I think it was Disraeli who said: show me a person who is not a liberal at twenty, I'll show you a person with no heart. Show me a person who is not a conservative at fifty, I'll show you a person with no mind.

That's a funny way of saying that when we are young, we believe we can change much more than we can -- and a good thing too, or we would never reach so far -- but we come to believe, with experience and maturity, that the larger life of our community knows more than reason alone CAN know. So we acknowledge traditions and institutions as repositories of wisdom, necessary structures that factor in the negatives as well as positives of human behavior.

Something else happens too. As we grow, we shed self-righteousness, recognizing our stake in the order of things and our collusion with societal structures -- unjust though they may be -- because they give us an advantage.

The spirituality that supports this point of view is passive.

Now, there is certainly a time for "letting go and letting God," a time for "wise passivity," as Wordsworth calls it, a time for aligning our energies with the tao or the flow of the universe, what Christians call seeking the will of God.

But isn't there a time too to question how a spirituality of acquiescence rationalizes our silence or inaction in the face of sustained terror?

The Internet can be the Mother of Lies, enhancing campaigns of disinformation or creating simulations of reality that we visit like Disneyland, suspending our disbelief in talking mice and ducks and dogs, pretending that the world floats like a sky-city in pastel clouds. The Internet can be a soporific that keeps us sleep-walking, dreamily happy.

But the Internet as a global forum can also be a threat to those who would keep things quiet, whitening out of the landscape the bloodstains we would rather not see. That's why every repressive government threatened by free speech is trying to control access to the Net.

Now, this is the dream-world: as you read that black-and-white description, to the degree that you identified your own society with freedom and the "other side" with repression .. to that degree, we live in cloud-cuckoo-land, where wishes are fishes and all have a fry.

A draft report was released this week by the European Parliament's Office for Scientific and Technological Option Assessment, "An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control."
The report details the economics and politics of using advanced technologies for population control, surveillance, and torture. The details are chilling, not because we are ... surprised, exactly, but because we prefer not to know so we can act as if we are (1) safe and (2) innocent.

The United States, joined by other first world countries, regularly exports the most sophisticated instruments of torture and terror to the outlaws of the world. The United States intercepts the world's electronic communications. The United States trains governments who align themselves with our economic and political interests in the efficient use of technologies of torture, electronic surveillance, and population control.

A friend suggested that it might be better not to know. He may be right. I would prefer to sing always a song of daisy-love in the sunlight. But what are we to do when -- while we are singing that happy song -- we suddenly hear screams coming from the closed room at the end of the hallway? Yes, we wish we had not heard them, but once we have ... what are we to do?

If we refuse to hear, we lose the power to choose. To choose, we must know, and to know, we must stay awake so we can at least ask one another ... shall we ignore what we heard? or is there still a way to redeem the blood-stained night?

Technology is indifferent to how it is used. The answer to those questions lies in the domain of human freedom and choice. Information and knowledge are preconditions of freedom. In a global society, there must be a global forum in which we can dare to become conscious and deliberate and choose. For all the nonsense on the Internet, it is still the world's one relatively free public forum.

Does anyone really expect the conglomerate mass media to create a forum in which we will learn what is real, engage in reasonable discourse, and make sane and informed choices? Does anyone really believe that their daily newspaper or local news will provide the details -- name names, connect the terror to the companies that sell it -- instead of filling our minds with sex, street crime, sports and other forms of entertainment, and trivia, the four horsemen of the apocalypse of the mass media?

Maybe that clever quote from Disraeli is not the whole story after all. Maybe maturity does appraise us of the scope of the principalities and powers that rule this world, but that does not quench the passion for truth and justice that still burns within us ... and insists that -- once in a while -- we go on record with a NO! that is a way of saying YES.

The torturers in Argentina, observed from a neighboring cell, always covered the head of a young women with a hood before turning on the electricity. That enabled the men who adjusted the current to her screams to not look into her eyes. When you look into the eyes, one explained, one can see that this is a human being. That can interfere.

The Internet is one means by which we can tap from cell to cell, telling the truth about those screams so faintly heard. Of course if it were our brother or sister being tortured, we would act. So the only relevant question is, who is our brother? who is our sister? And how long can we keep that hood over their eyes so we can remain quiet ... prosperous ... and indifferent?

The complete report, "An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control," is available at:

http://jya.com/stoa-atpc.htm (295K text + 210K images)

A zipped version is at: http://jya.com/stoa-atpc.zip (314K)

February 7 1998