Deep Thoughts from atop the John

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
-Ayn Rand

Sulphur Springs is a small Texas town neighboring the one I grew up in.  I don’t have much occasion to visit there, but recently I learned of an art installation in the town square:  A public bathroom with two way mirrors for walls.  This intrigued me.  First of all, Sulphur Springs just never seemed the likely home for Swedish installation art, and secondly, what a magnificent idea.  It being so close to my mom’s home, I made it a priority to visit the next time I was in town.  I recruited my friend Bridget and her 9 year old son Brandon who live in Sulphur Springs to join me – Bridget making the very astute observation that girls just cannot seem to go to the bathroom alone.

I drank copious amounts of coffee and water before getting into the car.  It worked!  I arrived 20 minutes later in Sulphur Springs and needed to go immediately.  The bathroom looked empty from the outside, if only because it was so still.  Bridget and Brandon weren’t there yet and too much thought about whether someone was watching from within led to an unpleasant self-consciousness that ultimately resulted in me shuffling around awkwardly outside the stall, looking at the ground.  I was reticent to push my nose to the glass to see what I could see, knowing that someone could be inside and that would be creepy.  So I paced around for a couple of minutes trying to act casual, and indeed a guy finally walked out.  Then I went up close to examine the glass.  As advertised, I could not see inside.  Still, when I went in I had a mixture of feelings.  For one, I was expecting more people walking around.  This was a little disappointing.  However, it was a busy town square, so there were plenty of cars circling, and this made me nervous to remove my pants.  But why, even after careful observation of the structure to ensure soundness, did some doubt linger that I could be seen?

Privacy is a strange thing.  It involves actions we perform willingly that become embarrassing only when they become known to others. Otherwise, we don’t usually think twice about them.  Thus it is distinct from shame which, assuming one has some form of a conscience, does not necessarily require an audience.  That said, shame is one possible result of infringed privacy and it’s a worldwide phenomenon that is important to this discussion.  With myself.  For starters, even though it is undesirable universally, shame is brought on by different behaviors, dependent upon the host culture.  In the biblical west, the idea of shame is introduced pretty much immediately after creation; that’s how deeply rooted and fundamental it is:  Hey, were’e here!  Aaaaand we’re naked.  And we are so sorry about that.  Oh man, are we ever sorry.  Awkward.  Shame has been known to manifest as hari kari, honor killings, blackmail… it does not exactly bring out the best in people.  In fact I would posit, simply the fear of shame has played a major role in directing cultural evolution.  And that’s sort of where privacy comes in, as a tool to mitigate that fear of becoming ashamed.

Privacy is oftentimes a wall, figuratively or literally.  It’s one act, one thought, divided cleanly into two parts by the potential for observation in an instance where observation might matter to you.  Thus, there are two sides, and we are on exactly both of them at once.  We have our own actions to guard, but we are also peering inquisitively at others, either hoping to catch them in the act or just to make sure they’re not watching us.  So, are we more concerned about protecting our own privacy or understanding what everyone else is doing?  Because doing both is hard.  And remember, privacy on either side can be an enemy to many likable things, like intimacy, dialog, and the ability to learn.

Take Facebook.  On the one hand, you’ve got people pushing for stronger privacy controls and posting meaningless copyright notices that reinforce nothing but a false sense of security.  But on the other hand, Facebook is a direct result of the desire to make our lives MUCH less private, and we often shame ourselves in the pursuit, like this poor girl.  Here we are, obviously trying to protect ourselves but furiously trying to make ourselves known.  How do we manage this, and where can we stand on the privacy spectrum to balance it out?  I suspect the secret lies in balancing on one’s own two feet.  If we stumble too much toward protecting ourselves from shame, we have lost to fear and will miss important opportunities to grow.  If we place too much import on visibility, we are not only wholly vulnerable, but we will likely become disconnected from ourselves in the constant effort to promote that which we are proud of.  Doing this to the exclusion of our imperfections isn’t realistic, and will ultimately distance us from others.

But I just needed to pee.

Get past the notion that people were watching me and pee.  In truth, probably not a lot of people were looking at the stall, but those that were could certainly deduce what I was doing there…but they could not be certain, and this was strangely liberating, even when I was doing the things expected of me.

I try to generalize my experiences in order to understand other people…and not that there’s an inherent harm to this, but I’m often questioned as to ‘what’s going on in that head of yours’, or I grossly over/under estimate people, which leads me to believe generalizations are not a good tool for this.  A lot of times, I guess wrong…OR, I guess correctly, but I’m told I’ve made an incorrect assumption about a situation by a person who’d rather deceive me.  And this is the thing that’s hard to get at, the thing I can’t know.  The thing you can’t know.

So to me, some interesting questions regarding privacy in a two-way mirrored bathroom stall as larger metaphor would be:

1. What do you do when you think no one is looking?
2. What is your response when you can see other people, but they can’t see you?

These have to be considered separately, because the first is privacy specific (you are alone), and the second is more of an invisibility question (with others around).  And these questions are very interesting to me indeed, because I can’t answer them.  I have no idea what you’re doing in that bathroom!  But to think about the first, let’s ask another question:  Where do we stand on self-observation? How often do we restrain ourselves when we know with certainty we cannot be found out?  Okay, that was two, but we use those sort of questions to determine “virtue”.  And we spend a lot of time judging the character of other people based on these fundamentally unknowable questions.

So on to the second question, let me ask this:  What exactly do you think you can know about these people?  Imagine for a moment that there were not people walking around the square, but rather everyone had their own stalls and none of us could see inside the others…even though we all know what goes on in bathrooms.  Because that’s a little bit what goes on every day, only substitute “stall” for “head”.  Sure, we might be given clues through expressions, gestures, we make assumptions, but in the end we really just don’t know what a person is thinking, what their true intentions are, or where they’re coming from.  All we can be certain about is what is going on inside our own.  Are we proud of it?

Well, I’ll tell you what I did to the people who couldn’t see me- I mooned them.  But I was still embarrassed, so I only did it a few seconds.  Timidly at first, just a little butt cleavage, and then, sheepishly, I flashed the whole thing.  Twice.  It is very hard to dismiss the feeling they can’t see you.  But there is a certain liberation to it.  And admittedly a certain meanness was revealed in me.  I don’t assume mine would be everyone’s response, but when someone tells me I can go into a public space and no one can see me, I think immediately: Moon people!  Give them the finger!  That is my initial scheme.  This was tempered in the moment because the only people running around outside were children and I didn’t feel any animosity towards them.  So I kept the finger to myself.  Or did I?