Tea at Trianon: The New Feudalism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

The New Feudalism

Here is an article which raises some pertinent questions. I think we are entering into a new feudalism, where in exchange for safety and having our basic needs met we give up our rights. In a feudal society the vassals must learn to live with a certain amount of interference from the feudal lords. It is unfortunate since our ancestors sacrificed a great deal for freedom. To quote:

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA has been empowered to undertake a mass surveillance program whose ultimate aim is to thwart terrorist attacks of the kind that took place on Sept. 11. The precise nature of Snowden’s disclosures is complicated, and their legal and policy implications largely pertain to the United States, but the gist of the matter is that the NSA, with the often willing help of companies like IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, has been scooping up data from phone and Internet communications of a broad swath of people in the United States and abroad in a way that is almost entirely indiscriminate. There is little doubt in my mind that emails I have sent and phone calls I have made to colleagues and friends are somewhere in the vortex of the NSA’s servers.

While the NSA has periodically violated U.S. law on such matters, so far as anyone knows it has not as of yet misused the information on innocent citizens of the United States or elsewhere in what can only be described as a mass and shameless invasion of privacy. The question at this point should be whether those whose lives are remote from terrorist activities should really care whether the government monitors our electronic communications, especially if such surveillance marginally increases our personal security.

Why should we care about whether our phone and online activities are private and protected from the eyes of the government, so long as compromising personal information is not released to the public? We already entrust the government with lots of personal information. Though I do not live an especially racy life, I would prefer that my emails and phone calls of the past 12 years not be public, but doing so would have at most a minor impact on my life and none on my personal freedom. Why should I care? What is at stake? And why did any of us think that our lives and mercurial obsessions could be played out on the Internet with impunity and in complete privacy? The Internet, after all, does not resemble a bedroom. Sending an email is more like shouting in a public square than like whispering in someone’s ear.

Images of George Orwell’s Big Brother from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a not-so-subtle critique of totalitarianism, are often invoked in this context, yet totalitarian regimes typically come into existence through violence and not surveillance (surveillance comes later as a way of maintaining an illegitimate regime), and there is little reason to think that curtailing the activities of organizations like the NSA will prevent the emergence of totalitarian regimes in the future; the problems with our not-so-transparent democracies, governed as they are by money and influence and short-term interests, run far deeper. (Read more.)