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Not only in the legal but in the social context, privacy is a relatively new value (and is still rare in much of the non-Western world, which either does not appreciate it or cannot afford it). One Greek word for a private person was "idiot," which, then as now, carried implications of ignorance —or at least a large indifference to civic concern. The tribe knew no privacy, and even the lord of the feudal manor lived in a swarm of servants, children and relatives, often all of them sleeping around the edges of the big hall where the fireplace was. Until the start of the 18th century, rooms in even the grandest houses led into each other. In those days, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, a lady's bedchamber still served as a reception room for her guests; only gradually did it become a retreat (boudoir is derived from the French bonder, to sulk). Privacy became valued as individualism and the ego became valued. In earlier times, retreating into solitude was a religious act; now privacy became a devotion in the new secular religion of the self.
The climax of privacy came, for the Western middle class, in the early 20th century, with the heavily built and uniformly heated house. But gradually, in architecture and in the imagination, the wall gave way to the window. This reflected not only an esthetic desire to let in light, but also the new creed of community, which distrusts private brooding. Besides, crowded cities made space ever more expensive, leading to "open plan" domestic architecture. The dining room became a corner of the living room, the family room opened off the kitchen, producing an illusion of greater space—and the fact of less privacy. As Mary McCarthy once observed, the bathroom is "the last fortress of the individual." Architect-Planner Serge Chermayeff asks, "Where is the provision for relaxation, concentration, contemplation, introspection, healthy sensuousness, all of which are conducive to intimacy, tenderness, wonder and delight?"
Lack of privacy is not calculable in terms of physical space only. In a new book, The Hidden Dimension, Anthropologist Edward Hall points out that people and animals have a sense of psychic space, which differs from race to race, from species to species. Americans waiting for a bus will automatically space themselves several feet apart; Arabs will cluster. In studies conducted on animals, Hall notes that a population crisis occurs when this sense of psychic space is invaded by overcrowding. The birth rate drops and animals die by the score—apparently from stress alone. Something equivalent, suggests Hall, could happen if modern society began to feel itself psychically overcrowded and overstressed.
In the U.S., signs of overstress are plentiful. Many Americans are suffering from a sense that they are invaded. Their neighbor's picture window looks in on theirs, the freeways are too crowded, the beaches are jammed. Says Science-Fiction Writer Ray Bradbury: "The best thing that could happen to New York would be to blow up every other block and plant the rubble with grass, turning it into gardens and pools so that people could get away from the mob."