Eavesdropping (14 page)

Like physical distance, walls gave neighbors new reasons to talk
about
each other, while providing new reasons to talk
with
each other. Walls thus altered the relationship between visual and linguistic communication—the only one our species had ever experienced—while changing the nature of human discourse and the street value of personal facts. They also promoted the feelings of conspiracy and closeness that accompany the sharing of secrets.

Clearly, everyone was seeking a blend of public and private activity, a balance between independence and autonomy on the one hand, and reciprocal sharing and assistance on the other. There was, by reference to Leyhausen’s parable, a “chill factor” that drove our ancestors from solitude to socialization, and a “quill factor” that prevented others from getting too close. What they sought was a “quill-to-chill ratio” that worked best for them. For all their concerns with things that were happening on the outside, they were discovering some precious new resources on the inside—ones that we, their distant progeny, would be willing to fight for.

Most people are afraid
not
of being what they seem to be, but of seeming to be what they are …                  Arthur Gardner, criminologist

W
HEN
people went behind walls, eavesdropping was needed to reestablish sensory contact. But it did far more than that, for the person
encountered
on the other side of walls was not the same person that had
disappeared
behind them. In his place was a different soul, one more revealed and vulnerable. When eavesdroppers breached the outer skin, they were rewarded with perceptual riches that exceeded, and in the future would embellish, their wildest dreams.

Whether the first homebuilders knew it or not, walls were a form of social technology; and when it came to definitional issues, walls behaved much like other technologies. The telephone was created with one function in mind—Alexander Graham Bell would have been happy if receptionists had simply used it to announce visitors—but took on other uses as time passed. Even if walls were
originally thought of as barriers against the outside world, they also kept domestic activities safely on the inside. In this sense, structural privacy could be seen as “a technical by-product of domestication,” wrote Peter Wilson. It was a resource that one could not reasonably consider
“natural
to human existence.”
¹

From the beginning of domestic life to the present, this
unnatural
condition of privacy has been responsible for a steady stream of social conflict. We saw evidence of this in the tensions of the Sakalava people of Madagascar and the Zinacantecos of Mexico, but these were not isolated cases. In the 1960s, Oxford anthropologist J. K. Campbell studied the Sarakatsani sheepherders of Greece. He found them “insatiably curious about the details of domestic life and relations in other families.” But the Sarakatsani hut was considered “inviolable.” “No stranger may invade it without an invitation,” wrote Campbell. “It is a sin, and a source of the greatest shame, if a man is caught with his ear to the wall of his neighbour’s house or hut.”
²

For a peasant hut to be
inviolable
, and for listening at its walls to be a
sin
and a source of
shame
, raises serious questions. What was happening on the outside of the Sarakatsani hut that was so awful that the occupants fought
to keep it out
? Or was something happening on the inside that was so special that steps had to be taken
to keep it in
? Were the insiders seeking the architectural and social equivalent of Gore-Tex, content for things to flow one way as long as they didn’t flow the other?

When openly living individuals had wanted to be alone, they went elsewhere. But wherever they went, they were still outside. Any aloneness they achieved was tenuous. Someone could burst on to the scene at any moment, possibly without warning, especially if the solitude-seekers had been seen leaving camp earlier. If they wished to take advantage of their isolation; if they planned to do something that could not be done in the company of others; they would have to remain perpetually wary. Under the circumstances, it would be hard to do much with, or to discover much about,
solitary experience—leaving it to qualify, at most, as privacy in the third degree.

It is obvious that the construction of walls offered something new. But what was it? How can we know, a good ten thousand years later, what the first domestic privacy was like? Was it mainly a form of social shelter; an interruption in what had been, until then, a species-long conversation?

It is safe to assume, I think, that the first walls were valued mainly as shields against the eyes and ears of outsiders. Even in modernity, this sensory connotation has been captured in definitions of privacy. Law professor Anita Allen recommended that privacy be treated as “a condition of
inaccessibility of the person
, his or her mental states, or information about the person to the senses. To say that a person possesses or enjoys privacy is to say that, in some respect and to some extent, the person … is beyond the range of others’ five senses.”
³

That the first domestic privacy was experienced as a form of
privation
is implied by the Latin
privatus
and
privare
. “To live an entirely private life,” wrote Hannah Arendt in
The Human Condition
,“means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself. The privation of privacy,” Arendt concluded, “lies in the absence of others.”
⁴

On one level, this seems uncontroversial. When people went behind walls, they lost touch with human activity that was occurring on the outside. But which “others’ did Arendt have in mind? Perhaps she meant the neighbors, or the other residents of the
village or town. Walls offered unprecedented separation from
these
outsiders, to be sure, and this raised moral and civic concerns.

There was, as we discussed earlier, a special and rapidly growing class of individuals whose senses the insiders wished to be safely beyond: strangers. Between 1500 and 1700 the continent of Europe was populating and urbanizing. In London, for example, the population at the end of that period was
nine times larger
than it was at the beginning. Such a period of rapid social change, wrote Paul Delany, “arouses anxieties about status even among people whose own position is fairly secure.”
⁵
The stranger, according to a second historian, Robert Muchembled, was “always dangerous, always feared.” He was “that
other
who resembled him like a brother but whom he trembled to encounter.”
⁶

Behind walls, people were safely beyond the senses of strangers—and everyone else. They would no longer have to ask questions such as Who is out there? Who is approaching me, and with what intentions? Who is looking at me, and in what way? Are they merely glancing in my direction or are they watching me? Where are my friends, and what are they doing? Released from the usual concerns, the new privacy—call it privacy in the second degree—would naturally have increased opportunities for several things that are now highly valued.

One is relating. In the past, the individuals to whom one was physically closest and might know the most about were neighbors. Now one had his own reception room. One could have guests. They would enter and leave at the behest of the owner, and it would be these invitees who enjoyed privileged access to the dweller in his most congenial and unguarded moments. When everyone lived on the outside, how close people stood or sat, whether they touched or whispered, and how they looked at each other gave observers the information they wanted and, in egalitarian societies, needed. Structural privacy changed this. Behind walls, interactions with familiar others would be carried out without fear of public scrutiny and the possibility of negative reaction.

In a population boom our ancestors had found a way to achieve a measure of peace and security. Without the stares and glares of their fellow villagers, insiders would find new opportunities to reflect, and perhaps the first good chance to ask where they wanted the world—the outside world—to stop and their own interior lives to begin. But when these refugees stepped over the threshold, they got more than a goal of flight, something that nested animals had. They got a “zone of immunity,” something that French historian Georges Duby defined as “a place to which we may fall back or retreat, a place where we may set aside arms and armor needed in the public place, relax, take our ease, and lie about unshielded by the ostentatious carapace worn for protection in the outside world.”
⁷
This zone is what newspaper columnist Pete Hamill called a
Great Good Place
, a place “where the harshness of the real world is fended off.”
⁸

But the new dwellings were not actually as secure as one might suppose—or the inhabitants might have liked. In thirteenth-century France, Raymonde Testanière told the village bishop in Montaillou that her neighbors had built a
solier
—a room above the kitchen—and that she suspected some heretics of sleeping there. One day, hearing some men speaking quietly in the
solier
, Raymonde decided to investigate. She went out into the courtyard and climbed a dungheap from the top of which it was possible to see into the
solier
through a chink in the wall. From there, Raymonde said, she was able to observe the heretics “speaking to each other in low voices.”
⁹

The heretics were acting
secretively, while in private
. Not a bad idea considering the chink, the dung, and the very real threat of being burned at the stake. But this raises a question: how do privacy and secrecy differ, and what do they share? Secrecy guards against others “coming too near, learning too much, observing too closely,” wrote philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok. “It serves as an additional shield in case the protection of privacy should fail or be broken down.”
¹⁰
Long before our ancestors adopted a structural approach to privacy, they had regularly sought secrecy, and it was
adaptive that they did. Secrecy enabled them to exercise their Machiavellian human minds—to discuss ways to deal with their rivals and forge alliances with their allies—things that the heretics may have been doing.

Walls immunized residents from outside forces, and homes provided them with a new ecological niche, a crucible that would shape the development of minds, personalities, selves, and personal relationships. “The skins of houses are shallow things that people are willing to change,” wrote folklorist Henry Glassie, “but people are most conservative about the spaces they must utilize, and in which they must exist. Build the walls of anything, deck them out with anything, but do not change the arrangement of the rooms or their proportions. In those volumes—bounded by surfaces from which a person’s senses rebound to him—his psyche develops; disrupt
them
,” Glassie warned, “and you can disrupt
him
.”
¹¹

How did the insiders regard their new niches? Surely they would have felt less transparent than the openly living generations that had preceded them: they were surrounded by opaque barriers. Just as surely, they would have assumed that privacy gave them much of what secrecy had offered in the past, and that few things that happened “behind closed doors” could be used against them. Freed from these concerns, it became possible to contemplate life as it was being lived on the outside. Secure in their homes, they could reflect on their work and the people in their lives without fear of review. They could ponder and ruminate without interruption. Through more thoughtful comparisons of themselves with others, they would discover their own unique properties. Walls also gave inhabitants more intimate contact with
other
humans—their cohabitants—than had been experienced by any previous generation in history. For none of the new dwellings was subdivided by
internal
walls. Everyone lived in the same small room.

Individuals and families would be the first beneficiaries of this new life. Before homes were built and occupied, looking around had always produced a range of person-images—from family and
friends to acquaintances, rivals, and strangers. By contrast, people in homes could focus on the members of their families; they could relate to each other without interruption or the scrutiny of others. Still, the family, according to Robert Muchembled, was mainly “a shield against pressing danger … a unit of production and of consumption” that “made it possible for its members to pool their efforts in order to survive.” It was not, he said, “the principal focus of affective relations.”
¹²

With uncertainties about survival, it would take time for insiders to develop a rich or complete concept of privacy and the things that privacy facilitates—including intimacy and conditions that foster deeper forms of intimacy. But nascent, second-degree forms of these things were literally on the doorstep.

Among those who lived openly, privacy was fleeting and fragile. Walls offered a richer and more intense form of privacy, taking over the role that had previously been played by reticence. With a new outer skin in place, people were free to spend more time in their minds, as implied by the Latin
intimus
, or “inmost.” But they were also free, at the same time, to express that experience in a way that was less calculated and more honest than in the past.