of a “public sphere” to capture how data
immersion has become the fundamental condition of our lives as workers, public
citizens and private persons.
The point is not
that we now work, play and associate ‘online’ – it is that the distinction
between on- and offline, real and virtual, is increasingly irrelevant. For many
of us – not restricted by any means to the old west or middle classes – data technologies
thread inextricably through our daily lives, through our health-records and
tax-returns as much as our metadata and geolocations. The datasphere is our workplace, our play-space, our home.
If information
is the datasphere’s ecology, knowledge is its economy. Our own data-trail is
subject to regular analysis and updating, mapping and recategorisation, finding
its place in general statements about welfare, markets, security, sales.
We are ourselves
increasingly called upon to select, parse, and restate in analytic form the
data that surrounds. Social media is a space of knowledge creation in both
these senses. And yet, the experience of data saturation is also marked by
ignorance. We don’t know how much data concerning ourselves is out there, where
it is stored, who (if anyone) has access to it, how ‘secure’ it is. In the
main, we don’t even know in which jurisdiction(s) our data is held or what law(s)
govern it. We don’t know how the system works; we don’t know if the system works; we don’t know if
there is a system.
Thirsting for
voice
Life in the
datasphere raises two questions of conscience. First, the conscience that
niggles whenever we worry about the immense data-trail we leave behind, our
extensive online record.
Even if we have
done nothing wrong, we may worry about the detailed data-print we leave behind
us as we go, like a transcript of our thoughts posted to the ether, or a
confession before the tribunal of posterity. Who knows about us? What do they
know? Do we ourselves have access to our own dataprint?
Second, the
excess of data pokes and provokes a new kind of conscientiousness. There has
been a recent spate of whistleblowers and a new kind of conscientious objector:
Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, the veterans of the Israeli elite Unit 8200,
who refused, in late 2014, to continue monitoring the everyday lives of
ordinary Palestinians. Appalled by the extent of their own knowledge, they
acted on conscience. There has been a resurgence in protest, and not just
twitterstorms. There is a thirst for voice.
The return of conscience
In short, we are
witnessing the return of both “bad conscience” and “good conscience”. Bad
conscience: guilt, remorse, fear, paralysis – think Augustine, Dostoevsky,
Freud. Good conscience: righteousness, autonomy, action – think Martin Luther,
Roger Casement, Rosa Parks. These are, in fact, quite distinct ideas, with
different protagonists, different moments in the historical limelight, and different
rates of fading and renewal. Both have been immensely consequential in western
thought. But both have become quite jaded of late: it has been fashionable for some
time not to take conscience very seriously.
The demise of
conscience as a serious political force has been taking place for hundreds of
years – from its heyday in the tradition of radical conscience expounded in
medieval Scholasticism. According to that tradition – developed through the
writings of Philip the Chancellor of Paris, Bonaventure the Franciscan, and
Thomas Aquinas – conscience provided a portal to the divine.
Conscience was conceived
as a kind of judge or tribunal – capable of error like any other tribunal. But
conscience was guided by something more reliable: the innate human knowledge of
good, the ‘angelic part’ of the human. As Aquinas put it, “Human nature,
insofar as it comes in contact with the angelic, must know truth without
investigation.” This faculty, guiding conscience, was called synderesis.
Synderesis
Synderesis is an
accidental word, starting out as a typo corrupting the Greek word for
conscience (“syneidesis”) in a biblical commentary that spoke of the “spark of
conscience”. It is a useful word, supplying something to guard against the
passion and immediacy of ‘conscience’, something which ought to ‘ignite’
conscience. The Scholastics speak of synderesis as an unquenchable pilot light
or beacon, an everlasting flame.
It is our
natural capacity for reason, our inherent consonance with the Divine – but it
may become obscured from us when clouded by passion. When synderesis is
obscured, our conscience may be mistaken. We may have lost the word – but the undying
flame of synderesis remains today as the symbol of human rights.
The Scholastics taught
that we have a primary duty to follow conscience – even if it is mistaken and
even (this is the interesting part) where it contradicts the law. We are
obliged to clarify for ourselves the dictates of synderesis – but we must also
obey conscience in the meantime. This is ‘radical’ conscience. It is a fine doctrine
in a notionally universal community of the kind the Roman Catholic Church considered
itself to be.
But as that
unity broke down during the Reformation, radical conscience came to inform the
truth-claims of the hundreds of fissiparous factions that flourished during Europe’s
wars of the seventeenth century, also in England. Everyone – Diggers, Levellers,
Ranters – claimed to be acting on the authority of conscience.
Hobbes targets conscience
Writing to end
the tumult of that time, Thomas Hobbes made radical conscience a target in Leviathan. Clearly the idea that each
individual is a potential source of moral and lawmaking authority was a recipe
for political instability.
Hobbes’s
solution was to distinguish sharply between “public” and “private” conscience.
We are free in our private conscience, he said, to believe anything we like. But
the public conscience belongs to the state and is expressed in law. We must
obey the law, even if doing so runs against (private) conscience. We may object,
but if we do, we must do so lawfully. That is what it means to consent to be
governed.
So Hobbes
proposed a bargain: we leave public conscience to the state and the state leaves
our private conscience alone. Our secrets are our own and we may believe what
we like, as long as we obey the law.
Good conscience
is tamed in this scenario: where there had been synderesis, there is now the law.
Bad conscience, by contrast, presumably thrives – the repository not only of
misgivings over private misdeeds, but also of our repressed public preferences.
And thrive it
did. Few themes animated the modern literary imagination like bad conscience,
from the great Victorian novelists through the high moderns, with Dostoevsky at
the apex. That is, until Sigmund Freud debunked the whole notion of conscience
as irrational and cruel.
In his account
of the superego, Freud makes conscience the shrill voice of the repressed id,
focusing its frustration into punishment of the ego. The superego adopts the
voice of authority: God, the father, the state, the law. But because the
superego is omniscient, guilt is inescapable. We are not guilty merely for
things we have done, Freud said, we are also guilty for sins we wish we’d committed,
laws we’ve considered breaking, desires we’d like to have acted out. Bad
conscience is simply the internalisation of prohibition, of social code, a source
of fear and paralysis.
Of course, in
cracking the code, Freud arguably broke the spell: the history of the twentieth
century is, on many accounts, one of gradual disinhibition.
Who’s who?
Today, three
changed circumstances seem to herald the return of conscience. First, Hobbes’s
bargain appears to be unravelling. It’s not just the rise – let’s say the
ubiquity – of state surveillance. It is the more insidious dissolution of the
boundary between public knowledge and private secrets. The datasphere is a free
for all. And the state, we now know, far from policing the boundary, is
actively plundering this new commodity, our data.
In truth, we
don’t know who is supposed to protect us from whom. Will the state shield our
privacy from exploitative companies? Or, vice versa, do we expect Google and
co. to guard our data from the state?
The cloud
Second, the datasphere,
like the superego, knows a lot about us. It presumably knows more than we know
it knows, more than we can remember. Our trail of digital detritus consists not
just of emails, texts, status updates and voicemails, but of draft and deleted
documents, search histories, reading habits, contacts, all stored, transferred,
parsed, put to use, becoming searchable, trackable, hackable, actionable.
The data is ‘there’,
for sure, but we don’t know ‘where’, or who can access it. It is certainly more
often subjected to algorithmic authority (to use Clay Shirky’s term) than human
eyes. In practice, ‘the cloud’ simply refers to other people’s computers: we
are relieved of the need to know whose. As a metaphor, though, the cloud is a
lot like God – omniscient, nebulous, indifferent. We don’t know. But we have
every reason to worry – about mistaken identity, unsympathetic monitoring,
overzealous policing.
Third, we-the-people
don’t seem to be holding up our side of the Hobbesian bargain too well either.
Manning and Snowden broke the law, but we are more interested in their
conscience than their obedience: Manning’s failure to shield innocents, Snowden’s
conscientiousness on the same score. Both are heroes.
Ditching state authority
To reach back before
the Hobbesian bargain is, presumably, also to reach back for something like
synderesis. Here, for example, is Snowden: “I want to make it very clear that I did not do this to be safe. I did this to do what was right”.
But to do what is
right is also to ditch the state as highest authority. Snowden again: “individuals
have international duties which transcend the national obligations of
obedience. Therefore individual citizens [sometimes] have the duty to violate
domestic laws.” This feels like reaching for something, an appropriate source
of ‘duty’ for a globalized self.
And so, in the
datasphere, conscience, both good and bad, appears destined to return. On one
hand, the paralysing realisation that our thoughts are naked and legible before
an omniscient authority, whose knowledge and motives remain inscrutable to us.
On the other, a
slow awakening into a capacity to act autonomously on the vast stores of
information available to us. “There
is still hope”, Snowden said, “because the power of individuals has also been
increased by technology. I am living proof that an individual can go head to
head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful agencies
around the world and win.”
Conscientious,
certainly – but is he right?