Eavesdropping (5 page)

Some embedded eavesdroppers are completely ignored. In Teopisca, Mexico, a place where a high value was placed on personal reputation, people sent their children to the town market and other public places with explicit instructions to spy. When the children came home, according to John Hotchkiss, the anthropologist who studied the Teopiscanecos in the 1960s, they were “extensively interrogated” by family members to find out what was going on in the village.
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Eavesdropping runs the gamut from casual to premeditated, from amusing to sinister, from personal and idle to historically eventful. But most eavesdropping is an adaptive solution to problems that are not of the individual’s own making. It is, in that sense, entirely normal. “There is nothing intrinsically objectionable in observing the world, including its inhabitants,” wrote philosopher Stanley Benn.
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Investigating absolutely everything that others do, wrote German sociologist Georg Simmel, “does not overstep the boundary of external discretion; it is entirely the labor of one’s own mind, and therefore apparently within the unquestionable rights of the agent.”
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Assurances such as these may not be needed by ordinary people. In an investigation of England’s neighborhood watch programs, many citizens said that they were
already watching their neighbors before the programs began
. One said that neighborhood watch “just sort of consolidated more or less what we already did but made it official.” A second said he thought the program was a good idea but that he and his family had already “been doing it for years … without thinking.” The researchers concluded that “the surveillance habits of members and non-members are indistinguishable.”
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Already doing it. This is an interesting confession. In 1889 a London woman described an average day in her apartment building. It is clear from her account that eavesdropping made apartment life intelligible. “At 5 o’clock in the morning,” she wrote, “I hear the tenant overhead, Mr. A., getting up for his day’s work.” Her report continues:

Exhibit 5
Spionnetje
, or “little spy”. In some parts of Amsterdam, the monitoring of neighborly activities is facilitated by house mirrors that are mounted on the side of parlor windows. Little spies are relics of an earlier period when they enabled residents to preview visitors, but they are now used to see what is going on up and down the block. At one time, similar mirrors were used in America, including Society Hill in Philadelphia.

Exhibit 6 “Spy hole” in Dinkelsbühl, an ancient village in Bavaria

His wife, who does a little dressmaking when she can get it from her neighbours, was up late last night (I heard her sewing-machine going till I o’clock), so he does not disturb her. He is a carman at the Goods Depôt of a Railway Company, and has to be there at 6 o’clock, so he is not long getting his breakfast of tea and bread and butter. But before he has done, I hear a child cry; then the sound of a sleepy voice, Mrs. A., recommending a sip of tea and a crust for the baby. The man, I suppose, carries out the order, for the crying ceases, and I hear his steps as he goes downstairs. At eight o’clock there is a good deal of scraping and raking on the other side of the wall. This means that my neighbour, Mrs. B., an old woman partly supported by her dead husband’s savings, partly by the earnings of two grown-up daughters, is raking out and cleaning her stove. Then the door is opened, the dust is thrown down the dust-shoot [sic], and a conversation is
very audibly carried on by two female voices. Among other topics, is the favourite one of Mrs. A.’s laziness in the morning—though Mrs. B. knows perfectly well that Mrs. A. has been up late at work, having indeed repeatedly complained of the noise of the sewing-machine at night, and though Mrs. C. openly avows that she will not say anything against Mrs. A., as she has always been very nice to her.

This continues in the same level of detail, through the morning and afternoon, only to end at bedtime. At various points other senses report in, for example, when the lady resident notices the aroma of food being prepared in other apartments. Toward the end of her description she offered an evaluation of life in apartment buildings. Loss of privacy was listed as a disadvantage, but chief among the benefits was its corollary, “the impossibility of being overlooked altogether, or flagrantly neglected by relatives in illness or old age.”
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Similar reactions appeared a half-century later in sociologist Leo Kuper’s account of day-to-day life in a residential housing unit in England. The homes were all semi-detached, and residents could easily hear radios and pianos, crying babies, coughing, shoes being dropped at bedtime, children running, laughter, and loud talk. Though some residents complained that they could “hear everything,” one said, “I don’t feel so lonely when I know there’s somebody about.” Another said she enjoyed the “company.”
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In 2004 an article in the
New York Times
carried a similar description by a Brooklyn man who liked to sit in his backyard on a summer night, where he experienced a “soundtrack-only version of ‘Rear Window.’” “Over the last four years of night-sitting behind my house,” he wrote, “I’ve become good at figuring out what my neighbors are doing just by listening. I hear dinners being cooked (clinking pans), dinners being enjoyed (light clink of silverware on plate) and dinners being cleared (loud clinking of plates and pans). I hear vacuum cleaning and blow-drying and screaming fights and bad guitar solos and birthday parties, all echoing around in the real sound stage created by a small block of interlocked brownstones.”
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If there had been an angry altercation, the Brooklyn man would have heard that, too, and he might have been able to call the police in time to prevent it becoming dangerous. To understand the quest for intimate experience as a proximal motive, consider the real
Rear Window
, the 1950s Hitchcock film starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. Stewart played the part of L. B. Jefferies, a photojournalist who, as the result of a leg injury, was confined to his apartment during a sweltering summer in New York City. Jefferies is bored until he discovers that he can see other apartment-dwellers across the courtyard, forced by the heat to open their windows and curtains, move out onto their balconies, and sunbathe on the roof. And then Jefferies instantly becomes un-bored.

The set of
Rear Window
was ready-made for people watching, a virtual smorgasbord for the visually curious. Merely by playing his naked eyes over the apartment complex, Jefferies is able to see a woman brushing her hair, a man lathering his face for a shave, and a couple sleeping on their balcony. In the kitchen of one apartment, Jefferies discovers a scantily clad woman doing dance routines; in the living room of another, a songwriter playing his piano and entertaining friends. Through other windows Jefferies observes a pair of amorous newly weds who foil his gaze by pulling the shade, and a lonely widow preparing dinner for two.

It’s central to the film, and no less interesting here, that in one of the units across the courtyard there is also an overtly angry husband and an ailing wife. Something is rather different, even sinister, about this apartment, for it is here that Jefferies begins to sense the possibility of a serious crime. At this point, he begins to augment his normal senses—first with a pair of binoculars, then by looking through a camera fitted with one of the tools of his trade, a massive telephoto lens—and his reasons for looking change too.

Eventually,
because Jefferies is already looking
, he sees something amiss, and new reasons for watching develop. It is then that he becomes “concerned citizen, looking for evidence of a crime.” And when he reports what he has seen, the police are persuaded to act,
eventually arresting the murdering husband who behaved so suspiciously.

My point is that eavesdropping is usually done in order to satisfy an evolved appetite for intimate experience in other lives, not, in the first instance, to solve some environmental problem. Of course, there are frequently some tangible
benefits
of eavesdropping, such as personal power and social control, but these may occur because the eavesdropper is already tuned in, on a purely psychological motivation, in the first place.

The drive to monitor the behaviors of others is built into the human psyche, but its strength varies with local conditions. Features of human societies determine who sees, hears, and eavesdrops upon whom, how often they do so, what they get out of it, and what happens to the victims. As we saw earlier, Mrs. Browne’s housing arrangement provided her with a treasure trove of data. But there are other factors, from religion and morality to government, politics, the law, internal competition, and external threat. All these things affect the degree to which people exercise their desire to invade the private space of others. After 9/11 many Americans began to look at strangers more suspiciously.

One of the more influential factors in social monitoring is interpersonal spacing. In urban centers, people are just close enough to eavesdrop, and just separated enough that they can do so without detection. But everyone with a stake in knowing about a particular individual can only be in sensory range part of the time. We would surely benefit if we could pool our images with others, and this is one of the more important benefits of language.

When there is no spacing, people have away of creating their own psychological distance. In close quarters, one may be spared unwanted attention by erecting psychological boundaries. The philosopher John Silber once noted that strip teasers, by virtue of their calling, seem to relinquish to others the right to examine their body. “But in the blank, dead expression on the face of the dancer,” Silber wrote, “one sees the closed door, the wall, behind which she hides an intense, if limited, privacy. She wears her fig leaf on her face.”
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Exhibit 7
The Maybe
: woman sleeping in a glass case

Some amount of perceptual freedom may also be conferred by others. Erving Goffman called this “civil inattention.”
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Years ago, social psychologists discovered that people tend to look into the eyes of others less when in very close proximity than they do at greater distances. Most of us assiduously avoid looking into the eyes of our fellow passengers in a crowded elevator, and we usually grant each other more space when in cramped quarters, such as an ATM area.
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There is a fascination with the boundaries between public and private. In 1995, an English actress spent a week sleeping in a glass case in an art gallery in London. “It was very unsettling looking at her,” wrote art historian Lisa Tickner after she had viewed the actress, Tilda Swinton. “You couldn’t look at her as an exhibit: she
was a human being. But you couldn’t look at her as a human being without feeling guilty. This was an art gallery. We were licensed to look. But she couldn’t look back and sleeping is private: the simplest involuntary movements cast us as uneasy voyeurs.”
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Five years later another actress, Daniela Tobar, spent two weeks in a small glass house. Like Tilda, Daniela was an exhibit at a museum in Santiago, Chile. The purpose was to stimulate debate about public and private space in Chilean life. The crowd could not get enough of Daniela—a human specimen under glass—even though she simply read, slept, cooked, and engaged in other ordinary household activities.