Modern forms of surveillance have medieval Christian roots. Medieval surveillance practices were grafted into other plants — military, industrial, individualist, rationalist, technological and so on — that transformed them, giving rise to modern forms of surveillance.
In the biblical story of Adam and Eve, we find the primal couple under God’s gaze when they fail to keep the basic rule not to eat of one tree in the garden. It seems that surveillance and our human responses to it are as old as humanity. Frequently, today, the “eye of God” is understood in a negative sense as something to be feared. Living in the C21st, surveillance no longer occurs in a pleasant garden where there’s an otherwise carefree couple. No, it’s a routine matter of everyday life for everyone, and with real consequences that we don’t understand but suspect are not good, surveillance is often seen as a threat.
Take the case of James McLeod, an Ottawa resident who installed a Tim Hortons mobile ordering app on his smartphone. After using it for a while to pick up his breakfast coffee and bagel, he became suspicious that it knew more about him than was needed for his breakfast order. A FoI request resulted in his discovering that, in fact, its geolocation software knew his girlfriend’s address when he attended a Toronto Blue Jays game, even when he went on vacation, through Schiphol Airport NL en route for Morocco and that he drifted close to a competitor coffee house in Marrakech!
The Canadian federal Privacy Commissioner investigated, concluding that a gross infringement of privacy had occurred. But Tim Hortons incurred no fine. However, McLeod made no comment about those data being sold to other companies or even government departments — that’s how surveillance capitalism works — for their use without our knowledge. Or about the scoring and ranking of our “lifetime value”, which in turn — divisively — affects our everyday life chances and choices. Also, companies deliberately use tactics to placate, divert, mislead and confuse consumers so that they feel helpless and resign themselves to the data-gathering (see Draper and Turow 2019). Worrying about the NSA is one thing. Even more concerning is Amazon!
A thousand years ago, surveillance felt very different in Europe. God’s eye may have been feared, but behind that uncertainty, historians tell us that most felt reassured, not intimidated, by it. These earlier features of surveillance contrast profoundly with those that succeed them. The eye of God, as understood then, promoted human flourishing. Churches, monasteries, guilds, legal systems and governing authorities organized surveillance, which was regarded as relational, justice-seeking, caring and trustworthy.
But today’s ‘technical control’ methods, supported by both market and state, in a dangerous dance, generally fail on all those medieval — and, one might dare say, human-centered — criteria. Michel Foucault observed that early modern surveillance shifted “…from the eye of God to the eye of power.” The secularization of surveillance paved the way for the rise of today’s profoundly different surveillance that critics, policy-makers and lawyers try to legislate or otherwise mitigate through regulation.
Surveillance as a “modern” phenomenon
When I first started to study surveillance in the 1980s, I argued primarily in modern terms. Because surveillance has indeed expanded exponentially in the C20th and C21st centuries, we tend to focus on its contemporary forms, which are associated with the military, security, policing, and today, the corporate and especially marketing spheres. The surveillance dimensions of the nation-state did indeed expand in the C19th, along with growing bureaucratic record-keeping, even as surveillance for policing and public order had begun to intensify from the C18th.
Over these centuries, something else was occurring; surveillance was becoming increasingly technologized. Paris won the moniker the “city of lights,” not for tourism but because it attempted to eliminate its reputation in the 1660s for being the murder capital of Europe. La Reynie, the police chief, demanded candle-based street lighting everywhere. Gas-lit by the end of the C18th, by the start of the C19th, the city became a model of policing due to its reliance on the technology of lighting to curb bloodshed in dark alleys by giving night watchmen clearer sightlines (Tucker 2018).
Surveillance always seems to develop in relation to social practices — the felt need for care, control, order, security, prosperity and the like. Surveillance is not technologically “driven”, though its advertised “successes” do produce further tech sophistication and sometimes a lack of alternatives to surveillant systems. All manner of mechanical and electronic devices may be adapted for surveillance purposes. However, only in the later C20th and C21st did companies appear with the sole purpose of manufacturing and marketing surveillance, and they are now international enterprises.
The technologies of surveillance favoured by movie-makers are often thought to be key drivers of surveillance. After all, lots of devices, invented for one purpose, can be re-purposed for surveillance! In the C19th, the telegraph, telephones, cameras, and phonographs were all used for surveillance. As Lauer (2011) observes, they were found to have “evidential value.” How much more, then, when computers were invented, their surveillance potential was quickly realized.
IBM computers were used by Nazis to identify Jews for cruelly differential treatment in Germany. And when it was thought in the 1950s that the Russians were readying for a “war in space” after they launched the “Sputnik” satellite, the race was on to find miniaturized and lightweight components, and the “silicon chip” was the answer. It enabled information technology, which became the basis for what we now think of as our “digital” era that, in turn, has enabled everything from surveillance capitalism to smart surveillance-targeting of victims in the current war in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon. (Though one might be forgiven for asking — if so “smart,” why so many innocent civilians are killed?)
The phenomenon of modern surveillance is something that demands not only scholarly attention but also social-ethical scrutiny, public examination and exposure, legal and political action, not to mention everyday negotiation and, often, resistance by us — ordinary citizens in everyday life. Surveillance represents one of the major global challenges that we face in multiple contexts.
What do we know about medieval surveillance?
“It strikes me,” writes Oxford historian Amanda Power “…that wholesale surveillance of society is nothing new. Until recently, most of the population of Western Europe understood itself to be under scrutiny by an omniscient and omnipotent Creator, who not only knew the contents of everyone’s correspondence but also the innermost secrets of their hearts… Whole systems of governance, both secular and religious, were based on this view of the universe” (Power 2013).
In medieval Europe, the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne was dominant from the 770s and, as Chris Wickham notes, Charlemagne “…and his successors were aiming at nothing less than the creation of a collective moral framework for the salvation of the entire Frankish people, and they assumed that their actions were constantly being monitored by God” (Wickham 2016:70 my italics). Anglo-Saxon England was technically still a Roman colony, but Christian leaders were already seeing people embracing their faith. As church influence grew, literacy was more valued (for Bible reading), and record-keeping was valued (for protecting land donated by kings), each of which was important for surveillance.
Michel Foucault — well known for his work on surveillance, especially for introducing Jeremy Bentham’s innovative C18th Panopticon prison to a broad audience — would have agreed with Power and Wickham. Bentham’s Panopticon — meaning “all-seeing place” — was intended as a “rational” answer to the horrors of violence and neglect in English prisons. Bentham wanted to turn places of “punishment” into sites of “discipline” where being surveilled by an unseen watcher would oblige prisoners to reform themselves in line with the expectations of the powers that be. Though a rationalist, Bentham appealed to another image that he knew would be familiar to his religious compatriots — the “eye of God” from medieval times.
In the 1970s, Foucault discussed the “eye of God” as the “power of care” in the figure of the shepherd, who “watches over” the flock. This, for Foucault, is a distinctly “pastoral” view of surveillance that was preceded by centuries of the “eye of God” in Bentham’s panopticon. Unlike the Greek model of gods, the shepherd watches over the flock as it moves, so shepherds are relationally involved with the sheep.
Foucault quotes the biblical book of Exodus, “In your faithful love you led out the people you had redeemed.” So pastoral power, Foucault concludes, is “fundamentally beneficent… its only raison d’être is doing good… its essential objective is the salut, the “salvation” of the flock. It’s a power of care… “the shepherd is someone who keeps watch… to avoid the misfortune that may threaten the least of its members (2009: 126-7).
Foucault continues; that the shepherding task is also entrusted to local under-shepherds, the elders or ‘pastors’ of the church. Syrian Saint John Chrysostom (347-407) says the bishop should watch over everything — individuals, the town and, in fact, the orbis terrarium — the whole world. Yet it was never a direct political power; pastoral power didn’t become political until the C18th, asserts Foucault (154).
Thus, “the idea of pastoral power…” Foucault infers, “…was introduced into the Western world by way of the Christian Church” (129). True, this church could be “creative, conquering, arrogant, bloody.” And this strange form of power became typical of the West and unique in the history of civilizations. Pastoral power is exercised both in everyday life in the medieval local church and in the wider society, suggests Foucault (147-8).
From this, one can infer two features of the “eye of God.” First, it is fundamentally relational; it implies that “social relationships” are basic to being human. This is an alien thought for many in C21st Western cultures, where expressive and acquisitive individualism are the order of the day — seen in both “surveillance” and “privacy” discourses — and where sociality is frequently downplayed in practice. Second, the “eye of God” watches over others in a basically caringfashion. The purpose is human flourishing, the meeting of myriad needs, especially for those who are, for whatever reason, disadvantaged or neglected.
Had Foucault pressed further into the biblical story of the Exodus, he would have noticed that God’s “eye” sparked the rescue plan in the first place. “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians and bring them… to good and broad land” (Ex 3:7). God’s eye may thus also be thought of as justice-seeking. No wonder the story of Exodus was so central to Jesus’ teachings or to the work of figures such as Martin Luther King in the USA or Desmond Tutu in South Africa.
God’s eye is, fourthly, reliable and dependable. When pastoral power was transferred to everyday life in the monastery, Benedict of Cassino’s (480-547) “Rule” ensured the reliability of human eyes, watching over other members of the order. The “rule” was for corporate life in the village-like monastery. Foucault often mentions the Rule of Benedict, focusing on the role of the abbot in overseeing the adherence to the Rule. Foucault notes that the abbott “represents Christ” as the “shepherd of the flock” who must “dispose all things, prudently and justly” (see Columbo 2021). The abbot’s task, then, was accountable to Christ himself. The reliability of divine watching is assumed, but the development of “surveillance” among under-shepherds depends on built-in checks on its power.
What insights arise from the study of medieval surveillance?
First, let’s return to the query I posed earlier: How did the very human practice of “watching over” — as a shepherd cares for sheep — become so threatening, such a challenge to our sense of what’s truly human? Part of the answer is that surveillance was secularized, by which I mean that surveillance practices, once rooted in basically Christian soil, were grafted into other plants — military, industrial, individualist, rationalist, technological and so on — that transformed them and steadily reduced their human-centred features.
One set of issues arose as a result of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. The church-state question became increasingly fraught as justice was subordinated to the favours they received from the Emperor, and as secular powers were permitted more influence over church affairs than was warranted or advisable from a New Testament perspective. Spiritual liberty was sacrificed too often to centralized control and organization (Bruce 1958: 293). This eroded the earlier reliance on the “shepherd” model, with pastoral “watching-over” the community at its core, based inter alia on New Testament teaching as interpreted by Bede.
Surveillance always seems to develop in relation to social practices — the felt need for care, control, order, security, prosperity and the like. Surveillance is not technologically “driven”, though its advertised “successes” do produce further tech sophistication and sometimes a lack of alternatives to surveillant systems. All manner of mechanical and electronic devices may be adapted for surveillance purposes. However, only in the later C20th and C21st did companies appear with the sole purpose of manufacturing and marketing surveillance, and they are now international enterprises.
Along similar lines, it is important to note that much criticism of modern surveillance revolves around the — equally modern — idea that ‘privacy’ is the central ‘value’ that is threatened by surveillance today. Privacy is essential, as long as it’s seen as a social, shared, public value, not just an individual “problem” of “what they know about me.” Privacy, as the desire to be free of unwanted attention by government, police, corporations, and so on, is an understandable wish and is indeed desirable in democratic societies seeking the rule of law.
However, the data that makes us visible, usually to unknown others, is not only harvested to increase the efficiency or effectiveness of the goods or services being offered to consumers. They are also being analyzed in extraordinarily complex ways and concatenated with other data in order to build consumer profiles.
And from those, the complex scoring and ranking — mentioned earlier — are calculated. The lives of those with whom ordinary users are in touch also exude usable data such that your Facebook ‘friends’ betray you. This is a classifying and evaluating system that determines who gets what benefits, opportunities, and special offers and who does not. This “social sorting” is a crucial purpose of today’s surveillance, affecting people’s everyday life chances and choices. So, the larger questions about surveillance are about justice issues.
The corollary is that far more attention should be paid to the reliability of surveillance. Much progress has been made over the past couple of decades in the development of privacy legislation (North America) and data protection (Europe). But the lag between new, large-scale developments in surveillance that profoundly — and all-too-often negatively — affect the lives of many millions of people around the world, on the one hand, and the appropriate development of suitable instruments to limit or even to ban certain kinds of surveillance practices, is growing exponentially. Accountability is lacking.
Concluding challenges
I argue that modern surveillance mutated from medieval Christian roots and that a key cause of mutation was secularization, in the sense that other motivations and motifs began to govern how surveillance was done and for what purposes. So, what may be retrieved for surveillance to serve truly human purposes?
Four characteristics of early medieval surveillance are now being explored by medieval historians and are worth considering closely. They are relationality (against individualism), caring (against supposedly “neutral” approaches that are amenable to algorithmic reduction), justice-oriented (against the inherently biassed systems of social sorting), and reliable (against the untrustworthy and unaccountable, seen in both ‘security’ and ‘consumer’ contexts). These four features are all too often almost entirely absent from contemporary surveillance practices.
But such values could inform our critique of, and our alternatives to, contemporary surveillance. It is not too much to hope for or to work toward. My aim is not to glorify some ‘golden age’ in the past but to find a guide to human-centered surveillance in the present.
Bibliography
Bruce, F. F. 1958 The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress of Christianity from its First Beginnings to the Conversion of the English, London: Paternoster.
Colombo, Agustín 2021 “The monastic origins of discipline: From the Rule to the norm?” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 47: 8.
Foucault, Michel 2009 Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 New York: Picador.
Lauer, Josh 2011 “Surveillance history and the history of new media: An evidential paradigm’” New Media & Society, 14 (4).
Power, Amanda 2013 “Under watchful eyes: The medieval origins of mass surveillance” Lapham’s Quarterly 9 (1). https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/spies/under-watchful-eyes
Tucker, Holly 2018 City of Light, City of Poison, NY: Norton.
Draper, Norah and Turow, Joseph 2019 “The corporate cultivation of consumer resignation,” New Media & Society 21:8.https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444819833331?journalCode=nmsa
Wickham, Chris 2016 Medieval Europe: From the Breakup of the Western Roman Empire to the Reformation, New Haven: Yale UP.
