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Date: Fri, 18 Jul 1997 21:13:51 +0200
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: czerlinski@mpipf-muenchen.mpg.de (Jean Czerlinski)
Subject: social control in the 90's

> He
>describes how control and surveillance techniques have become part of our every
>day lives (e.g., store video cameras, metal detectors, random drug testing),
>discussing specific examples of these in one of the chapters.

When I read these sentences, I realized that maybe the trends of the
past centuries in social control have reversed themselves.  Namely,
as Michel Foucault argued, there has been a trend from controlling
physical bodies to controlling ephemeral thoughts.  Rather than stopping
robbery by cutting off the robber's hand, for example, modern societies have
focused on education and re-education into values that made people
*think* that they shouldn't rob and that it wouldn't be in their
best interest to do so.  But with cameras, metal detectors,
and drug testing we seem to have moved back to physical control.
Society no longer cares if you want to use drugs or not-- it will
simply deny you a job if any are found in your urine / hair / bloodstream.

On the other hand, perhaps postmodern society continues a
different trend, namely the trend toward controlling more and more
intimate aspects of citizen's lives.  While pre-modern society
focused only on controlling actions people took outside the
home, modern society moved to molding thoughts (which are present both
inside and outside the home), and postmodern society now
regulates our every waking moment, even when we are not
consciously thinking about what we're doing and the fact that
we're being monitored.  Postmodern society also explicitly
tries to control many things that had previously been strictly
private, internal matters, like child-rearing: children not brought
up properly will be taken away from their parents.

While such changes might in general be thought to improve
the average citizen's lot by minimizing suffering in the short term,
they also pose the potential for tragic misuse of society's power;
for example, when children are wrongly taken away from parents,
due to anything from a computer type-o [as in the movie
Brazil] to an overzealous Department of Family Services
who assumes all bruises are due to abuse.  Furthermore,
they cut down on what I believe to be a healthy amount
of variety in lifestyles.  Just as planting the single best
strain of corn poses the risk that all will become infected with
the same disease, I think a society where all people live the
same way is vulnerable.

And oddly enough, my subjective impression is that it is the
most capitalist of countries (the U.S. and the U.K.) that
undertake the most monitoring.  Big Brother has taken root
not in the Communist countries but in the capitalist ones....

Just my 2 cents worth,

Jean


Jean Czerlinski
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research
Leopoldstrasse 24, 80802 Munich, Germany