Everyone acts differently around different people: they behave one way with their spouse, another with strangers, another with parents, and still another with employers. Is this appropriate? Some have argued that such 'social masks' are a form of dishonesty, a way to conceal our true selves from others.

In the Autumn 2000 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, Jeffrey Rosen writes:

Instead of behaving as a single character, people display different characters in different contexts. I may (and do) wear different public masks when interacting with my students, my close friends, my family, and my dry cleaner. Far from being inauthentic, each of those masks helps me to act in a manner that suits different social settings. ... If this “dramaturgical” view of character is correct, and if privacy is defined broadly as the ability to protect ourselves from being judged out of context, then there are clear political, social, and personal costs attached to the changes in the architecture of privacy.

I can’t imagine behaving in precisely the same manner with everyone — not because different behavior is a form of dishonesty with people, but because of the different social contexts. Behaving differently in different social contexts is obviously appropriate: we behave one way at a formal dinner and another at a baseball game. Is this a form of dishonesty because we are concealing our “true” selves? Of course not — and the same is true when we interact with different people in different social situations. The social context for our interaction with an employer is different from the social context for our interaction with our parents, so of course our behavior will be different.

The philosopher Judith Shklar gave a helpful example of the political value of privacy when she argued that, in a democracy, we don´t need to know someone´s title to avoid giving offense. The democratic honorifics Mr. and Ms. suggest that all citizens are entitled to equal respect, without revealing their rank or family background or professional accomplishments. Democracy is a space where citizens and strangers can interact without putting all their cards on the table--and privacy allows citizens who disagree profoundly to debate matters of common concern without confronting their irreconcilable differences.

It is interesting, and helpful I think, to conceive of privacy as being a way to control the context for information about us. We all have aspects to our lives that we don’t reveal to just everyone — not necessarily because we ashamed, but because those aspects to our lives can’t be reasonably judged in the absence of a lot of knowledge about us as persons. Revealing the information without that context would make us look bad in a way that wouldn’t happen if the information were revealed in context — like, say, to very close confidants who have known us for many years.

Privacy is important not only, or even primarily, to protect individual autonomy but also to allow individuals to form intimate relationships. In one of the most thoughtful essays on the subject, the Harvard University legal philosopher Charles Fried has written that, without a commitment to privacy, “respect, love, friendship, and trust” are “simply inconceivable.” Friendship and romantic love can´t be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends on the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don´t share with everyone else. [...]

Properly shielded, friendships and loving relationships provide us with opportunities to share confidences and test ideas because we trust that our confidences won´t be betrayed. (“A friend,” said Emerson, “is someone before . . . [whom] I can think aloud.”) To the degree that jokes, rough drafts, and written confidences can be wrenched out of context and subjected to public scrutiny, it is less likely that those confidences will be shared in the first place.

We need close, intimate friendships in order to grow as individuals; we can’t have such relationships, though, unless there is a difference between what we reveal of ourselves to certain people we wish to be close to and what we reveal to the rest of the world. Privacy, then, is necessary in order to form positive relationships with others which allow us all to grow and develop into better human beings. A democratic society contributes to this by putting us all on the same, level playing field where we can interact as equals, regardless of what we do or do not know about others.

 

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• Godless Political Notes
• Godless Constitution
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