Privacy and Propriety

Society imposes limits on what one person can, with propriety, know or say about another.  Once when I was taking a video shot of a student who had been hurt on the soccer field, a teammate chastised me for such an insensitive act.  "Videotaping a person in pain is off limits."  Once I asked a co-worker who declined a beer, "Are you in AA?"  It turns out he was, an association that is to be kept private!  A friend of mine doesn't like it when I ask, "What did that bicycle cost?"  "Hey," she answers, "What business is that of yours?"  (My curiosity here wasn't how much money a person was spending, but how much the manufacturer thought the merchandise was worth.)

There certainly are limits to publicizing the private.   One senses devaluation when something inherently private is publicized.  That, it seems, is one of the chief evils of pornography.  The human sexual act is inherently private and to publicize it is to change it, to demean it, to objectify it, to render it "consumable."  When we do that with people, we degrade their inherent dignity by depicting them as no more than animals in heat.  This is why the paparazzi are despised, at least by the persons whose pictures are being taken.  (The rest of us seem to crave the publicity, perhaps to "cut down to [our] size" the celebrities who fascinate us so.)

Respecting privacy indeed is a form of reverence, a treating something as off-limits, as sacred, as therefore as of inherent value. Politeness in address, and the formality of our dress, bespeak attitudes of respect -- or lack of respect -- towards others.  That is part of why we treat the Eucharist with reverence, remaining in silence after communion, and waiting to recommence the chatter of life until after mass is over.

Privacy is one aspect of a larger concern with "propriety," which "makes an issue of the fittingness of our conduct to our places or circumstances, even to our hopes." Wendell Berry, Life is Miracle, 13. We cannot but act in a context (which includes others) and so should not ignore our influence on others in that context, which supplies a standard for our conduct.  Propriety, thinks Berry, "is the antithesis of individualism.  To raise the issue of propriety is to deny that any individual's wish is the ultimate measure of the world." Ibid, 14.

Berry thinks that questions of propriety, since they are questions of context, are local questions, calling necessarily for small answers.  And he worries that the professions, and science in general, eschew the local, in favor of "big answers that will make headlines, money, and promotions." Ibid., 15.  Berry worries that the local no longer restrains big science, which is now all essentially "applied" rather than "pure," since it is dominated by big corporations who determine what research takes place and when. "Pure" science, if it exists at all, says Berry, "now needs to move fast (and beg hard) to keep its skirts from being lifted by the ever randy and handy corporate giants." Ibid, 17.  As a result, contends Berry, science has failed "to attend to the possibility of small-scale or cheap or low-energy or ecologically benign technologies.  Most applications of science to our problems result in large payments to large corporations and in damages to ecosystems and communities.  These eventually will have to be subtracted (but not, if they can help it, by the inventors or manufacturers) from what has been gained."  Ibid, 21.

I, like Berry, worry that technology -- from medical technology to bicycle technology -- is less and less "governed" by considerations of propriety.  Technology's dynamism seems driven by the corporate search for profits in a "blue sky" of new products, each of which promises ever more refined and mesmerizing effects, at . . . oh, yes . . .an ever higher cost.

Propriety, if Berry is right, means fitting into the local,  the simple, the small, the less expensive.  With an economy recently puffed up by consumerism, and now deflated, maybe attention should again be paid to propriety, and the local and small (but ultimately most helpful) answers it promises.

Finally, while we all need to be sensitive to privacy and propriety, at pain of properly being called "off limits," there also seems to be a scope for questions that try to expose the impropriety of "high tech," expensive solutions to some of our most pressing non-problems.

Read about the picture above:  High Tech Trash.