Hague's support for digital ID is hardly "conservative".
Is he stupid? Or does he just think you are?
At least in their version of “problem, reaction, solution” the Mob managed to “prevent” the smashing of shop windows in 1930s Manhattan. The proposal to solve the immigration crisis by introducing digital ID is a far more dishonest business model than anything the embryonic New York Mafia came up with.
This was William Hague the other day:
“Arguments against digital ID are paper thin. Most voters now back them.”
[Shouldn’t that be “paperless thin, by the way? Seems even the WEF outriders slip back into old money, so to speak.]
It’s difficult to know where to start with that. Both sentences are, like families in a Jane Austen novel, unhappy in their own way. So I suppose we might as well look at them in turn, after pausing to acknowledge that these are not thoughts which would be entertained by a mind properly catechised in the traditions of conservative thought.
I don’t agree that the arguments against digital ID are paper thin (see below) but nor do I care. It’s not for me to justify my reluctance to become an algorithm. It’s for the WEF, via Mr Hague if necessary, to justify why it wishes to turn me into one. This Jesuitical sleight of hand -the reversal of the burden of proof- should fool nobody.
Conservatism used to involve an instinct for cultural preservation, an affection for the tried-and-tested, and a scepticism about snake-oil Utopianism. Is it a bit “meta” to be wistful for the good old days of “good old days” conservatism? If so, there’s another thing I don’t care about.
Is it true that “most voters” back this cultural paradigm shift? I doubt it, because “most voters” would not know what they would be voting for and, as is the way with the credentialed classes, will in any case not be included in the decision. This is the way of things, now. Your money is not your own, your children are barely your own, and your opinion is assumed to be whatever the regime experts want it to be.
But, again, for a conservative it is not relevant whether or not “most voters” would back digital ID because those voting for it are only a fraction of those affected by it. Conservatism stripped of a sense of intergenerational obligation is just snapshot, historically insensitive liberalism.
We hold our historical inheritance in trust, and are obliged to pass the best of it onto those yet to be born. Digital ID might be no more than a simple consolidation of information already available in distributed form. Or it might be an irreversible act of political, social and even religious vandalism. Who can say?
I can. It’s the second one.
Digital ID is part of a wider strategy of incremental transhumanism sold on a promise of greater convenience. It is a trap.
The transhumanist project is software driven. It is the Frankenstein creation myth refashioned in the idiom of the ascendant technologies. The integration will not be flesh and machine, but a slow-motion merger between your self and the myriad data points you generate moment-to-moment, all collected in one virtual space, for the convenience of governments and the people running them. It is identity theft by the State. You will be reduced to the algorithms on your smartphone.
Why? To keep you safe, or to keep them safe from you?
What’s at issue is not political but metaphysical. Digital ID is the replacement of a conception of the human person as soul-and-body commingled, with an abstracted view of human beings as interchangeable generators of manageable data.
As ever, we are to be sold this on the basis of “convenience”. But not all Ponzi schemes involve money. There are spiritual ones as well. We are not created to have easy lives. We are made for virtue, not comfort. The more the likes of Hague plug the “convenience” angle, the surer you can be that you are being played.
It’s pretty depressing, actually, that Hague has resorted to arguments like this, which are so insensitive to the traditions of thoughtful conservatism. He’s not doing so because he’s stupid, but because he thinks you are.