Psst! The Human Brain Is Wired For Gossip

FAULKNER did not at all mind speaking out about the world in which he lived. At one time or another he complained of many features of our American life style: of our haste, of our activism—though we all said that we approved of culture, we couldn’t find the time to read a book or listen to music or look at a picture—of our commercialism, of business so often pursued merely for the sake of business, of our tendency to reduce nearly all human relations to the cash nexus, of our huckstering salesmanship, and of the value we placed on respectability. One of the characters in “The Wild Palms,” Harry Wilbourne, makes a notable comment on the subject of respectability. He tells a friend that it is idleness that breeds all of America’s real virtues, virtues such as “contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone,” whereas it is such prime virtues as thrift and independence that breed all the special modern vices, which are “fanaticism, smugness, meddling, fear, and worst of all, respectability.”
Closely allied to this fear of what your neighbors may think of you is something that sounds like its direct opposite: your own nagging desire to know the worst about your neighbor— the wish to find out all about his private life—and a willingness, if necessary, to violate his privacy.
The vices I have named are precisely those that any artist might be expected to reprehend. Artists tend to be unconventional, even bohemian. Naturally, they decry the moral furniture of a typical bourgeois household: a commercial ethic, an urge to keep up with the Joneses, an undue regard for respectability, an itch to pry into our neighbor’s private life, and a concern to sell oneself to the public, to have a good “image,” rather than to be oneself.
The modern vice that most outraged Faulkner, however, was the violation of one’s private life. Its enormity had been brought home to him by attempted violations of his own privacy. These attempts came to a head in 1953 with the publication in Life Magazine of “The Private World of William Faulkner.” Though Faulkner had begged the editors of Life to desist, they could not be persuaded to leave him alone. Faulkner took the matter sufficiently to heart to devote to it one of his rare full-dress essays. It bears the title: “On Privacy.” It constitutes his most elaborate and considered attack on the value system of contemporary America.