Texts:Rom-E-68b-E-Pur-6

Purposes
Eight Reflective Essays

6—Of Privacy and Public Schooling

6:¶1

Federal and state agencies, credit bureaus, employers, insurers, schools, and many others constantly collect detailed data about us all; and the safeguards ensuring that access to this data will be withheld from those who should not be privy to it are weak. In response, public opposition to the abuse of privacy is increasing; and fortunately, jurists are looking for ways to prevent interested organizations from misusing the power to preserve and retrieve information about our private lives. To abet those trying to prevent the abuse of privacy, let us reaffirm the proper use of privacy.

6:¶2

One cannot subscribe to a magazine without contracting for a steady stream of unwanted offers, offers for pornography, for "free gifts," and for all with which junk mail abounds; man's ears, ever open, lose their alertness as they are deadened by the ubiquitous noises produced in the fruitful worship of the great god mammon. More portentiously, federal and state agencies, credit bureaus, employers, insurers, schools, and many others constantly collect detailed data about us all; and the safeguards ensuring that access to this data will be withheld from those who should not be privy to it are weak. In response, public opposition to the abuse of privacy is increasing; and fortunately, jurists are looking for ways to prevent interested organizations from misusing the power to preserve and retrieve information about our private lives. To abet those trying to prevent the abuse of privacy, let us reaffirm the proper use of privacy.

6:¶3

Privacy should not be defined in simple opposition to the state of being public. Etymologically, "private" comes from the Latin for bereavement and the seclusion that comes with it. Thus, retirement from the public and withdrawal into one's inner world is an intrinsic part of privacy; and hence privacy is a certain kind of public act. Without asserting his privacy, the unobtrusive, hidden, unnoticed person will entirely lack privacy although his deeds attract no public interest. For instance, there is little privacy in the life of the typical consumer, for although he may spend all his time on private premises, he never turns inward to his own devices and his life transparently follows the patterns laid down for him by the anonymous producers of the goods and services he consumes. To gain privacy, one publicly shuts oneself off from the public, and such withdrawals are a necessary ingredient of a healthy public life. Public and private are not antitheses, but a harmonious tension in which each is an integral aspect of the other.

6:¶4

We can learn much about the inherent unity of the public and the private from the Romans, who for centuries shared an amazingly strong sense of public concord and who at the same time maintained a powerful tradition of family unity, autonomy, and intimacy. Their god of doorways, of gates to both public spaces and private homes, was the two-faced Janus; and the Roman practice was to keep the doors to city and home open when the inhabitants were out and closed when they were in. Janus presided over the point at which the inward turns outward and the outward inward—the door—, and by extension, he was further the god of initiative, of commencements, and of new enterprises; thus we still celebrate him as the patron of beginnings by naming the year's first month after him. In Janus the Romans understood something profound about human initiative; they sensed the productive unity of outward solidarity and inner autonomy: Janus showed that public and private were not opposites, but directions in which a single person alternatingly faced. Repeatedly we go in and we go out through the name door.

6:¶5

In Plato's depiction of Socrates we meet another great exemplar of privacy, a man strong enough to maintain his privacy in public. Socrates frequently admitted to "fearing the crowd," yet his capacity for withdrawal into himself fittingly manifested itself in public places, for he taught one thing: that the public would flourish only through the full and proper use of private judgment. In the Symposium, Plato twice noted Socrates' power of private meditation. First, Socrates stopped in a busy street on his way to a dinner party and stood for several hours while he pondered a point; and second, his friends recalled how, years before while in the army, Socrates had stood stark still from dawn to dawn engrossed in meditation while his comrades sprawled around him, wagering on how long his absorbtion would last. Socrates was condemned not only for corrupting youths, but for introducing new, private deities into Athens, deities that we might now call intuition and conscience. And in his Apology, Socrates insisted that it would be in the public interest of Athens to support his effort to make people think through their private opinions and confront their inner selves.

6:¶6

Socrates shows why the private should not be defined in contradistinction to the public: the preeminent use of privacy is in public affairs. This fact will be resisted by those who believe that the conduct of public affairs consists merely in the manipulation of the public. Woe to those men of action who need to engineer, direct, organize, and command whatever deeds they do; these men will be overwhelmed by the deep obstinacy of mankind, by the profundity of the human response, by the insignificance of the human surface as compared to its substance. The pathos of power becomes visible in men like Lyndon Johnson: his Até was his competence, for it led him blindly into believing that he could rule, not merely reign, that with his capacity for detail he could command the intricate execution of his will. But public power does not operate on the visible surface, for the true determinant of what happens in history is in the private decisions that each person inwardly makes; here, when each man draws within his self and forms his own intentions, he tests his commitment to the common weal and decides which leaders, laws, and customs he will follow and which he will scorn. Public professions of allegiance are meaningless in the long run unless they are founded on a real private allegiance. No system of public enforcements can be sufficiently omnipresent and omnipowerful to shore up a law and an order that we do not recognize in the privacy of our hearts.

6:¶7

For this reason, the wise have long upheld that the apparent power to manipulate the crowd is likely to end by producing harm to the shrewd few and to their docile followers; instead, despite appearances, the important ability of the statesman is to inspire men in the privacy of their hearts with more just, humane aspirations. Power exercised in this indirect manner will prove substantial; it will persist without continual surveillance and reenforcement, it will not evaporate at trying moments, and its greatest accomplishments will seem to be achieved spontaneously.

6:¶8

The conflicting claims of manipulation and inspiration to political significance have been best memorialized in Plato's Gorgias. Against three persuasive opponents Socrates doggedly upheld first that what mattered was not what "everyone thinks," but what each person thinks when he examines a question carefully, and second that what mattered for public affairs was that each person see to the Tightness of his own conduct. This insistance that the only politics we can take part in is the politics of our own heart, as Plato put it in the Republic, most offends those with inclinations to manipulate their peers; they will ask heatedly about this question or that question and insist that it is so important that a solution must be found even if it degrades the people's humanity. In one or another matter, we are all susceptible to these inclinations; thus it helps to remind ourselves periodically that the essence of leadership is the recognition that no matter what office we hold the only conduct over which we have any real power is our own.

6:¶9

This discussion, so heavily indebted to the Greeks and Romans, might be ignored as ancient history if it were not for two facts: the uses of oratory in classical Athens and contemporary America are ominously parallel, and the importance of private judgment as understood by the ancients is integral to the political theories on which our institutions are based. Our founding fathers on both sides of the Atlantic shared a schooling in the classics, and they absorbed the lesson these works taught. In retrospect we have a tendency to fasten our attention on the differences between the great political theorists of the Enlightenment; and in doing so we fail to note their common point of departure: an effective political system should ensure that particular, personal judgments concerning concrete situations would have precedence over the fictitious universals that swayed factions and crowds and that coddled outworn systems of rule.

6:¶10

Out of this concern, the theory of checks and balances arose. The idea was to prevent power from being concentrated in such a way that it would be exercised impersonally, without the finitude of a particular, private man standing as a public guarantee to the humanity of the deed. The ultimate aim of the theory was not only to ensure that definite responsibility for every official act could be located, but further to ensure that for every public deed there would be a man who, in the privacy of his person, felt responsible for its consequences. In practice, existing checks and balances have been greatly weakened by rhetorical persuasiveness, for orators provide public servants with ready-made convictions by which they can depersonalize their official conduct: men of diverse offices and constituencies become impersonal delegates of a party point of view. Further, even where responsibility is still located with a single person, its humane implications are glossed over with euphemisms: the actor is therefore rarely confronted directly by the actual consequences to others of his deeds. One way to strengthen the use of privacy in public affairs would be to reexamine the theory of checks and balances in order to bring these up to date.

6:¶11

Likewise, the Bill of Rights embodied, in a slightly different way, a similar concern for the private man and his place in public affairs. The comfortably complacent have always distrusted these amendments to the Constitution as hindrances to efforts to protect public tranquillity. The placid here err; to preserve the peace, to maintain law and order with any efficiency and humanity, the freedom and responsibility of every citizen must be convincingly guaranteed. The danger to law and order is not in the coddling of criminals or in permissiveness towards the provocative; it is in the growing conviction among intelligent and well-intentioned men that under contemporary circumstances the Bill of Rights and other safeguards are no longer adequate to guarantee to each person the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should these, in all sincerity, lead one out of the monolithic middle.

6:¶12

As Martin S. Dworkin profoundly points out, the great danger in contemporary radicalism is in the widespread belief that American society, the entire "free" world, has become totalitarian. Men who no longer believe that they are free no longer recognize that they are responsible; in fighting against oppression, it is most easy to convince oneself that all is permitted. Now the dilemma we face is that the urge to force responsible behavior on disruptive minorities simply helps confirm the conviction that gives rise to their underlying sense of irresponsibility. Permissiveness and authority are, after all, merely different ways by which public officials can exercise paternal responsibility for other persons' conduct; the alternative to both, the alternative on which this country was founded, is to publicly guarantee private autonomy. To do this in present circumstances we should be seeking ways to strengthen, not weaken, our Bill of Rights.

6:¶13

Unfortunately, the best theoretical analysis of privacy and public affairs resides in a flawed work, namely Rousseau's Social Contract. Like Nietzsche, Rousseau is a dangerous writer when he is read quickly with the illusion of comprehension; unless his principles are slowly absorbed, he easily seems to stand for the opposite of what he truly teaches. Thus, he propounded neither a naturalistic anti-intellectualism nor a tyranny in the name of the common good; on the contrary, he unfailingly upheld that inner, authentic, "natural," thoughtful, private responses were the only foundation suitable for a community of men. By itself, official legislation was powerless to promote the good life, for "the laws . . . constrain men without changing them . . ." Properly understood, the social contract stipulated that the only legitimate public power was in the acts that arose spontaneously from the aggregate of separate decisions that each member of the community made as he meditated privately on the matters about which he was personally, fully informed. In this manner, privacy is the basis of community.

6:¶14

Important pedagogical consequences follow from this proposition; and despite their significance and relevance to current issues, these consequences should be merely suggested here as appetizers, perhaps, for private meditation.

6:¶15

There is a serious ambiguity in the idea of universal education: its proponents are not clear whether mass schooling should suppress or cultivate the inner man. This ambiguity stems from the nineteenth-century school reformers: they knew that by "common school" they did not mean an ordinary, undistinguished school; but they were not clear whether they meant a school that would teach a common, a shared body of knowledge and values to all, or a school that would offer a common, an equal initiation to the art of self-culture to each. When confronted with pressing public issues, the easy course is to look to the schools as a means of paternally imposing a solution to the problem on our progeny: if only all get adequate driver education, vocational training, contact with those of other races and creeds, indoctrination to the American way of life, or what have you, it would seem as if many problems would happily disappear. With Horace Mann if not before, it became customary to see the public schools as a powerful agent of social engineering; the schools could constrain the disruptive, improve the safety of street and home, increase productivity, and spread a sense of patriotic service.

6:¶16

All might be well if schooling for these public ends coincided with the education of each inner man; but in fact, it does not. Consequently, to the degree that the reigning powers manage to harness the schools to the direct pursuit of their public policies, they divert teachers and students from their true public service, the cultivation of the private, inner response. In this way, in the name of the public we jeopardize the future foundation of the public. The fruits of this practice are visible in the way a resentful anomie is spreading among youths, and the most promising antidote to it is the movement towards what has been misnamed as "local control," but what is in truth the client control that has long characterized the practice of medicine and law. This movement may be the harbinger of a renewed appreciation of privacy and its public uses.

6:¶17

At any rate, the prospects for privacy will always seem bleaker than they probably are, for the prospects are—as prospects—presently private and hidden from our prying view. Let us hope with Nietzsche that inwardly people realize that "to let oneself be determined by one's environment is decadent."

Robert Oliver
Teachers College Record (vol. 70, no. 6, March 1969)