The Naked Society. Vance Packard

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СКАЧАТЬ stable primitive societies the attitudes of the people in regard to what is proper and decent in personal relations—including respect for privacy—do not change much from century to century. In the Western world today, however, swirling forces are causing whole populations willy-nilly to change their attitudes, ideals, and behavior patterns within decades. This is nowhere more dramatically apparent than in the United States.

      One effect of these forces is the undermining of respect for privacy. And there is a straining after even better ways to sort, inspect, control, and keep an eye on individuals.

      I shall note here five of the forces produced by the changing nature of our society and technology with the hope that the reader will bear them in mind as underlying factors when we later examine their effects in detail. Throughout, our concern will be with these underlying forces, not with individual villains.

       1. The Great Increase in Organized Living

      In the coming decade another 40,000,000 people will be added to the population of the U.S., a figure approximately equal to all the people now living in the western half of the nation. And by the end of the present decade four-fifths of all Americans will be living in metropolitan areas. Until quite recent times most of the nation’s citizens had little experience of urban living with its tendency to reduce self-sufficiency and to require that the individual relate to large organizations.

      Closeness of living does not necessarily destroy privacy. Holland is one of the most thickly populated nations in the world and yet, until very recently, individual privacy was greatly respected. But genuine considerateness toward others has not been a notable trait in the average American’s make-up for several decades. And as America’s empty spaces began filling up, the inhabitants developed an increasingly gregarious style of life. Perhaps they were over-reacting to what historian Walter Prescott Webb called “the nauseating loneliness of frontier life.” And perhaps now the overreacting is changing. But a few years ago an Argentine visitor referred to modern Americans (U.S. breed) as “friendly as puppies—and just as nosy.” A lag has developed between the habits of a people and the condition of their existence, so that personal privacy suffers.

      Simultaneously there has been the continuous growth of giant organizations in U.S. society. Michigan State’s Professor Eugene Jennings observed that “organizations consume our privacy.” And Clark Kerr, now president of the University of California, has commented that the destruction of privacy seems to issue from the logic of organization itself.

      As technology develops, it spawns large organizations—both business and governmental—to keep up with technology. U.S. society in a little more than a century has moved from being a nation of entrepreneurs to being a nation of employees. Most people today work for large organizations.

      The larger an organization becomes, the more its managers seem to be obsessed with controls on the people involved, to keep the organization from flying apart. Since the top managers in bureaucracies cannot hope to know all the individuals in their organization they resort to appraisal forms, cumulative files, six-page application forms, and lie detectors as a means of “knowing” their people better. And being dedicated to rationality, the managers become obsessed with assigning numbers to people.

      Congressman Kastenmeier relates that when his three-year-old son opened a $10 bank account the bank asked for the lad’s Social Security number. It may well be that within a few years organizational logic will require that a Social Security number be put on each newborn person’s birth certificate—and follow him to his grave.

      Officially, one’s Social Security number is a well-guarded secret and cannot be used to keep track of people’s whereabouts. But I was told that some states have been using Social Security numbers to trace deserting fathers. And private detectives told me they had often got a man’s number merely by calling the personnel director of a company where the man was known to have worked. The standard form that investigators of one national investigative agency are supposed to fill out when checking up on a man specifies that his Social Security number be established.

      Urban living has played a part in making citizens more fearful of being beset by criminals. In many urban areas these anxieties have a sound basis. In the first three months of 1963 the FBI’s Crime Index indicated that the volume of serious crimes had risen seven per cent during the preceding year. A growth in population and a growth in temptations in a nation increasingly swollen with material goods could help to account for much of the increase.

      Law-enforcement officials cry out for more effective tools and techniques for catching the criminals. They argue that criminals have become so slick in developing organizations based on business models and in using the aids of modern technology that the law enforcers must be permitted to become slicker and rougher. The Police Review carried the headline: LEGALIZED WIRETAPPING ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, in quoting Brooklyn’s district attorney. The late New York tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, editorially called for the fingerprinting of all Americans.

      News accounts of the prevalence of criminals have persuaded many millions of Americans, too, that the police must indeed become slicker and rougher. Much of the public anxiety about crime, incidentally, seems to be concentrated in urban redevelopment areas. Here the residents usually live in relatively expensive new apartments built in the midst of low-income areas where the people often are of different ethnic, racial, or religious backgrounds and may be envious, resentful, or disdainful of their seemingly rich, stuck-up new neighbors.

      At any rate we have the paradox of a society trying to put men on the moon when millions of its urban residents do not dare to walk alone at night in streets or parks near their homes.

      The same society that breeds criminals by the millions demands that its police catch the criminals, even if they must trample on constitutional rights and existing laws to do so. There is little awareness that lawlessness is a symptom of national character and that the character must change before the symptoms can be significantly affected. To cite an extreme, a Methodist minister in Dallas charged, after President Kennedy’s assassination, that “the spirit of assassination” had flourished in Dallas for some time. There were reports of small children in several public schools clapping and cheering when their teachers told them of the terrible event. The children were reflecting not only the intolerance of their parents but the new genteel lawlessness that forgives assaults, in violation of law, against people who are disapproved of for one reason or another. In Northern cities genteel citizens have condoned the use by police of lawless or heavy-handed methods against suspects who happen to be members of minority groups that have produced a disproportionate share of disturbance of the peace of their particular urban society.

      The United States cannot hope even to start becoming a law-abiding society until the great majority of its citizens know in their hearts that the constitutional rights of every citizen must be respected.

       2. The Movement Toward a Garrison State Mentality

      Although not the least bit militaristic as a people, Americans are being swept toward being a martial—and thus watched—society. The impetus comes from the facts of the cold war, the space race, and the growing appreciation of how defense and space spending spur the nation’s economy.

      Tens of thousands of employees of federal agencies spend all or much of their time handling secret data. And then of course there are about 2,700,000 citizens in the U.S. armed forces who require varying degrees of surveillance based on their assignments.

      More disquieting has been the spread of security precautions in U.S. industrial plants that do some business with the Pentagon. Business Week estimates that 24,000 industrial facilities are now under Pentagon regulations on security and that more than 3,500,000 industrial employees in the past fourteen years have had to obtain clearances.

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