The previous three entries on The Middle Class Forum described free will, free thought and merited consequences as our natural rights. Our guaranteed liberties do not stem from our natural rights so much as from cultural entitlements. The big three cultural entitlements that we frame as liberties are privacy, property and security. Out of these choices privacy had the fewest advocates at the start. James Madison did not call privacy “a fence towards liberty;” John Stuart Mill did not focus his Utilitarianism on this particular cultural entitlement.
Not even the Constitution addressed privacy in the text. The view of privacy as a fundamental right, the “right to be left alone” as Justice Brandeis phrased it, came about through a doctrine known as substantive due process. Supreme Court justices interpreted the Constitution subjectively to include privacy as a liberty.
Many might be shocked by this news. Many might even equate privacy with a natural right. This would be an offshoot of the philosophy made famous by Thomas Hobbes, a misanthrope who spouted that natural man was “solitary.” In positive terms, many might assume that early humans survived through rugged individualism in a hostile world. Many might assume that these early, “solitary” humans enjoyed a lot of privacy.
Of all the misconceptions cultivated about natural man since the Enlightenment, the notion of us being “solitary” is the single most furthest from the truth. This should be obvious even to scholars who like to deduce their knowledge with reason rather than construct meaning from real experiences. Line us up with other animal species and everyone, even scholars like Hobbes, must conclude that we fall on the altruistic end of the continuum. We are without question a social animal. Early social bands were characterized by intimate contact between members. Only Culture turns individualism into a desired, adaptive trait, otherwise we would conclude a person who craves individualism to be maladjusted, unsuited for the natural life of a social band.
As someone who traveled in the wilderness for months at a time with social bands, known as expeditions, I can attest there is far less privacy in that setting than in the houses and cities of modern culture. But just because privacy is not a natural right does not mean it is not a cultural entitlement worth having as a liberty. We are not fooling ourselves quite as much by craving privacy than if we crave individualism. There must be some perks connected with civilization, why not have privacy as one of them, if kept in a proper perspective?
Over the past eight years, through the USA PATRIOT Act and other initiatives, we were reminded to keep privacy in a proper perspective. In this case we were told to share the perspective of Mill, that security trumps other objectives of society. I will explain later why security is a cultural entitlement as well, but giving it a higher priority than privacy does not bother me. If a democracy collectively wants to prioritize the entitlement of security over the entitlement of privacy I have no complaints.
Yet the lack of privacy for the sake of security needs to run both ways. In my small town many people know most of my business. In some ways that’s a nuisance but I chose to belong here and I’m willing to accept the total package. But I also happen to know the town’s business. The business of the selectmen and the commissions are done completely in the open for me to scrutinize whenever I am so inclined. I am well aware when local government is not acting the way I wish. This contrasts sharply with the policies of the Bush II administration.
I don’t mind government “listening in.” A sociopath’s lack of privacy increases the security of others. I do mind not knowing they are listening in and that they can circumvent checks and balances for doing so. The security of a democracy has not been enhanced for all if a police state can whisk people away without us knowing how or why that came about.
The entitlement of privacy is less important than the natural right to free thought. If I have the open and honest information that my actions will be scrutinized–whether by a social band, a small town or our federal government–I have the freedom to decide to “clean up” my act accordingly, or otherwise suffer the consequences that my actions merit. I do not need to know precisely how they acquired the information as long as both myself and our democracy as a whole knows what is being done to provide the proper checks and balances.
When the entitlement to privacy is preserved for government, at the expense of both our individual privacy and our free thought, security actually has decreased and natural rights have been trampled. Out of the two sacrifices, security and natural rights, the latter is the more serious loss. Knowing that we naturally evolved to exercise free will to belong, and free thought based on open and honest information, the cultural evolution of the governments hiding things from citizens cannot be in our best interest. Perhaps I speak too much as an ecologist in this matter. No doubt many would prioritize security above all other concerns, as authoritarians and some scholars have pretty much trained us all to do. Yet too many people in modern culture do not realize the full liberation that our natural rights provide, a liberation that is worth a security risk.
