The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty

In every corner of the Western world, writers proclaim "privacy" as a supremely important human good, as a value somehow at the core of what makes life worth living.Without our privacy, we lose "our very integrity as persons," Charles Fried declared over thirty-five years ago.Many others have since agreed that privacy is somehow fundamental to our "personhood. 2It is a commonplace, moreover, that our privacy is peculiarly menaced by the evolution of modem society, with its burgeoning technologies of surveillance and inquiry.Commentators paint this menace in very dark colors: Invasions of our privacy are said to portend a society of "horror, " 3 to "injure us in our very humanity, ''4 or even to threaten "totalitarianism," 5 and the establishment of law protecting privacy is accordingly declared to be a matter of fundamental rights. 6 It is the rare privacy advocate who resists citing Orwell when describing these dangers.At the same time, honest advocates of privacy protections are forced to admit that the concept of privacy is embarrassingly difficult to define. 7"Nobody," writes Judith Jarvis Thomson dryly, "seems to have any very clear idea what it is." '8 Not every author is as skeptical as Thomson, but many of them feel obliged to concede that privacy, fundamentally important though it may be, is an unusually slippery concept.In particular, the sense of what must be kept "private," of what must be hidden before the eyes of others, seems to differ strangely from society to society.This is a point that is frequently made by citing the literature of ethnography, which tells us that there are some societies in which people cheerfully defecate in full view of others, and at least a few in which the same is true of having 7. See, e.g.,