Subject or Object?

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.)