Eavesdropping (29 page)

When behavior persistently occurs in the absence of discernible benefits, we see, with unusual clarity, the possibility that it may be due to a once-adaptive disposition that is still “in there.” When people spend large amounts of time perusing the personal material on electronic diaries, some of which was composed by strangers or intended for other eyes, they do so not to minimize danger or acquire needed resources. They surf these diaries—and read romance novels—for a different reason, one that is self-evidently psychological. When all of the practical possibilities have been filtered out, the one thing that remains, the irreducible core, is the drive to access and savor the intimate experiences of others—preferably by theft.

He seeks to catch the other at an unguarded and intimate moment, a moment when the other will be naked and available to his concealed gaze … He wishes to experience from the outside another’s life as it is lived from the inside.

Edgar Dryden

W
E
have seen many reasons for eavesdropping, from idle curiosity to concerns about personal or public safety and maintenance of moral values. Here we return to examine what, in modernity, may be the most important motive. It is also the most mysterious, both because mystery is created, enjoyed, and resolved by those who share intimate experience with others; and because the use of one mind to access another is a process that, itself, works in mysterious ways.

In the previous chapter we were reminded by many things—the street scene in
Paris, A Rainy Day
, the sheer number and popularity of Parisian
physiologies
, and new forms of architectural individuation—that, in most societies, every person has his own life, with his own ideas, plans, and goals. Collectively we are, as English psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has written, “a society of selves.”
¹

The minds of others
are
different from our own. We accept this because we,
as humans
, have consciousness—an awareness of our own mental activity
—paired with
what is commonly called a “theory of other minds,” a conceptual awareness that others have mental activity too. Once this other-minds concept is activated, early in childhood, it continuously reminds us—and will keep doing so as long as we live—that others know, think, and feel things that may or may not correspond to our own knowledge, thoughts, and feelings.

Philosophers refer to these things as “qualia,” a term my dictionary defines as “the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.” Qualia are set up when we sense and interpret specific aspects of the environment. Examples include the taste of wine and the color of the sky at day’s end. We and others sip the same wine and gaze together at the setting sun, but our responses are subjective, which makes our qualia different.
²

Taken together, consciousness and the other-minds concept alert us to the possibility of
discrepancies
between other minds and our own, without actually telling us what they are. Sensing-without-understanding fuels the quest to explore, from the outside, the contents of minds that are not completely intelligible to their “owners.” It is because we regularly exercise these gap-narrowing skills, according to Nicholas Humphrey, that we humans get along with each other as well as we do.

These processes that pull together semi-isolated selves share properties with empathy. Normally we think of empathy as the disposition to help people who are suffering, and to feel what they are feeling. But it was pointed out many years ago that empathy has a
cognitive
component too. Except for emotions that are directly provoked by a perception, such as the sight or sound of a person
suffering, there is usually a role for
understanding
that others are experiencing
something
, and knowing what that is.
³
Viewed in this light, it is possible to see empathic responding, to some degree, as a
product
of the fact that humans are more or less continuously scanning and reading each other.

That we do so is attested by the number of processes that are automatically set in motion by these scans. For example, it has long been known that people in groups tend spontaneously to adopt a rhythm, and to move in synchrony with each other, and that people in dyadic arrangements additionally tend to pick up, without intending to, a range of peculiarities of voice, speech, and body language. The relevant processes, convergence and contagion, ensure a measure of social coordination, their reliability virtually guaranteed by the fact that they operate unconsciously. But people around the world also take special delight in
perfecting
their capacity to coordinate temporally and substantively. These celebrations of coordination include chorus kick lines, barbershop quartets, and marching bands.
⁴
When sought and practiced as a goal, synchron-icity may be responsible for even greater degrees of other-comprehension and unity. Indeed, it appears that the human brain has some highly specialized cells (mirror neurons) that are responsible for just such effects.
⁵

If an adaptive species such as ours is outfitted with social sensors, we must also have the possibility of doing something with the input that they provide, and the challenge of understanding other minds is one that we
welcome
. Returning home from a dinner party, one finds oneself analyzing the behavior of the other guests, much as one relives a film, dissecting the plot and reviewing the performances. The degree of functionality is different in films and real life, but we approach the analyses with similar levels of enthusiasm.

Our goal, of course, is to relate all of this to our own lives. Here, the deck might seem to be stacked against us. “There are no wormholes between conscious minds,” Humphrey has written.
“Really there are not.” But, he added, this lack of connections “does not stop people avidly searching for them.”
⁶
To the contrary, the absence of “wormholes” is the source of our Asmodean dispositions. We lack the magical powers of limping demons, but we can
do things
to establish connectivity. This is what creates the chase scenes in human life, the opportunities to use our interpretive systems for the things they were designed to do. Given half a chance, we know we will make a great deal of headway with these challenges. When the gaps are narrowed, we know that the narrowing is due to something that we did, to the skillful ways that we learned to apply our psychological capacities.

Of course we do not throw everything we’ve got at these human mysteries. Every investigation is guided by a theory. The kind I have in mind is what some lawyers call a “theory of the case.” We direct our attention to particular things based on our sense of what is going on, or what
could be
going on. Eavesdropping on the thoughts and feelings of others is not just a matter of interpreting what we see and hear, but selectively looking and listening for, and to, particular elements that are embedded in the behaviors of others. In doing so, we are never unaware of what would make a compelling narrative for us, and for our friends.

We are drawn by mystery, and try to resolve it, but we do so half hoping that when the investigation is over, some mystery will remain; and to make sure that some does, we stand ready to envisage additional possibilities. The possible existence of an undiscovered “something” is intriguing. Did you: see the expression on her face when you asked … notice that he looked away when you said… sense their surprise when you tried to explain…?

This is not to deny our relief, and occasional joy, at the discovery of common ground. But I think we usually do not want to understand
everything
about
everyone
—unless, perhaps, we are totally dependent on them. Do we want everyone in our social circle to be
exactly
like us; to associate only with individuals who can finish our sentences, and we theirs? Or do we prefer the company, at least
part of the time, of people whose minds have been in places that ours have never gone?

The experience of understanding others partially, but
not completely
, is a boundary experience, like several others that we will see. This is largely responsible for the allure of eavesdropping.

Like many other animal species, we humans are territorial. If people walk onto our property, our “zone of immunity,” to reuse French historian Georges Duby’s phrase, we are entitled to react defensively. Studies of proxemics indicate that people can be extraordinarily unnerved if a stranger, or mere acquaintance, stands a few inches closer than he should. What if someone enters our
mental territory
, a region that was designed by nature, and molded by culture, to be exclusively our own? What if they situate themselves too close to the face of our private self?

Many people fear that their privacy might be breached, and this feeling undergirds, and perhaps reflects, the laws that were passed to forbid such violations. What is less obvious is
why
people are frightened. Locating the source may help us to isolate the experience of the intruder.

A brief look at some legal history will be helpful. In a landmark article that appeared in the
Harvard Law Review
in 1890, Richard Warren and his law partner, Louis Brandeis, argued that every citizen has a “right to privacy.” “The common law,” they wrote, “secures to each individual the right of determining, ordinarily, to what extent his thoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated to others.”
⁷
Their concern in the late nineteenth century was with the press, as it would now be with a broader range of media.

There were at least two reasons for the article. For some years a general trend had been building, away from strictly physical definitions of a person and toward more psychological interpretations. Though Warren and Brandeis made repeated references to
traditional laws against
trespassing
, that is, laws that criminalized “physical interference with life and property,” they understood that cultural changes justified new concerns about violations of “man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and his intellect.”
⁸
It was becoming clear, they thought, that only a fraction of life’s pleasures lay in physical things. More could be found in thoughts, emotions, and sensations, and these were demanding legal recognition.
⁹
Just two years before they argued their case for a right to privacy a respected jurist, Thomas Cooley, alluded to a growing recognition of the “right of each individual
to be let alone.”
¹⁰

Richard Warren also had personal reasons to feel strongly about the right of private individuals to be let alone. He was not being afforded this privilege himself. In January of 1883 Warren married Mabel Bayard, daughter of a U.S. senator, and began an elegant style of life in the Back Bay section of Boston. News of his social activities regularly appeared in the
Saturday Evening Gazette
. A Boston “blue blood,” Warren may have been irritated by this tendency of the press to expose the activities of the socially prominent. In June of 1890 the
Gazette
published a short item indicating that the Warren home had been transformed into a “veritable flower bower” for a breakfast celebrating the wedding of Warren’s cousin. Six months later his article with Louis Brandeis was published.

One can violate the personal space of another, purely as a proxemic matter—by staring, standing too close, or displaying other physically dominant behaviors—without actually trespassing upon a private place. In recent years, individuals who might have been arrested for eavesdropping in previous centuries have been charged with
stalking
.

Stalking is a “modern” crime in the sense that there were no laws against it until the 1990s. In most cases of stalking, the perpetrator physically follows the victim. That’s because the latter, usually a female, is on the move. The stalker’s desire is to watch—to
follow his victim
perceptually
. He usually follows his prey, stands outside her home and stares, or otherwise physically intrudes on her zone of privacy, even if in public. For this reason, surveillance is specifically identified in most of the state laws against stalking.

Research conducted by a California professor of criminal justice, Doris Hall, found that eighty-four percent of the stalks include surveillance of the home.
¹¹
That’s four percent more than were guilty of following, the hallmark of stalking. “Peeping Toms,” according to two English barristers, Paul Infield and Graham Platford, “have all the attributes of the stalker who loiters.”
¹²
A recent bulletin in America warned potential stalking victims to “trim the bushes beside your home.”

Just as over eighty percent of the ancient under-the-eaves type of eavesdropping was committed by men, modern stalking is also dominated by men. The percentage of stalking due to males varies, depending on the study, from eighty-four to eighty-seven percent. A similar majority of stalking
victims
—from seventy-eight to eighty-three percent—are female.
¹³

Over seventy percent of male stalkers are considered “intimacy seekers.”
¹⁴
Intimacy seekers, like a related class—incompetent suitors—are among the most numerous and persistent of all male stalkers. “Both groups,” according to Paul Mullen and his associates, “are attempting to establish a relationship with the object of their unwanted attentions.”
¹⁵
The prime motivation of intimacy seekers is “to enable their love to find expression in an intimate relationship.” Most of these individuals are shy, live a solitary and lonely life, and have consistently failed in intimate relationships.
¹⁶