Panoptic God - Sermon 20th May 2007
When I was a child, we used regularly to visit my father’s elderly aunt, who had a sampler on the wall which mightily impressed me. It just said:
Thou, God, seest me…
There have been several times in my life when I have been tempted to do things I shouldn’t, that no-one would ever have found out about – only to have that sampler flash before me like the heads-up instrument display on a flashy car. Thou, God, seest me…
Jeremy Bentham was some man. A doyen of English utilitarian philosophers, his radicalism led him to espouse, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some very progressive positions: equal rights for women, abolition of slavery, of physical punishment (including that of children), pensions and a form of health insurance, and even animal rights. He is an important philosophical figure in his own right.
So it’s a shame that he largely gets remembered for two things, both with rather bombastic Greek names. He dictated in his will that on his death his body was to be preserved – basically stuffed – and put into a glass-fronted wooden cabinet called an “Auto-Icon”. It still sits, with a glum looking wax head – the real one didn’t come through the preservation process terribly well – in University College London, which Bentham did a great deal, maybe more indirectly than directly, to help found. It sparked off the enduring myth that – as the University College website tells us:
… the Auto-Icon regularly attends meetings of the College Council, and that it is solemnly wheeled into the Council Room to take its place among the present-day members. Its presence, it is claimed, is always recorded in the minutes with the words Jeremy Bentham - present but not voting.
There’s also a myth that:
Bentham had originally intended that his head should be part of the Auto-Icon, and for ten years before his death [in 1832]…carried around in his pocket the glass eyes which were to adorn it.
Now with stories like that circulating, small wonder that the niceties of utilitarian philosophy aren’t the first thing that people think of in connection with Jeremy Bentham.
But he’s also famous for something else, something that he intended as a practical reform, which became a project and an obsession that cost him a fortune, and left him out of pocket even after the government had recompensed him to the tune of £23, 000 in 1813, but which really became important as a philosophical concept in the hands of a much more recent thinker, the Frenchman Michel Foucault. This was what Bentham called the panopticon. Which is clearly cobbled-together Greek for something like “sees everything”.
The panopticon was a form of prison. Specifically it was a prison in which the prisoners guarded themselves. The idea is simplicity itself. The cells were to be arranged in tiers in a doughnut-like structure with a circular courtyard or space into which they all looked. Each cell had a floor-to-ceiling window facing into this space, in which stood a watchtower. From the watchtower, everything they did could be seen. Everything. If you stood in the watchtower, you could police the activities of all the inmates simultaneously.
But here’s the twist.
The prisoners would have no means of knowing if there was anyone in the watchtower. Most of the time, there wouldn’t be. That’s how it represented big savings. But they would always have to behave as though there were.
Foucault came along and suggested that, coming as it did at a particular point in the history of institutions, when modern societies were in the process of shifting from brutal external controls to sophisticated, “scientific” manipulation of behaviour, you could see Bentham’s idea not just as an idea for a prison, but as the underlying idea of a whole society – what he calls the “panoptic society”. Foucault’s argument is very subtle and complex – but there are all sorts of things around us in the day to day world that suggest that he has a serious point. How many times a day are we each supposed to appear on closed circuit television cameras? How many traces do we leave, electronically, when we shop, or make a mobile phonecall? This is from a Yale University paper:
[Y]ou wake up and walk out to your mailbox. A neighbor's private security camera is trained on his driveway across the street and picks you up. Later, you drive to work and when you get to the light on the corner, a video camera is watching to see if you went through red. You stop off at an ATM and you are taped. You go into the 7 Eleven-taped; pump gas- taped; get on the interstate and the traffic control cameras are focused on you. You get to work and the camera in the parking lot follows you into the building. Then you finally get you your desk and once more you are monitored. Let's not even consider the possibility of hanging out at the water cooler or going into the bathroom. It's only 8:15 AM and you have already had more TV exposure than Regis Philbin. You begin to think that maybe you shouldn't have worn that plaid tie with the checkered shirt. (1)
(I had to look up Regis Philbin – turns out he’s a sort of US television Terry Wogan.)
Did you know that there’s a hymn about the panopticon? Let’s sing it – seated, so that we can really think about the words. And as you sing it – don’t you find yourself waiting for the verse that you’re sure you half-remember being there, about how, although I’m just a little child, God loves me and understands me, and forgives me? Well – this is the whole hymn:
God is always near me,
Hearing what I say;
Knowing all my thoughts and deeds,
All my work and play.
God is always near me,
In the darkest night,
He can see me just the same
As by midday light.
God is always near me,
Though so young and small;
Not a look, or word, or thought,
But God knows it all.
Scary, huh…?
Paul and Silas, judicially beaten up, and thrown in prison. And this prison, in Philippi is no panopticon! No nice eccentric utilitarian philosophers here with exalted views of penal reform!
The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely.. he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
And we know how the story goes.
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's chains were unfastened…
But what is this story really about? Well, it’s obviously a story about God. In fact, it’s a miracle story, a story in which certain elements are clearly there to make God’s role, and presence, and reality – well, real… How does it do this?
Well, it’s a story about a situation in which people have been in physical restraints – all the prisoners, not just Paul and Silas – and these restraints have been suddenly removed. The doors are open, the chains have fallen off. And nothing else happens. One reality – the brutal, chafing, heavy and oppressive reality of physical confinement – has just gone away. But in its place there’s another reality, and this reality is keeping the situation stable. What reality is that?
Obviously, since it’s a miracle story from the Book of Acts, the answer is – God.
But that won’t do either. Because in this story, God could mean one of two things.
God could mean freedom. Or God could mean a new captivity that just feels like freedom. It all boils down to this. Why, for us, do the prisoners not move when the doors open and the chains fall off? Why are they still there? Is it because they are still captive, or because they are free?
This might be a story of freedom, of liberation, of an opening of doors, of unfettering. And if there’s one consistent theme in the Old Testament, that spills over into the New, it’s that God is a God of freedom, of liberation, from the Exodus to the return from the Babylonian Exile, from Joseph’s progressive freedom from his multiple captivities to Jeremiah’s, and on to Jesus proclaiming release to the captives in the synagogue in Nazareth, and to the crucifixion and resurrection and beyond. God is the God who comes to the unfree, and sets them free. The Psalmist’s God is a god who comes to him, literally, in a narrow place, and sets him in a wide place. (Ps. 118 v.5)
But I first heard this story, when I’d be about 7, in Sunday School. I assumed that the prisoners were in jail because they were Bad. That’s where they should be. Paul and Silas, of course, were Good. Their being in jail was a mistake. But for them to run off because the doors had opened, even though they shouldn’t have been in jail, would have been a Bad Thing to do. Just as Bad as if the prisoners, who should have been in jail, had run off. Because jail is jail, and you shouldn’t just run off. You should wait until things get sorted out. Which happens as soon as the jailer gets the full details, and Paul and Silas are released and the other prisoners banged up once more. God is to do with being good, and doing the right thing. And the right thing is not to run away. Paul and Silas were Good, and did the Right Thing.
I never really thought about the other prisoners. Maybe I assumed that, although they’d been Bad, which is why they were in prison, they had done a Good Thing by not running away when the chance came. Who knows what happened to them afterwards – the story isn’t about them, it’s about Paul and Silas. Maybe they got time off for good behaviour?
Obviously a childish understanding like that is impossible to square with the real world. A world in which even in our country there are horrific stories of people spending years in prison for things they simply didn’t do. Or people being imprisoned who should clearly be being treated for mental illness. Which is to say nothing of all those prisons all over the world where imprisonment is a matter of governmental convenience, or the play of corruption on judicial systems. And then there was Saddam Hussein.
And then there was the Third Reich…
Luke tells this as a really quite juvenile story. But it can make us think, if we let it. For one thing, it can help us diagnose juvenile elements in our own faith. If we use it as a prism, through which faith can pass and be analysed, it can bring us to the point where we suddenly find ourselves asking: what is God?
Is God basically captivity? A different captivity, maybe, a nice, benign, even loving captivity - like Bentham’s panopticon, a captivity that actually sets us free to be our own jailers, if you can call that freedom? There are lots of voices that would tell us just that, and they are getting stronger. Even in the Church of Scotland. God’s freedom is the freedom to be respectable and conformist, to follow the rules.
Or is God really freedom? A freedom we can grasp and live in our real, daily lives? And what might that mean?
I mentioned the Third Reich a few seconds ago. For Christians, just mentioning the Third Reich will conjure up at least one powerful image of what is freedom, and what is captivity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by the Nazis as the liberating Americans’ guns could be heard only six miles away from the Flossenburg camp where he was held prisoner. No last-minute rescue, no opening of prison doors. And yet, his final words to his fellow prisoners had been “This is the end – for me, the beginning of life.” Could anything more staggeringly express the experience of God as freedom than this?
Again, several of Bonhoeffer’s fellow plotters against Hitler could easily have fled in the hours after the failed bomb plot of July 20, 1944. But some, as Christians, chose to allow themselves to be captured, knowing that they would be brutally killed, on the grounds that after the war Germany and the world would need to know that there had been Germans willing to give their lives to overthrow the Nazi abomination. For them, it was their Christian freedom that led them freely to surrender themselves into the most brutal captivity. Even captive, they were free.
Is God, then, captivity? Like the panopticon, like CCTV, like that sampler – “Thou, God, seest me…” is God simply the ultimate policeman, so that when the prison doors swing open and the chains fall off, we can see that, for Good People, it’s God who keeps them comfortably, respectably captive?
There are plenty of people who see the Gospel like that. Plenty of people who see the Christian faith in terms of conformity to rules, living respectably, timid subjection to a jailer God.
But that’s not the Gospel. If it were, where would we turn when the prisons fill with political prisoners, when the CCTV cameras track anybody who doesn’t fit in, and the presumption, so convenient to governments, holds sway that “You’re guilty until proven innocent”? What hope would we have, if our hope were a God who could only love the people who fitted in, the nice, respectable people?
It isn’t hard to imagine Jesus of Nazareth walking our streets today with CCTV cameras swinging round and zooming in on him from all directions. Because Jesus means freedom. Revolutionary, world-changing freedom.
No, if you ask me, Paul and Silas didn’t leave the prison because they didn’t need to. In Christ they were free even before the doors opened and the cuffs fell off. And if you ask me, too, the other prisoners didn’t leave, because they had caught a whiff of what Paul and Silas were about. To run off would be to play the jailer’s game. To choose to stay, when the doors were open – now that was something else. That was something revolutionary, That was to say to the system, the surveillance, the panoptic society, the world: “God has made me free. You can’t do anything to me…”
And how many people, from John Bunyan, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to Nelson Mandela, have said the same thing, for much the same reason?
And we can say it too. God in Christ has made us free. God forbid that we should turn God into our jailer, and reject the difficult freedom he calls us to.
NOTE
1) Privacy in the Age of Video Surveillance This Is Not Your Father’s Candid Camera by Angelo J. Pompano