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Threats To Liberty |
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There is a good deal of loose thinking about threats to liberty, witness the right to bear arms so defended by the National Rifle Association in the United States, which helps to keep a homicide rate about a hundred times greater than in comparable anglophone countries. That denies liberty to live to a great many people on the specious grounds that carrying a lethal weapon should be a right of every citizen. Of course, it originated in the days when blacks or Afro-Americans would not have been citizens and therefore would only have been the recipients of bullets and not their possessors.
We are accustomed, because of the traditions of coercion exerted upon people holding different views, to see a secret ballot as a natural concomitant of democratic elections; but in fact it is a second-best. Not knowing what one's neighbours think of the people who represent us in a legislature is a serious weakness and we have to go to all sorts of lengths of opinion polls to find out things that are denied us on a point of principle. In a truly free and democratic society, no one would be inhibited from expressing opinions of and support for or against candidates for office. Nevertheless, there are particular questions of how far such general considerations need to be modified to fit different societies. How much allowance should be made for varying cultural traditions? One need not give too much credence to the suggestion that there are Asian standards of human rights, for example, which permit governments to exert more control over individual citizens than are thought right in Europe. The example of Nazi Germany shows well enough that Europeans are capable of plumbing the depths of maltreatment of human beings - they need no lessons in inhumanity from people anywhere. But the habits of governments to continue the traditions of trampling on individual rights are to be seen everywhere and we may safely dismiss their self-regarding claims. More complex are the rights of individuals to be protected against the foibles and prejudices of their fellow-citizens. Ultimately, it may well be that the success of claimed rights can only be made good by the resolution of individual citizens. The supposed right of states to conscript young men into armed forces and train them to fight and kill enemies of the state or government are still maintained in most countries. Even in Europe the question is still moot. But in the United Kingdom the rights of conscientious objectors to refuse military service were only established by the willingness of a succession of youngsters to go to gaol rather than accept conscription. And that pattern, of the determination of individuals to defy governments is, finally, the only safeguard against any threat to liberty.
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But in a simple society, a village community, it is generally accepted
(and acceptable) that the vital facts of everyday life and everyone's
business are known, more or less, to all. Communities may have been
small-minded, but the scale of living precluded some of the evils of our vast
impersonal bureaucracies, dealing with people as numbers or statistics. To
deal with one's neighbours as people implied that one had to know them and,
more or less, know how they lived. That we still crave such knowledge is
evidenced by the attention that popular newspapers give to the minutest
details of the lives of celebrities or indeed, anyone in the news. In
societies where the idea of the society as a community has not totally
vanished, there is still something of this attitude enshrined in law. In
Sweden the public have open access to the files on everyone's income and tax;
and, for reasons of crime prevention, even the secretive Swiss are being
compelled, little by little, to relax their total ban on the disclosure of
details of bank accounts. Because secrecy is a great enemy of liberty, which
is why spy-systems, whether the KGB or the CIA, are threats to democracy.
There are objections made to surveillance by closed circuit cameras,
installed usually at places where crimes are likely to be committed. Indeed,
if citizens are routinely subjected to surveillance without a responsible
check kept on the use of such means, they can be questionable. But whereas
police if present may be acceptable, because they are trusted to perform a
public function, it should be in no wise different when watching six places
by camera instead of one by being present. And what of cameras to spot
speeding drivers, now being squealed at by some motorists in Britain?
Surely anyone taking charge of a lethal implement -- and many more homicides
result from the driving of internal combustion-powered vehicles than from the
use of guns - should do so under strict conditions. And every means should
be used to check that the use conforms to the laws currently in force.