The accidental evolution of human privacy

[Magical Realist]

I am such a private person I can't imagine living without it, always exposed to the gaze and comments of others and demanding some acknowledgment from me. Strangely enough privacy itself as a human right didn't really exist until about 150 years ago. Being around others had always beat out being alone in its ability to ensure our survival. These days with the domination of wireless hyperconnectivity in our lives, there is hardly any excuse for privacy anymore. Which means the protection and preservation of it is now more important than ever.

https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/t...614c26059e

“Privacy may actually be an anomaly” ~ Vinton Cerf, Co-creator of the military’s early Internet prototype and Google executive.

"Cerf suffered a torrent of criticism in the media for suggesting that privacy is unnatural. Though he was simply opining on what he believed was an under-the-radar gathering at the Federal Trade Commission in 2013, historically speaking, Cerf is right.

Privacy, as it is conventionally understood, is only about 150 years old. Most humans living throughout history had little concept of privacy in their tiny communities. Sex, breastfeeding, and bathing were shamelessly performed in front of friends and family.

The lesson from 3,000 years of history is that privacy has almost always been a back-burner priority. Humans invariably choose money, prestige or convenience when it has conflicted with a desire for solitude.

This chapter takes a look at how technology shaped desires for privacy over the major epochs of human history..."

[C C]

Early Christian saints pioneered the modern concept of privacy: seclusion. The Christian Bible popularized the idea that morality was not just the outcome of an evil deed, but the intent to cause harm; this novel coupling of intent and morality led the most devout followers (monks) to remove themselves from society and focus obsessively on battling their inner demons free from the distractions of civilization.

“Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace. So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell, for fear that if we delay outside we will lost our interior watchfulness” ~ St Antony of Egypt

It is rumored that on the island monastery of Nitria, a monk died and was found 4 days later. Monks meditated in isolation in stone cubicles, known as “Beehive” huts...

One would think Buddhism had a lock on the seclusion stuff as much as the Judeo-Christian version, but perhaps not. Due to the discarding of "self", the consequence didn't lead it down the long conceptual road to valuing privacy?

"The Buddhist doctrine of not self (anattā) rejects the existence of a stable and essential self. According to this view, persons are fictions and questions of personal identity have no ultimate answer. From a Buddhist perspective, the scope and value of privacy are entirely determined by contextual norms—nothing is intrinsically private nor is privacy intrinsically valuable..." (from the abstract of the below)

Roots may go further back than the practices of religious recluses, though, if privacy stems from the earliest conceptions of "human dignity" as inspired by the OT (or whatever).

Privacy without persons: a Buddhist critique of surveillance capitalism
https://rd.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1...0204-1.pdf

EXCERPT: . . . the origins of privacy as a moral concept lie in Judeo-Christian theology. He writes, “mythically, we have been taught that our very knowledge of good and evil—our moral nature, our nature as men -- is somehow, by divine ordinance, linked with a sense and a realm of privacy”. In the Old Testament, God knows that Adam and Eve have eaten from the tree of knowledge, because they immediately seek to cover themselves. Humans qua humans require privacy because that is what distinguishes civilized life from the animal and barbaric.

In this tradition, the need for and right to privacy are both grounded in the concept of human dignity. Human dignity is a broad and troublingly vague concept, but can be roughly glossed as the idea that humans possess special value simply in virtue of being human...