Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

352 THE SOCIETY REDEEMED FROM ENVY-A UTOPIA
problem is the question of paid workers from outside who are employed
by many of the kibbutzim.
The sin of privacy
Privacy is recognized by different cultures in very differing degrees. Yet
we must not imagine that there is a straight path leading from a primitive
first stage without privacy to a high civilization in which such privacy is
definitely assured.
Significantly, if a man really makes use of his right to be alone, the
annoyance, envy and mistrust of his fellow citizens will be aroused, even
in cultures where a private life is a permissible and long-established
institution. Anyone who cuts himself off, who draws his curtains and
spends any length of time outside the range of observation, is always
seen as a potential heretic, a snob, a conspirator. It is hardly surprising,
therefore, that the puritans of New England felt a profound mistrust of
those who valued their privacy. Besides this, there must also have been
prejudice, wholly undemocratic and without religious connotations,
against the man with a private existence, especially on the western
frontier, where, if someone put up a fence or a hedge round his house, the
consequences could be serious.
To the same degree that Anglo-Saxon culture respects and values
privacy, the egalitarianism of the American polity has given rise to
resentment against it. Anyone who lives long enough among Americans
today must notice how greatly many of them still fear to indulge in what
their fellow men might consider to be undue privacy. In so far as possible
they try to show that they have nothing to hide. A drive after dark
through a middle-class suburb will reveal countless families behind the
uncurtained windows of living-room or dining-room, as in a goldfish
bowl. With few exceptions, modern Americans· still fight shy of surrounding
their houses with fences or hedges, at least of the kind that
might give complete concealment. In some townships these are even
expressly forbidden.
There is in America one profession above all in which, for egalitarian
reasons, fear of seeming to take advantage of a privacy in itself natural
and necessary is particularly in evidence; it is the profession which today
is most intent on egalitarianism, that of college and university pro-