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Secrecy is destined to persist as part of mankind's world in all of its political forms. Even though most often associated with deceit, acts of concealment can be both benign and indispensable to the protection of personal and public values. Secrecy may not be privacy by definition, but it is certainly essential to it. In totalitarian states, where Big Brother's eye is everywhere, privacy can be had only by the most meticulous practice of evasion and concealment. But throughout human history, people have relied on silence to safeguard the sacred as well as the intimate and personal.
Ultimately, the very nature of things is densely veiled. If religion arose to celebrate ineffable mysteries, science sprang into life to solve them. So it is science that has shown the universe to be an almost onion-like construct of secrets, with ever more of them lying under the layers peeled away. Atomic theory explained everything—until it was found that every atom contained entire worlds of other inscrutable particles that even changed their nature upon being observed. Today the quark is hotly pursued. When caught and analyzed, will it turn out to be the ultimate answer to the ultimate secrets of matter? Not unless the dossier tells when the quark happened to come into being and out of what materials and by what power.
To imagine any general reduction in human secrecy is intriguing but oddly difficult. It is not possible to envision a world from which all secrecy has gone. Some people have tried. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre felt that "transparency" should eventually prevail in human affairs and claimed to be able to imagine a time when people would "keep secrets from no one." Still, anybody contemplating humanity as it is must wonder whether, in a thoroughly transparent world, the species would not suffer spiritual anemia and perhaps terminal boredom. It may be diverting to speculate about the future of secrecy, but it can only be frustrating in the end. The future is the biggest secret of all.
—By Frank Trippett