Opinion
Spy technology has awakened the Big Brother in many of us, posing all kinds of ethical quandaries.
There are many ways of playing God. Thankfully most of them are the exclusive province of despots; the use of armies, forced migrations, summary imprisonments, precipitous taxations, outrageous prosecutions, the establishment of harems, the building of arches … to name a few that appeal to me in my more fantastical moments.
But omniscience, one of God’s most frequently touted and envied powers, horrifies and frightens me. I’d hate to be omniscient. Imagine being made to view your aunt’s libidinous transgressions like some horrified cinephile who’s wandered into the wrong duplex. Imagine knowing what people really thought of you, and of each other. Imagine being able to foresee in detail the death of your loved ones. Or not having the omnipresent fog of ignorance to guard you against what this world really is. Imagine all of life’s inhumanly hot truths coming at you in perpetual fusillade from every angle. This great cascade of injurious truth and debilitating knowledge would bend the mind and break the heart of any mortal.
Still, there are stickybeaks and busybodies who covet omniscience. People who, despite not having finished this month’s payroll and sent it off, nor changed the sheets and done the ironing, will happily watch you from on high just to make sure you’re at Bunnings when you say you are and not at a rival store, or the pub. Omniscience is now available in boutique, handheld form to those wannabe deities who can’t keep their noses out of other people’s business.
We can now track people’s phones, a technology that wakes the sleeping Big Brother in many of us. I know husbands and wives who constantly monitor each other’s whereabouts via the phone. I know parents who track the comings and goings of their adult children from afar. Just a peek to see if Dora’s actually gone to the clinic. And bosses who wonder why you pulled over for 10 minutes on the Hume Highway on their time. What is this terrible godly urge to know where everyone is when they’re not with you?
I know a group of blokes who drink in a wooden pub in the hills of Gippsland on Friday nights. One night Kev didn’t turn up. This was strange, but then, he had been a little wayward lately, hard to pin down. They rang him, and he said he was in Sale getting new tyres put on the ute. Next week he was absent again. One of the kids needed a lift to netball, apparently.
After a few weeks of this, Cedric, one of Kev’s drinking mates, bought a GPS tracker and secretly attached it to the underside of Kev’s ute. Friday night they rang Kev and asked him if he was up for a schnitzel. He couldn’t, he said, he was shopping with the wife. Except, looking at Cedric’s phone, they could see Kev wasn’t shopping. His ute was parked outside 1 Foolhardy Place, a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of the clifftop town of Treachery – the address where his sister-in-law lived.
In the following weeks, his mates tracked Kev on Cedric’s phone and whenever he went to 1 Foolhardy Place they’d ring and ask him where he was, just for the joy of hearing him scramble forth a lie … he was in Moe, at the dentist … Warragul seeing his accountant … Maffra getting tractor parts … he got around while going nowhere but wrong. And his mates sat in their weatherboard pub nibbling schnitzels while laughing at him.
So, who’s in a deeper moral ditch here, the guy lying or the friends letting him lie, enjoying a tawdry omniscience? At least Kev has the excuse of love, or lust, or some suddenly entwined chimera of the two risen up before him, warping his decisions.
After a while, the hilarity died for Kev’s mates, and they began to feel resentful. I mean, wasn’t he cheating on them as well as his wife by not including them in his poignant new … direction? Their camaraderie soured. And what do you do with knowledge like that? Now that you’re secretly privy to a friend’s awful secret – what’s your moral position, being friends with Kev’s wife as well as Kev?
Let’s leave them there tangled in the tawdry ethics of their own foolish joke, as an example that you can know too much, see too far. That omniscience is a power that gods handle way better than primates do. Ignorance is a lubricant that aids the spin of the world. Omniscience would bring it to a screeching halt.
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Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
