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In my writing over the past few years (Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture, What is Ritual? The Essence of Peopling, A Bad Carver), I have been somewhat of a cheerleader for group ritual and small group agency, lamenting the capacities and mental states lost in the transition away from a communal, close-knit society, toward an atomized, market-driven society.

In reality, the thought of living in a communal, close-knit society, surrounded daily with family and friends, perhaps living in close quarters with many siblings or children, fills me with horror. Here I will allow my own heart its expression, and be a cheerleader for privacy. For something precious has been gained as well as lost in the transition to social modernity.

Consider obesity. A stylized explanation for rising levels of overweight and obesity since the 1980s is this: people enjoy eating, and more people can afford to eat as much as they want to. In other words, wealth and plenty cause obesity. Analogized to privacy, perhaps the explanation of atomization is simply that people enjoy privacy, and can finally afford to have as much as they want. Privacy is an economic good, and people show a great willingness to trade other goods for more privacy.

Privacy is wonderful in and of itself, and privacy keeps the peace. Consider a finding from the 70s, mentioned in Baumeister et al.’s Bad Is Stronger Than Good, as an invitation to reflection and introspection. Does physical proximity cause friendship?

[N]early every psychology textbook teaches that propinquity breeds attraction. This conclusion is based on the landmark study by Festinger, Schachter, and Back (1950) in which the formation of friendships in a married students’ dormitory was tracked over time. Contrary to elaborate hypotheses about similarity, role complementarity, values, and other factors, the strongest predictor of who became friends was physical propinquity: Participants who lived closest to each other were most likely to become friends. Yet a lesser known follow-up by Ebbesen, Kjos, and Konecni (1976) found that propinquity predicted the formation of disliking even more strongly than liking. Living near one another increased the likelihood that two people would become enemies even more strongly than it predicted the likelihood that they would become friends. Propinquity thus does not cause liking. More probably, it simply amplifies the effect of other variables and events. Because bad events are stronger than good ones, an identical increase in propinquity produces more enemies than friends.

It makes sense that shoving people together mostly makes them hate each other. Privacy allows us to be free from being annoyed by and intruded on by others. But privacy is a cooperative effort, composed of billions of people individually choosing to mostly leave each other alone. Each one of us is one nosy sociopath away from some level of disgrace, and yet such violation of privacy remains rare. Privacy is a component of well-being, a form of wealth, a luxury even, and the gains from supplying more privacy to a larger number of people must be weighed alongside alleged losses of social capital from atomization. What looks like a loneliness epidemic to a certain kind of observer may look like a golden age of privacy to another. Just as there are mental states that are only possible in crowds or with others, there are mental states that are only possible in privacy.

The Positive Experience of Privacy

One thing that people are said to do with privacy is to luxuriate in it. What are the determinants of this positive experience of privacy, of privacy experienced as a thing in itself, rather than through violation?

First, aloneness. The exclusion of most or all other people is core to the experience of privacy: to be alone in a room (even the bathroom), or perhaps alone with one’s spouse, or even with friends or family or the other people at a twelve-step meeting. The experience of “luxuriating” in privacy seems most connected to being alone in a room.

Second, the room: some kind of permeable enclosure protects one from intrusion – permeable, so that one is private, not trapped or claustrophobic. Different enclosures offer different levels of privacy: rooms in houses, rooms in hotels, tents, treehouses, cubicles, cars, gazebos. Some enclosure are more conducive to “luxuriating in privacy” than others. Permeability can enhance, rather than detract from, privacy: a window on the outside world reassures one that nobody is there, whereas a windowless wall does not. Ideal privacy is asymmetric surveillance: being able to see outside, but not being oneself visible.

Third, there is not just one layer of enclosure, but multiple layers: picture a room within a house, within a lot of “empty” distance with no people in it, surrounded by trees or a bramble of hedges, surrounded by a residential neighborhood. The same room would not be so private if excised from the house and transported to a shopping center. Layers allow greater permeability of enclosures. A window overlooking a private back yard provides a reassuring view and does not impede privacy, but a window looking right into one’s neighbor’s kitchen may.

Fourth, the outermost layer of enclosure, an invisible layer, is civilization. Compare the experience of spending an evening alone in a tent in the wilderness to the experience of spending an evening alone in a house in a residential neighborhood. Which is more private? The first experience is a cold and piercing kind of privacy, privacy underlined by adrenaline. Who’s there? What was that noise? The latter affords a warmer and more luxurious privacy, ensconced in a protective field of normalcy, an imaginary field created through the cooperative efforts of everyone nearby.

Sometimes civilization is the only “enclosure” necessary to create the experience of privacy. In the order of civil disattention, in which strangers in public politely ignore each other while giving cues that they are harmlessly aware of each other, one can go almost anywhere swaddled in a high degree of personal privacy and anonymity.

Fifth, the light is low. Luxuriating in privacy is best conducted in enough light to see (unless one is sleeping), but not in bright fluorescent light or direct sunlight. Generalizing this, privacy is not only freedom from surveillance, but from sensory cues of possible surveillance or intrusion: bright light, loud or sudden noises, vibration, smell. To be in private is to be free from cognitive as well as physical intrusions from others. Headphones and sunglasses act as sensory blockers to help produce the experience of privacy in public.

Now consider the internet. It operates as a window that seems to allow you to see out all over the world, without others being able to see you. Of course, the mirror is not really one-way, nor would it be as satisfying if it were: the ability to display identities and get attention is part of the allure. Satisfying internet selves are often private, in the sense that, even if not anonymous or pseudonymous, they are distanced or walled-off from one’s socially responsible identity. Internet identities are perhaps examples of the layers of permeable enclosures described above.

Besides privacy, another thing people are said to luxuriate in is hot water – a bath, a shower, a hot springs. Part of this is the pleasure of not having to expend energy maintaining temperature homeostasis. The pleasure of privacy is similar: freedom from having to expend cognitive energy in modeling others and conforming one’s behavior to the standards of public self-presentation, in order to maintain status homeostasis. Privacy is a form of rest.

An important aspect of privacy is that it is not absolute, but a matter of degree. Humans have many social selves to express. There are professional selves, one for interacting with clients or customers, one for interacting with colleagues, another for interacting with management. One can “be oneself” in private with friends, shedding the constraints of professionalism, protected from the attentions of hostile busybodies. And one can “be oneself” all alone. There is no single bright line between public and private, and efforts to construct one (as with a “real name” policy) deny human nature.

Privacy and Past Selves

Times change. One of the cases mentioned by Warren and Brandeis in their influential paper “The Right to Privacy” (Harvard Law Review, 1890) concerned an actress who was playing a role in a theater production that “required her to appear in tights,” and a devious paparazzo, by use of a flashlight, managed to photograph her thus. She was able to enjoin the publication of the photos. In our own time, tights have become normal exercise and leisure apparel commonly worn in public, and the vigorously contested privacy case of our time involved the unwanted publication of a hardcore sex tape.

At any moment, the self is using social and environmental cues of appropriateness to decide what to do and what to say. Proper behavior in 1890 was different from proper behavior now, because it arose from different informational and societal contexts. One’s behavior at 15 is different from behavior at 35, as it arises from different emotional and developmental contexts.

Every action and utterance of a past self was a performance under a particular set of constraints, a particular emotional mood, a particular worldview, a particular set of knowledge, a particular fashion milieu. When past selves’ performances are recorded, as in writing, photographs, or video, the performance becomes frozen in time. Meanwhile, the world changes around it. Fashion and sensibilities change, old knowledge is discarded, cool and uncool shift. A past self’s recorded performance can thus grow to be very much at odds with present fashion and standards. The past self is improper and uncool, or at the very least different from the present self, and threatens the present self’s social status by association.

Viewed in a vacuum, from the perspective of reputation, it seems like it would be a good strategy to be stable and predictable as a cooperation partner, to establish a highly predictable persona. Evidence of being different in the past not only pokes holes in the persona, but the change itself casts doubt on the sincerity (and durability) of the present self. So perhaps we should self-modify to change less, and we should prefer cooperation partners who have remained stable and predictable.

However, the rapidly-changing self may be better suited to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, and being able to change rapidly is a strong response to increasing complexity. A rapidly-changing self in a rapidly-changing environment will accumulate increasing amounts of recorded performances that are at odds with the present self – especially since part of the changing environment is that more performances are recorded. These can be an albatross around one’s neck, a messy closet that one can never clean out. Privacy – the freedom from making performances, recorded or otherwise – allows one rest from this gradual accumulation of temporal baggage.

“Information wants to be free” used to be a cheerful rallying cry against censorship, but now sounds like a curse. As culture changes, new disputes emerge, and sides are taken, the past must be reinterpreted according to the new organizing principles and sensitivities, or written off as mess and hidden. But even if obscure, the mess of the past is there in that closet, that closet that perhaps anyone can access, waiting to be sifted through. Long-forgotten recorded performances of past selves might emerge suddenly to mock the present self. In privacy there is relief from such worries.

Private vs. Shameful

Everybody knows that everybody poops. Still, you’re not supposed to poop in front of people. The domain of defecation is tacitly edited out of our interactions with other people: for most social purposes, we are expected to pretend that we neither produce nor dispose of bodily wastes, and to keep any evidence of such private. Polite social relations exclude parts of reality by tacit agreement; scatological humor is a reminder of common knowledge that is typically screened off by social agreement. Sex and masturbation are similar.

But not all that is private is shameful, and not all that is shameful is private. Sleep, for instance, is normally performed in privacy, but it is not particularly shameful or embarrassing. Crying is embarrassing, but seems especially mediated by the presence of others.

Privacy means that your behavior is not constrained by other people’s ideas of what you should be doing or saying. It’s tempting to imagine that behind closed doors, everyone is engaged in all kinds of illicit and licentious behavior. However, I suspect that most of what is performed while luxuriating in privacy is more procrastination and laziness than debauchery.

In private, people are free to do what they want, and what they want, according to Seth Roberts, is to do the same thing they always do, over and over. In private, people watch television, read low-status books, play video games, tweet. Do you want to judge them for it, or say that these things are not the pinnacle of human achievement? Too bad – they’re doing them in private, where your disapproval can’t reach.

Privacy allows for the possibility of deep absorption, relaxing the cognitive demands of modeling others and regulating one’s behavior and appearance. Privacy allows executive function to take a break.

The more public the persona, the less challenging, strange, and interesting the ideas presented by it, the more self-conscious and halting its language, and the more excluded it is from intimacy and genuine communion. The most difficult audience to speak to is the public as a whole; this is reflected in the stereotyped and somewhat impoverished communications of politicians and advertisers.

Privacy Gains

In the early days of television, televisions were expensive, and a family would usually only have one. Decades later, as electronics became cheaper to produce, it became normal to have a television in every bedroom. Instead of watching television together, people chose to watch in private as soon as they were able to. This is usually presented as a sad fact of modernity, but perhaps we should view it as anything but sad: more people were able to express their preferences.

As I wrote in A Bad Carver, social interaction has increasingly become “unbundled” from other things. This may not be a coincidence: it may be that people have specifically desired more privacy, and the great unbundling took place along that axis especially, in response to demand. Modern people have more room, more autonomy, more time alone, and fewer social constraints than their ancestors had a hundred years ago. To scoff at this luxury, to call it “alienation,” is to ignore that it is the choices of those who are allegedly alienated that create this privacy-friendly social order.