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I wonder if Edward Snowden will one day be awarded the Nobel peace prize.

I’m not nominating him. I’m just musing on how previous recipients like Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi were branded as criminals and imprisoned or, forced into exile because they exposed uncomfortable truths.

It’s interesting how earlier in the year Snowden was being called a traitor, a villain, a danger to national security by some of the people who are now expressing concern about the rate and type of intelligence-gathering on which he blew the whistle. Indeed yesterday it sounded as if the internet giants were making common cause with him, although I suspect that their motives were more to do with the threat of diminished trust rather than anything more altruistic.

Different agencies - supermarkets, social science faculties, security forces - are always keen for information on what other people are thinking or doing. This desire brings to mind a well know but largely discredited story.

Others may call it a true story, I prefer to call it a truth story, and like the ancient Jews I believe it is divinely inspired. It’s about a tree planted in the middle of the Garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve were forbidden to pluck any fruit.

Let’s set aside any fatuous notions that the fruit was either an apple or an aphrodisiac; we just don’t know. What we do know is that the plant was called The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: not just evil, but good and evil, which suggests to me that it was forbidden not because it was bad, but because it was more than mortals could cope with.

You see, knowledge is intrinsically limitless and intrinsically partial. An old Chinese proverb which I learned at school spoke of how the fool ‘knows not and knows not he knows not’ whereas the wise man ’knows not and knows that he knows not’. There is always much in the world and its people which is beyond our ken.

But knowledge is also partial. Theories of how the universe came into being have been rehearsed
with assurance by scholars of one era, only to be negated or surpassed by the more feasible theories of their successors. The knowledge that South African apartheid regime had of Nelson Mandela was enough in one decade to make it illegal to quote him, but in another era it approved his liberation.

The magnitude and sophistication of intelligence-gathering must be an endless fascination for those charged with national security, but what to do with the data is the problem. Machines might be able to capture and store endless information, but the capacity to use such knowledge has to be driven less by the desire to possess and control and more by the wisdom which can differentiate between what is possible and what is right.

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