"Privacy" in the 18th Century: An instance of ignorance of the Evolution of Language

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In a blog post from February this year, Thom Hartmann puts forward the accusation that it serves the Conservative cause for the population to be ignorant of history.  Why would the GOP (for example) want people to be clueless?

It is a long and complicated argument, but at least in one area, he appears to have a point: the place of privacy among the liberties listed in the Constitution.

Here's the story.  First of all, why is the concept of privacy so pivotal, from a legal point of view?  It so happens that some rulings of the supreme court, both in 1965 and more recently a decade or so ago, it turned out that  the defense of the search of the bedroom of a couple in which some evidence had been gathered had been challenged as illegal.  Now, by modern standards, of course, a forced entry into a bedroom would be considered an outrageous invasion of privacy.  But some members of the Court argued that there was nothing in the Declaration of Rights about the right to privacy.  (Needless to say, it was a conservative justice who protested the invocation of the concept of a right to privacy, in 1965, as well as Justice Clarence Thomas more recently.)

Thom Hartmann argues that the use of the word privacy in the modern sense was only a 19^th century notion, traced back perhaps to the invention of modern indoor plumbing equipment.  The earlier meaning of privacy was to use the bathroom.  Hartmann argues that the right to use the bathroom has never been in question, and so the Right to Privacy has never been deemed necessary to enshrine in the constitution (as well as other rights, such as the right to breathe, and so on, which might really come into play very soon).  The closest Right that would have a bearing to the modern concept of privacy would be, he says, the Right to Liberty.  Liberty subsumed privacy.  If people were ignorant of history to the extent of not realizing the subtleties of the use of the term privacy, even a Supreme Court justice could either mislead the court, or willfully deceive the court into believing that no right to privacy was contained in the Constitution, or any of its amendments.

To go further, Harmann argues that human beings had rights regardless of whether they were present in the Constitution, simply by virtue of being human beings.  It is not the Constitution, he says, that grants those rights; the Constitution simply lists certain ones that might not have been recognized, in order to limit the powers of the Government.  Only a religion, or a despot grants rights.  In a Republic no one's rights are at anyone else's disposal.  So we have many more rights than are listed in the Constitution; they are simply listed there for easy reference, and to set out how far the government can go.

A fascinating illustration of the power of education is given in a letter of Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, quoted in the blog post:  "And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people."  Jefferson gives a beautifully reasoned, easy-to-follow analysis of the question and its solution, which I as usual leave you to read fully; paraphrasing the writing of the founding fathers does no service to my readers.  Read it for yourself.

Common sense is certainly good; but the record of the application of the common sense by the wise men of the past is better, and that is part of our history.

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