Writing in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, two distinguished members of the Boston bar, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, observed that "The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilisation, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury".
The invention of the telephone and the introduction of the cheap ‘party lines', which made eavesdropping a national pastime in the US, were alarming enough for the authors to signal the need for a ‘Right to Privacy' law, defining privacy, not as a social construct or state policy, but as a purely individualistic need, engendered as a response to the ‘advancing civilisation'. These two axioms--that privacy pertains to the individual, and that personal wealth fuelled its need--should form the crux of the privacy debate, because they point to the inescapable conclusion that privacy is thus an elitist concept, a product of cultural refinement brought about by increasing affluence; its practical worth accessible only to those who can afford to purchase it. And to this, three millennia of human history bear witness.
Up until the dawn of the 19th century, privacy was a non issue.The citizens of the world ate, slept, relieved themselves, had intercourse, gave birth, died, all in public, with childlike insouciance. Houses with Interior walls and partitions were non existent, and it took 17 centuries to warm up to the concept of the ‘bed chamber'. And even then, the lord and lady slept on a bed in a hall, with the servants sleeping around them.
The concept of privacy was not only alien and irrelevant to their existence but was also viewed as an anomaly, a disagreeable and off-beat personality trait, loggerheads with societal norms.
"For where men conceal their ways from one another in darkness rather than light, there no man will ever rightly gain either his due honour or office or the justice that is befitting" held Socrates, equating the need for seclusion with the need for secrecy, delegating a ‘private' person to a lower social status. The word ‘idiot' comes from the Greek word ‘idios' which meant a insular person, worthy of disdain; and in many armies today, the private is the lowest of the enlisted ranks.
In ancient Rome, small communities left nothing to imagination, and similar to our attitudes today, privacy was traded for convenience, wealth and prestige; the plebeians living in cramped dwellings had no privacy by default, and the patricians living in palaces had the privacy, but chose to forgo it by opening up their private quarters in a public display of ostentatious wealth. Pliny the Elder, author and a contemporary of the emperor Nero, writes "It (good fortune) opens up the homes of princes, and not only that but their bedrooms and intimate retreats, and it opens up and exposes to talk all the arcane secrets". The indifference towards personal space--both mental and physical-- continued right through the Middle Ages, where individual beds were the ultimate luxury, and both at home and even in hospitals, they were willingly shared.
The 1800s brought great upheavals. The Napoleonic Wars ended in Europe, dismantling the oppressive feudalistic and monarchic structures, unshackling human enterprise and ingenuity, bringing an exuberance which burst forth through the Industrial Revolution, making life complex and consuming. Great empires like the Mughal and Ottoman fell; social ills like slavery in America and serfdom in Russia ceased; new empires emerged. While the resultant cultural sophistication sowed the seeds of privacy in the mind, the wealth made the body follow it. One room became two, our space became my space; and privacy fell into the arms of those who could afford it. But for the elite, generations of prosperity brought exposure to notions of individuality and alternate lifestyles, and together with the resources to pursue it, deconstructed joint families, stayed single and ‘got away' to fashionable retreats. For many of us, privacy is a concept we were born with, and unlike many of our countrymen, we are primed to expect it.
The German-Jewish émigré political theorist and Holocaust escapee Hannah Arendt, defined privacy as an indispensable ‘darkness' from which all life originates, an exclusive and deeply personal space that exists by the sheer virtue of being human.
For that very reason, though idea of privacy is elitist, it does not conflict with, or negate the the need for privacy for any individual. Privacy is self-manifest. Something that has to be discovered and not mandated.
Alleviating poverty, prioritising food and shelter, creating jobs, and building infrastructure foster the idea of privacy to take root and blossom in individual minds. As the people's economic and social conditions improve, liberating them from burden of survival, the sensitivity to privacy will increase, and they will have the means to get to it.
