In the lecture on Foucault that I listened to this morning, the word “panopticon” appears.  I first heard of it in connection with utopian theory. Jeremy Bentham, an architect as well as theoretical philosopher, designed a building from whose center all distant parts can be seen.  A good example of a panopticon would be Rahway Prison that I passed each day for many years.  According to Foucault, schools and other places where large numbers of people congregate are designed in much the same way.  The principle is control.  The manager in the center can see and know what is going on everywhere.  This is especially necessary in prisons, schools and, as Professor Roderick added, in hospitals.  A brief period of thinking about your experiences in schools and hospitals should tell you that this is true.  Is it necessary? Well, that depends on your political philosophy.

It is confusing to me to find that Liberals are derided as people who do not liberate.  Conservatives blame them for excesses that create more criminals so that we need more prisons.  Conservatives love the idea of the panopticon.  There is a proposal to find a great deal of U.S. taxpayers’ money to build prisons in Iraq.  By extension of the practice here in the United States, we would rather build prisons than spend on education.

We have a government here in the United States that makes our Union great although it is divided into three parts.  When you think of the States that are united you realize that there are wheels within wheels all operating at the same time. Dividing government up between an executive, legislature and judiciary is supposed to slow down the urge to dominate by those we elect to represent us.  For a while there, the central government of the United States was effectively concentrated in the District of Colombia, Washington. That made a central government an easy target but only the Pentagon was chosen in the September 11, 2001 attack that brought down the World Trade Towers in New York City.  It would be a terrible blow if while concentrating this country’s management in a single panopticon that would enable a President and the Legislature and the Courts to be more efficient, the government could be demolished in a single blow.

Conservatives are generally suspicious of government and the present group in power thinks that government should be made smaller. This is at odds with reality while the U.S. is extending its control from Washington, D.C. The intent is to control many countries around the world in addition to its on-going war in Iraq.

Efficiency is not sufficient a reason to install a control panel in the White House to regulate the U.S. presence in other countries around the world.