A man who hates seeing his photograph in public media is either morbidly modest or a sociopath. Unless, of course, the photo is accompanied by an ‘armed and dangerous’ warning and a promise of a large reward.
Yet show me a man who craves to have his likeness in the public domain, and I’ll show you a narcissist and a simpleton. Unless of course he’s a film actor for whom self-exposure is his job.
I’m neither a narcissist nor a sociopath nor a criminal. So if you asked me whether I like to see my picture in a magazine or on the net, my answer would be a cautious ‘that depends’.
When a French conservative magazine put my grinning likeness on the front cover, I quite liked it. Why, I even keep a couple of copies of the magazine where my guests can see them, and don’t tell me this is infantile. I already know this.
When an amateur photographer put on Google an unflattering (some will say realistic) picture of me pontificating to an academic audience, I was neither happy nor unhappy. Personally, I would have chosen a kinder angle, but I knew the event was being photographed, so there are no grounds for complaint.
Then two years ago a wily oriental gentleman chose to drive his car into mine in an empty street, and he didn’t even know me. That manoeuvre was caught on two separate CCTV cameras, which exculpated me and got him charged with dangerous driving.
Then this morning my wife spent a giggly 15 minutes playing with her new toy, an I-Phone. This wasn’t the first quarter-hour she spent with the gadget and it won’t be the last: the device has so many features that only a dysfunctional 10-year-old can learn them all quickly.
One feature she did discover is a sort of SatNav that can guide you photographically to any place in His creation. All the diabolical gadget asks is the destination and the starting point of the journey, which you must agree is a modest request.
Just for the hell of it my wife offered our nearest bus stop as Point A, and sure enough a photograph of it instantly came up. Standing at the bus stop was a portly chap, wearing my track suit and toting my tennis bag.
Upon closer examination she realised that the copycat wasn’t some star-struck admirer who sees me as his role model, not that such a possibility was ever on the cards. He was, well, me.
Judging by the clothes I was wearing, the shot was taken some time in October. Four months ago, and I haven’t had a clue that my squarish frame was there to be despised by anyone interested in the 22 Bus.
I didn’t know my picture had been taken, and neither was there any dramatic situation, such as a car accident or a mugging, in which one’s principles could be compromised.
And there are principles involved. Protecting individual privacy is the cornerstone of Western decency. ‘Western’ is the operative word here for, say, the Russians don’t even have a word for privacy.
Entitlement to privacy is closely linked to the Western belief in the autonomous value of every individual, something that these days goes by the awful term ‘human rights’. Personal dignity is an essential constituent of this value, and part of it is freedom of unmonitored movement when going about one’s lawful business.
Yet Britain boasts more CCTV cameras than the rest of the West combined. We have one such camera for every 14 of Her Majesty’s subjects, making surveillance one of the few areas in which we comfortably lead the world. Communist China, for example, has fewer cameras even in absolute terms, never mind per capita.
As a result every Briton is secretly photographed an average of 240 times a day, and we can’t even smile for the camera because this would entail scowling non-stop.
This clearly goes against the grain of any traditional morality: only downright despotic regimes proceed from the assumption that everyone is a naughty child who needs watching round the clock.
One could argue that any state that feels the need to monitor its subjects every step of the way is despotic on the strength of that fact alone. One could even go so far as to say such a state is immoral.
In fact, when government officials defend such wholesale surveillance, they argue not from morality but from utility. Being able to watch every square foot in real time may be upsetting but at least it prevents crime.
If so, we clearly need even more cameras. For Britain proudly leads every Western country in crime rate. For example, the latest data show that 63 million Brits commit 6.5 million crimes a year, while 315 million Americans barely manage 12 million. France’s crime rate is half of ours, and Germany’s two thirds.
Of course a utilitarian will point out that we don’t know what the crime rate would be like if we didn’t have those cameras, and on his own terms he’ll be right.
But his terms are wrong. It’s clear that a nation’s crime rate reflects a whole panoply of social, demographic, religious, moral and economic factors. A profusion of cameras is as far from explaining a lower crime rate as a dearth of them is from explaining a higher one.
Thus someone who, like me, despises moral utilitarianism may justifiably object that neither do we know that fewer cameras would lead to more crime. In the 1890s, for example, Britain’s crime rate was a fraction of today’s, yet not many CCTV cameras were in evidence.
A moral argument, when properly constructed, ought to beat a utilitarian one every time. In this instance preserving the fundamental moral values of our civilisation is infinitely more vital than lowering the crime rate – even assuming that cameras do that. A criminal may kill a man; undermining moral foundations can kill society.
Then again, all modern tyrannies, which category to varying degrees includes all modern states, put forth utilitarian arguments to justify the burgeoning of state power.
Both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany trained their people to inform on one another because they were allegedly threatened by swarms of foreign spies (typically if not exclusively Anglo-American) and home-grown subversives.
Of course even paranoiacs have enemies, and all regimes at times suffer from foreign espionage and internal sedition. Yet if a regime can’t survive without losing any moral justification to do so, perhaps it doesn’t deserve to.