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New Statesman
14-05-2025
- General
- New Statesman
Modernity has killed the private life
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
Telegraph
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Privacy must be defended – this timely book proves it
I grew up in a polite, orderly middle-class suburb in the 1960s, where today's idea of belonging to a broader, vaguer 'community' was unheard of. Neighbourliness was confined to morning greetings and borrowing a pint of milk. What was paramount was 'minding your own business': behind your front door, your life was your own. We knew that 'an Englishman's home was his castle,' and only a search warrant could breach it. At the age of 12, however, I was sent away to boarding school and that demarcation was suddenly eliminated, without borders or appeal to justice. Sleeping in dormitories; no locks on any doors, even lavatories; prefects who acted like the Gestapo – this was a regime as totalitarian as anything imagined by George Orwell. Privacy has remained a sensitive issue to me ever since: we would all agree that the domestic freedom of the family and the individual from the state's gaze is the root of our liberties. But it also competes with equally urgent injunctions to be open and 'transparent': a right to hide coexists with a duty to expose and live by the truth. As a journalist and biographer, an essential aspect of my job is uncovering secrets and honouring facts, whatever their source; but as a citizen, I cherish my freedom within the boundaries of my own dwelling to say what I like and do what I like with myself – to hell with what anyone else might think. This is not a neat fit. Meanwhile we have Freedom of Information and Data Protection Acts that contradict each other in proposing a right to know and a right not to be known. Exchanges leaked from WhatsApp group chats incriminate and embarrass politicians. CCTV, mobile phones and computerised algorithms track our actions and movements in minute detail, holding them up to judgment. Anyone with a reputation is hostage to thought police: Boris and Carrie Johnson have a screaming row in their flat and the world gloats and sneers after neighbours turn nosey parkers (or whistleblowers); Philip Larkin is 'cancelled' for self-mocking satirical jests made in letters to Kingsley Amis that flout the modern shibboleths of racism and sexism. A militant puritanism increasingly holds us to public account for our private opinions. This new book by cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins boldly surveys this foggy and contested territory. She isn't the first to do so – intellectual heavyweights such as Jürgen Habermas and Philippe Ariès have preceded her, but her style and approach is lighter in manner than theirs. Her research is unimpeachable nonetheless. Lucid and elegant in style, Strangers and Intimates is sweetly reasonable and pleasantly readable – Jenkins respects all sides of an argument or situation without tub-thumping or special pleading. Her conclusion that 'the private realm must be validated and respected as equal to the public' may seem tame and question-begging, but the evidence she offers should set alarm bells ringing. The focus of the book is largely British, with later chapters embracing American material, moving in strict chronology and sometimes sounding like a whistlestop A-level history course as it passes from curbs on ancient Athenian democracy through to the Online Safety Act of 2023. Mysteriously, however, the hotly debated topics of tabloid intrusion into the Royal family and the shenanigans of show-business celebrities – often considered fair game, inasmuch as they feed the same publicity machine that they complain about – are barely mentioned. The Sussexes for instance, appear only as a perfunctory starting point; the hoo-ha over the tabloids' phone-tapping doesn't feature at all. Did Jenkins fear legal redress? It was during the Reformation that the debates began to intensify, as the idea of personal conscience consolidated theologically. 'I do not seek a window into men's souls' insisted Elizabeth I, a policy developed into law by Edward Coke and seeding a code of measures culminating in the Toleration Act of 1689. Come the Victorian obsession with 'the inviolable sanctity of the household hearth' and this became almost a fetish, extending into privately addressed correspondence. Jenkins provides a particularly fascinating account of the controversy surrounding the Home Office's clandestine opening of letters to and from the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini. A turning point in the modern concept of privacy was an article published in 1890 by the American jurists Samuel D Warren and Louis D Brandeis, aimed at filling a gap in the Constitution by asserting that those without a public role had 'a right to be left alone', embracing a further right 'to control how their thoughts, sentiments and emotions were published'. This would offer the protection of anonymity for the subjects of numerous sociological surveys that ensued in the 20th century, starting with Robert and Helen Lynd's groundbreaking study, Middletown – a 'peep through the keyhole' at life in American towns – and Alfred Kinsey's sensational reports into national sexual behaviour. In the 1960s, the tables turned. Privacy became associated with hypocrisy, as the revolutionary young took to a rollercoaster of liberation and argued that we should come out of our closets and let it all hang out, with psychiatry endorsing the view that one's personal life should be completely open and released from repressive influence. At the same time, there was an often paranoid fascination with the technology of bugging and wiretapping, dramatised in a rush of spy movies and culminating in the Watergate scandal. Related anxieties about government harvesting and hoarding information about individuals on computers can be traced back to the American proposal for a National Data Base in the mid 1960s and surfaced again in Cambridge Analytica's dubious role in the American election of 2016. But what has probably eroded privacy more than anything else is the explosion in popularity of fly-on-the-wall 'reality' television, a phenomenon that was born in 1973 with An American Family, a PBS show observing the Louds of Santa Barbara from within their own home – a concept immediately imitated by the BBC with The Family and the Wilkinses of Reading. These showed only highlights of what was recorded: a development that followed 22 years later was Jennifer Ringley's live and unedited streaming of everything in her life, including sexual activity, on a webcam. This would inspire Endemol to produce Big Brother and all its lamentably voyeuristic spin-offs dedicated to making what was private public. A lot here gives one pause for thought, if not unease, and Jenkins is justifiably of the view that 'the private realm is now under assault' from both 'indifference' and 'a growing suspicion of privacy itself'. For evidence of the latter one has only to look at measures approved over the last decade by the SNP-dominated Scottish parliament. The Named Persons Act, struck down by the Supreme Court in 2019, 'safeguarded' the welfare of every child by granting them access to an individual whose authority would effectively override that of their parents. In 2021 the Hate Crime and Public Order Act criminalised hate speech within one's own home, theoretically making chance remarks at a dinner party or in the course of a marital argument, subject to as much as seven years' imprisonment. In its most outspoken passages, Tiffany Jenkins's book is a potent defence against such legislation and a valuable call to defend privacy as something more than what one cynical journalist described as 'the space bad people need to do bad things in'.
