Modernity has killed the private life

New Statesman​

14-05-2025

Illustration by Carlo Giamberresi
Can any man be a hero to his search engine? We confide to Google our anxieties and confusions so readily, so obligingly, that it is no surprise that its algorithms may know us better than we know ourselves. Should we be so trusting? Asked that question, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, replied with an answer that should chill the blood of any liberal: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.'
Schmidt was unwittingly echoing the menacing words of the 17th-century English preacher who insisted that: 'The murderer and the adulterer are alike desirous of privacy.' Privacy, some feminists have insisted, is equally the last redoubt of the wife-beater. A space set out from public view, and thus from public accountability, wrote the radical legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, 'serves male supremacy'. The tabloid reporter Paul McMullan put it even more pithily: 'Privacy is for paedos.'
Really? Tiffany Jenkins's stimulating history Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life is not, despite what its subtitle suggests, a history of private life itself. That would, for obvious reasons, be a difficult book to write. It is, rather, a history of the many competing ideas of private life and its value that we might assemble from the past.
It is, as Jenkins nicely puts it, 'neither 'natural' nor universal to have a private life'. That is not to deny that 'all societies draw a line somewhere to distinguish between what is open to view and what takes place in private'. But they do not all draw that line in the same place. Defecation and sex tend to fall on the private side of that line, but there are (alas) exceptions even to that supposed universal.
Societies through history have managed to do without our ideas of a private sphere. What constitutes for us – now and around here – the value of privacy is, as Jenkins puts it, 'a hard-won, historically contingent achievement'. Hard-won but always at risk of being diluted. Privacy has, throughout its long history, had formidable rivals: the competing values of openness and authenticity. Jenkins's history raises two fascinating questions: How did our ideas of privacy come to be? What (and whom) are they for? Why (if at all) do we need them?
Much of Strangers and Intimates is devoted to a brisk intellectual history of the West since the Reformation. We start, appropriately enough, with the insistence of Martin Luther and – curious bedfellow – Thomas More on the primacy of the individual conscience: My body you may torture, but my beliefs remain my own. Descartes, with his influential dualism of mind and body, is surprisingly absent from the story, but that gives Jenkins space to champion such figures as the Elizabethan judge Sir Edward Coke, who maintained in an age of public conformity that 'No man ecclesiastical or temporal shall be examined upon secret thoughts of his heart.'
Abstract ideas of privacy had tangible effects – for instance, on the architecture and interior design of houses. By the 18th century, it was possible for James Boswell to pursue (and write frankly of) casual sexual encounters without fear of the public shamings once risked by fornicators. In the writings of Adam Smith and David Hume, even the most public of virtues had their foundations in the private sentiments. As the practice of letter-writing exploded, we needed new norms to force the Post Office (and our neighbours) to respect the confidentiality of personal communications. 'The sealed letter,' Jenkins writes, 'became a symbol of a self, shielded yet seeking connection.'
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
The 19th century saw the development of the Victorian home ideal – of walls that were 'as much defensive battlements as they were sanctuaries' – as well as its antithesis in radical experiments in communal living. Early feminists, including such male writers as John Stuart Mill, wrestled with the tensions in their thought: privacy was both essential for the sort of liberty they espoused and also the greatest threat to the freedom and security of house-bound women.
Virginia Woolf's insistence on 'a room of one's own' was one way to square the circle, by claiming for women the right not just to a private space but to an autonomous one. The room for which Woolf clamoured was a condition not just of non-interference but of imagination and creativity.
The influence of Freudian psychology was one of many 20th-century threats to the evolving idea of privacy. Under the psychoanalyst's unblushing scrutiny, 'No part of the inner life was beyond interrogation.' The counterculture of the 1960s, and the political movements that emerged from them, revived romantic ideals of authenticity and self-expression, which came with the corresponding incitement (and pressure) to disclose facts about oneself one might prefer to hold back. The feminist insistence that 'the personal is political' did much to expose the violence that lurked behind closed doors. But politicising the personal risked eroding some of what was valuable about the private sphere, even – especially – for women.
The important case of Griswold vs Connecticut established a constitutional 'right to privacy' in the United States. One's interests in having a protected sphere, not open to public scrutiny, now placed others – fellow citizens as well as state institutions – under a duty not to pry. But that duty, like other duties with which the American courts have saddled the state, rested on the goodwill and restraint of the other branches of government and of individual citizens, qualities that could not be counted on.
That brings Jenkins to (more or less) the present day. Our social media encourages perverse forms of self-surveillance. Even childhoods are now lived in the public glare, and not only for the ill-starred children of celebrities. We waive our rights to privacy for what can seem, on reflection, trivial benefits. The precious gains of the last few centuries are at risk of being frittered away for next to nothing: a few more followers, a few minutes of wi-fi access. The case for privacy, for the private life, has to be made explicitly to a society that has forgotten why such things might matter.
In her altogether too-short final chapter, Jenkins begins to make that case. When and why did we forget the lessons of Orwell and Huxley, the last century's most influential prophets of dystopia? How, after centuries of incremental liberal advance, did we end up in a world where the CEO of Google and a tabloid editor ended up unwittingly echoing the words of a censorious clergyman? The answer may lie in part where it always does, in the development of technologies that enable (in the literal sense) publication and self-exposure with an unprecedented ease.
Once openness rather than reserve becomes again our default condition, it becomes harder to maintain a sense of what distinguishes a seemly curiosity from prurience. To resist the enticements of social media and keep some things resolutely offline, to say with conviction that some things are none of anybody else's business, takes guts, bloody-mindedness and the willingness to be thought 'old-fashioned, quaint, even odd'. But more of us, Jenkins asserts, should risk those judgements.
Parenthood, friendship and (above all) romantic love are no longer the same thing when they are performed for a social media audience. Sunlight, we are told, is the best disinfectant. Yet the sunlight that is social media is not the gentle light of an English spring but the blazing sun of the tropics: it darkens, it burns, it defaces and it destroys. It denies us many things we all need: a space in which to make tasteless jokes to people whom we trust to know we don't mean them (or forgive us if we do). As the sociologist Erving Goffman put it, even so public a person as an actor could not survive without a space backstage where he might take off his mask and 'be himself', relieved however briefly of the demands of performance and conformity.
I would happily have read Jenkins going on in this vein at much greater length than she does. Her book may be evidence of a welcome turn in our discourse, one also represented by the American political philosopher Robert B Talisse's recent monograph Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance. Talisse is pained by the model of political involvement that sees the mass public protest as the only image of 'what democracy looks like'. Democracy, as he conceives of it, calls equally for 'occasions where one can engage in solitary reflection on civic matters' in settings that are 'detached from the fray of partisan political struggles'. Solitude, far from being an occasion for withdrawal from politics, may itself be a requirement of 'responsible democratic citizenship'.
A prophetic 1998 essay by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, 'Concealment and Exposure', had anticipated, when such tendencies were first visible, how the growing scepticism directed at the idea of a protected private sphere might develop into something pathological. 'There is,' Nagel wrote, 'much more going on inside us all the time than we are willing to express, and civilization would be impossible if we could all read each other's minds.'
Our culture, like all cultures, has a justified place among its values for such things as honesty, sincerity, earnestness and authenticity. Curiosity, even about other people, can be motivated by nothing more ignoble than a simple desire for truth. But to what truths about other people have we a right? And if reticence can sometimes be hard to distinguish from shiftiness, the same is true of the relation between inquisitiveness and prurience, between honesty and what we now call 'oversharing'. Jenkins's history does not deny the difficulty in drawing these lines; it does, nevertheless, make it amply clear how much we would lose if we ceased to draw these lines at all.
Nikhil Krishnan is the author of 'A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60' (Profile)
Strangers and Intimates: The rise and fall of private life
Tiffany Jenkins
Pan Macmillan, 464pp, £19
[See more: The lost boys of North London]
Related