Privacy

Privacy is a different ballgame when living in a van. I'm used to spending a great deal of time alone at home. Right now, though, it's getting up to 100 degrees in my van during the day, so out I go. I'm visiting friends, spending time in bookstores, hanging out at parks, etc. It's much more contact with people than I'm used to, even if a lot of it is really superficial contact. I'm also getting used to dragging my tired-ass into a fast food bathroom to brush my teeth in the morning. Seeing anybody right when I get out of bed is an interesting challenge for me.

A while back I was driving through Florida and passed a house in a little town with a falling apart fence. That fence, for some reason, sparked a whole train of interesting thought for me. It's a little convoluted, but let's see if I can communicate the train of thought.

The fence was theoretically a privacy fence, but it was old and had lots of missing boards. It provided some lack of sight-line to the yard if you just glanced past it. But if you were actually looking, you could see the whole yard.

My first thought was "Wow, they need to fix that." Then I wondered why? Why do you need a fence. One possibility is to keep dogs or kids in the yard. That set aside, the other basic reason for a privacy fence like that is to prevent people from looking in. To prevent people from knowing about what you're doing? Why do you need to do that? What can't you do if people know about it?

The first thing I thought of as an answer to that was "get naked". If you want to sunbathe or even just be in your yard naked for no particular reason, you need a fence. But wait. If you lived at a nudist resort, you wouldn't need a fence to get naked. So privacy isn't just about people knowing what you're doing. It's specifically about who cares what you're doing. Privacy isn't about who knows; it's about who cares.

I thought about other things that people want to keep private. What diseases they have, what crimes they've committed, the details of their finances, etc. It's okay if your doctor knows we have cancer, because it doesn't really matter to him. He doesn't have much of an opinion about it. It might matter if you boss knows. Or if your kids know. Why is that? Because your cancer somehow matters to those people personally. Your boss wonders about how your cancer will affect his bottom line. Your kids worry about what will happen when you die. You might share the details of your crime - drug use for example - with your partners in crime or with strangers on the internet. They can know because they don't care that you're committing the crime. Share the info with your neighbors, though, and it matters. They worry about the silver candlesticks or are morally offended. And on and on. Who cares, not who knows, is the dividing line for where we think we need privacy.

Why do we care about some information and not others? Because we think it has something to do with us. If it's your father who has cancer, I might not care. If it's my father who has cancer, it's about me in a way that your dad's cancer isn't. Your finances don't make a lick of difference to me, but my husband's (if I had one) finances are about me. With moral issues, people aren't just worried about your immortal soul, they are personally offended. Your sins are about them.

One little sidestep in topic: the main difference between community and isolation is who knows what. You can be surrounded by thousands of people - as we are - but if they know nothing about you, it can't be called community in hardly any sense of the word. People knowing about you is the opposite of privacy. Creating community, then, is about removing the need for privacy.

And people thinking your information is about them is the reason we need privacy. We need the things we do to be about us. The guy hides his cancer from his wife because she's going to be all worried and distressed - not the reaction he needs. That reaction is centered on her, even if it arises from a place of caring. You hide your finances from your neighbors because they are going to have an opinion about it - do you make more than them? less? spend in a way they wouldn't? - and you'd rather they didn't have the info. It belongs to you. It's not theirs to have an opinion about, so you keep it to yourself.

What if we didn't make other people's information into something about us? What if your state of health was just about you, and I didn't have much of an opinion about it, beyond compassion for you? What if no one gave a bit of concern to how much you made? What if no one cared if you did drugs because it had nothing to do with them? Even things that seem to be about us - it's your partner with cancer, for instance - we just stepped back and let it be about the person who's actually ill, placing our own concerns somewhere else where they wouldn't add to the problems of the person with cancer?

What I'm awkwardly describing here is a philosophy of non-attachment or non-judgment, which I come to mostly by way of Non-violent Communication. If I took your information and just accepted it, just observed, without attachment, without fear, without judgment, compassionately empathizing and reflecting your experience, wouldn't there be a lot more things you could tell me?

A lot less privacy, in other words.

And finally, a lot more community.