Secrets and Democracy

From Arcana Imperii to WikiLeaks

L. Quill

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780230367777
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313010
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Secrets and Democracy develops a new approach to understanding the centrality of secrecy to political life. From the ancient world to the modern, this book considers the growing importance of secrets, the dilemmas this poses to conceptions of democracy and the challenges that collecting secrets poses to publicity and privacy in the network society.

1

Theory’s Secret History

Introduction

Nearly every major political theorist of the past 2,000 years has had something important to say about secrecy. The reasons for this are not difficult to understand. The ability to keep something secret is an exercise of power, and power is a concept that is integral to understanding how communities function. This chapter will be dedicated to recovering this tradition of secrecy within political theory by concentrating on the secrecy/revelation opposition within different traditions of theorizing.

Before embarking on this journey, something must also be said about theory, and political theory in particular, that makes its relationship to secrets and secrecy so interesting. Theory is concerned with sight, with vision. Above all, to theorize is to see in a certain way. Those who see clearest, or who say they do, possess a tremendous advantage over their less perceptive peers.

In his discussion of the relationship between vision and political imagination, Sheldon Wolin (2004) points to the connection between the construction of theory in the mind of the theorist and the perspective or ‘particular angle of vision’ from which he/she theorizes. Wolin notices that ‘political philosophy constitutes a form of “seeing” political phenomena and that the way in which the phenomena will be visualized depends in large measure on where the viewer “stands” ’ (p. 17).¹

One need only think of the founding myth of political philosophy, Plato’s myth of the cave, with its allusions to shadow and light, the ascent of the philosopher into the bright glare of the sunshine, and his return to the world of shadow and flame beneath to appreciate this connection. Plato’s theory, his architectonic vision of a world in harmony, was a vision achieved by the application of philosophical wisdom from far beyond the political realm. Other philosophers have adopted a similar approach to understanding what it is they do when they theorize. Two thousand years after Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche climbed into the high mountains to escape from his peers, his ascent (and retreat) from other humans one that took him to a ‘vast, distant and hidden land . . . beyond the world,’ a sojourn that was necessary if he were to see more clearly than his peers (Nietzsche, 1994).

There is within the theoretical approach an act of distancing, discrimination, and, ultimately, incompleteness. As Machiavelli noted in the dedication to The Prince, the theorist has much in common with the landscape artist, who must place himself on the plain in order to see the mountain and on the mountain in order to see the plain (1981, p. 30). Yet what one sees is, at best, partial. If we push the analogy a little further, the painter and theorist are both artists. Machiavelli’s landscape is permeated with memory and, to return to Wolin, a visionary imagination; it is ‘the imaginative, not the descriptive, element that is uppermost’ (Wolin, p. 18).²

All theorists, we might now say, especially in light of the advances in scientific understanding that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, are embroiled in a ‘measurement problem’ of sorts, such that their task is less the objective rendering of the world before them than the subjective construction of a world image. Philosophy has, as a consequence, turned increasingly to the study of language to address these and related issues. It was Martin Heidegger’s great insight that language itself might contain the means to reveal things previously hidden from understanding that makes his approach simultaneously so alluring and so frustrating for those who want their world of language to be not obscure but, rather, neat and clear.³

The realization that there are deep problems with the study of knowledge has resulted in distinct and conflicting responses. On the one hand, one might claim that there are some things that cannot be known and cannot be talked about. They will, therefore, remain secret and unknowable. Or we might say, somewhat more optimistically, that it is in fact possible to uncover that which is hidden if only we try hard enough. Here is one such optimist, Karl Popper, on the subject:

I do admit that at any moment we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories, our expectations, our past experiences, our language. But we are prisoners in a Pickwickian sense: if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time. Admittedly, we shall find ourselves again in a framework but it will be a better and roomier one, and we can at any moment break out of it again. The central point is that a critical discussion and a comparison of the various networks is always possible.

(cited in Wood, p. 18)⁴

Finally, we might take a middle route between these two positions and suggest that the contingency of one’s own language becomes accessible only with the passage of time, portions of the invisible structure revealing themselves as one’s understanding changes as a result of linguistic shifts, often when the very schemas that have held us captive are no longer persuasive. In other words, secrets are revealed when we no longer believe the stories that we have been telling ourselves about ourselves. This peculiar conundrum was styled by Hans-Georg Gadamer as prejudgement, by Thomas Kuhn as a paradigm, and by Michel Foucault as an episteme, a fundamental cognitive structure or frame of reference in a particular period that only becomes visible once it is no longer functioning as intended (Wood, 1990).

And yet, as Wolin notes, political theorists were always aware of this tendency. The social contract described no actual state of human affairs – only an imagined one that might make sense for those keen to defend the bourgeois management of property and society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Theorists, if they are to say anything at all, are compelled to present an image of the world in miniature. Those elements that do not fit the theory are to be deliberately left out, or secreted, intentionally or otherwise. Sheldon Wolin again:

The necessity for doing this lies in the fact that political theorists, like the rest of mankind, are prevented from ‘seeing’ all political things at first hand. The impossibility of direct observation compels the theorist to epitomize a society by abstracting certain phenomena and proving interconnections where none can be seen. Imagination is the theorist’s means for understanding a world he can never ‘know’ in an intimate way.

(2004, p. 19)⁵

Theory and secrecy have much in common. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘secret’ is derived from the Latin secretus, ‘to separate or set apart.’ The definition continues to stipulate that the meaning of ‘secret’ refers to hidden knowledge that is private, political, even theological in nature. Secrets are, by definition, available to only a few, refer to things unobserved or kept from the uninitiated, often involve a desire to conceal or disguise, to incorporate mystical or occult matters, underlying causes, with often an appeal to mysteries of a deity or nature.

The key within this definition is the notion of discrimination, of ‘setting apart.’ To theorize is to organize the world into meaning. But in so doing, theory is simultaneously involved in the making, hiding, and keeping of secrets.⁶

Sensitivity to the limitations of theorizing might be expected to produce a certain humility amongst those who theorize, an understandable hesitancy to proclaim one’s particular (and necessarily partial) vision final. Martha Nussbaum notes relatedly how:

we are struck at every point by the incompleteness and inadequacy of our attention. We notice the ways we are inclined to miss things, to pass over things, to leave out certain interpretive possibilities while pursuing others. This consciousness of our own flaws and blind spots . . . recalls to us the fact that our path is only one path and that we cannot humanly follow all paths through these tangled lives at all times. The authorial voice also reminds us that, even when we do attend, our attention, like all human attention, is interested and interpretive.

(1990, p. 144)

Yet, as we shall see in this chapter, for many theorists, discovery, disclosure, and the politics and power associated with secret knowledge can be a heady mixture that is far removed from such cautious reasoning.

In what follows I have tried to identify different perspectives that political theory brings to the study of secrecy. The categories that I have employed are not meant to be exhaustive or mutually exclusive. They offer, as should now be obvious, an interpretation of the theorist’s different types of advocacy and form a basis for the chapters that follow.

The theorist as adviser

The relative status of the theorist, whom they wrote for, even how they wrote what they did, can reveal much about their theory. We run up against additional problems, however, when we consider ancient texts, and especially those texts that refer to secrets.

First, there is the problem of translation and the related problem of context.⁷ Second, there is the problem of availability. Our sources from the past are incomplete, leaving us to wonder how much we can ever truly understand or know for sure. Third, often the weight of past interpretation can cloud present-day efforts to understand what is actually going on in a text.⁸ Finally, and perhaps most worrying of all, many of the most important texts, according to some modern interpreters, were deliberately designed to keep the uninitiated well outside the charmed circle. There are often hints of this: a central character (Socrates or Jesus) may suddenly become obscure, or may use one voice when addressing his closest disciples and another for the uninitiated or simply curious. Notwithstanding these rather serious limitations, however, it is possible to draw some reasonably firm conclusions about secrecy and theory from the texts we do have and the (apparently) candid style of the theorists themselves.

The importance of secrecy was obvious to the theorist cum counsellor in the ancient world. In the Arthasastra, a classic Indian treatise on ‘statecraft’ believed to have been compiled by the counsellor Kautilya (‘the crooked one’) in the fourth century BCE, the moral order by which all life is governed was expounded as the ‘Law of the Fish’ (matsyanyaya): ‘The big ones eat the little ones and the little ones have to be numerable and fast.’ In this ‘fish-eat-fish’ world, the role of secrecy was pivotal to good governance. The king would rely on the discretion of counsellors (such as Kautilya) to advise him concerning which course of action would be best for the maintenance of his rule. Theorists, then, are people who can be trusted, a proposition that, today, may be greeted with appropriate hilarity but one that for many thousands of years has been endlessly repeated.

Those theorists unable to keep their mouths shut, ‘blathering through carelessness or when they are drunk or asleep,’ would be eliminated (2012, p. 9).⁹ A similar fate awaited animal imitators such as parrots and mynah birds, and even dogs, which might be used to spy upon secret meetings between the king and his advisers.

As one might expect in ancient kingdoms, war and conquest were at the forefront, and the Arthasastra contains an extended discussion of the use of spies in external affairs. Covert activities were promoted to ‘seduce’ disaffected members of the enemy territory, to encourage disloyalty by using bribery or other tricks in order to undermine the integrity of the state. If a sufficient commotion could be created, then the assassination of the king should be a relatively easy task, a result obtainable in a city, on a mountain pass, or by a river.

So much was common to the writing of the period. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, God tells Moses to send spies into Canaan (Numbers, 13). Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, mentions the importance of the role of intelligence in military planning and execution (see Chapter 24), and Herodotus how the Medes lost their freedom when monarchy was invented and deliberately shrouded by secrecy and mystery to create an aura around power (Histories, Book I).

In China, Sun Tzu also noted in The Art of War the importance of ‘foreknowledge’ or advanced intelligence, and the employment of secret methodologies to undermine one’s rivals. There were, noted the author, five different kinds of agent (native, inside, doubled, expendable, and living), and when they worked together, they formed a ‘divine network.’ It was the job of the ‘director of national espionage’ to identify individuals within a rival’s territory, ideally within the administration, who, due to weakness of character, could be manipulated into creating disharmony within the government. Bribery was commonly used, along with flattery and the use of false promises. It was also not uncommon for a government to leak false information deliberately to its own spies, with the intention that they be captured by the enemy, thereby revealing their bad intelligence before being put to death. In short, only a few spies would be accorded ‘living’ status – truly exceptional individuals ‘who seem to be dull but are strong in heart; men who are agile, vigorous, hardy, and brave; well-versed in lowly matters and able to endure hunger, cold, filth, and humiliation’ (Sun Tzu, 1971, p. 147). An army without a secret agent, notes the author, is exactly like a man without eyes or ears. But, and perhaps most crucially of all, only a wise and humane ruler could know how to use these weapons of war properly, to the greatest possible effect.

It would be tempting to say that then, as now, ‘intelligence’ was only ever as good as the person analysing it, interpreting it, and using the information to good effect. In a society that was riven with distrust and suspicion only an enlightened sovereign knew how to treat spies (even supposedly sincere and truthful ones are vain and prone to liberality), and when to trust them (they could, after all, be double agents). Ultimately, the burden falls to the leader to determine how and when to use the divine network at his disposal.

There is no place, declares Sun Tzu, where spying is not used. But what of domestic intelligence? Sun Tzu pays little attention to this matter in The Art of War. But other texts from the same period recognize the interrelated nature of foreign and domestic spying, secret-gathering and -keeping.

Kautilya in the Arthasastra spends considerable time describing the many threats to internal political stability (thorns) and how an army of informants and spies ought to find permanent employment throughout society and, crucially, within every level of the political administration in order to thwart these efforts. Through coordinated surveillance, enquiry, propaganda, torture, and assassination the ‘eradication of thorns’ might be effected. To an official working in the administration or a subject engaging in daily activities, one’s loyalty or ‘seducibility’ would need to be tested constantly.

Different individuals, using different methodologies to identify particular weaknesses, would examine officials without their knowledge. What was at stake, in all cases, was loyalty to the king. If passion, greed, even religious conviction trumped an official’s commitment to the monarch, then their behaviour would be ‘flagged,’ and ultimately they would be exposed and removed from office. And if this proved difficult because of the high profile of the official in question, then framing the individual, turning his family against him, or using innocent individuals to serve in the process of political expediency, even if it resulted in the death of those innocents, was all perfectly justifiable. In fact, one of the most obvious conclusions to draw from the description of activities a monarch and his spymasters might engage in during this period is the deliberate flouting of social conventions and morality while simultaneously defending those same community standards. Hypocrisy, then, was a central feature of political life.

What officials and subjects both knew was that they were likely to be tested at some point – by a clandestine operative dressed as a beggar, a student, a farmer, a merchant, a musician, a valet, or a religious ascetic – but they had no knowledge of precisely when they might be tested. The young, the ambitious, energetic, and crafty, notes Kautilya, were a particularly plentiful source of recruitment for these kinds of covert activities, being readily swayed with money and honours.

We find a similar approach, interestingly, in classical Athens. Plato, by the time he wrote the Laws, had moved a considerable way from the idealism of The Republic. If in the latter we had been introduced to at least one tradition that has come to be associated with statecraft, ‘the noble lie,’ in the Laws we are introduced to the ‘think-tank,’ or ‘advisory council,’ whose es...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Darkness Visible
• 1. Theory’s Secret History
• 2. Liberal Secrets
• 3. Secrecy and the Liberal State
• 4. Privacy and Secrecy
• 5. Life after WikiLeaks
• 6. Conclusion: Secrecy and Silence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index