FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Panopticon

Rant Number 451 3 August 2011

The All-Seeing Eye. An ancient symbol for God’s eye, or the eye of Providence. The Creator watching over, caring for his creation. But, as modernity gradually pushed God out of the picture, another eye took over. A sinister, human, or inhuman one – the panopticon. And that snooping eye even made it into the back of the one dollar bill. Hmmm...Our Freemasons friends – dreary boy scouts of the shadows – again, eh?

Panopticon is an idea contrived by that eager utilitarian weasel, Jeremy Bentham. An all-seeing human scanner can scan, run over its implacable eye over the denizens of a suitably designed circular building. Not just any building and any denizens, mind. Prisons and prisoners, especially. And cheap! No need of paying many wardens to watch. The inmates’ awareness of being watched does the trick, keeping them cowed and quiet. Huh! Jerry Bentham today would advise the Government on cuts...

Eye shifts to Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. The priest was there on Sunday – relax! No jailbird he. Just as a visitor. Awfully grim place. Somebody called it an ‘Irish Bastille’. But, unlike the French jail, Kilmainham was never stormed and destroyed. The Irish people, groaning under English colonial rule, rose up 5 times from 1796 to 1922 – the Gaol’s life span – the rebellions were ruthlessly repressed. The names of patriots and heroes like Wolf Tone, Robert Emmet, Connolly, Parnell, Plunkett, De Valera and a multitude of others live on in the blood-spattered graffiti of Kilmainham Gaol. (Emmett, a Protestant, was the last to be publically hung, beheaded, drawn and quartered there.) The panopticon-like structure of the Gaol’s East Wing was meant to make subjugation easier. To intimidate and break down the prisoners’ spirit. It did not work. God’s providential eye is sharper than that of myopic Benthamite utilitarian fantasies.

Bentham’s physicalist and reductionist philosophy foreshadows our sad times. ‘Nature has placed mankind under the sovereign governance of two masters, pleasure and pain. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do’, the ‘sage’ wrote. So, there! Forget values like honour, piety, duty, love, spirit, glory and similar old-fashioned virtues. Bodily sensations like pleasure and pain rule. Held in common with beasts. Get those sorted and control is a piece of cake. Like rats in a maze – stimulus and response. Bentham was a prophet – in a sinister use of the word. He foresaw the post-modern plight. All about gratification of the lower instincts – pleasure and pain again. Sure, Epicurus had anticipated it nearly 2000 years ago but his influence was limited to intellectuals. Bentham brought hedonism into legislation and social life – Karl Marx rightly saw him as ‘the father of us all’. Sehr gut, lieber Karl!

‘She was my girl friend. I derived much pleasure out of her body.’ Lad I knew said that once. Spoken as a true Benthamite. If those words make you a wee bit uncomfortable, well, mere prejudice, surely. Pleasure and pain are your masters. Rejecting them would be wrong, irrational, reactionary, religious. The two inflexible principles must be obeyed. Bodies, persons, are for pleasure. Legislation must enforce that. Rats cannot rebel against the scientist’s wise hand, can they?

The panopticon concept has been lately analysed by Michel Foucault. A puzzlingly famous French philosopher – ‘charlatan’ is perhaps a more fitting title. Not just prisons but also social institutions like hospitals, schools and the Army are panopticon-like hierarchies, according to Foucault. There is something in that but, alas, there is also much, too much left out. A hospital is primarily a place of treatment, healing and care, not a ‘hierarchical power structure’ a la Foucault. A school’s chief purpose and value should be disciplined learning, not simply subordination to authority. And a soldier’s calling is meaningless without concepts like courage, loyalty, honour, self-sacrifice, patriotism and so on. Foucault, like Bentham, was a malevolent reductionist. I doubt his coherence. Did he refuse ‘hierarchical’ hospital care when he lay dying of a fashionable disease, I wonder?

Bentham of course plugged his ideas under the aegis of progress and reform. All part of the Age of Reason. Dogmatic rationalism is a better word. The champions of godless freedom often end up creating totalitarian nightmares. Unlike the French philosophes, staunch enemies of revealed religion, Bentham paid lip service to Christianity but his impoverished, mercantile anthropology gives the game away. One who enthrones pleasure and pain as the moral masters of mankind ipso facto dethrones the Creator. (No coincidence that Epicurus’ gods were useless, absentee divinities.) Spirituality he abominated. But Bentham’s felicific calculus was so absurd that even J.S. Mill gave it up. Still, the panopticon idea thrives on.

Look about you, as you shop, work, saunter or chat with mates in London. Or other cities. CCTV cameras are watching you. All the time. The original panopticon was rudimentary, because still human. Technology has changed that. The all-seeing snooper has become ubiquitous. A French guy expostulated to me: ‘We don’t want Paris to be like this.’ Bravo! Hope to God the French hold out. In Bentham’s country the battle has been lost without ever being fought...

The haunting Eye gazes at you online, too. Forget the Murdoch hacking furore. Piffling stuff. Far more gigantic snooping is taking place. Wikipedia opines that ‘ISPs are able to track users’ activities’. Menwith Hill, in North Yorkshire, is the biggest phone-monitoring centre on planet Earth. Oh, I wish MI5, or the CIA, or whoever, stopped messing about with my e-mails. I might be a turbulent priest but surely not as dangerous as I wish I was?

Don’t be fooled: the panopticon society is no Orwellian, Big Brother world. Pace Marx, Bentham advocated capitalism, not communism. And tyrants are tottering, even in the wretched Arab world. The ghastly Eye is a wholly democratic one. All the snooping is now done in the name of the free market, liberalism, consumerism, human rights, gender equality, same sex, the whole caboodle. Bentham would have loved it – this is the pleasure-loving society he wanted to create. He plotted his plans well.

It is Ramadan, hence, it is appropriate I should please my Muslim friends with a Qur’anic quote: ‘But Allah is the best of plotters.’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli