Which means you actually have to load and fire the damn things. And hit.
Oh my, but this has been a huge topic lately, hasn't it? With the massive Wikileaks dump of documents relating to the Afghanistan war earlier this week, the issues come up, with various observers saying that this changes everything, that this really changes everything and that this changes nothing. Of course, in the midst of all this, a favorite topic has re-emerged: transparency.
One of the best summations, Wikileaks: No Substitute for Transparency, was written by Quinn Norton shortly after the leak broke. It summed up the ongoing debate well, and linked to a number of articles that have wondered if transparency is all it's cracked up to be. She gets to the heart of the matter fairly well, I think:
My least favorite argument about transparency is that it breeds complacency. This is an argument from a position of tremendous privilege that comes from forgetting why we fight corruption in the first place. It is always the case that corruption costs; right now it is taking a terrible price on a real and growing segment of the population which the corrupt entity is meant to serve. You can only forget the proximate hurt if you’re someone in a position to forget it, someone with money, health insurance, the right travel options. Someone with good schools, and probably, it’s easiest to forget the day to day cost of corruption in America as someone with white skin. Without transparency threatened populations have to take up common myths about why they are in the situation they are in. In short, they blame themselves. Not only are they the victims of corruption, but when it’s not discussed, they’re the victims of believing they’ve brought the situation on themselves. If you want a complacent population, ruining their lives and then getting them to believe they did it themselves is a pretty good way to start.
That's (mostly) it, at least about the consequences of not being transparent. The problem with corruption is that it means someone's getting screwed and something isn't working the way it's supposed to. In the long run it eats away at the heart of government: legitimacy. People being what they are, though, many won't go the victim route and will begin turning to other methods to get things accomplished, be it the black market, vigilantism or, eventually, outright revolt.
Transparency, sometimes, can act as a check on that, because it essentially serves as the body politic's ammo dump, with all those revealing bits of secrets and information the individual bullets. Together, as Norton writes, all that forms a mindset.
If it's used.
The reason people get disillusioned with transparency is because many of them regard it as a holy grail — a magical solution in and of itself — and fail to grasp that it's only one part of a larger picture. All that ammo's only useful if it has a target or people willing to fire it, and a more transparent government is supposed to deter corruption because political factions, journalists and activists have their own reasons to take aim. Likewise, people in power have an incentive to use that ammo themselves to fend off such attacks (by firing incompetent officials or trumpeting legit good statistics, for example).
The important thing to note is that politics then isn't more transparent because of a widespread allegiance to ethics (remember Madison: "if men were angels they would have no need of government") but because there are consequences if they aren't. Groups that are vying for power want to know what's going on and the public is likely to get angry at them if they don't know some measure of it too. Venality is, in the long run, more reliable than nobility and less easily dissuaded.
Ideally, if all sides have such creatures and there's an active press who can make hay out of savaging any of the factions, you do get a more transparent government and, far more importantly, a more accountable one, especially as people internalize the need for openness.
Transparency, then, is an entire system of conflict and behavior, one as much about punishment as moral clarity. Shoulder to shoulder we're looking over each other's shoulders.
So yes, transparency can work, even at the "the people will be outraged" level. A powerful right-to-know law in India has given some of the poor access to many services they were previously denied. It's hardly a silver bullet, but it is an example of how transparency, used properly, can do some real good.
While the electorate is too dispersed and slow-acting to be a day-to-day political lever it does form the terrain on which this all takes place. Enough facts, repeated often enough, will change that landscape and make certain actions more or less difficult.
But several factors currently hamper transparency. Large parts of the journalistic classes have essentially become courtiers, political operations are increasingly concerned with winning narrow margins rather than building solid bases and people who've seen repeated scandals fail to seriously damage the corrupt will eventually grow numb.
Furthermore, as the Wikileaks documents make clear, government's gotten in the habit of classifying huge amounts of mundane information and this has become widely accepted enough that media, politicos and the electorate don't yet seem to be mounting a serious challenge (yeah, be very afraid on that score).
What's can fix this? Several very long fights. Agency actions plans probably aren't going to do the trick.
And let's be honest, there's also a problem with the perspective of "the people" themselves. We see a lot more of what our politicians do and say than ever before, and it's revealed some pretty ugly contradictions in popular views.
People want someone like them in office, then grow disillusioned the second their leaders behave like their voters. People claim to want bipartisanship but scream about betrayal the second any compromises actually take place. Adapting to a more radically open political culture will require getting past some of those illusions.
Where I part ways a bit with Quinn's piece is that what Wikileaks does is part of transparency, but it's also a sign of how broken things are. If the info that makes up transparency is ammo, Wikileaks' massive document dump is the equivalent of holding down the trigger until the chamber's dry: impressive but desperate.
This is because the organizations required to start firing more shots are currently in disrepair, and need to be fixed, at least a bit, before we'll start seeing real transparency. A bullet's useless without a gun, and the aim to use it.
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