Can the world be made safe for democracy? Can democracy be made safe for the world? These are two different questions. Both involve the extent to which we know our enemies and how they act. They also imply that our enemy knows us and how we act. Aristotle had remarked that a tyrant seeks to have everything made public so that no conspiracy against his rule can arise without his knowledge. This fear is why, he thought, that tyrants tried to prevent real friendships from arising. The ideal totalitarian world would be one in which nothing is private, while all coercive powers are in the hands of the state to use as it will. Yet the freedom to know what is to be known is, as such, a good thing.
Such thoughts occurred to me as I read Michael Warner’s The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History, published this year by Georgetown University Press. “In a way,” Warner observes, “the digital revolution was making intelligence officers of everyone.” He means here that each agent, like foreign intelligence officers in the Soviet Union, must assume that everything he does, writes, and says, even in the privacy of his own home, is seen, read, or heard by someone else.
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