Privacy

Extract

I am associating Privacy with “Do not disturb, I want to be left alone”. On the face of it, this is an egoistical anti-social standpoint. But is there anything that can be said for being anti-community? In this paper, for the sake of argument, I align myself with this attitude because from this position I can make certain observations and raise questions related to the other.

Whether we like it or not, the mood of the day favours privacy rather than community. Individual privacy is more and more sought and jealously guarded.For many people community is bad news. It evokes a sense of restriction and narrowness rather than openness, conflict rather than harmony .One has only to think of, Islamic community, Serbian community, Protestant community, Roman Catholic community, David Koresh’s community at Waco, the European Community—all these give out negative signals. Even ‘basic community’ has echoes of an in-group and can be seen as a form of protest or elitism. Sometimes it seems as if the only communities that have any popular appeal are fictional ones like Ambridge or Coronation Street. These are fanciful, idealistic creations, real life is much more grim. Survival depends on individual effort. This rejection of community is often the result of its failure to satisfy our needs or its degeneration into such positions as extreme nationalism. But a denial of community often leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness. We can note that both the 1991 General Household Survey of the U.K. (published in 1993 and the recent Report into European Lifestyles by MINTEL draw attention to the fact that over a quarter of all British homes are single person households and about 14% of households are people living alone.