Moral Enigma Quotes

“Though Bentham's Panopticon was never constructed, the Westminster Review institutionalized the same democratic and scientific principle of public exposure:
'It were to be wished that no such thing as secrecy existed - that every man's house were made of glass. There would be the less reason to desire windows to his breast ... The more men live in public, the more amenable they are to the moral sanction. The greater dependence men are in to the public, ... the clearer the evidence comes out, the more it has of certainty in its results. The liberty of the press throws all men into the public presence ... Under such influence, it were strange if men grew not every day more virtuous ... A whole kingdom, the great globe itself, will become a gymnasium, in which every man exercises himself before the eyes of every other man. Every gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible influence on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down. The constitution of the human mind being opened by degrees, the labyrinth is explored, a clue is found out for it. That clue is the influence of interest ... It is put into the hands of every man. The design by which short-sighted iniquity would mask its projects are every day laid open. There will be no moral enigmas by and by.'
This vision of journalistic exposure provided the youthful propagandist with the prospect of becoming 'a reformer of the world.'
However, the moment arrived when the propagandist could no longer look forward to this prospect. He found he was a moral enigma to himself. In the course of struggling with this moral enigma, he became a liberal.”
― Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought