“… there
must be unity without confusion and
distinction without separation.”
Vladimir Solovyov, The Justification of the Good
Following
closely on the previous article on meaning, let us try to apply our thinking to
one situation blowing up in the world today. A quick survey shows that Edward
Snowden’s flight across the globe is being followed by many, while Wikileaks
and the Right to Information Acts have been opening up closets all over the
globe. The chances of the governments, corporations and the public getting to know one’s specific details are higher
than ever, via technology. Simultaneously, there is a demand for transparency and privacy. The paparazzi phenomenon
and gossip columns have created a virtual industry by themselves, detailing
every move taken by a celebrity or a public figure. The trial of Bradley
Manning has shown how he was caught between guarding secrets and making them
transparent. If one can clear out this thicket of publicized debates and
arguments on security, the scandals and gossip columns, public and private
information, the hacking of passwords and the withholding of information on
product labels, if one can keep the mind off all those branches, in the very
midst of them lies The Question, the elephant in the room which has been shrunk
to the size of a dog, which raises it trunk and trumpets meekly “If I may ask,
what IS privacy?” Yes, indeed, what is privacy, what is the point of it, and how
does it relate to secrecy?
It
is not that the question is not addressed, but it is talked about, assumed,
referred to, discussed, elaborated, argued… basically everything except
providing a real answer. And there are good reasons for this hesitation, as
normally, the answer is elusive… most often, one relies on an inner “comfort sense”
to decide on questions of privacy. It is quite impossible to think about
questions of privacy without thinking of the effects of spilling one’s own secrets
to the world… and hence it is much easier to allow that inner sense to rule, to
tell us when to keep quiet and when to disclose, when to be outraged by an
invasion and when to demand information. And hence, relying on this sense, we
run our lives, and the law-makers have drafted a maze of laws, of what is legal
and what is not. So on the one hand we look outwards to what is legal,
(resulting from an ‘average’ of the comfort sense of the law-makers) and on the
other, inwards to our own inner sense of comfort to help us decide what is what
regarding privacy.
However,
this situation cannot be sustained… for one thing, not everyone’s inner sense
is the same. Every culture has a different inner sense compared to the others,
and also varying laws. In one culture, asking about one’s family can be seen as
invasive, in another, questioning one’s superior can be seen as probing. In one
culture, sexuality might be kept under wraps, while in another, mental trouble
can remain unacknowledged. Similarly, by scanning its historical development,
one can see that notions of privacy have undergone tremendous upheaval in the
times gone by, depending a lot on the century and even the decade. In other
words, with such widely varying answers given by this ‘comfort sense’ of
privacy, how can we make sense of it? Today, people of every cultural
background and personality encounter one another on a daily basis. Do we just
throw up our hands, let the different “senses” average themselves out, and then
be satisfied with the outcome? Is what we deem private something that is up for
a public vote? What is to become of our own inner sense, if what we thought was
private suddenly becomes public, or vice versa? That is precisely the situation
being faced by individuals at the present moment, and that is the direction for
our journey of understanding.
Hence,
from different sides, one can see that it is necessary to get to the bottom of
it, to identify some clear foundation for our thinking, about what privacy
actually is, and what its role is. It will involve some discomfort as we poke
and prod our sense of comfort, the sense that is generally not dislodged as we
flip between public and private every day.
First
off, if we attempt to define privacy
with respect to the individual in some way, there are immediate obstacles. For instance,
if we say that a private matter is whatever a person does that does not
negatively affect others, we will have to specify what does NOT affect the
persons around us, and what is negative. Is it possible for one to be isolated
and not affect the surroundings? Being in a society, our innermost judgments
and feelings, sympathies and antipathies have an effect that passes over into
daily life. A private indulgence, say, one obtained by purchasing a diamond or
fur, can have repercussions in Africa or Indonesia. Even a single hostile feeling,
which we hold in our “private” minds, can have massive repercussions, be it the
effect on a child who can directly sense it, be it the extra aggression at the
wheel, or the beggar whom we ignore on our way to work, or the shade of bias
that tilts the scale in a murder case. For every definition we provide for privacy,
reality will provide an exception, and for every reason we can consider a human
being as isolated from his environment, reality will give a way in which that
isolation is seen not to be absolute.
On
the other hand, the same reasoning also works in the opposite fashion. For
every reason that we can provide to prove that a person is the NOT distinct
from his environment, that he is merged with it, there is an opposition as
well. Every genius born in the midst of war and poverty, every person who has
raised himself or herself above circumstances which have discouraged others, every
teenager opposing the house rules, every twin that has a single different feeling
from the other twin is living proof that a person is not just the stereotype of
his origins or his environment. So, in trying to establish the boundary of a
human being, to determine privacy, we have two opposing ideas. One says that
the individual is isolated, and there is a clear boundary. The other says, that
the individual is not separated, but simply a part of the collective. Both
appear to be true and both appear to be false. This is a logical contradiction,
and we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Since the reality is what it
is, it makes no sense to find fault in it, we can only question our logic. Our
search for the boundary of a human being has brought us to a boundary of logic
itself, at least as old as Aristotle. No wonder that this aspect is generally
passed on to our inner sense, and also no wonder that debates, all based on
this logic, continue to rage. Hence, pictorially or conceptually we can never draw a static diagram like this:
At
this point, we must ask, is there a way of really grasping a concept in without
the above form? Does this mean that our concepts have to be illogical and irrational?
On the contrary, it means that we must associate the right reality with the
right concept, for example, the above diagram would work very well for anything
in the mineral world. One can keep a stone in vacuum, and the boundary will not
disintegrate. That is the hint about the perfect suitability of Aristotlean
logic to solid objects with defined shapes.
What
is the next level of thinking that is possible? Here is where the key provided
by Solovyov in the opening quote is so valuable, it is a form of thinking that
is capable of keeping things united without confusion and distinct without separation. To anyone steeped in
mathematics and the natural sciences, those words might appear gibberish or
completely abstract. But what is being described is a form of organic thinking, indeed a thinking that
is in agreement with living organisms. Centuries ago, zen koans and many other
scriptures had precisely this sort of content, to enable the mind to grasp
life. Take the simplest cell, and it is indeed at one with its environment (unity), as it constantly circulates
matter in and out of it, and yet it is distinct
from the environment, as a cell. The boundary is not absolute and not blurred,
but semi-permeable, fluid and mobile. Just as exact logical thinking works very
well with rocks and mechanics, at the very least an equally exact organic thinking will be necessary to
understand the living world, of which humans are a part.
It
should be noted that there is a vital difference here, between thinking about the organic world and thinking organically. One can still define,
describe and elaborate all sorts of functions in the biological world using
straightforward mechanical logic, such as the DNA structure, chemical
reactions, nutrient intake, or bone densities. Even the contradictory concept
of “open system” can be juggled with. But it is impossible to apply this line
of thought to really describe the process of life itself; hence due to this
form of thought, life has always remained enigmatic to scientific
understanding.
So
now, only by adopting this living idea of thinking, can we come back to the
enigma of the individual within the society, and hence of privacy. An
individual is by no means isolated, nor a stereotype of his surroundings, but unique
and distinct. There is a unique “point”-- the conscious individual -- that can
never be diagrammed but is present nevertheless. This distinct individual
concerns himself or herself with the likes and dislikes, and the deep inner
drives for acting in the outside world, which forms the sphere of influence, or
“body” of this private world. The only door of entry and exit for accessing
this private world, is the conscious individual, and all that proceeds from the
person to the outside world, as a transformation of these impulses, is the
“public domain”. For an inaccurate visual (all the boundaries are
intrinsically false), we can use the following image:
By
studying this concept, and working with it, we can derive the answers in a
living fashion to the questions raised at the beginning of this article. We can
understand the private domain of an individual as the portion of passions,
drives and feelings which the person is working with, and organizing into something
that is of use to all, and reaches the public domain. We can also understand
the work of the society to nourish the individual, and to provide the right
impulses from outside. Both must exist simultaneously, when individuals are not
sufficiently interested in each other’s well being (no external nourishment) or
when the individual does not interest himself or herself with anything in the
public domain but resides solely in one’s likes and dislikes, the “cell” breaks
down and starts dying.
From
this aspect, we can observe that the analysis of the lives of people by others
can accurately be described as dissection, when done without permission. This
is particularly true with respect to those in artistic fields, who reach
deepest down into their impulses and perturb their private world a lot, leading
to perturbed private lives. The responsibility of society is to protect and
nourish such individuals, as opposed to the paparazzi nature of dissection, or
the spying undertaken of individual data. Both these actions cruelly rip open
the private being of the individual, one due to curiosity and one due to a
misplaced sense of justice. Transparency in the public domain, and privacy of
the personal domain, with the conscious mutual interworking of both would be
necessary for law to exist. It is on this basis that laws can be drawn up,
otherwise any law that rests on the isolated side or the publicity side alone
will only work harm.
Taking
this further, just as individuals are unique, every collection of individuals
is also unique; hence the cultural variations in privacy can be understood.
Cultures vary in the level of interest of the community in the individual, AND
the individual’s capacity and natural desire to work for the entire community. With
time, both the individual and the community have to evolve, and as cultures and
traditions derive from earlier forms of community, we can identify how the two
are balanced within every culture, and how it varies within a single culture
over a time period. The balance and regulation that exists in the organic world
has to penetrate our thought processes, and proceed to regulate the private and
the public world. This appears to be the vital prerequisite to cease the
endless debates and open the door to more useful work.
Knock knock.
