Question
Is the deeply held notion of individual privacy a recently developed value?
Answer
Individualism and individual privacy are not the same thing. I suspect confusing the two is what is motivating the question.
Individual privacy has always been part of the species, and is not a particularly Western mode of behavior. Some behaviors have always been private (going to the toilet, sex), others have been/are private in some cultures and public in others (prayer, eating, sleeping, feelings, judgments of others). Many things are private in the West that are not in the East, and vice versa. There is also the role of economics (privacy is quite an expensive luxury where homes are expensive and the outside environment is too harsh to wander off alone to seek solitude).
As an old example, one of those unreliable old Greek travelogues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per... I think, or Megasthenes, can't recall) noted that Indians retreat to eat alone in privacy, which surprised the Greeks, to whom eating was a communal practice (it is not clear what Indian community they encountered, but adult men eating alone is a practice in some communities even today).
Individualism on the other hand, the idea of the individual as an autonomous political, financial, social and cultural actor, is probably Western in origin, and relatively late on the scene (probably around 1100 or so in Northern Europe). The argument for a late emergence of individualism is sketched out in Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order (one of my favorite recent reads). The reasons are complicated, having to do with the peculiar struggles between the Church, monarchies, nobility, etc. It is still an uncomfortable idea outside the West.
Individual privacy has always been part of the species, and is not a particularly Western mode of behavior. Some behaviors have always been private (going to the toilet, sex), others have been/are private in some cultures and public in others (prayer, eating, sleeping, feelings, judgments of others). Many things are private in the West that are not in the East, and vice versa. There is also the role of economics (privacy is quite an expensive luxury where homes are expensive and the outside environment is too harsh to wander off alone to seek solitude).
As an old example, one of those unreliable old Greek travelogues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per... I think, or Megasthenes, can't recall) noted that Indians retreat to eat alone in privacy, which surprised the Greeks, to whom eating was a communal practice (it is not clear what Indian community they encountered, but adult men eating alone is a practice in some communities even today).
Individualism on the other hand, the idea of the individual as an autonomous political, financial, social and cultural actor, is probably Western in origin, and relatively late on the scene (probably around 1100 or so in Northern Europe). The argument for a late emergence of individualism is sketched out in Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order (one of my favorite recent reads). The reasons are complicated, having to do with the peculiar struggles between the Church, monarchies, nobility, etc. It is still an uncomfortable idea outside the West.