Eavesdropping (4 page)

Exhibit 3
Overheard
, Jules Adolphe Goupil, 1839–83

There has never been a time when humans were free from evaluation. “Existence as a human being,” wrote social philosopher Edward Shils, “entails being under scrutiny.”
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The urge to eavesdrop is a natural disposition, one that evolved anciently, develops early, is expressed universally, confers a number of important benefits, and has a long history, dating back to the Middle Ages. But some people scrutinize more often, and differently, than others. Men, more than women, have trained their senses on the periphery of social space in order to vet strangers. Women, more than men, have monitored the social, sexual, and familial behavior of the members of their own social groups. Both men and women are unusually interested in sexual rivals.

Exhibit 4
Curiosity
, Eugene de Blaas, from the
Pears Annual
, Christmas 1892

As functional as it can be, eavesdropping is quirky. Information is received by someone to whom it was not intentionally or knowingly sent, and this occurs without the sender’s cooperation or knowledge. Moreover, seeing is an act of reception, but looking—the thing we do in order to see—can also be a signal. Others notice that we are looking at something, and because it is easy to follow one’s line of regard, they can usually tell what that thing is. Frequently, the object on the other end of our gaze is a face, one that is pointed in the direction of another face. We see people, who, like us, are watching people.

This tells us something that we need to know. In our species, as in the other primates, the individual who gets the most looks is usually the most important. The male ape that attracts the most attention usually holds the highest rank. He has powerful friends, and gets more of everything he wants. Much the same is true in our species.

Information has always been a precious resource—the psychologist George Miller once referred to humans as “informavores”, individuals who cannot survive without a steady diet of information.
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But “information” has an arid sound. We
are
informavores to be sure, but the information that is important here is not the coldly decontextualized sort that resides in libraries. It is the kind that radiates from our fellow humans, merely by their living. If we are to find out the answer to one of humankind’s most important questions—who we are—it is necessary to know what others are like. This evaluation tells us to what degree, and in what ways, we are unique or ordinary, and whether we are justified in thinking of ourselves as being, among other things, intelligent, kind, or generous.

To evaluate others in this way, we must ascertain what it is like
for them to be them
. This requires that we enter their patch, the little
piece of the world that is uniquely theirs. But we cannot really enter it. If we did, critical behaviors would change. Thus the only possibility, as Charles Baudelaire noted, is to see their world from a distance, or an obscure vantage point.

We investigators come equipped with powerful acquisitive mechanisms. This is particularly evident in the case of smell. True, we may be able to detect odors if they rush past the sensory receptors in the nose—under some circumstances, merely breathing is enough for this to happen. But if we wish to investigate, it may be necessary to
sniff
, and sniffing has its own brain mechanisms.
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Recently, a test of olfactory ability was developed that is based purely on sniffing. When the test is administered, people are asked to identify an odorant that is pumped into the nose through plastic tubes. A transducer measures changes in air pressure. Predictably, research shows that when the odor is identified, the participants
quit sniffing
.
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If we humans are outfitted with specialized means of ingesting socially relevant information, one might expect us to have specialized ways of
blocking
the flow of this information too, and we do. Our ancestors evolved at least one signal that prevents interception—the whisper. By design, whispered words do not travel well over the kinds of spaces that normally separate humans, so it seems safe to assume that this way of speaking has entered our repertoire just so we can foil eavesdroppers.
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Eavesdroppers are interested in people, to be sure, but they are also perfectly willing to explore the places where people have been. Assignations leave clues. Anthropologist Thomas Gregor studied the Mehinacu, a small tribe of Arawakan-speaking Indians occupying a village in Central Brazil. In his report, Gregor noted that the paths are sandy, and that every tribesman was known by his footprints. But other parts of Mehinacu anatomy are also familiar. “The print of heels or buttocks on the ground,” wrote Gregor, “may be enough to show that a couple stopped and had sexual relations alongside the path.”
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Heel and butt prints are clues to intimate deeds, but intimacy is also to be found in the person who is alone with himself. When socializing, people are under the review of their friends. They are likely to be acting to some extent—performing or playing a role. But the solitary individual appears without any psychological make-up. He is alone with himself, trying to please or share the moment with no one but himself.

Oddly, there is something worth protecting here. Milan Kundera once wrote about a man who suddenly discovers that this hidden self is under the review of another. The man is alone in his room at night. “Head lowered, he paces back and forth; from time to time he runs his hand through this hair. Then, suddenly, he realizes that the lights are on and he can be seen. Abruptly, he pulls the curtain.”
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What the man lost was the opportunity to spend an evening with his self, and all that self-companionship affords, from rest to reflection and creativity. He also lost the freedom to undress psychologically. Some years ago, this ritual was portrayed in an improvisational theater in San Francisco. Seemingly in preparation for bed, an actor took off his hat and placed it on a bureau, then removed his hair (a wig). The man took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose where the glasses had rubbed. Then he took off his nose and removed his teeth. Finally he disconnected his smile and lay down to sleep, a man now finally restored to his natural state.
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In many societies there is an etiquette to personal observation, and has been for some time. In the thirteenth century Robert de Blois wrote that whenever people passed by a private residence, they should “be careful never to look in and never to stop. To stand agape or idle in front of a person’s house is not wise or courteous behavior. There are things that one does often in private, in one’s own home, that one would not want others to see should someone
come to the door. And if you want to enter the house,” he wrote, “cough a little upon entering to alert those within to your arrival, either by this cough or by a word.”
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Cough to announce your presence? How about knocking? In the French Pyrenees the following century, Raymond Sicre was out checking his sheep one night when he passed the house of Jean-Pierre Amiel. There were lights burning, suggesting that Amiel had company. Sicre must either have felt intense curiosity or suspicion, for the next thing he did, remarkably, was
open the door
. Met by a rough curtain that blocked his vision, but not the sound, Sicre lingered for a while, taking in the conversation.

It was pretty tame stuff—they were talking about different recipes for bread—but Sicre was determined to find out who the talkers were. “I went to the corner of the house,” he was later to tell the village bishop, “and with my head I lifted up a part of the roof,” taking “good care not to damage the roof covering. I then saw two men sitting on a bench. They were facing the fire, with their backs to me. They had hoods over their heads and I could not see their faces.” Sicre then proceeded to repeat in minute detail everything the men said to each other.

It’s strange to read of a person who, fueled by curiosity, was so bold as to open the door to someone else’s house, and when that supplied too little information, proceeded—and
was able
—to pry up the roof of the house with his head. But the people of early fourteenth-century France saw little shame in the odd act of de-privatization, and architecture was on their side.

The etiquette of Robert de Blois notwithstanding, there were no rules against eavesdropping in centuries past. People readily admitted that they did it. They knew that minding
one’s own business
was the risky thing. If they needed to know about the nature of a relationship, or what a person was really like, or if someone who acted like a friend was really a foe, what was the alternative to eavesdropping? Polite observation picked up crumbs; consulting the subject or his associates was fraught with danger.

The information that is snatched, from unwilling—and unwitting—sources, is usually a higher grade than the material that is on offer. Eavesdroppers catch people with their guards down—sitting as they like to sit, dressed in a way that feels comfortable, behaving in ways that feel natural. Donations, by contrast, are contrived to please, or to meet a standard. Like “photo ops,” they may be designed to impress.

At first glance there appears to be a mismatch between the effort and the yield. In ordinary life, little happens from moment to moment, but imagination and fantasy may be enough to keep eavesdroppers at their task. When closed-circuit cameras were installed in the lobbies of New York City apartment buildings, residents discovered new ways of watching their neighbors. Inability to hear them seemed to make the experience even more exciting, since the viewers were free to generate their own theories about what was going on. “This,” said sociologist Peter Bearman, “may be one of the reasons that it is so much fun to watch essentially nothing.”
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In an intensely social species such as ours, an unposed being, caught in an asocial moment, is something of an oddity. The image beckons. Who is this person; what is he thinking? From what life experiences has he derived his bearing? He may be alone in a crowd, wearing a mask that he chose for the occasion. Is he looking around, pleasantly, hoping to make contact with the others? Is he preoccupied with his own thoughts, or attempting to distance himself from someone in the group?

When people are observed while interacting with others, additional questions arise. What is the nature of the relationships between the individuals that we see? Are they breaking up, or reconciling? Is she pensive or sad or playing hard to get? Does he really care about his lady friend, or is he merely feigning interest?

Even before the emergence of public and private selves—a late development in cultural history—there were boundaries between a person’s outer and inner lives. In order to earn a place in the tribe,
individuals had to socialize, and occasionally to perform. In time of high interdependency, some minimal level of social presence was required. But thought is private, and our distant ancestors did not act on every impulse. Like us, they kept some things to themselves.

Domestic walls realigned and deepened these basic divisions between the human selves, leaving residents with two major “versions”, one private, the other public. When they stepped out of their dwellings, they stepped into their public selves, assisted physically by clothes and other adornments, and psychologically by masks and social roles. When they came home, public personas were checked at the door.

In the competitive environment in which our species evolved, individuals kept certain kinds of information to themselves—even took steps to conceal it. If others got the information they needed, it was frequently because they were able to
snatch
it. These early humans were hunters and gatherers, and they were eminently qualified to hunt and gather social information as well as food. When language emerged, our ancestors were able to tell others about things they had seen. Biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar has even suggested that it may have been the need to pool social information that pressured individuals to communicate in more complex ways, and at some point, to speak. This more recent evolution—manifested in the capacity to “tell tales”—would become one of the most subtle yet powerful of all social weapons. To this day the offspring of eavesdropping—gossip and its siblings, rumor and scandal—have the capacity to change fortunes, tarnish reputations, and ruin lives.

Information is power, but one may not have to go to unusual extremes to acquire it. The socially
embedded
eavesdropper is in the presence of others. He must be visible if they are to be audible. Merely by
tuning in
, the embedded eavesdropper can gain access to
material that is unintended for his consumption. By adopting an “ultra-receptive posture,” as a detective did in a story by the French writer André Breton, the embedded eavesdropper puts himself “in a state of grace with chance.”
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