Let your phone be your conscience
As children we are taught of the existence of the conscience — a voice in our heads that tells us whether the thing we’re about to do is right or wrong. Whose voice it is exactly was never made clear to me, or maybe I just tuned out in class. There was a lot to tune out in Catholic school. For instance our Social Studies teacher told us that in 1521 the Spaniards came to the Philippines in order to save the souls of our pagan ancestors. Right. No mention of an economic and political agenda, of empire and colonialism, or even the project to circumnavigate the planet and make the flat earth believers shut up. Just being good! That was on the exam, too.
In cartoons the conscience was usually represented by two miniature versions of yourself levitating by your ears. The “good you” had angel wings and a halo; the “bad you” had batwings and horns. The good conscience advised you against putting thumbtacks on someone’s chair; the bad conscience urged you to use the whole box of tacks. If you chose to ignore your good conscience, it would lay a huge guilt trip on you. A soap brand cleverly hijacked this concept by advertising their product as the one approved of by your conscience. Yes, you were made to feel guilty about trying a competing brand. Genius, if you think about it.
The behavior of public figures leads us to suspect that they’ve managed to ignore their consciences or switch them off altogether. Their parents must not have taken them to see Walt Disney’s cartoon Pinocchio, in which Jiminy Cricket admonishes the puppet to “Always let your conscience be your guide.”
By now you will have heard of the latest scandal involving Prince Harry of the British royal family. You will have seen and critiqued the phone camera photos of the redhead, third in line to the British throne, standing naked in a Las Vegas hotel. Apparently he had just lost a game of strip billiards. Bad Harry, losing at billiards, but isn’t the point of strip billiards (or strip poker, strip Dungeons and Dragons and anything prefaced with “strip”) to lose?
So Queen Elizabeth’s grandson went to Vegas with that moron Lochte, they partied, they lost their clothes. It’s not good if you are held up as a model of propriety and sound judgment, but no one can accuse Harry of being either. It’s not bad unless the taxpayers are funding his shenanigans — oops — but then there’s the entire issue of the expensive monarchy, which serves largely as a tourist attraction (though a huge one). I doubt that there was even the slightest peep from the conscience of the prince.
If Prince Harry is the most popular member of the royal family, it is due to his willingness to make an ass of himself in public. I almost typed “embarrass himself in public,” but who’s embarrassed? Not Harry, the tabloid gift that just keeps giving. Ironically the British media have been forbidden to run the naked pictures, which are available to anyone on the Internet and have appeared in every newspaper on earth. Presumably they’ve neutered themselves out of respect for a 27-year-old who has no problem with letting it all hang out. The official reason for not republishing the shots: they were taken “without his consent.” Right.
Henry Charles Albert David Windsor’s antics only endear him to the masses, who see that he is “just like them!” They cut him plenty of slack, the poor motherless bairn, and anyway he’s just the spare. (If it had been William there’d be real trouble.) There’s a Shakespeare play about the hijinks of Harry’s namesake ancestor — Henry IV, Part 1 — in which the young prince mostly hangs out in taverns with drunken lowlife and vulgar wenches. Given all the publicity the present-day Harry generates I’m shocked that the makers of Love, Actually have not made an updated screen version. (The lesson is: Whatever you have in mind, Shakespeare has beaten you to it.)
Prince Harry’s activities in Vegas and elsewhere would not have become worldwide knowledge so quickly if someone in the hotel hadn’t produced a phone and started snapping photos. Once you finish wondering where the presumably nude photographer had stashed the phone, you have to wonder what the prince’s s ecurity team was thinking. Clearly they weren’t, or maybe protecting the prince’s reputation was removed from their job description after they’d proven their incompetence in this area. (Maybe this is the reputation their employer wishes to cultivate. Or maybe they were having shots, too.)
Since the pangs of conscience aren’t what they used to be, cellphones could become the New Conscience. Obviously it’s too late for Prince Harry, but for other people the fear of being photographed while doing something idiotic could be an effective deterrent. Think about it. Everyone has a phone. It takes a second to shoot the picture, and minutes to upload the picture to Facebook-Instagram-Twitter. Evidence of your stupidity gets out there before you can wipe your fingerprints off someone’s ass or concoct a plausible excuse. When that evidence lands on the Internet it will stay there forever, ready to haunt you when you apply for a job, run for public office, tell others to behave properly, or do anything that requires a “strong moral character.”
We are living in strange days, when choices are not measured by their rightness or wrongness, but by the number of “likes” and “dislikes.” The next time you feel like beating up a traffic enforcer, taking a bribe, stealing, or having sex with persons you’re not supposed to have sex with, imagine that someone in the vicinity is whipping out a phone and documenting your actions. You will get caught, there’s no way you can escape. Fear of exposure (with its implied hypocrisy) may not be as high-minded or compelling as conscience, but in this day and age, we’ll go with whatever works.
