How Technology Threatens Liberalism and Conservatism

Posted on March 15, 2010
Filed Under Philosophy, Politics | 1 Comment

Interesting post up last week at Postmodern Conservative. The question is the whole Google Buzz debacle and what that says about future politics. I think it undeniable that the line between public and private has at best blurred and at worst outright become effaced due to technology. It’s not just “auto-discovery and revealing” of private information. Google Buzz is hardly the first to do that sort of thing. Rather its the very nature of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the like where for so many what was once private is no more. There is a generational gap even between Gen-Xers like myself who are highly technically sophisticated and the newer generation.

The question becomes what effect this will have. I think the main political effect isn’t due to a deconstruction of the public/private divide. That’s because such a deconstruction makes things more complex than it first appears. After all the public will also be contaminated by the private and vice versa. Of course we recognize this is always in play. When I worked at LANL the government used to classify as top secret stuff easily available from public European journals and even newspapers. This led to the surreal situation, when I was awaiting my Q clearance, of my bosses telling me I might find these journals in the public (rather than private top secret) library interesting but not being able to say anything else. How much of this was just due to the logical implications of some ideas being judged top secret by our government and public by others isn’t clear. I suspect some of it was just an unstated strategy to make so much information private that it would pose information overload problems for the Soviets (who had just recently collapsed at that time)

Where I think there will be a problem is due to the shifting line of privacy. Historically many political debates hinged upon a given sense of private sphere vs. public sphere. With those lines changing it inexorably will bring such issues back to the forefront. For instance the abortion debate in the 70′s was tied to a perceived (if not enumerated) right to privacy in the Constitution as well as the idea of ones body being private. Shift that line and the debate shifts. Likewise for most other aspects of sexual mores.

Postmodern Conservative sees this as troubling to liberalism but I think it applies equally if not more so to social conservatism. Take for instance sexuality again. If obscenity is tied to the private nature of sex what does that mean in an age where so many publicly blog the details of their sex life and put up photographs on MySpace or Facebook? The discussion shifts. The private becomes public which inevitably leads to libertarianism of a sort in sexual matters.

Where the complexity appears is precisely the deconstructive arena of the body. Privacy and publicity tends to traditionally be tied to bodily ownership and the very notion of property rights. The ultimate property each of us owns is our body. When we take our ownership and make it public then we lose certain rights. (That is public speech and private speech are judged differently as is your private own versus your public place of business) Do that with the body itself (as is the trend) and suddenly you destabilize many aspects of politics that have stood the test of time for centuries. (Although even there the distinction was never pure: how can our body be what is ultimately ours when slavery was justified by so many cultures including ours for so long)

Will society converge on a new stability? Almost certainly. But it’s quite difficult to say when. If technology continues to advance it may make things even more problematic. Heaven help society ones brains and computers become more integrated. Having the equivalent of an iPhone in my head seems like a great science fiction idea but makes the very notion of privacy deeply problematic.

All this said, American society has always privileged a sense of the individual above any sense of the collective. (Even if never fully – despite the wishes of a libertarian minority) With technological changes I suspect there will be more of a move towards collective action and responsibility. Of course I’m a conservative who doesn’t think that necessarily a bad thing. Further this breakdown also implies that democratically there may be a push-back. Witness the debate over abortion in the health care bill. Likewise in sexual matters what enabled the more libertarian perspective was the notion there was privacy. Break that down and social conservatives may feel more of a right to impose their views on others.

So I don’t think one can see this as a Left-Right issue. What it does is change the debate between both.

Related posts:

  1. Private and Public Morality
  2. The Secular Question
  3. Respect Part II
  4. Davidson: Private Language
  5. Defending Libertarianism

Comments

One Response to “How Technology Threatens Liberalism and Conservatism”

The way I see it opposition to government regulation of sexual relations, abortion, and what are traditionally considered “civil rights” is by now a bit of a liberal anomaly. In virtually every other area (e.g. salt and sugar consumption) the invasion of privacy is part and parcel of the left liberal agenda. There is a fundamental tension there.

No conservative considers abortion a “privacy” issue, but certainly there is a tension among conservatives about how much and whether to regulate issues of private morality at all. It would seem that the libertarian streak is on the upswing.

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