Eavesdropping (16 page)

But this was not just a matter of titillation and prurience. Everyone needs to know how others behave in their
public
lives. It must be possible to see how they dress and what they do.
This process, which psychologists call “social comparison,” enables individuals to conform to or deviate from the behavioral patterns established by others. People began to feed this appetite. Private quarters became dressing rooms where residents prepared themselves to “go out” and be seen. Now it was possible to
manage
one’s images, thus to define oneself in the eyes of others, and there are indications that people began to devote more attention to grooming and bathing.

In eighteenth-century France, wrote director and dramatist Nikolai Evreinov, “the competition between life in actuality and life on the stage had reached the point where no one could say which was more theatrical. In both there were pompous, over-studied phrases, a mannered refinement of bows, smiles and gestures; in both, showy costumes … powder, rouge, beauty spots, monocles, and very little of one’s ‘natural’ face.”

People have been intrigued, and perhaps somewhat dismayed, by the deception that is involved in the maintenance of two selves. In
Le Diable Boiteux
, Asmodeus exposes Cleofas to a “superannuated coquette” who, in readying herself for bed, removes her hair, eyebrows, and teeth; and an “amorous dotard of sixty,” who, having finished making love, has removed his eye, false whiskers, and wig, “and waits for his man to take off his wooden arm and leg to go to bed.” In an adjacent house, Cleofas is excited by the sight of a beautiful and charming young woman. Asmodeus responds that she is, in actuality, “a machine, in the adjusting of which all the art of the ablest mechanics has been exhausted: her breasts and her hips are artificial, and not long since she dropped her rump at church, in the midst of the sermon.”
³³

Everyone now had questions: what was the
real
, behind-the-scenes version of each public self like? How did others act when no one could see them? Answers would be needed if these others were to be understood, but there was an additional issue. How could one design a private life for himself without knowing how others lived? How was social comparison to be carried out in this
new sphere that lacked visible models? If one’s own private self—increasingly a major constituent of one’s complete self—was to conform to contemporary models of private behavior, one would have to inspect this. But the inspection would have to be carried out from the outside.

There is always a great deal of interest, wrote Victor Hugo, in “a wall behind which something is happening.” Fortunately for those on the outside, the walls were cracked. When insiders began to speak and act without the usual inhibitions, new levels of intimacy became available not just to them, but to those who peered and listened through the available orifices. There is something of the cinema here, the expose or peepshow, the real reality TV show. The things that people did in privacy were valuable new resources, and they held a special allure for everyone, especially those on the outside.

In the so-called “back stage” areas of their lives, individuals were free to display personal vulnerabilities on a scale that would have shocked their transparent ancestors. When eavesdroppers went on their usual rounds, attempting to restore the basal knowledge required for orderly village life, they stumbled upon these new behaviors. These were far more intimate than anything they had witnessed in the past, and this added functions, and dimensions, to eavesdropping. It had become a flexible, multi-purpose strategy, serving the old civic and moral purposes while offering a new psychological experience. To be sure, that experience was compelling, but it also offered benefits to those who were merely seeking greater understandings of their own interior selves.

Court records make one thing very clear: for much of the time when there were walls and people could peek through cracks, they did peek. But the personal motivation to eavesdrop and the recognized value of doing so were fundamentally different. One day in
early seventeenth-century Virginia, John Tully and Susanna Kennett heard the sound of snoring from an adjacent residence. Their curiosity aroused, John and Susanna got up on a hogshead of tobacco and peeped in. They saw Richard Jones in bed with Mary West. Enthralled, they watched as Mary placed her hand in the “codpiece” of the snoring Richard and “shaked him by the member,” an act that caused Susanna to laugh so uncontrollably that she and her friend had to leave. Moments later, Susanna and John heard the adulterers enter a different room and start “Laughing and playing upon the bedd.” Susanna displaced a loose board, allowing her to see Mary again, this time “with her cloathes up to her eares” and Richard “betwixt her leggs.”
³⁴

Like Margaret Browne, Susanna amused herself for an afternoon. When the next-door lovers moved, Susanna moved too, keeping them in sight at all times. That she did so is due, in the first instance, to an appetite for intimate experience in the lives of others. But her foraging produced images that had a larger value. Because the lovers wrongly thought they were (mis)behaving in private, and Susanna was naturally drawn to the experience, she was able to augment her own personal power and exert a measure of social control.

Monsieur Chatard … suspected that his wife was having an affair with a young man named Péchet, and so he, along with a friend and two gendarmes, hid in a closet in his house until the two “had attained the highest degree of criminality possible in such a situation.”

Patricia Mainardi

W
HAT
might a moral man do if nobody could know that he was doing it? One classical philosopher’s answer is to be found in
The Republic
, where Plato recites a fable about Gyges. A poor shepherd, Gyges experiences a sudden change in fortune when an earthquake opens up a giant fissure in the earth. In his curiosity, Gyges enters the chasm and discovers a naked corpse wearing a gold ring, which he removes and puts on his own finger. Later, while together with his fellow shepherds, Gyges discovers that if he turns the ring one way, he becomes completely invisible—the other shepherds speak about him as though he were gone—and if he turns the ring another way, he is instantly visible again. Deciding to put his new power to
advantage, Gyges gets himself appointed a court messenger and in rapid succession seduces the queen, kills the king, and takes over the kingdom.

At the end of the fable, Plato asks his readers to imagine that there were
two
magic rings, one worn by a “just” man, the other by a man who is “unjust.” Without fear of detection, Plato reasoned, the two men would be indistinguishable. For no man “would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked … or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure.” Indeed, it was Plato’s opinion that a man who
could
get away with wrong doing but failed to take advantage of the opportunity would be widely ridiculed as “a most wretched idiot.”

Plato’s fable reinforces some basic facts about human life. First, visibility—exposure of oneself to the eyes of others—tends to suppress misbehavior. Second, when in their homes and able to do whatever they want without fear of detection, people do things that they wouldn’t do in public, and these things may not be good, either for them or for anyone else. Acutely conscious of these facts, our medieval ancestors began to fear that villages would become disorderly, even dangerous, without optical control. In response, pressures mounted on ordinary citizens to monitor events occurring on the inside of walls. This required them to learn what they could from the outside.

To outsiders, lack of visibility was a regulatory concern, but insiders had a libertarian worry—that their own walls might be breeched by individuals who expected first to extract intimate experience, then to exchange the sensory information (whether auditory or visual) for personal power and social control. In fact, for several thousand years, this trio—experience, power, and control—moved through villages, homes, and lives as a unitary mass.

Around the time that Plato was writing about Gyges, vision was playing a conspicuous role in the public and private lives of real
Athenians. Ancient Athens was said to be a “face-to-face society” owing to a population that was small, residences that were concentrated, and a Mediterranean climate that enabled people to spend a great deal of time outside. It was also considered a “shame culture” inasmuch as there was a great deal of concern about “what people would say.”

That Athens had no police was scarcely noticed. Most of the tasks that are normally carried out by law enforcement personnel—investigation, arrest, and prosecution—were carried out by the citizens themselves.
¹
But the people never had to
seize
the powers of government. “Athenians were
encouraged
to pry and to probe,” wrote Virginia Hunter in her book
Policing Athens
,“to know what their neighbors were doing and had done.”
²

But it didn’t stop there. When a case came to court, the litigant, ideally an adult male Athenian citizen, also
presented it to the jury
.
³
Where did this ideal citizen get his evidence?

In Athens, there was an intimate connection between vision and knowledge, and the most trusted testimony was informed by the visual sense. Eye witnesses were needed. Frequently they were slaves, who were found everywhere in the Athenian home, from the courtyard and kitchen to the workrooms and
gynaikonitis
, an upstairs area that was reserved for women. Some slaves slept in the same room as their master and mistress. “As they moved about their tasks by day and into the night,” wrote Hunter, “they shared in their masters’ secrets. The latter were, in a sense, under constant surveillance.”
⁴

But their masters tended to forget about all this. Many acted, according to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “as if their house servants had neither eyes nor ears—as if they hardly existed at all.” As a consequence, slaves were privy to practically everything that their masters said, did, and heard. If something was proved or disproved in a court of law, it was frequently because a slave had sworn to it.

Even ordinary people try to avoid exposure and control. Fortunately, it has long been possible, without magic rings, to achieve invisibility merely by going behind walls. In the privacy of their own homes there was nothing for the
occupants
to fear, of course. They knew that
their behavior
posed no threat to themselves or to anyone else. Moreover, domestic freedom enabled them to act as they wished. But
other people
were also free from observation, and this was worrying. Who knew what their standards were? How could
they
be allowed to act on impulse?

Other eyes would have helped. A few years ago the controlling effect of eyes—
artificial eyes
—was documented by Melissa Bateson and her colleagues at the University of Newcastle. They placed an image of a pair of eyes in a university coffee room to see what effect this would have, if any, on contributions to an “honesty box” used to collect money for coffee, tea, and milk. It was found that people put nearly three times as much money in the collection box when the eyes were displayed than they did when a control image was used. This suggests that even a black-on-white line drawing of eyes may naturally deter dishonest behavior.
⁵

The power of optical monitoring is implied by the ways we talk about vision. We “have” someone in our sights, according to linguistic custom; we “hold” them in our gaze, possibly even “capture” them, much as a wildlife photographer might be said to have “captured” a moose drinking from a pond. The visual sense is implicitly linked to domination and control. In some places, especially the Near East, the Mediterranean, and South Asia, it is believed that certain people can harm others merely by looking at them or their property. In this “evil eye” belief, there is a conviction that “power emanates from the eye,” according to anthropologist Clarence Maloney, and thus can strike whatever the eyes fix upon, whether a person or a valuable object.
⁶

Visibility is also associated with threat. In hierarchical societies little attention is devoted to individuals on lower rungs of the social ladder. If these lower-downs want to get ahead, they can put their invisibility to good use by acquiring information about the vulnerabilities of their political superiors, and then reveal it—or threaten to do so. If they do, the higher-ups may take a great fall, and many have reasons to fear that they will. Economic and other forms of success require a good reputation, something that takes years of hard work to build. But a good reputation can be whispered away in seconds, especially if there is something to whisper about.

In this chapter we will see in vivid detail why it has been necessary to keep intimate experience behind closed doors. There is, as discussed, an evolved appetite for precisely this kind of experience. Like the main character in
Rear Window
, the eavesdropper may sample this experience purely because it is enjoyable to do so. But once he has absorbed intimate images and ascertained their meaning, the eavesdropper may discover
uses
for this material, uses that may be injurious to one of the intimate parties but beneficial to himself. One benefit is personal dominance over one of the intimate parties. Another benefit, related to the first, is social control.

Fear of personal injury is the reason why there are laws against blackmail. Blackmail is an ancient crime. As of 1567 it was already illegal, according to Scottish law, to
pay
blackmail. The first English statute, in 1601, made it a crime to pay or receive money, or any other form of compensation, in order to protect one’s person or property.
⁷
Laws against blackmail are also quirky, since they criminalize the conjunction of two things that are individually legal: talking about what one knows to be true and asking a person for money.
⁸
But our own interest in blackmail is due to a different conjunction. Like eavesdropping, blackmail sits squarely on the intersection of intimate experience, personal power, and social control.