(In)Security

I think what I am thinking about this morning is maybe heresy in many circles. Be warned.

It's a bit of reverse social engineering, speculating about "security" and "surveillance" before the internet, before Twitter and the whole complex of social media, before video cameras on every street corner, before electronic eavesdropping, before parabolic microphones, before anything even remotely electric let alone electronic. What were the mechanisms that allowed the state or enabled the state to keep its ears to the ground, to help them know what was going on in the bedrooms of the city, state, nation?

Spies, sure. Insiders among the household staff who were paid informants or hapless gossips, sure. I understand that even today, the Duchess of Cambridge is still finding reason to wonder about the motives and loyalties of some of her household staff, these days, and with graphic reason.

In fact, Hunter S. Thompson once held forth on this issue, Rolling Stone 21 July, 1983:

            That is the weak reed, a cruel and incurable problem the rich have never solved--how to live in peace with the servants. Sooner or later, the maid has to come into the bedroom, and if you're only paying her $150 a week, she is going to come in hungry, or at least curious, and the time is long past when it was legal to cut their tongues out to keep them from talking.
           The servant problem is the Achilles heel of the rich. The only solution is robots, but we are still a generation or so away from that, and in the meantime, it is just about impossible to hire a maid who is smart enough to make the bed but too dumb to wonder why it is full of naked people every morning.

 Of course, by the time we have them, the robots might be full of undetected sensors, too, given the direction things are going.

But on a large scale, in pre-electronic times, where was  the dirty linen on display regularly. Where did gossip and even self-revelation centre. Where was it encouraged, even made a necessity?

Obvious answer: not the torture chamber--which is notoriously unreliable because people will agree to nearly anything and make up the most convincing stories under enough painful encouragement. No, what comes to mind is more subtle: the confessional.

Confession is supposedly good for the soul. PostSecret and its ilk profit from that truism. They make an entertainment out of it, as well as an outlet, a safety valve for releasing secrets that become public without attachment to an individual. But in the earlier times, when the church and the state were joined at the cradle, when rulers of the realm and of the church were brothers, sisters, cousins, etc.? What a temptation to place injudicious priests in key places, or even priests whose first loyalty was to the human institution of the church, rather than the spiritual calling. Or who could not tell the difference.

Think of it: a household servant comes to confession and admits to peeping on her mistress's indiscretions. And to gossiping about them to others. Both are "sins," but the penance might be made to depend on the nature of the act gossiped about. To get at the kind of gossip than can raise or lower an aristocratic house, confessing really useful gossip might get a surprisingly light penance, to make further such confessions more forthcoming.

The confessional might well be a mechanism to encourage the human need to unburden in private. It would take only a very small body of false confessors, serving different ideologies and different masters than God above, to corrupt that handy mechanism into a conduit for dynastic ambitions and power manipulation. And it could all be done in the name of "security"--of the soul, and of the state.

So I guess the more secretive form of the "general confession" as I learned it in Protestant services--as we confess our manifold sins and wickedness to Almighty God, meekly (or to judge from the groans and cracking of joints, weakly) kneeling, is maybe a reaction against such corruption (real or potential). But there was still a need for the information. That must have been a problem. For a long time in such states.

Maybe that's why so many internet and other kinds of electronic mediators and mechanisms for self-revelation and self-disclosure exist now in our more secular western world. The divinely ordained mechanisms do not have the same draw they once had, but the need to unburden is still there. The electronic means for unburdening are, as McLuhan and others have argued, really just extensions of the human mind and senses into a different, more extensive, mediation.

And we still have no idea over who or what is listening in or reading over our shoulders. Or what their reasons.