Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Keeping Secrets

In a culture that values openness and honesty what are we to make of secrets? How important is it to keep secrets? Compared, for example, with the habit of sharing everything about your life with your 2, 439 closest friends on Facebook. Do you have a right to divulge a secret told to you in confidence? Do  you have a right to break faith with someone who has shared an intimate detail of his life? When you agree to keep a secret, can you ever break the promise?

If you discover that your neighbor's wife is cheating on your neighbor, should you tell him? Surely, it depends on whether said wife has confided in you or whether you have witnessed her casual encounter? If you discover that your friend's teenage child is engaged in dangerous activities, hanging out with gang members, trafficking drugs... should you tell your friend? Should you tell even if you learned about it from the boy himself and he asked you not to tell? In that case you will probably think that it is right to tell. He is a juvenile and he is engaged in potentially life altering dangerous activities.

In all cases, deciding whether to keep a secret is complex, not simple.

In an age of oversharing, what should we make of the fact, well know to everyone, that the worst thing a criminal can do is: to snitch, to betray a secret, to fail to keep a confidence. You might be thinking that we should not base our moral principles on the behavior of criminal gang members, but, under the circumstances such groups have an acute understanding of what allows a group to cohere. You might say that it’s life or death. You might say that it's the difference between freedom and jail. Surely, criminal conspirators value discretion because the alternatives are so dire.

On the other hand, the secrets do constitute a conspiracy. What if the district attorney offers you a new life in a new state with a new name... if only you tell what you know? In that case, the moral requirement to keep secrets seems to yield, not so much to the imperative of keeping you out of prison, but to the imperative of being a good citizen.

Beyond the realm of personal familial secrets, we also have trade secrets, company secrets and national security secrets. They are often closely held. If you betray them you will soon find yourself either without a job or in jail.

Or else, consider this. When two or more people share a life, when they are married or living together, they know things about each other that are intimate and personal. You cannot share a life if you do not. They may be highly embarrassing personal habits or they may be innocuous habits that are only indulged at home. In all cases, if you want to continue to live together, if you want to live in conjugal harmony, you do best not to betray such secrets. If you do so and if it gets back to your cohabitant, you will have broken the bonds of trust. Without such bonds your living arrangement is likely to become fraught with drama.

At a time when we have all been told, over and over again, that good relationships are based on shared feelings, especially on empathy, it is useful to redirect our thinking to a simpler and clearer point: good intimate relationships involve sharing secrets, and keeping them in trust. Secrets are not feelings. They are pieces of information. If your husband fails to put his dirty socks in the hamper, it is a fact, not a feeling. If you share it you are betraying his trust. Even on so trivial a matter. Especially on a trivial matter. If you cannot keep an innocuous secret, why should anyone expect you to  keep an important secret?

There is nothing simple or easy about this issue. I imagine that the therapy culture invites us to overshare because it is easier to blurt it all out than to reflect on what we should or should not share with whom when and where. It takes moral judgment to know when it might be permissible to divulge a secret. Often, there are no really good answers. You find yourself deciding between two difficult options, bad and more bad.

Elizabeth Bernstein raises the issue in her Wall Street Journal Bonds column. She recounts the following event: her sister Rebecca was going to have a breast cancer biopsy and wanted her to come to be with her. Rebecca insisted that Elizabeth not share the information with other family members. She did not want to subject them to potentially unnecessary worry.

So, Bernstein was faced with a moral dilemma? Should she or should she not tell? She chose to keep the confidence and not to tell. Fair enough. Most of us would have done the same thing. We believe that it was the right thing to do. She respected her sister’s wishes and kept her word. And yet, Rebecca herself broke down and told other family members, adding that only Elizabeth knew.

Here is what happens:

Two days later, while I was sitting in Rebecca’s living room, I got a call from my mother. My sister, overwhelmed with worry, had told her about the biopsy she’d asked me to keep secret, and my mom was angry with me for preventing the rest of the family from supporting Rebecca. Then my other sister, the gynecologist, called, hurt that I didn’t seem to value her expertise. Too late, I realized that in keeping Rebecca’s secret, I might have betrayed others. It took me almost a week to get back into everyone’s good graces. By then, we’d learned that the biopsy, thankfully, was negative.

For keeping a secret Bernstein was accused of depriving the rest of the family of the opportunity to support her sister. By keeping faith with one sister she offended several other family members, some of whom were physicians.

She made a moral judgment. She could not split the difference and tell part of the secret. She had to choose and she chose to keep her word to her sister. Thus, she offended some family members while maintaining her relationship with her sister. 

Interestingly, the offended family members have forgotten the incident, doubtless having come to understand the importance of bonds of trust. Her sister, however, maintains that Elizabeth did the right thing… because if she hadn’t she would no longer have been able to confide in her.

Now, my family has forgotten this incident. But Rebecca hasn’t. When I brought it up recently she was adamant that I had done the right thing.

“If you’d told people what I asked you not to, I wouldn’t have been able to trust you again,” she says.


cj said...

Holding a confidence close, barring illegality, is honorable. In Ms. Bernstein's case, she agreed to respect her sisters wishes, regardless of the expertise of others. It was up to her sister to divulge such personal information. The family should respect what Elizabeth did in honoring her sisters wishes not be angry at her for failing to break a promised confidence.

Ares Olympus said...

The word "secret" itself is tricky, and there ought to be some difference between being told "Don't tell anyone" versus general sharing where you have no evidence of a need for privacy. I don't know if I've ever needed to break a specific directive, while a general phrase "Don't talk about me behind my back" is a more troublesome request since it suggests nothing can be shared at all. That request made me by one friend made me think harder about my own sense of shame. Mostly I've decided to override it and trust people who care about me to share whatever they think is important, and not gossip in an unkind way, or if they do, it's more about them than me.