The pathology of modern American life and leadership is most sadly seen in the rapid erosion of privacy, certainly an essential aspect of all high civilization. Privacy is unknown in primitive cultures. Lewis Mumford has often stressed the fact that privacy is the creature of civilization and its decline indicative of a reversion to barbarism. The term “courting,” he once wrote, originated in the sixteenth century when wit and charm as well as physical passion became part of love-making in court society where private rooms were available for the first time. He also has pointed out that modern architecture’s love of free-flowing space at the expense of doors and walls, the suburban developer’s love of picture windows facing the neighbors if not the passing crowd, as well as the decline of the parlor in favor of the automobile and movie-house as courting atmospheres, are all part of an age dominated by public-relations barbarians in Brooks Brothers suits.
Perhaps only a people who had lost all sense of privacy would have consented to discuss their intimate sexual life with a zoologist who subsequently became America’s most famous social scientist, when he rescued sex from the privacy of the bedroom and placed it on statistical tables for all to see and compare with their own experiences. And it was surely no accident that the late Dr. Kinsey was most severely criticized for his biased sample, which of course contained a disproportionate number of cases from the enlightened and educated classes rather than the ignorant masses, who presumably had more of a sense of privacy and were therefore harder to interview.
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