Keeping tabs on us all

Wisdom of the week

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 7, 2002]

Until modern times, kings could only do moderate harm, because they lacked the means of closely supervising and controlling large populations. Most of human life went on below their radar, as our telling phrase puts it.

So it didn't occur to the old kings to keep tabs on their subjects' income, to tell them where they could smoke, to fiddle with the money supply, to regulate their myriad activities, to keep stupendously detailed records of their doings. It wasn't that kings were such nice fellows; they could chop off heads when the humor seized them. It was just that people used to be a lot harder to catch.

Modern communications, transportation, recordkeeping, weaponry, and technology in general have changed all human relations, especially political relations. Before the twentieth century, a friend of mine has observed, the harshest tyranny had less control over its subjects than the mildest state has today. Caligula was one of the nastiest brutes on record, but he would have had a hard time finding any Roman who didn't want to be found.

-- Joseph Sobran, excerpt from "Laws and Kings," Sobran's newsletter, September 2002. For the most candid insights on culture, government and society, subscribe to Sobran's.

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