Last year, 20 leading public intellectuals were asked to choose five books that best “explained” modern Britain.

The resulting list was notable for its diversity. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations rubbed shoulders with Being Jordan; Charles Darwin with the IKEA catalogue; Alister Campbell’s diaries with The Interpretation of Dreams. What little consensus there was rested on one author: George Orwell. Several of the panel chose Animal Farm or Orwell’s essays as capturing contemporary Britain but an unequalled five chose Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell’s dystopia is rightly lauded. You only need think of its gifts to modern English to recognise its importance: Newspeak… Doublethink… Thoughtcrime… 2+2=5… Room 101… Big Brother.

In a nation that boasts 4.2 million CCTV cameras, the largest DNA database in the world, and where data from credit, debit and store loyalty cards, mobile phones, and Internet search engines mean that the “average” person can be monitored more or less continually throughout the day, who could deny Nineteen Eighty-Four’s awful prescience?

On closer inspection, however, that prescience is somewhat superficial. Our invocation of Orwell is reflexive rather than reflective. Yes, Airstrip One and contemporary Britain are both relentlessly watched, but that does not make them one and the same. Citing Nineteen Eighty-Four as the best “explanation” of modern Britain is a good example of what the writers of Yes Prime Minister called “Politicians’ Logic”: “Something must be done. This is something, therefore we must do it.” Thus: “Surveillance is ubiquitous in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Modern Britain is full of surveillance. Therefore modern Britain is like Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Such logic suits those who are, for whatever reason, unreservedly opposed to CCTV cameras and DNA databases. But it fails to recognise the basic fact that the surveillance society has not spread in the teeth of popular opposition. If anything, the public’s attitude to omni-surveillance rests somewhere between apathy and lukewarm approval.

For one thing, it is the great British public who are, in part, responsible for the rise in CCTV coverage. The Retailer Maplin claims its sales of cameras, monitors and recorders have gone up 265% in the past five years. We are as much filming as filmed against.

More pertinently, we are nothing like as appalled with our surveillance society as Orwell was with his. When, in 1994, the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey asked people whether they thought video cameras should or should not be allowed on roads to detect speeding motorists, at football grounds to detect troublemakers, and on housing estates to detect vandals, the overwhelming answer – more than 90% in each case – was yes. BSA have not asked the question since but when the Home Office published a report exploring “Public attitudes towards CCTV” in 2005, it reported that 82% of all respondents stated that they were “happy with” the installation of CCTV.

Cynics will scoff at such figures. “Of course people want surveillance of ‘troublemakers’ and ‘vandals’.” “Of course, the Home Office would claim that people are ‘happy with’ CCTV.” “Isn’t the whole point of surveillance society that the people are conned into wanting it?”

Perhaps so, but a simpler and less convoluted response might be that the British public doesn’t object to and indeed actually endorses surveillance.

If this is so, it should not be a cause for complacency. Even the best intentioned public surveillance can suffer from mission creep, and no-one could argue that all public surveillance is necessarily well-intentioned. The line between privacy and publicity is always blurred, not least when technology develops at its current pace. CCTV footage is one thing; DNA databases quite another.

Recognising the public’s active desire or, at least, passive acceptance of surveillance should, however, steer us away from the morally uncomplicated template of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The modern British surveillance society does not exist in the social vacuum caused by an oppressive, totalitarian regime. Instead, it operates in and draws its justification from the context of genuine public fears about violence, crime and terrorism. There are legitimate questions to be asked about how justified those fears are, just as there are about the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of surveillance technology, from CCTV to DNA databases. But those questions should not obscure the fact that our fear of ne’er-do-wells lurking in the crowd provides the fertile soil in which our surveillance society grows.

There is an irony here, which leads us back to where we started. Orwell’s satire was a powerful protest against totalitarianism and for what we would call a liberal society. And yet, it is the very nature of our modern liberal society that seems to be feeding the spread of surveillance.

Liberal societies, unlike totalitarian ones, are diverse: sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally. Few would deny that they are much the better for it. But the reverse side of diversity is unfamiliarity. A diverse society is one in which we spend much of our time among strangers, a fact that is compounded by two social trends that are particularly dominant in modern Britain.

The first is “hypermobility”. Britons travel more and further than ever before. In the last 50 years, as the total number of passenger miles travelled has risen threefold, the total number travelled by private vehicles has gone up over ten times, the number of private cars has risen from 2 to over 25 million, and the length of roads in Great Britain has increased by 80,000 miles. We spend more time away from home, and thus among strangers, than ever before.

Second, Britain is culturally and ideologically plural to an unprecedented degree. The gradual erosion of union, empire, monarchy, and Protestantism – the four pillars on which national identity rested for several hundred years, coupled with historically high levels of immigration, and a prevalent doctrine of multiculturalism has meant that we are less sure of who we are today than for many years. And this means that we are less sure of who everyone else is. Not only do we live among strangers, but we cannot even be sure those strangers share similar ethical outlooks as ourselves. And some of them – who knows how many? – pose an active threat to my person or property.

Diversity should not, in itself, necessitate fear or distrust. But it is a basic observation that humans trust the unfamiliar less than the familiar. And the more unfamiliar society is, the more substitutes for trust we reach for. If I can’t trust you, at least I can watch you.

Hence, we are back where we started. Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been the heart of the expert panel’s list but that heart was comparatively small (chosen by only five of the twenty experts). More noticeable, was the size of the body. Nobody should expect unanimity from such a collection of experts, whether asked the question in 2007 or 1907. But the sheer breadth of answers from today’s public intellectuals underlines the problems we have today in identifying what makes us us. We don’t really know.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a brilliant novel but its brilliance can blind us. In particular it can blind us to the awkward fact that surveillance may be just as much a motif of liberal societies as of totalitarian ones.

This is not, at the risk of repetition, to claim surveillance is a necessity or a good or that we should let down our guard and give the green light to any attempts to monitor further our daily movements.

It is, instead, to say that if we attempt to deal with the problems relating to surveillance without also considering the many other factors that serve to erode trust and social capital – from hypermobility to the question of what citizenship should demand of us – we are likely to miss the full picture.

Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos, the public theology think tank.