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In law and government, the trend is toward more privacy. Recently the FCC banned the use of radio devices by private citizens to eavesdrop on others. The civil service abolished personality tests. The Internal Revenue Service, which had been caught bugging rooms where taxpayers conferred with lawyers, promised never to do it again. The Post Office walled up the peepholes through which its agents had been spying on postal employees in their locker rooms and toilets.
Legislators hope to get a regulatory law on the books before long. Attorney General Katzenbach favors a law that would allow supervised police wiretapping and bugging, but concedes it would be better to outlaw the practice altogether (except for national security purposes) than to continue the present confused situation. The wider dilemma is much harder to cope with: how to preserve privacy not only against the outer thrust of modern life but the inner fear of solitude.
Some seek physical solutions—better-planned cities, apartment buildings with thicker walls, atrium houses that turn their backs on the street, telephones that truly turn off. Others seek psychological solutions: psychiatric therapy to make up for the loss of privacy, or the secular equivalent of religious retreats.
Perhaps the only possible answer is that privacy must be fought for resolutely step by step: the door closed, the questionnaire ignored, the mass resisted, the electronic eye out-stared, the moment of silence stolen and cherished. That way does not lie loneliness or selfishness but the best, indeed the only way toward community. For only in the healing and sometimes illuminating moments of privacy can a man make himself truly fit to live with others.