Cat in the Box

A friend once said to me 'No one knows what you are really alike when you are alone'. I was a teenager and fancied myself a philosopher and argued the point, suggesting that if people knew what you were like when you were not alone they could extrapolate, make predictions, about your characteristics when you were alone. I only realised some years later that I was quite wrong, and that what Jan had discovered was the psychology equivalent of Schrodinger's cat in quantum physics - the observation itself affects an outcome, so that it can never be known what the outcome would have been if it were not observed.

I was reminded of this teenage debate the other day when I saw that people in Britain now are each monitored by, on average, some 300 CCTV cameras every day. And I am reminded of it every time I am told, by right wing politicians, that if you have nothing to hide you should be happy to be filmed 300 times a day, have your emails and web use monitored, your credit card and bank details scrutinized, your library borrowings analyzed, your phone calls listened to, your presence at political protest rallies photographed, your membership of environmental groups noted. And all of this has terrible implications for political, civil, social and economic liberties in our society. But it also has personal implications.

When we had that debate, over 40 years ago, neither of us had any doubt that it was possible to be alone, even if briefly, from time to time. That while it was important to be a functioning member of family, community and country, interacting with people, presenting a face to the world, it was also important to maintain a sense of self, of personal identity, in privacy.

One of the worst aspects of being in any high security prison must be the total lack of privacy. When your cell is lit 24 hours a day, and cameras and microphones are recording every facial expression, every exclamation under the breath, every word spoken in your sleep, every moment of despair, then where does the real you go to hide, how does your inner self survive? And how far are all of us away from that now in western society?

Does it matter? Or will those same right wing politicians soon be saying to me that my inner life must be exactly the same as my outer life, that there is no room, in the interests of fighting crime and terrorism, for anyone to have private thoughts, unusual ideas, individual ways of looking at things different to the mainstream? And then we will all be exactly the same in private as in public because there will be no difference in the context. If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of 'private', and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity.

Won't be missed, will they?

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