I write an occasional guest post for the blog run by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, and I have shared some of them here on our congregational blog in the past (see Hannah Arendt, Jewish Philosopher, Hannah Arendt and Charlie Chaplin, and History and Freedom). And I thought it might be worthwhile to share my latest post here as well, even though there is very little in the way of Jewish references in this one.
But in our Saturday morning Torah study sessions that have focused on the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides for the past few months (see previous posts such as The Less Than Perfect God of Hebrew Scripture, Stroke of Insight, Thoughts on Torah Study, Religious Freedom in America, Scientific Vs. Theological Justifications), the subject of privacy has come up in relation to the strong sense of community that existed in antiquity and the medieval period. And Arendt herself is very much a Hellenistic philosopher, although her sensibility is necessarily grounded in Jewish experience, thought, ethics, and culture. And some of you may recognize the influence of an old Yiddish proverb on the final point I make in this post. So, I think that all constitutes sufficient grounds for including this post here.
You can also see the post over on the Hannah Arendt Center site under the same title (which I've linked to their site for your convenience), The Deprivations of Privacy, where it was posted over on December 3rd. And you might find it interesting to learn that the post went up on their blog on that Monday, and 2 days later, on that Wednesday morning, I heard from the director of the Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz, that the post brought 2600 people to their site, with many more hits continuing to come in after that. And of course I'm happy about that, for my own sake sure, but also pleased to contribute in this way to center and the promotion of Arendt's work and thought.
So, lest you be deprived any further (and with thanks to the Arendt Center's Bridget Hollenback for providing the illustrations), here it is now, beginning with a quote from Hannah Arendt, as this was written for their blog's "Quote of the Week" feature:
"The emergence of society—the rise of
housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from
the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public
sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and
political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of
the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and
the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life
spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world
of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to whom
privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica;
we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be
able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek
antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly
unknown to any period prior to the modern age. "
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Here are the titles of some recent posts on the Deeplinks Blog, which
is published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, America's leading
organization advocating for citizens' digital rights:
- Who's Tracking Your Reading Habits? An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy, 2012 Edition
- Ninth Circuit Gives the A-OK for Warrantless Home Video Surveillance
- Attempt to Modernize Digital Privacy Law Passes the Senate Judiciary Committee
- NASA's Data Valdez: Thousands of Employees' Personal Information Compromised in Embarrassing Data Breach
- Don't Be a Petraeus: A Tutorial on Anonymous E-Mail Accounts
- ECPA and the Mire of DC Politics: We Shouldn't Have to Trade Video Privacy to Get Common Sense Protections of Our Email
- EFF to Supreme Court: Limit Release of Driver Info
- Do Not Track Update: Professor Peter Swire to Co-Chair W3C Tracking Protection Working Group
- Reform to Require Warrant for Private Online Messages Up for Vote, but Down on Privacy
- Jones Meant What It Said: EFF Urges Court to Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking
Privacy is far from the only issue addressed by the EFF, but this list does account for 10 out of 16 posts appearing on the Deeplinks Blog
between November 21st and 29th of this year. And concerns about
invasions of privacy surface repeatedly in regard to Facebook's data
mining of user profiles and updates, Google tracking and analysis of
search queries (not to mention their indiscriminate street view
photography, monitoring of wifi signals, and use of gmail address
books), and Apple's tracking of the whereabouts and movements of iPhone
users (also done by Android and other mobile systems). Companies are
known to monitor their employee's internet use, email, and some even
demand access to their social media accounts. Law enforcement and other
government agencies (foreign and domestic) seek access to citizens'
email and text messages and records of websites visited and documents
downloaded. Personal messages, photos, and videos are forwarded and
distributed without permission. Sites like Wikileaks publish secret
government and corporate documents. Hackers break into databases, steal
information, take credit card numbers and banking information, and in
the ultimate invasion of privacy, engage in identity theft.
As much as the modern understanding of privacy seems to be under
assault on account of new media and digital technologies, it's also true
that many of us readily reveal personal information via online profiles
and posts, post our personal photographs and video recordings, divulge
our location through Foursquare and social media status updates, enable
GPS tracking on our mobile devices in order to take better advantage of
various apps and services, enter credit and debit card numbers on
websites assuming that they are secure, and treat email, instant
messaging, and SMS as if they were absolutely inviolable channels of
communication.
Privacy is being consumed. Online, our privacy is consumed by the
advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, while we in
turn are encouraged to serve ourselves up as personal brands (as befits
cattle). But through social media, we ourselves also consume other
people's private lives, perusing their profiles, attending to their
status updates, looking through their photographs, listening to their
podcasts, watching their uploaded videos. Online we participate in a
great orgy of consumption, as personal and intimate details are freely
exchanged. On television, we consume the privacy of a select few, but in
the age of the internet, paralleling our online devotion to following
the lives of ordinary people just like ourselves, we have the relatively
new genre of reality TV, which serves us up real housewives and biggest
losers, bachelors and bachelorettes, apprentices and survivors, amazing
racers and American idols. We are cast in the role of Big Brother, but
not in the Orwellian mode of surveillance in the service of social
control, but rather in a trivialized form of peeping tom titillation,
spying for its own sake, the pure pleasure of voyeurism as another
instance of the consumption of privacy. It's a short step from ogling
others to googling them.
There is nothing new about our consumption of private lives. What is
new is the extent to which it is being carried out. We are in the
process of fulfilling Andy Warhol's prophecy that in the future everyone
will be famous, but only for fifteen minutes, or was it only for
fifteen people? Without a doubt, fame and fandom are being leveled and
democratized as never before, as the erosion of privacy that has long
been the price of fame for celebrities has now been extended to everyone
who has an online presence. We have long grown accustomed to consuming
the privacy of famous individuals in the form of celebrity gossip
distributed through online services such as TMZ, through television programming such as Entertainment Tonight, and through print media such as the supermarket tabloids and People
magazine (not to mention the fact that all too often this type of
content is featured by legitimate news media). Celebrity is a
phenomenon that's older than television, but television's emphasis on
the up-close and personal, the way that the small screen favors the
close-up, lends itself to unveiling of intimate detail and expression.
As much as he was an icon of hardcore broadcast journalism, Edward R.
Murrow pioneered the format of bringing television cameras into the
homes of celebrities in Person to Person, a program he hosted
from 1953 to 1959. As television came to dominate the media environment
of the late 20th century, the proliferating presence of cameras and
microphones made private life all but impossible for celebrities. It is
no accident that the term paparazzi traces its origins back to
the same year that the Kennedy-Nixon debates signaled the beginning of
image politics, 1960 (the term is derived from a character named
Papparzo, a news photographer, from Federico Fellini's famous film, La Dolce Vita). Is it any accident that the synonym for television set is monitor, as television's basic function is the monitoring or surveillance of the environment?
But to be fair, while television, and before it radio, allowed
audiences to view the outside world while remaining themselves
unobserved, providing a kind of two-way mirror (aka a one-way window) on
events, they also have constituted an intrusion of the outside world
into private homes, and thereby contributed to the erosion of the
private sphere. And long before the internet, the adoption of the
telephone allowed strangers as well as friends and relatives to invade
our privacy at any hour of the day or night, interrupting even the most
intimate of activities (before the widespread use of answering machines,
some referred to this phenomenon as telephonus interruptus).
Over the course of the 20th century, the increasing presence of
cameras and microphones have subjected private life to increasingly
greater public exposure, but more generally the wiring of the
environment (the environment in effect wearing a wire) and the
unimpeded flow of wireless transmissions permeating the very air that we
breathe has placed privacy under increasing assault. In the aftermath
of Watergate, Marshall McLuhan noted that on account of the electronic
media, "the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large
portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of
mankind under surveillance." McLuhan held Arendt in high esteem, and he
incorporated Arendt's observation that the ancient Greeks viewed the
private individual as an idiot, noting that modern ideas about privacy
are an aberration, rather than a natural and universal human
understanding about how we should live our lives.
It often comes as a revelation to individuals not familiar with the
Constitution of the United States to learn that there is no specific
articulation of a right to privacy in the Bill of Rights or elsewhere,
and that privacy rights are the product of judicial interpretation of,
for example, the Fourth Amendment protection against "unreasonable
searches and seizures."
This absence is not an oversight on the part of the founders of the
American republic, but rather a reflection of the fact that the modern
concept of privacy was a novelty in the late 18th century. And as
surprising as this may be, the ancient Greek understanding of private
life typically comes as a shock. As Arendt goes on to explain:
In ancient feeling the privative trait of
privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant
literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the
highest and most human of man's capacities. A man who lived only a
private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public
realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm,
was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we
use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous
enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.
The root meaning of privacy is the same as privative and deprived,
as lacking a role in or access to the public arena. For Arendt,
privacy provides the space for the individual's thoughtful
contemplation, but must serve as a backstage region, to use Erving
Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor, for the staging of public action,
political activity involving collective deliberation and cooperation.
Underlying this is the essential point that the public and the
private are interdependent, which is why "the barbarian," or member of a
tribal society, has neither. Conceptions of both the public and the
private are tied to the nascent notion of the individual, of identity
separate from the group, which only began to form following the
introduction of writing and the advent of literacy. Writing, as Eric
Havelock put it, "separates the knower from the known," allowing for
objective distance from one's tradition and tribe, and from one's own
thoughts. This inward turn opens the door to the idea of the private
individual, while the act of reading and writing itself require a degree
of isolation. Readers read alone and apart from one another, even if
they read the exact same text at the exact same time. Listeners
constitute a group, a collectivity, as an audience (which is a singular
noun, whereas readers are plural). A public then is dependent
on the existence of the private individual, as the public is composed of
individuals who govern themselves because they can think for
themselves, speak their own minds, and deliberate as equals. Equality
too is linked to writing, as it is with the introduction of codified law
made possible by writing that we gain the idea that we are all equal in
relation to the same set of rules and commandments. Public and private
then have their roots in antiquity, but do not become fully formed
until the modern era, following the introduction of the printing press,
which also opened the door for the modern ideology of individualism.
As public and private have a common origin, so too are they commonly
at risk due to the same forces. Politically, totalitarianism seeks to
remove all of the barriers that make private life possible, at the same
time that the public sphere is dismantled to create a single homogenous
field of power through surveillance. Economically, in ancient Greece,
the center of public life was the agora, which also served as the marketplace, but only a few years before Arendt published The Human Condition, the modern marketplace began to be referred to as the private sector,
as corporations usurped the human invention of private identity, and
have systemically undermined the last vestiges of the public sphere as
they seek to create a single homogenous field of consumption through the
manufacture of desire. We might well wonder why corporate executives
for the most part have been allowed to escape the heavy media scrutiny
that political leaders and other celebrities are subjected to? Why are
they allowed to hold on to the privilege of privacy where other
prominent (and not so prominent) members of society are not? Wouldn't
we all be better off if they were held to the same standards of
transparency now required of politicians and government officials?
Underlying the general blurring and dissolution of the private and
the public that we have been experiencing is the electronic media
environment, which has undermined, superseded, and shortcircuited the
media environment associated with literacy and print. In place of
individualism, which was based on the compartmentalization of private
life kept separate from the public sphere, we have personalization,
which involves providing open access to personal data, history, and
activity, and the persona itself. In the absence of boundaries, honesty
becomes of the highest value, but it's typically the honesty of
self-disclosure, narcissistic self-revelation in the interests of
self-promotion, as when celebrities go on talk shows to confess to
personal problems as part of what is, or seems to be, an image
revitalization strategy. Openness in communication is treasured, even
though indiscriminate openness can be damaging rather than healing
depending on the context and manner in which it is approached.
Transparency is put forth as a basic principle for internet activity,
and while awareness that we are being observed generally results in more
ethical behavior than would otherwise occur, there are times when some
amount of secrecy in politics is needed for successful negotiation.
Arendt teaches us that the modern concept of private and public is
not immutable, and having changed before can and is changing again. And
having been born the year before Arendt published The Human Condition,
I am not entirely comfortable with the increasing loss of the
distinction between the public and private, nor can I completely relate
to the post-individualism of younger generations. But given our current
trajectory, our options may be limited to living with surveillance
carried out by powerful entities such as governments and corporations,
or meeting surveillance with sousveillance, to use the term
popularized by University of Toronto political scientist Ronald Deibert,
with citizens pointing their cameras back at the cameras pointing at
them. Or more generally, our best option may be to work for a transparent society,
to use author David Brin's notion, where our personal sacrifice of
privacy is compensated for by transparency on the part of the rich and
powerful. If we must be deprived of the boundary between private life
and public activity, and instead live and work in glass houses, let's
make sure no one gets to gets to mirror theirs, just because they have a
great deal of silver.
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