"We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space, and protect. But we come to understand its dangers too: how it is used to oppress and exclude; what can befall those who come too close to secrets they were not meant to share; and the price of betrayal. "
Just so, and aptly enough, opens the book Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, a new study by Harvard Lecturer Sissela Bok, an authority on ethics and author of the 1979 book Lying. Scheduled to be published in February, the book is scholarly, cool, painstaking and analytical. Even if it is not likely to crowd out works of romance, sex, adventure and physical fitness, its subject could hardly be more fitting, at a time when the human urge for secrecy sometimes seems on the verge of getting out of hand.
Not that Sissela Bok wants to rid the world of secrecy. Far from it. She argues that the practice itself is neutral, only good or bad according to the purposes it serves. Says she: "While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive." It is benign, for instance, when it helps human intimacy or the casting of ballots in democracies.
Such hospitality toward secrecy is doubtless widely shared. To consider it evil in and of itself would be a considerable inconvenience to the human species. Everybody, after all, has things to hide; the mind, psychology teaches, even conceals information from itself. It is probably the very naturalness of concealment that tempts people to carry it to excess. There is, in any case, no end of secrecy.
No beginning is visible either. It is hidden in the remotest past. The tactic of camouflage that is instinctual among animals has been ornately elaborated in the human race. But no animal could mimic all the varities of mankind's surreptitiousness. Hidden or encoded information is the very mainspring of drama, suspense, excitement and adventure. The screening of information has always been indispensable to both war and peace, to murder and romance, to spying and spirituality. Extreme privacy plays a prominent role in the most ancient myths. Irascible Zeus, who intended to withhold the knowledge of fire from humans, was outraged when he learned that Prometheus had gone public with it. Zeus was so put off that he assembled a plethora of troubles and sent them down to mortals in the custody of Pandora. Everybody knows the calamity that resulted from the insistence on disclosure of Pandora's cargo.
Secrecy hardly fascinates mankind any more today than in the past, but it is certainly practiced more methodically.