Privacy

The existence of a sense of privacy across different cultures and times is frequently asserted or denied on little evidence. One of the most influential studies to encourage the belief that a sense of privacy is specific to the modern Western world was The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (originally published as Über den Prozess der Zivilisation in 1939) by Norbert Elias (1897–1990). Elias did not take privacy as his subject, but his comments on shame, embarrassment, delicacy, and modesty are frequently quoted by writers on privacy. His work examines the process by which a code of polite manners was formulated and disseminated between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, starting with the publication of De civilitate morum puerilium (On civility in children) by Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) in 1530. Erasmus dealt with the changing etiquette of familiar and social life, ranging from snot (how to handle a handkerchief before and after blowing one's nose) to urination (someone inadvertently seen urinating should not be greeted).

A large part of polite manners focused on how to accord personal space (physical or mental) to individuals (or groups of people) in which to carry out desirable or necessary activities without embarrassment to themselves or to onlookers. Elias did not assume that privacy as a goal of etiquette was unique to Europe; commenting on how meat is served and eaten, he notes that the concealment of carving behind the scenes was effected much earlier and more radically in ancient China than in the West.

Critics whose knowledge was largely confined to European and American history regarded a sense of privacy as peculiar to a specific Western economic and cultural environment. In a 1965 essay, "Literature and Post-History," the American literary critic George Steiner (1929–) related the rise of the Western novel and its audience to the domestic privacy, leisure, and reading habits of the mercantile class of the eighteenth century, claiming that printed fiction and individual privacy were alike products of the typographical revolution. If typography is a measure of impersonality and privacy, then it would be reasonable to regard late imperial China, where moveable type was invented and where printed fiction flourished, and Korea, the first country in which moveable type passed into common use, as founders of the sense of privacy in the modern world. Historians of English literature nevertheless continued to site the development of a sense of privacy alongside long prose fiction in the eighteenth century. Works such as Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (1999) by Cecile M. Jagodzinski and Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (2003) by Patricia Meyer Spacks also identified privacy as a special attribute of women, a theme that appears in many cultures under different guises, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, produced evidence that privacy is a universal human condition whose expression is not necessarily verbal and is adaptable to specific circumstances. Interest in the existence of universal traits in human behavior peaked in the early 1980s, when conventional assumptions on cultural differences that formed research methodology from the 1920s onwards were undermined by new research in the late 1960s and 1970s that showed the differences had been exaggerated and similarities had largely been ignored; new research in linguistics and in brain-mapping gave added support.

A summary of this debate and of traits that can be categorized as universal are contained in Donald L. Brown's Human Universals (1991). Among the characteristics of what Brown calls "Universal People" (UP) are standards of sexual modesty, sex generally in private, and discreetness in elimination of body wastes. Universal people possess a concept of the person: "They distinguish self from others, and they can see the self both as subject and object.… They know that people have a private inner life, have memories, make plans, choose between alternatives, and otherwise make decisions" (p. 135). Most but not all of the lists of universal characteristics compiled by anthropologists since 1945 and summarized by Brown include privacy.

The anthropologists' evidence became part of the background to discussions on privacy in the 1980s and 1990s. Still the belief persisted among non-anthropologists that a distinctively modern sense of privacy was an attribute of post-industrial societies. Even a philosopher as sensitive to ethnocentricity as Charles Taylor in 1981 and again in 1985 identified a sense of privacy as a defining characteristic of a specifically modern (and by assumption therefore Western) concept of self-identity. In premodern societies, according to Taylor, "One's life was led before everyone else, and hence shame and its avoidance played a big role in people's lives. There was no space, not just physically but psycho-socially, to withdraw into the privacy of one's own self-estimate, or the opinions of a circle based on affinity.… With the rise of the modern identity, this intensely public life withers. The community retreats, and the nuclear family achieves privacy" (pp. 261–262). In modern societies, Taylor concluded, privacy has become a requirement for the good life, a space for family affection and individual fulfillment.

Barrington Moore's Privacy (1984) was a unique contribution to the debate in examining four widely different types of premodern societies: primitive societies, classical Athens, Hebrew society as revealed in the Old Testament, and ancient China. Much of his discussion about ancient Greece and China is on the mutual obligations of government and the populace at large, and he records the Confucian distinction between the separate realms of the state (public) and the family (private), as well as information in early texts on courtship, the family, and friendship. Starting from a narrow definition of privacy, Moore found that rights to privacy in early Confucian China were weak in comparison those enjoyed in fourth-century B.C.E. Athens. He concluded that privacy of communication was possible only in a complex society with strong liberal traditions and that in the absence of democracy, private rights are either few or undeveloped.

The spread of globalization and the inclusion of privacy rights in international law has rendered almost irrelevant the argument about Western and non-Western or modern and premodern societies, as governments in all parts of the world strive to identify themselves as modern, democratic, and based on the rule of law. Although speculation in popular opinion, journalism, and conservative nationalism continues to dwell on which societies or ethnic groups do or do not enjoy a sense of privacy, the academic debate in the 1970s and 1980s shifted to distinctions between public and private realms.