An Ode to Technology and to Gossips

"Going against the virtue of selflessness. Being unreasonable. Using evil intentions to guide your actions. Being cruel and destructive.Taking advantage of kind people.Talking secretly against your parents and elders. Showing disrespect for your teachers. Engaging in rebellious actions. "Framing" the innocent. Slandering your co-workers. Being deceitful. Lying to your relations. Being aggressive and resentful.Taking things for yourself whenever you wish. Not knowing right from wrong. Talking behind people’s backs." --Treatise on the Tao, by Lao Tzu

When we, for a long or short period of time due to anger, envy or other resentments, speak out about others in ways that are false or misleading about that person, we commit character assassination. Gossip has the same effect, and that is the reason many, if not most, spiritual traditions either ban it or take a dim view to its practice. It is corrosive and damaging to community.
For this discussion assassination is defined as: to kill in a surprise attack for political or religious reasons; to gossip for same or similar personal reasons (Webster's Dictionary).

Today the overwhelming presence of technology in our lives and the easy access to the internet makes the opportunities for character assassination, gossip or outright slander easy, and increasing. Even when things are posted are untrue, oddly over time people's beliefs may be swayed and their former good opinions altered to a more negative tone. How does that happen?

Lori Andrews writes about this subject in her new book, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did,  primarily about privacy issues and the internet. She discusses at length the 1890 legal briefs written by then young Boston attorneys Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren in a chapter titled Technology and Fundamental Rights. Recounting the young Brandeis' life, author Andrews talks about his concern for his family when in 1889 his first child was born and the Kodak Brownie portable camera simultaneously made its first appearance. No longer was it necessary to go to a photo studio to be photographed with large, cumbersome cameras. Now they were portable and increasingly every where. He was concerned about the indiscriminate photographing of his children while in public. Doesn't a person have a right to "their own face?" he mused. Surely there must be a legal answer to this new question brought by technology.


Prior to portable cameras a person could hardly be photographed without their permission, largely due to the limits of the technology. After 1888 when the Brownie appeared, all changed. These photo enthusiasts were called "photo fiends" by the popular press. As Warren and Brandeis assessed the impact of the portable camera in modern life, their instinct told them several things: people should be able to have control over their images; they also should have the simple right to be left alone, and the right to control the information others could collect about them; in short theirs was a conception of the privacy rights, and rights of due process that today we all now enjoy.

Their 1890 legal brief advanced these ideas:

"The intensity and complexity of life attendant upon the advancing civilization have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; modern enterprise and invention have, through [various] invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury."

They continue their thought that there is indeed an essential right for individuals to be simply left alone, like the legal protections against assault, beatings or malicious prosecution. The right of a person to control what is said or written about him has long had a place in law. The suits of slander and libel address traditional wrongs to others committed by would be character assassins when in public speech or in traditional publications such as books, newspapers or magazines. One's reputation is among the very first of property rights an individual must, and ought to protect. It is indeed the very first form of property rights possessed by individuals. Brandeis and Warren later went on to become members of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Democracy, Communism and Fascism

"The social aspirations of man cannot attain full originality and full value, except in a society which respects man's personal integrity." --Building the Earth by Teilhard de Chardin

Returning to the topic of religion and politics, we turn to the modernist ideas of democracy, communism and fascism. For those who doubt that religion, or even less spirituality, has a place with politics, permit here a simple enumeration: from the earliest religious history, politics demonstrates its part in the religious and spiritual milieu of mankind. As was common in the ancient world, the king or ruler of a tribe or nation had the "divine right" to determine, institute and force religious beliefs upon a population. They did this often, enforcing a state religion.

The Greeks and Romans, along with other Orientals, formed religions and spiritualities which predictably led to establishment of moralities for any of these given cultural groups. This practice continues with the moderns (1200-1800 in the common era), who as Kings and emperors forced their judeo-christian beliefs upon the population; indeed their kingship made them the heads of those faiths. In other words, the king was the state-church, so the church was represented in the body of the king.

It was this against which Machiavelli protested.

The Khalifs of the mid-east, Africa and other places arose to form what is now called Islam. They ruled in places by persuasion and by force; the United States of America was formed in part to protest against the state religion which during the colonial period was constituted by the King of England (King George III and others); today in the 20 and 21st centuries, there have been and will likely continue, governments which attempt to control, even police the population through forced religion.

Indeed we learn of places around the globe where Islam is practiced by regimes in an oppressive manner; the 14th Dalai Lama has been forced from his native Tibet into exile through religious actions taken against the Buddhists whom he leads. It seems the Chinese government wishes to direct and control his faith and others as well. Then there are the Sikhs in India, in opposition to the Hindus. They have, like many others, sought their own lands to live and practice their faith freely. The Jewish faith cannot be overlooked. It is in the arbitrary political formation of the modern state of Israel which has cast conflict upon previously settled territories.

And just now, today, in the United States the cry goes out for the practice of religion, freely or even not at all. The civil religion of the State wishes to suppose that it can most easily supplant the free will of the people and their freely chosen faiths for a legislated, legalistic spirituality and belief system. Today we are mired in conflict regarding forced participation in health care initiatives. The legislation which possibly thwarts the US Constitution, has made its way to the US Supreme court, the highest and final authority, asking to determine if Americans can and do have the liberty to practice their faith freely and the resulting morality they derive from it.

Many in this nation believe that government is dictating their moral stance in regard to health care. Many Americans who do not follow the state instituted Civil Religion represented in the law wish to practice a faith of their own free will and to determine what, if anything this should be; that the civil religion of the American state not be forced upon them.

It is these ideas and others, as such contained within democracy, communism and fascism against which many struggle from the bounds of religion and government.