Three Privacy Cheers for Etiquette?
posted by:David Matheson // 10:34 PM // February 06, 2005 // Core Concepts: language and labels
The case against old-fashioned rules of etiquette is well-known: they’re repressive, elitist, and more often than not reinforce offensive sexist attitudes. But maybe they had their positive side just the same, particularly when viewed from a pro-privacy perspective. Consider, for example, the following rules drawn from a chapter entitled “The Art of Conversation” in G.R.M. Devereux’s little 1929 book, Etiquette for Men: A Book of Modern Manners and Customs:
“To speak about yourself to any extent, or to discuss your personal affairs in general conversation, are two other things that must be avoided.”
“Nor is it good form to discuss the personal affairs of anyone else.”
“It is inadvisable to discuss mutual friends with anyone. Even if your remarks were kindly, they may go back to the person concerned in a distorted manner, and so cause ill-feeling. Apart from that, another person’s affairs are purely their concern, and not a fit subject for conversation.”
Pretty obviously, the more such rules were followed nowadays, the more privacy we’d all enjoy.
A similar point is made by NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel in connection with etiquette proscriptions against discussing the personal lives of public figures:
“Sexual taboos in the fairly recent past were also taboos against saying much about sex in public, and this had the salutary side-effect of protecting persons in the public eye from invasions of privacy by the mainstream media. It meant that the sex lives of politicians were rightly treated as irrelevant to the assessment of their qualifications, and that one learned only in rough outline, if at all, about the sexual conduct of prominent creative thinkers and artists of the past. Now, instead, there is open season on all this material. The public, followed sanctimoniously by the media, feels entitled to know the most intimate details of the life of any public figure, as if it were part of the price of fame that you exposed everything about yourself to view, and not just the achievement or performance that has brought you to public attention. Because of the way life is, this results in real damage to the condition of the public sphere: Many people cannot take that kind of expose, and many are discredited or tarnished in ways that have nothing to do with their real qualifications or achievements.” (“Concealment and Exposure,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1998) 27: 3)
So, what do you think: three privacy cheers for a return to etiquette? At least where the rules of which it consists are stripped of their sexist, elitist and unduly repressive aspects?
