A news story I read recently about proposed new rules about when law enforcement agenices need to obtain warrants (and when they don’t) quoted a government official making the claim, “Privacy is only a recent invention,” implying that it can’t be that important since much of human history has existed without the notion of legally enforced restrictions on what information about you is public, and what is not.

Someone in the crowd apparently shouted out,”So is sanitation!” Sanitation is clearly something most of us do not want to live without. In other words, going back to the old days isn’t always a good plan.

I have a problem with the original statement, however. I mean, at least one of the lessons to draw from the old testament story of David and Bathsheba (and Bathsheaba’s ill-fated husband, Uriah the Hittite) is that Kings should not go about peering into the bathing chambers of other men’s wives.

I know, that isn’t what the official quoted above meant, but in a more important sense it is. A great deal of how any society works is an implicit agreement between us all to look the other way about some aspects of each other’s lives. And when we can’t, to pretend we don’t know some things about each other. I’ve known more than one mother, for instance, who admonished their children, “There are some details a Mother has a right to be spared.” In other words, part of the process of becoming an independent, functional adult is to experiment, make some mistakes, and learn from them on your own. And Mom really doesn’t want to know how you figured out what your favorite way to kiss is, for instance.

I wound up thinking about this a lot this weekend beginning with a moment Saturday when Michael and I were still laying about in bed. We had a fairly small number of things to do, and have been feeling stressed and over-busy, so lazing much of the day away seemed a good idea.

So there we were, overhearing some conversations outside, and finding ourselves giggling at some things. Things that weren’t particularly private or personal, and probably not any topics that would have changed if we had walked outside. But we were trying not to giggle too loudly because it could be taken wrong. And it wasn’t about us.

That evening, one of our neighbors, a guy in his mid twenties whose studio is directly below our bedrooms, was playing his electric guitar. He does that a lot. He has asked us to let him know if it disturbs us. It never has (though when he’s trying to learn a new lick, I wind up grabbing my head phones because the repitition is a bit maddening). That night his playing was a louder than usual. And also a bit wilder. I think I even observed to Michael that it sounded angry.

Sunday, we found out his mother had died the previous morning. Even weirder, we found out that the odd lady who had recently moved in with another neighbor was the mother in question. This is the neighbor whose wife recently died. So we had had this rather odd situation of a woman moving in with the alcoholic neighbor of her son, just because he happened to be nearby, and because the neighbor was desperate for a roommate.

I have already shared more details than are mine to share. But that’s what we humans do. We learn things about each other and we share them, whether the people we share them with are involved or not. Sometimes we pretend we didn’t share them. Whether we admit we know some details or not, we also make decisions on how we interact with people based on those details. Even when we believe it was wrong for us to find out in the first place.

It’s one thing if we decide not to be as friendly with the neighbor we hear screaming obscenities at his housemates at odd hours of the night. It is another thing, entirely, if we make hiring and firing decisions based on things we learn while snooping around the pages of their facebook friends. Or if we make search, seizure, and arrest decisions based on searching text message streams for keywords. Or other details that technologies have made it a bit too easy to collect. And often much less accurately than we are led to believe.

In the end, it’s just gossip. And that has been around for as long as there has been language.