Bruce Schneier, a prominent expert in cryptography and other areas of security, regularly provides interesting commentary, sometimes technical in nature and sometimes philosophical or sociological. In his blog post of 2013/07/09, Another Perspective on the Value of Privacy, Schneier merely provides a short quote from and link to an opinion piece at the website of the New York Times: Privacy and the Threat to the Self by Michael P. Lynch.
This opinion piece explores some aspects of what it means to be a person and asks, “What makes your thoughts your thoughts?” after telling us, “[T]he concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.” To a traditional Christian, this is actually a contradiction in terms. The true persons, that is—Persons, are Father and Son and Holy Spirit. We can only hope that we will one day receive as gift a more complete nature which will be more truly a state of personhood. Yet, Father and Son and Holy Spirit aren’t autonomous Persons, but rather Persons who fully share all thoughts and feelings and acts. They are one God in the belief of traditional Christianity and yet are truly individuals. Individuals, not autonomous individuals and not individuals who voluntarily become one God by accepting a contractual relationship of sorts. Not by coincidence, this is the older understanding in the West of marriage, to choose one important example. Under that older understanding, though not always explicitly acknowledged, a man and a woman change by the very act of marrying (not always having a ritual basis in Christian history) and take on a new dimension to their communal human beings. In the modern understanding, the bride and the groom remain what they are and only voluntarily enter a contractual relationship which leaves them what they were before.
See Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a short discussion of Einstein’s position that things are what they are and are not altered by relationships against Bohr’s belief that relationships are primary and shape things. Bohr has won in quantum mechanics but modern advocates of autonomous individuality tell us that human beings are less likely to be changed by relationships than protons and electrons. I could say, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that Bohr belonged to the school of thought founded by St John the Evangelist who taught that we exist because God first loved us.
I’ll be proposing an idea I’ve developed over a number of writings in recent years: those who will become part of the Body of Christ will remain individuals while being truly part of that complete man, as St. Paul termed matters according to some translations. The saved will be persons analogous to the divine Persons while the Body of Christ will be one as God is one.
Having told the reader what my main point is, I’ll move toward it. Lynch goes into greater detail in his essay, Privacy and the Threat to the Self, playing off of Descartes’ strange mixture of insights and outright errors:
[W]hile Descartes’s overall view has been rightly rejected, there is something profoundly right about the connection between privacy and the self, something that recent events should cause us to appreciate. What is right about it, in my view, is that to be an autonomous person is to be capable of having privileged access (in the two senses defined above) to information about your psychological profile—your hopes, dreams, beliefs and fears. A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.
This is insightful but also mostly false from the traditional Christian viewpoint, at least as I understand it and have restated and enriched it in light of modern empirical knowledge. Traditional Christians should fear to be caught up in a discussion of personhood limited to modern theories of the individual, theories which can be seen in light of the speculations of Descartes or Calvin or the American follower of Calvin—Jonathon Edwards.
We are called to complete ourselves, ultimately, by entering fully into the Body of Christ, though we do this best, at least in this mortal realm, by developing our unique characteristics and talents and then contributing them to that Body. There is some serious uncertainty in some of the speculations of sociobiologists in the early years of this field of research, but it seems certain that many of our ways of perceiving, of feeling, of thinking, of acting, work to the needs of our family lines and not to the needs of any imaginary autonomous individuals. I wrote about the biological foundations of human social ties in Social and Biological: Being Honest About the Basics of Human Nature and expanded the discussion in Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality? where I quoted Jacob Neusner, who proposes similar ideas about the communal aspects of human being but from a Judaic viewpoint. In his collection of essays, Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity, Neusner tells us:
The doctrine of emotions in the view of the sages who created Judaism remained always the same. The reason derives from the social realities that give meaning to emotion and definition to the possibilities of feeling. If we begin with feeling, we end up in society. [page 51]
In response to Neusner’s claims, I pointed out, “In this way of thought, emotions are produced by ties or relationships and then help to strengthen and shape those ties, shaping them to what might be called a communal heart but also helping to give birth to a communal mind, an intellect.” Human communities aren’t nominal entities in general, though some might be the sorts of voluntary, contractual relationships possible to truly autonomous individuals. Our brains themselves, some of our strongest desires and most common instincts, tie us into communities existing over the generations of a family-line of organisms, as sociobiologists have pointed out. In various writings, I’ve speculated that these desires can be turned, and have been turned, towards the creation of communal bonds of a sort which aren’t strictly dictated by biological needs, not even the long-term needs studied by various sorts of evolutionary theorists. We form scientific societies, Moose and Elk clubs, and sports leagues, as well as chess clubs and cruiser car clubs, as well as political communities rising to nearly continental size. This is little different, in principle, from the turning of our general mental skills to abstract mathematics or metaphysics or the composing of symphonies.
In fact, the formation of our selves is an open process of sorts, strongly oriented toward the formation of aspects corresponding to an autonomous individual and to a communal being and also to a being who is a mixture of organism and tools. In recent generations, thinkers starting at least with Michael Polanyi (though Bishop Butler had some insights about this in the 17th century) realized that our tools and our prosthetics can become parts of our bodies in a more constant way. I wrote about this in Creation Is Us, It Also Are Us. In an earlier essay, Does the Body of Christ have non-human components?, I had raised and discussed the question: “Is it possible that as we form the Body of Christ, we integrate human technology such as the Internet viewed as a fancy memory device?”
Our minds leak out into our tools and our prosthetics, including the printed reference books and the databases we access and the software we use. The more powerful and more reliable parts of our minds are largely shared across communities; see my discussion of Jacques Barzun’s insights about this in his book, The House of Intellect: Intelligence vs. Intellect.
There is a lot of obscurity in the discussions of the Body of Christ in the New Testament; none of the Christian authors, not even St Paul, seem to have been able to develop this concept very well. In various writings, I’ve made an attempt to develop underlying concepts and language to start a better conversation on communal human nature. For example, in the essay, Are Communities a Form of Created Being?, I wrote:
Being is at least what we can touch and point to and study by the methods of physics and chemistry and other empirical sciences. I’ve claimed, partly upon Biblical grounds and partly upon my experiences as a creature, that being is also what moves and interacts and forms relationships and various sorts of narrative streams including the morally ordered narratives which we can call stories. I’ve claimed that relationships are primary, not concrete and thing-like being and not even some general sort of stuff. Thing-like being comes into existence as a result of relationships and can be further shaped by relationships. See the Gospel of St. John or the letters attributed to him or his followers. See Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a short discussion of being. [A] longer writing […], From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives, is more recent, more complete, and perhaps closer to a good understanding of created being. I write in a different and perhaps more accessible way of what I mean by `abstract being’ in three short essays, Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies, Studying Steam When All You Have is Ice, and More on Matter as Frozen Soul.
In other words, I think we Christians can’t possibly tie our defenses of privacy against government intrusions to a radical individualism and we aren’t going to understand human being before we have a better understanding of created being in its concrete and abstract forms.
Let me quote Lynch on his claim that privacy is necessary to our existence as individuals:
[I]magine that I could telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings—I could know about them in as much detail as you know about them yourself—and further, that you could not, in any way, control my access. You don’t, in other words, share your thoughts with me; I take them. The power I would have over you would of course be immense. Not only could you not hide from me, I would know instantly a great amount about how the outside world affects you, what scares you, what makes you act in the ways you do. And that means I could not only know what you think, I could to a large extent control what you do.
I’ll return to the theological issues before claiming a more plausible Christian argument against our government’s current abuse of our privacy.
Christians believe Father and Son and Holy Spirit to be truly Persons, remaining individuals even while being one God. They share thoughts and feelings and actions in the most intimate way and yet they remain three Persons, Individuals but not Autonomous Individuals in any meaningful sense. The concept of divine Personhood is manifested in Creation in terms of the incomplete and immature personhood of human beings. Christians cannot accept Lynch’s line of argument though we are bound, for other reasons, to take a position similar to his against government invasion of our privacy. In fact, I’d go so far as to claim that neither the President of the U.S. nor the American intelligence agencies have any plausible claims to the authority or right to shape the Body of Christ in the ways implied by the powers over us that they have tried to grab; they haven’t just committed crimes against the U.S. Constitution, they have become enemies of God.
Any arguments for privacy, or other goods, based upon autonomous personhood, would bias us strongly toward thinking that God is different from the Trinitarian God of Christian belief, if He exists at all. We would probably rediscover all sorts of philosophical and theological heresies in a more or less natural way once we fell into this false belief that the term `autonomous person’ has any meaning in this world. In this strange age, sociobiologists and other evolutionary theorists who are non-Christians argue against this false belief more strongly than Christian clergymen, but this merely means that empirical science caught up to St John the Evangelist and St Thomas Aquinas just when Christian thinkers and leaders turned onto other paths.
In this modern way of thinking about individuals as being autonomous, the Body of Christ would be only a voluntary gathering of autonomous individuals, busily negotiating their contractual relationships. Communities would have only nominalistic existence, being the result of always revocable, voluntary, more or less contractual, agreements between individual human beings, those truly existing entities. This is, in fact, the way many modern human beings view their marriages and their memberships in all communities, even their Christian church or other community of worship. Neusner in the already referenced work reminds us that salvation in the Jewish and Christian Bibles is in terms of a community. We aren’t saved as autonomous individuals but rather as the People of Israel or the Body of Christ. Or both.
Should Christians be strongly opposed to the State’s invasion of our thoughts and feelings and most intimate acts? I would most emphatically agree with Lynch on this practical matter and say, “The Federal government and its agencies should stay out of our private communications.” I’ve speculated about Christian civilization being the true Body of Christ, inclusive of the Church but not only the Church and not subordinate to the Church, though bound to be guided by the Church in analogy to the human being who is guided by his conscience and his religious beliefs. That Body greater than just a hymn-singing choir, that is—that Body which meets all legitimate human needs and desires, would have political aspects but, if there is a political organ, it would not have any right to invade individuals or other organs for the purpose of controlling them or for any other purpose. It would be the human members of the Body of Christ who would share all thoughts and feelings with each other while remaining individuals. Each of those members would also share in the worship activities and political activities and artistic activities of the entire Body. We would all share the thoughts of the most brilliant of mathematicians or theologians as well as the skills of the greatest musicians and furniture-makers but there would be no educational institutions with the power and right to invade our privacy for the purpose of making sure we all think properly.
We can think in terms of dependencies, the true bonds of human communities. The trick is to form the proper relationships of dependencies, as I discussed back in May of 2011 in the essays: Freedom and Structure in Human Life — Criminal and Not Satanic, The Liberal Mind: What is politics?, and Who Do You Choose to Be Dependent Upon?, not by coincidence, dealing with improper dependencies when trying to make a more plausible story out of the large amount of information that our governments, or more accurately—gangs inside our governments, have engaged in some large-scale criminal conspiracies against each other and also against American citizens. In 2012, I returned to the more particular issue of the illegitimate expansion of governments into various activities, some outright criminal and immoral in all important ways. The relevant essays were Prosperity that Never Ends…Oops and Why Are the Parasites Killing the Host?.
The invasion of our privacy by the American national government through various agencies is illegitimate, but so is its effort to make Americans and others dependent upon it for medical care and for education and for a variety of regulatory activities more properly done by other institutions or communities. Many of these efforts to make us inappropriately dependent upon the American government, or other governments, have been strongly supported by leaders of other institutions or communities, including the leaders of the Catholic Church and other Christian churches and Jewish congregations, all of whom should have known better.
Download my book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, where I argue, however inadequately at times, for the ultimate unity of created being and, hence, of our knowledge of created being. An overview of my understanding of human being, including a discussion of what we should be aiming to be, can be found in a book I recently released for free download: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. The title of that book was taken from words spoken by Pope Benedict XVI:
Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man. [Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech given on 2008/06/07 to participants in the sixth European Symposium of University Professors, which was held in Rome from 2008/06/04 to 2008/06/07 on the theme: “Broadening the Horizons of Reason. Prospects for Philosophy”.]
More of my writings, including some novels, can be found in Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston which includes descriptions and also links for any books available for download.