I’ve been considering the proposition that maybe privacy is a mid- to late-Twentieth Century concept that’s already proving obsolete.
Up until the 20th Century there wasn’t any privacy to be had, unless you were some kind of hermit that lived by himself in the wilderness far away from any civilization. (And even some hermits wouldn’t have had privacy— none of that on a desert pillar, for sure.)
Hunter-gatherers lived in small communities, in caves or huts made of twigs and leaves. No privacy there. I imagine Ogg and Thogg were up in each other’s business all the time.
After the development of agriculture, most people lived in farming communities and thrived on gossip, there being nothing else to talk about except crops and weather, both of which lack human interest. No privacy here, either.
People from Scandinavia to Polynesia lived in longhouses— whole families sharing a big space. Noisy lovemaking was entertainment for the whole community, adults and children alike.
If you were lord or lady of a medieval manor, you got a certain degree of privacy by virtue of the fact that you might own a curtained bed. But you’d be sharing the bedroom with various family members and servants who would be sleeping on the floor next to you.
People who got together privately might well be up to something illicit, fornication or heresy or insurrection or fraud. As the premiere theoretician of capitalism remarked, businessmen “never gathered together even for a social purpose save to conspire against the public interest.”
With the industrial revolution, we got people rich enough to build themselves palaces and mansions, which might have guaranteed them a degree of privacy, except that you need servants to maintain palaces and mansions, and the servants knew everything that was going on.
Surveillance by the servants was so ubiquitous that it just became a part of the background. When you read of the genteel folk in Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or Honoré de Balzac, picture a servant or two silently observing every scene. They were so taken for granted that the authors never commented on them.
People could send telegrams, but they were sent and read by third parties. People could use telephones, but they were on party lines, and both operators and neighbors could listen in.
People left agricultural communities for cities, but they lived in apartments. And every apartment that I’ve lived in had thin enough walls so that I knew my neighbors’ affairs.
It wasn’t until the middle class moved to the suburbs that privacy became possible. The middle class could afford houses, but they couldn’t afford live-in servants to spy on them. Nuclear families became just that. Privacy was possible, though neighbors and local community standards imposed their constraints.
Or maybe you got just enough privacy to convince yourself that you really had a lot more than you did.
And now it may no longer be, not unless we go as off-the-grid as any medieval hermit. Never use credit cards, never get social security numbers, never use the phone or the internet. Pay everything in cash.
And that sort of behavior, of course, is suspicious, and might get you looked at.
So we may have no more privacy than Ogg and Thogg. Except that the balance of power has changed.
Back when we lived in small communities, Mrs. Grundy may have known all about us, but we also knew all about Mrs. Grundy. The balance of power was roughly equivalent. If Mrs. Grundy denounced us, we could denounce her right back.
Now, the people sapping our privacy are big corporations and governments who insist on the secrecy of their own doings. Information flows one way, not the other. We know little of the people who know all our business, and that leaves us no power, and little recourse.
My own privacy might be an illusion, but it’s an illusion to which I’ve grown rather attached. I preserve it when possible. Though I’m a fairly public figure, and I chat here and elsewhere about those aspects of my life that I choose to label “public,” I stay away from a lot of topics. My Facebook page gives an incorrect birth date, and very little other information.
But yet there’s that lack of equivalence. The watchers have the power and we do not.
So let’s keep watching the watchers. Because if I can’t have my illusions of privacy, I don’t see why they should.
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