Trapped in our own privacy

We hear a great deal these days about the right to privacy. The European Court ruling on the matter of what can be carried by Google on the internet is only the latest point of controversy. Earlier claims that, for example, the police could not release the names of convicted criminals who had absconded or otherwise offended also caused concern. 

In theory everyone is in favour of privacy. These cases only serve to bring into focus what is the extent of the privilege. But this notion of privacy is, in the long history of mankind, a comparatively recent thing, unknown to earlier generations.

That ''anarchist of the right'' as he called himself, the eminent French medievalist Phillipe Ariés, in his magisterial work Histoire de la vie Privée (1985-1987), suggested that in earlier times, certainly within recorded history, the very idea of privacy was unknown, especially to the ruling class.

This began to change in the course of the 17th Century, as houses and the arrangements of families within them changed. Nowadays, with an increasing number of people actually living alone in apartments, with or without a child, a very different notion of what constitutes 'privacy' reigns. The corollary of privacy is personal isolation and loneliness in old age.

But privacy is a varied concept still. The rise of the press, and more lately of the electronic media, has caused confusion. For the ruling class, which had begun to value privacy as an extension of its right to power, is now increasingly vulnerable to exposure. This must largely be a good thing, one suspects.

But the condition of the lives of others outside of the ruling class has changed. There is now the social media on which many people thinkingly, or unthinkingly, expose their lives and actions in ways that would once have been impossible, or even pornographic. The use of bullying and near blackmail, for instance, in the lives of many young people is continually reported, and often leads to suicide.

But in general the press and media are not concerned with this area at all. Their interest is dominated by the developing notion of celebrity, for the concept has always been with us.

Do celebrities, who exploit the weakness of their audiences for their own profit, have a right to complain when that exposure takes on a form which they cannot control, but which others benefit from. Doubtless the moralist would say anything that degrades any individual is intrinsically wrong.

But in traditional communities, such as rural Ireland to a very recent date, individuals knew very little privacy. Anyone with experience of country cottages, with their limited living and sleeping space, or the crammed and crowded rooms of city slums, will know that the conditions taken for granted now did not exist say around 1950.

In rural Ireland everyone spied on everyone else – this is a constant theme in fiction – as we can read in The Valley of the Squinting Windows and many others. Crimes and misdemeanours could rarely be kept quiet.

The right to privacy has been claimed by some for families accused of child abuse in recent times. It is doubtful if people have a right to commit crimes in private – that would make a complete mockery of any ideal of protective justice.

Yet the developing modern notions of privacy, at least as handled by administrators, can have strange results. Some years ago when my brother was seriously ill in hospital in England, in danger of dying, I asked that the Catholic chaplain might be called.

I was told that as my brother himself had not requested the chaplain, he would not be called. Now my brother, though conscious in part, had been rendered speechless by a botched tracheotomy. He could not speak. His wife was in another ward of the hospital powerless after a stroke and only able to mumble in Polish. My request was not enough: I was not considered 'next of kin' by the administration.

In that hospital my brother was never visited by a priest. This seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, carrying the notion of respect for privacy to an undesirable extreme. Here the concept veered over into cruelty. One hears nowadays similar tales from hospitals. As a result I now look askance at all such claims to 'privacy'.