The philosopher Michael Lynch has
published two essays on privacy in the New York Times
philosophy forum, The Stone. They are simply stated but startling in
their implications. I think it's time we thought much more deeply
about the relationship between privacy and personhood.
In his first essay, “Privacy and the
Threat to the Self,”1
Lunch argues that without privacy, we cannot cannot be fully
subjective human beings: “. . . what is private is what is
yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. . . . A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous
personhood.” Why? Because if you don't have “privileged
access to . . . your hopes and dreams, beliefs and fears,” then
someone else can define them for you and use them to manipulate you.
We become the object of other people's thoughts rather than the
subject of our own. Lynch then presents this chilling thought
experiment:
“ . . . imagine that I could
telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and
feelings—I could know about them in as much detail as you know
about them yourself—and further, that you could not, in any way,
control my access. You don't, in other words, share your thoughts
with me; I take them. The power I would have over you would of
course be immense. Not only could you not hide from me, I would know
instantly a great amount about how the outside world affects you,
what scares you, what makes you act in the ways you do. And that
means I could not only know what you think, I could to a large extent
control what you do.”
Of course, all of us who use the media
are subject to a version of this thought theft everyday, via
advertising and marketing. It is a fact of life that there are
people who use my computer's link to the internet to monitor what I read, what I consider
buying, and even to a realistic degree what I think in the privacy of
my bedroom (where I keep my computer) in order to guide me toward
actions and decisions that will enrich or empower them. Or what if
you are in a relationship (unknowingly) with a sociopath who
apparently empathizes with you but also uses his growing knowledge of
your psyche to use you and betray you? Or what if someone wearing
Google glass records a private conversation you are having with a
friend in a public place and then uses that knowledge of your
personal life to blackmail you? Or what if now or someday very soon,
people will be able to read other people's thoughts, via computer
chip or not, and use that information to manipulate you? We are
obviously approaching something close to total lack of privacy very
quickly. We have to understand the consequences.
Let's take the example of the person
speaking privately to a friend in a restaurant. That person has
chosen to reveal a problem to this particular friend, presumably
because she feels pretty sure that this friend will understand to
some extent what troubles her and why and will thus handle the
information carefully and respectfully. The speaker's subjectivity
will remain intact. But if the person wearing the Google glass is
able to record some of this information and interpret it in the
context not of the speaker's psyche but of his own agenda, then the
speaker has lost control of defining her problem and her self and has
essentially become an object for manipulation to the other person.
If we are to remain subjective individuals on any level, we have to
have control at the very least of who has what information about us.
As Lynch puts it, “As I learn what reactions you will have to
stimuli, why you do what you do, you will become like any other
object to be manipulated. You would be, as we say, dehumanized.”
What, exactly, does the government know
about you? What, exactly, does Google or your cell phone provider
know about you? In all truth, we do not and mostly cannot know. We
really can't know how others are using information about our private
thoughts and feelings in order to manipulate us into buying things or
betraying ourselves or other people we know. Big Brother is very
deeply entrenched. Or maybe we should rename him Big Father, because
people are using our private information to judge us and thus affect
our future options: your Facebook account, your medical records, any
interaction you've had with law enforcement, what you've written
online.
In his second article on privacy,
“Privacy and the Pool of Information,”2
Lynch has this to say about the government surveillance program:
“When we systematically collect private data about someone, we
implicitly adopt . . . [an] 'objective' or detached, attitude toward
her. We see her as something to be manipulated or controlled. . . .
[A government that collects private data on its citizens] has begun
to see them not as persons, but as something to be understood and
controlled. That is an attitude that is inconsistent with the
demands of democracy itself.”
What does all this have to do with
metaphor? People will always lean toward pleasing authority and
cleaving to a group for protection. As long as we can objectify
others by removing their own subjective right to control their own
private information, people will abuse others in order to enhance
themselves—because they see those people as objects, not subjects
like themselves. In the Milgram experiments, in which people were
willing to torture other people at the command of an authority
figure, one of the few changes to the experiment that allowed for
some compassion toward the victim and disobedience of authority was
when the torturer was near or in physical contact with the victim.3
Then the torturer could see the victim as subjectively suffering, as
she indeed would herself in the same situation. This is where
metaphor comes in. The authority's command is essentially
abstract—Do this, whatever you might think about it. But when the
apparently real suffering of a real, physical individual became part
of the experiment, many fewer people were willing to obey the
authority figure and inflict suffering on a fellow human being. In
other words, we always need to pair a real, physical image or
experience with an abstract idea in order to test our own morality
and to avoid our dangerous tendency towards subservience to
authority.
But if an individual is ostracized from
a community, the people in that community really have no real
physical individual against which to test their abstract ideas, and
prejudice can become pervasive. Oh, he's black, he's lazy. Oh,
she's a woman, she likes to suffer, she brings it on herself. Oh,
he's Polish, he's stupid. Oh, he's Jewish, he's deceptive and
tight-fisted. And when there is no platform in that community for an
individual to correct assumptions, then prejudice will become fact
for the people of that community; the individual will be objectivized
by them; and the community will feel quite free to punish the
individual in order to maintain its own ideas of superiority. And if
an authority figure, like Hitler, who feeds on people prejudices and
fears, comes into power, the life of ostracized individuals can
become very miserable indeed—and quite possibly beyond their power
to correct.
As our lives become more and more
abstract, as we telecommute and get groceries delivered and
communicate with friends online rather than in person, we greatly
increase our risks both of becoming hardened by living by abstract
ideas without the correction of real, physical individuals and of
harming those individuals with our ignorance and lack of compassion.
Personal privacy is the corrective in our increasingly abstract lives. If we
give up our privacy willingly or allow others to take it essentially
by force and without protest, God only knows what we will become.
1New
York Times online, 22 June 13.
2New
York Times online, 27 July 14.
3“In
the variation where the learner's physical immediacy was closest,
where participants had to hold the learner's arm physically onto a
shock plate, compliance decreased. Under that condition, thirty
percent of participants completed the experiment” (as opposed to
65% who completed the experiment when the victim was in another room
and could be heard but not seen). Completing the experiment meant
giving increasingly painful shocks to the victim at the command of
an authority figure, up to 450 volts. (Victims were not actually
shocked, but they did cry in pain, and the people administering the
shocks did not know there were actually no shocks.)
