Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Four)

In the preceding three entries, I've discussed three examples of how British society and culture deal with beliefs and behaviour that are considered to be 'beyond the pale': instances of radical intolerance or hostility towards the 'tolerant society' that are by that token 'beyond tolerance' – intolerable to the tolerant society. These examples are those of 'racism', 'terrorism' and 'anti-social behaviour'. Britain responds to these phenomena in a manner that is reminiscent of psychological censorship and repression. In Freudian terms, the super-ego (the authorities) suppresses the irrational, violent thoughts and desires of the id (the racist / terrorist / anti-social individual) from the conscious mind or ego (from the public domain) and then keeps jealous watch to make sure that these 'undesirable' tendencies do not re-manifest themselves openly – resulting in them being acted out in another way that eludes the scrutiny and sphere of operation of the super-ego. Hence, the racist, terrorist and lout are placed under a regime of watch and control (Celebrity Big Brother, Control Orders and ASBOs); but their thoughts and they themselves nonetheless elude their detention, because Big Brother has merely suppressed and displaced the forces that drive its enemies, not dealt with them and resolved the conflict.

Notice that I referred to these three forms of antagonism towards tolerance in inverted commas. One of the means by which censorship of these phenomena takes place is that particular individuals are stigmatised and scapegoated as representatives of the tendencies that society wishes to repress. In psychological terms, society projects onto those individuals its stereotypical image of the racist, terrorist and yob. These stereotypes in turn partly represent the racism, destructive violence and anti-social attitudes of normal, tolerant members of society themselves. By then suppressing those individuals and confining them to a limited, private space, society believes that it is dealing with racism, terrorism and mindless thuggery themselves – in the same way, and for the same reason, that respectable and respected members of the tolerant society believe they have resolved these very tendencies in themselves: by locking them up in a private, mental space that does not, and must not, be articulated openly.

In other words, all of us individually, and society as a whole, bear an uncanny resemblance to the racist, terrorist and hoodlum. They are as it were extreme manifestations of our own petty intolerances. But because we cannot admit to being intolerant, violent and anti-social in whichever respects apply to each of us, we end up wanting to suppress those extreme examples rather than deal with the underlying issues, which would involve confronting the 'enemy within' ourselves. That's not to deny that racism, terrorism and anti-social behaviour are real problems in the external world, for which practical solutions need to be sought. On the contrary, no real solution to these issues can be found if we're not prepared to admit that we're also an integral part of the problem.

Putting this in more straightforward language: to what extent really is any kind of understanding of the reasons for antagonism between the different races, nationalities and religions currently crowded together in the UK advanced by merely stigmatising Jade Goody as a racist and reprimanding Channel Four for not censoring material that offended the veneer of British inter-racial, multi-cultural tolerance and harmony? Similarly, we do not know whether the terrorist suspects that escaped from their Control Order detention the other week were really terrorists or not: one of the purposes of Control Orders is to suppress any possibility of public scrutiny of these cases and of an open debate on the grievances of those who might be drawn to terrorist-type violence. Tony Blair said we were placing too much emphasis on the civil liberties of the suspect. But if they're only suspects – assumed to be innocent until proven guilty – surely, they should be accorded every civil liberty. But 'suspect' in Blair's book seems to imply that that they are, and indeed they are treated as, guilty without trial.

Mr Blair himself, of course, has been widely accused of being the equivalent of a terrorist: a war criminal and mass murderer because of the direct and indirect consequences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Branding someone a terrorist or a war criminal is a way to distance and differentiate oneself from one's enemy: to refuse to see any parallel or linkage between your actions and those of your adversary. And so the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are not to be compared with those of 2,000 tragic victims of 9/11. The former are a consequence of 'justifiable' resistance to terrorism and defence of Western strategic interests; while the latter are mere terrorism – not an example of an albeit extreme and, in some cases, desperate response to the injustices for which the West is blamed in Palestine and to Western efforts to place the Middle East firmly under its control. And yet millions of tolerant British citizens gave Mr Blair their approval for the Iraqi foray – apparently accounting the lives of Arab civilians that would be lost as of less importance than those of the Westerners supposedly threatened by Saddam's WMD; just as the so-called Islamist terrorists apparently account the lives of Western 'infidels' as of less importance than those of Muslims.

And is the anti-social individual really any more anti-social than the mass of citizens who pursue their private interests and preoccupations with little concern for those who get left behind? The 'ASBP' (anti-socially behaving person) is stigmatised, on one level, precisely because (s)he is the symbol of the asocial society we have built: one where there is no longer any real shared vision of the type of society and communities we wish to create and sustain, but where individuals invest their energies and aspirations into their own private realm – their homes, their assets, their careers and relationships. The ASBP is someone who is left behind in this rat race. Deprived of the means, opportunity or ability to strive after these personal goals – and without any social or community network to re-direct their energies – they are people confronted by social indifference and lack of personal purpose. So in a sense, it is inevitable that they take it out on a society that has turned its backs on them and attempt to wreck our nice, quiet, comfortable lives. In this way, the ASBP is perhaps more social than the rest of us: they are crying out for the help and attention of a society that doesn't want to know. Rather than opening out and engaging in the social realm that is falling apart around us, our response to ASBPs exemplifies our own social alienation that has given rise to the anti-social behaviour in the first place: the ASBP is merely suppressed, placed under the terms of an ASBO – made to become merely another private individual that will no longer demand that we reach out to them from beyond the parapets of our homes-as-castles, thereby acting in a social, collective manner that could change all of our lives and begin to re-make a broken society.

Those who we ostracise as beyond tolerance – the racist, terrorist and anti-social person – are, ultimately, symbols of the limits of our own tolerance: of the prejudiced bigot, the supporter of violence and the selfish individualist that we all are to some extent. Overcoming these problems will involve defeating them in ourselves: to love our enemies, indeed, as ourselves.

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Three)

Britain is the most extensively watched society in the world, in terms of the number of CCTV surveillance cameras per head of population. Three weeks ago, a senior British policeman criticised the extent of CCTV usage, expressing concern that CCTV was spreading out from the cities into the villages and that Britain was in danger of becoming a Big Brother society.

In my February blog entry, I expressed the view that Big Brother – the Channel Four reality-TV show – was a symbol for British society as a whole, as a meritocracy defined in relation to increasingly amoral market forces. Is it also a symbol for Britain as a CCTV culture: one where recording and viewing of actions and events that have previously been beyond the public view is driven by fear of the hidden forces that threaten to undermine the superficial tolerance of the market society – fear of anti-social behaviour and intentions of every kind, from the random and aggressive vandalism of local yobs to the ruthless and systematic actions of the organised criminal or terrorist?

One might say that CCTV is a prime example of the privatisation of the public domain: not just because the operation of CCTV systems is contracted out to private companies, but because it corresponds to a view of the world that is one of the citizen obsessed by watching what is happening 'out there' in the public space that threatens to overrun the security and control of his / her private realm and create a world of chaos and violence. In this way, CCTV is a way of reclaiming for the private individual a public space that has increasingly come to be seen as alienating and hostile. But at the same time, CCTV confirms and perpetuates that alienation from the public sphere, in that responsibility for making our cities, roads and countryside a secure environment in which the citizen can go about his / her private business is transferred away from individual citizens and 'outsourced' to anonymous 'providers' that are not part of the community they are watching.

Indeed, the extent of CCTV deployment in Britain could be taken as an indicator of the degree to which 'old-fashioned' communities have broken down. In a real community, streets, towns and villages belong to the people who live there, and they in turn have a sense of belonging to their environment and to each other. This is what provides real security: people watch out for each other and care for their environment; and there is not so much of a divide between that external social and physical environment, and the 'private' realm: the one flows into the other. CCTV marks the increasing retreat of individuals into private existences separated from the social and physical environment: into their homes, careers, and ever more atomised nuclear families. The external world beyond these bastions is correspondingly not only perceived as an ever greater threat to assets that are all the more vulnerable the more value is invested in them; but it actually becomes a greater threat. This is because 'the outside' is a space that the individual has absolved him- / herself of responsibility for shaping into a human and caring environment, so effectively handing it over to persons who may not have the individual's or the community's best interests at heart. In this sense, perhaps the encroachment of CCTV into the rural environment demonstrates that communities have increasingly broken down there, too, as well as in the cities.

Despite all of this, surveys show that people generally feel more secure in going about places where CCTV has been installed than where it hasn't. 'Classic' CCTV is more effective at reducing casual crime (such as muggings, car crime and violence against the person) than systematic crime, such as drug or paedophile rings, and terrorism. But even classic CCTV has its limits. Offenders can learn where the blind spots of existing cameras are; and while CCTV has a relative deterrent effect, it cannot really prevent the determined thug or thief from carrying out his / her intentions. In other words, it is no substitute for individuals or, rather, communities taking charge of their own security, and being prepared to keep watch over the places where the camera can't penetrate and to intervene when a criminal act is taking place – and the more people are involved in intervening, the less is the risk of being hurt in doing so. But the absence of such a genuine community-wide response to petty criminality and anti-social behaviour generates the demand for more and more cameras to be deployed to cover those blind spots. And as for the petty criminal or anti-social individual themselves, we simply want them taken out of the public domain, whether through detention in prisons or their equivalent, or through so-called Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which – like anti-terrorist Control Orders – simply involve confining the offenders away from our embattled private lives into their own private spaces and homes. In either case, the problem of their intolerable behaviour is not resolved but merely displaced, to re-emerge elsewhere and on a subsequent occasion.

In other words, CCTV, as a response to behaviour that is beyond what a tolerant society can tolerate, illustrates the same ambiguities and inadequacies as Channel Four's Big Brother and Control Orders: while it appears to be a means to place radically intolerant / intolerable individuals under watch and control, it is actually a means of suppressing and censoring such intolerance rather than really dealing with it. The urge to watch such anti-social individuals is driven by a wish not to see them in a public domain that belongs to the tolerant, private individual who keeps themself to themself. The racist, terrorist or thug can continue to be a racist, terrorist or thug in a confined, private space away from our own. But this exile of the racist, terrorist or anti-social individual from our private world and consciousness means that ultimately (s)he will be free to operate in the public realm from which we have retreated.