Eavesdropping (2 page)

I had also begun to study ethology, a field that deals with behavior in a broad range of species, and had encountered the work of Peter McGregor. He pointed out that birds increase their chances of survival by monitoring the long-distance calls of
other
birds—signals that are not even intended for their ears. Such interceptions, McGregor noted, are ignored by all existing models of animal communication, which are uniformly dyadic, that is, focused exclusively upon two parties—“the sender” and “the receiver.” These models contain no provision for any
other individuals
that might be partaking of the experience from obscure or distant positions.

Models of human communication are also dyadic. They emphasize the back-and-forth channeling of verbal information between two individuals. But in the lives of humans, not just birds, additional ears are often in operation—we know this because our own ears are among them. If real people also tune in to each other, and become usefully informed in the process, then theories of human communication must explain these things that real people do.

But they have not done so. Animal behaviorists have been able to document eavesdropping because they study birds, fish, lizards, and other species, either naturalistically or in structured experiments, and their research subjects do eavesdrop. The reason why social scientists have failed to document equivalent levels of eavesdropping in humans, however, is not because they looked for it and discovered that there was nothing to be seen. They never looked in the first place.

Why they did not, I think, is linked to a long-standing tendency of philosophers and psychologists to put humans on a pedestal, to regard our species as more intelligent and rational than other animals. This view could not be sustained if humans were on a continuum with other primates and mammals, so they concentrated on the behaviors accounting for, and related to, Man’s best and highest accomplishments. Central to these was language, the symbolic code that enables speakers to consciously transmit thought to willing listeners. This kept other animals safely at bay but, paradoxically, also excluded important facts about
human
communication.

Eavesdropping is communication, and it has two features that make it unusually interesting. The first is that it feeds on activity that is inherently
intimate
, and is so because the actors are unaware of the receiver, therefore feel free to be “themselves.” The second feature that makes eavesdropping so interesting relates to the way the information travels. It is not
donated
by the sender. It is
stolen
by the receiver.

My colleague nodded as I told him these things, but later I realized that he might have been wondering about
me
. Most of my friends do! When I describe my interest in eavesdropping, several have asked if I am, unbeknownst to them, an unusually serious practitioner. While admitting to a weakness for social eavesdropping—some of the methods described are my own—I’m afraid the answer is less exciting. I study humans for a living. Much of my graduate and post-doctoral training was in linguistics and psychology, fields that have a clear stake in human communication.

But this is only partially relevant because these disciplines take little interest in messages that are transmitted
unintentionally
, and they care even less about information that is received
surreptitiously
. What they usually investigate, instead, is the verbal behaviors that pairs of people willingly and consciously donate to each other. One of the two parties, usually designated Person A, is “the speaker.” He or she tells Person B, “the listener,” something that B will be interested to know. “When I communicate with another person,” wrote esteemed mathematician and communication scientist Norbert Wiener, “I impart a message to him, and when he communicates back with me he returns a related message which contains information primarily accessible to him and not to me.”
¹
It is all very tidy and rational.

Just what human life is not.

The Person A–Person B models might make sense if the behavior to be explained is a telephone conversation between two colleagues who are attempting to consummate an important business deal under the pressure of time. But in more natural circumstances—like those in which our species evolved—the sender and receiver can see and hear each other, and they are frequently not alone.

In many species, individuals live close to each other, and to their predators and prey. The signals that they emit are designed to reach the sense organs of mates and competitors but they also come to the attention of others who have an “interest” in the existence and
location—and business—of the signaler. Since humans live in close contact with each other, I began to wonder how social scientists could justify
not
dealing with eavesdropping.

My goal here is to address a number of questions pertaining to the voracious human appetite for intimate experience in the lives of others. How, I ask, did our evolutionary ancestors engineer this appetite, thus our modern craving for sensory images that will satisfy it? How has the appetite been expressed, from the earliest moments of recorded history? What were the benefits, and the risks?

I also deal with the things that people have done, and now do, with the perceptual “booty.” Observation of intimate behavior, regardless of the reasons, leaves bits of information behind. What happens to it next, and how does this affect the personal lives of the perpetrators and the victims?

Premonitions of creeping “big-brotherism,” once a source of nervous amusement, have been replaced by real and widespread alarm about hidden cameras and other forms of monitoring. Though currently acute, these fears are predictable from evolutionary and historical trends. Our distant ancestors were secure because they could see each other at all times. They were either trusted, or did not need to be. But on the way to modernity many things happened. A sequence of factors—from sedentism and population growth to the construction of durable housing—nudged our ancestors along a path that could only lead to long periods of personal opacity. The process took many millennia but only began to seriously impact supplies of social knowledge in the last several thousand years.

When residential walls were erected, it was the beginning of truer and deeper forms of intimacy. Walls also made it difficult—and ultimately unnecessary—to look around every few seconds to see what others were doing. A human vigil, one beginning with ancestors that we share with apes, was reduced to manageable proportions, freeing up many hours of undistracted time per day.
This would gradually increase opportunities to develop the kind of personal, marital, and familial relationships that we now hold dear.

At one time, the isolation-cum-privacy enabled by walls was about as welcome as incipient blindness. By blocking the eye, walls placed a premium on something that they knew very little about: trust. What was trust? Who could be trusted? With so few previous opportunities to
violate
trust, it was hard to tell. Predictably, suspiciousness and fear rose precipitously. If walls were to continue, more penetrant means of perception would be needed. Fortunately, a suitable cognitive mechanism was waiting in the wings.

It was eavesdropping, a term that I will use in its conventional sense to mean surreptitious observation as a technique for sampling the intimate experiences of others—whether the surveillant is peeking through a keyhole or just feigning inattention to ambient activity. But I also use the term metaphorically to represent the lifelong quest of all humans to know what is going on in the personal and private lives of others.

Much of what we call “information” begins as sensory images that acquire informational status with the recognition that others might appreciate the same material. When verbalized, these images are morphed into “intimate capital,” which can be exchanged for needed resources. It is illuminating to see how power-hungry men and intimacy-seeking women, as traditionally characterized—if not caricatured—have spent the last thousand years accumulating and managing their funds of intimate capital. But the gender division is not always so tidy. For in blackmail and stalking we also see women trading their intimate knowledge for power and men exercising their dominance in pursuit of intimate experience.

A great deal of the most potent information is stolen, but all normal humans also donate privileged material about themselves to selected others. They do this in an attempt to relate intimately, and to be understood. Since intimacy is linked to selectivity, each of us also needs to limit this exposure. We must be skillful in how we
act on these opposing impulses, but act on them we must. Doing so necessarily produces a spirited social dance, with alternate thrusts and withdrawals of our selves.

This dance reveals the interplay of biology and culture, for social monitoring is biologically mandated—we simply must absorb information about the behavior of others if we are to benefit from gregarious life. These objectives require acquisition of information that is valid, and much of this will necessarily come from “behind the scenes.” Culturally, however, people have placed a premium on opacity; thus the scene is set for conflict, with the inherited drives of biology on one side and the acquired imperatives of culture on the other.

Taking the path of least resistance, watchers direct their gaze at electronic images of unfamiliar and invented beings. The media provide the images, and the beings. In some ways, our fascination with these figures is more, not less, interesting than real-life eavesdropping. For the functions, and the benefits, would seem to be entirely different, and yet it is possible that they are not.

At times I have worried about my own use of the term “intimacy,” aware that it could raise expectations of a “pop psychology” book that tells women how they can get more of it, and men why they must quit avoiding it. Mine is an entirely different type of project, for I explore the deeper social and biological issues that provide the foundation for intimate experience. We will see some interesting gender differences, to be sure, but these are not at all like those addressed in the other kinds of books. They are less obvious, and they run deeper.

I have also worried that that an author who uses the word “eavesdropping” will be expected to deal with electronic surveillance of the type we associate with the FBI and criminal investigation. But where social eavesdropping is concerned, these sleuths are rank amateurs. They may know how to put a “bug” in a potted palm or hack into your personal computer but ordinary humans know how to tell when a friend is behaving unusually, an
acquaintance is reluctant to share something, or a stranger is up to no good. These judgments require observational skills that were built up hundreds of thousands of years ago, and cannot be taught.

In doing the research for this book, I pursued threads of evidence from fields ranging diversely from social, sexual, and cultural history to biology, ethology, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, architecture, psychology, neurophysiology, urban studies, and the law. When woven into a coherent pattern, each has something to say about the theft of intimate experience in other lives—a central question of the book, a central issue in human life.

For the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy… to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world…                  Charles Baudelaire

I
N
May of 1598 an English housewife named Margaret Browne was spending a quiet day at her home in Houndsditch, near London. Records indicate that at one point she peered and listened through a hole in a wall. It was a shared wall. By looking out of her home, Margaret was gazing directly into the private rooms of her neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. John Underhill.
¹

If the Underhills had been playing cards or taking a nap, nothing would have come of Margaret’s adventure, and nothing would be known about it today. But on that spring day Mr. Underhill was away, and the activities next door were anything but ordinary. What Margaret saw was a series of rough-and-tumble sexual encounters between Mrs. Underhill and a man named Michael Fludd, scenes that Margaret was surprisingly able to follow even as the lovers moved from place to place within the tiny home.

Once she saw what was going on, Margaret could have turned away, but she remained at the hole like a sentry at his
post—watching and listening for an entire afternoon and some part of the evening. In an adultery trial, held just two weeks later, Margaret testified to everything, from the precise nature of each sexual maneuver to the couple’s pre- and post-coital banter. From the transcript, we even learn the color of Mrs. Underhill’s underwear (“seawater green”).

Margaret could not have known it then, but four centuries later millions of married women would spend entire afternoons watching intimate activity from the comfort of their homes. These spectators would be glued to a different aperture, watching serial installments of
Days of Our Lives
on NBC where Margaret was forced to content herself with a single episode from her home in Houndsditch.

It is also possible that Margaret watched the hijinks next door because she felt a moral obligation to do so. Sixteen years before that fateful day in 1598, a highly placed official in the English Congregational church exhorted parishioners to “watch one another, and try out all wickedness,” and it was wicked to covet somebody’s spouse. What Margaret saw in the first few minutes was enough to make her pound on the wall, shout disapproval through the hole, or pay a visit to the local vicar—but there is no indication that she did any of these things.

Margaret may also have wanted to protect her own marriage. If Mrs. Underhill exercised no restraint when it came to Michael Fludd, what kept her from flashing her seawater green knickers at Mr. Browne? How, if women like Mrs. Underhill showed so little respect for the bonds of matrimony, would the married women of Houndsditch keep their marital and economic lives together? The court transcripts say nothing of Margaret’s own marital relationship, of course. Did she pine for more tenderness; or crave more sexual satisfaction? It would be surprising if she failed to compare the sexual adventures next door to the activities in her own bedroom. Margaret could have marveled at the way Mrs. Underhill aggressively and repeatedly seduced Mr. Fludd, a fantasy that is now played out in romance novels.