The wisdom we have lost in knowledge

Jeremy Seabrook contends that, while the harvest of information reaped by its spy agency, the National Security Agency, may prove invaluable to the US in individual cases, its sheer volume may defy analysis.

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THE 'harvesting' of information - in the bucolic phrase used by what is called 'the intelligence community' - has increased by a factor of thousands in the past few years. The data, the intercepts, the triage of communications by US and British knowledge-gatherers are no doubt as threatening to our freedoms as the recent revelations by Edward Snowden have shown. (It is significant that his status shifted from 'whistleblower' to 'fugitive' shortly after the extent of his disclosures became known.) But, despite the British government's efforts to intimidate the press, accusing the Guardian of having endangered lives and given succour to 'terrorists', the implications of the endeavours of custodians of 'the national interest' should perhaps not be exaggerated, serious though they are.

The trawl of global intelligence by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its sub-contractor GCHQ in Britain (to which millions of dollars were paid, since British oversight of intelligence-gathering is significantly more lax than in the US) was indeed comprehensive; it included the monitoring of calls by at least 35 world leaders, including those of the redoubtable Angela Merkel. The capturing of her communications was particularly sensitive, since she grew up in the Democratic Republic of Germany, where monitoring by the Stasi (secret police) was routine: the last thing she expected was for the intrusive apparatus of the US equivalent to target her as a person of interest. The US stressed it is not currently and will not in the future monitor Merkel's communications; a tacit acknowledgement that it had done so in the past. Germany is particularly sensitive to its exclusion from the privileged 'Five Eyes' group of Anglophone countries (the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) which routinely share intelligence.

If close allies can be subject to such scrutiny, the potential damage to leaders neutral or hostile to the US is considerable. The WikiLeaks revelations showed that doubts had been cast upon the mental and emotional stability of Cristina Kirchner of Argentina, when in a secret diplomatic cable, Hillary Clinton asked US diplomats to discover whether she was in fact taking medication to calm her state of nervous anxiety. Although this information was not obtained by intercepts, it suggests a possibility that even elected leaders may be open to manipulation or blackmail by a power unconstrained by the 'values' it theoretically embraces.

If there is any comfort to be taken from the mammoth intercept, it is that however much the US authorities have 'gleaned', they appear incapable of making much sense of it. The global sweep of the power of surveillance is a dispersant, since its political and military masters have little understanding of what it all adds up to. What they gain in information they lose in insight, coherence and imagination; qualities indispensable to any effective use to which their efforts might be put. Perhaps this is why the US is so angry at the disclosures of Assange, Manning and Snowden, and why the UK is intent on showing it has greater powers to suppress information than its ally, since Britain is unencumbered by the First Amendment (on free speech) to the US Constitution.

It is perhaps the fate of all imperial entities - and their supporters - to lack comprehension of those on whom they spy and into whose lives they pry, whether enemies or allies. Power has never needed to understand. All it requires is that it express itself - like the 'shock and awe' visited upon Iraq - to cow people into silence or compliance.

Nowhere are these failings more apparent than in recent Western elective wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was not only faultiness of information (the lies that authority told the public, and even itself, are another matter) that led to the destruction in Iraq, but a failure to imagine the consequences of ousting the Sunni minority in favour of a majority which would inevitably align itself with an Iran which is supposedly the principal adversary of the US in the region. In Afghanistan, the idea of 'Taliban' became indistinguishable to the clouded eye of power from al-Qaeda, to which the Taliban had offered hospitality.

This is sometimes acknowledged by the mighty, when they insist that the 'hearts and minds' of the people should be their objective; but it is to the 'conquest', and not to an understanding of those hearts and minds that it devotes its energies, usually with promises of the same goods and articles with which the peoples of the West have shown themselves broadly contented. They have little sense of the strength and tenacity of other cultures and traditions, and absolutely no insight into those people they wish to attach to themselves.

It is one thing to be observed by the unwinking Argos eyes of drones which can 'take out' individuals involved in terror and, at the same time, unnumbered innocents, since this universal watchfulness is highly fallible. As well as 'surgical strikes' on putative enemies, it also generates widespread resentments among the people of Muslim countries, and serves to recruit more individuals filled with murderous rage to replace those killed. In this way the cycle of mutual dependence between the US military, its victims and their savage and indiscriminate retaliations is preserved; that unstable stasis which seems indispensable to great powers and the enemies they require. Meanwhile, the US appears obsessed with obscure internal cultural wars, and scarcely able to engage significantly - even in its own interests - with a world over which its spies have established their sombre electronic panopticon.

TS Eliot, in his poem 'The Rock' (1934), asked, 'Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?' This ought perhaps to be inscribed over the doorway of the NSA in Maryland and GCHQ in Cheltenham. The questions posed by TS Eliot now go further - where is the information lost in data, where are the data lost in the glut of gathered facts?

Every refinement of technology takes the world of 'intelligence' further from the point it is intended to reach. It is significant that among those employed at GCHQ, according to Edward Snowden, those who understand advanced mathematics are welcome, but there is no place for classicists. Perhaps, in the restoration, if not of wisdom, then at least of common sense, it might be considered that those who know something of the 'lessons of history' - constantly invoked, but seldom heeded - might have an 'input' of some utility to the purposes of those who wish to gain entry into the mindset of potential adversaries, enemies or traitors.

The West must have an enemy against which it can define itself as the sole bringer of light and liberty to the world. Without the permanent presence of an external embodiment of evil, the ills of capitalism might become, once more, only too apparent. Perhaps this is why, with the death of Socialism, the Islamo-fascist enemy had to be created, just as the alien creed of Communism emerged without transition from the vanquished aberration of Nazism.

And as if these were not sufficient, our 'economic well-being' must now be safeguarded by the same mechanisms that oversee the avowed enemy: the covetous malevolence of China, Russia or other competitors for the secrets of the West's miraculous wealth is an additional reason for the extension of our 'umbrella' of security over the mysteries that have made us rich. This is a particularly ironic development, since we have been at pains to spread globally the rules of the game by which countries are supposed to create wealth. The point apparently is that when those rules threaten our supremacy, new forms of surveillance must be devised, in order to make sure that control of the game remains with its originators, who have merely franchised their brand to countries that now threaten their dominance in the world.

The bloated inutility of many of these endeavours undermines them, and may, perhaps, lessen some of the anxieties of citizens that their most private communications are the object of unacknowledged scrutiny, since it is inconceivable that enough personnel could ever be employed to 'join up the dots', in the playful image of those set to watch, spy and inform on us.

Spies have always been deployed to manage the enemy within, as well as potential external aggressors. Because the technology exists, it must be used, no matter to what effect, and even if the technological refinements far outrun the capacity of democratic entities to supervise them. But since interpreting the sheer quantity of surveillance and eavesdropping now established exceeds the ability of those to whom our 'security' is entrusted, their ability to penetrate the secrets of their own citizens is surely limited, since who, among the disaffected and alienated of their homeland - should any such exist - would now dream of exposing their subversive thoughts to the grim patrol of the overseers of global communications systems?        

Jeremy Seabrook's latest book is Pauperland: Poverty and the Poor in Britain (Hurst, 2013).

*Third World Resurgence No. 278, October 2013, pp 30-31