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Earlier this year, breaches of security protocol by US politicians on the private messaging app Signal, in which information about military strikes in Yemen was shared with family members in one group and with the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine in another, garnered global attention — and led to the firing of national security adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy.
This potentially catastrophic episode highlighted not just the recklessness of members of the US administration but also the blurring of public and private spheres.
That boundaries around personal lives are no longer tightly defined is the subject of Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life, a new book by cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins, whose previous work includes Keeping Their Marbles: How Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums . . . and Why They Should Stay There. Here, she makes an impassioned argument that “the private realm is now under assault from both indifference — where private matters are seen as no different from public ones — and from a growing suspicion of privacy itself. We are revisiting an era when the seventeenth-century adage ‘Do nothing publicly that you wouldn’t do privately’ and the observation ‘Privacy is for adulterers and murderers’ resonate strongly.”
This is evident in Big Tech’s invasion of our private lives, picking up information about our likes and dislikes, our viewing and shopping habits. Jenkins also explores the state policing of private views, highlighting the 2023 case of Michael Chadwell, a retired police officer who sent a racist joke to his former colleagues which ended in him and others being found guilty under the Communications Act and receiving a suspended sentence. Then there is the debate over the extent to which celebrities should expect a personal life when the public feel a sense of ownership over their careers. Jenkins cites as evidence what Rupert Bell, TalkTV’s royal correspondent, said of Prince Harry: “If he really wants his privacy, then surely he must shut up!” (This was during coverage of the phone hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers, which resulted in a partial victory for the prince.)
So too, the modern demand for authenticity which holds that people should be their true selves in the workplace, as if there should be no distinction between the personality they show at home, ticking off a teenager for not emptying the dishwasher, and the one pitching in the boardroom.
It is a far-reaching — occasionally dizzying — book, primarily looking at the UK, though with comparisons to Europe and the US, and covering terrain from philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill to writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf, as well as huge political, religious and technological changes.
“It’s neither ‘natural’ nor universal to have a private life,” Jenkins writes. “Neither fixed in definition nor eternal in form”, the meaning attached to private life has fluctuated. In ancient Athens, for example, men had a strict division between private (“oikos”, the home and family) and public (“polis”) life. “Everything essential to life’s maintenance and reproduction — work, economics, sex, eating, cooking, birth, death — was hidden from public view.” Yet in other eras, Jenkins shows, such as “medieval Europe . . . the two spheres had blurred into one”.
Her investigation into the significance of a private life really starts at a “critical juncture” after the 16th-century Reformation “that tore Europe apart for 130 years”, when “individuals from all across society” pursued their different Christian faiths in private.
Jenkins deploys an array of lively anecdotes to make her case, such as the 1970s shift to openness about previously private details demonstrated by Betty Ford, wife of President Gerald Ford. Despite political advisers counselling against it, Betty went public about her breast cancer and talked on television about a radical mastectomy, prompting a rise in the couple’s popularity. She continued to make a virtue of being candid about health and family matters, a pioneer of the celebrity interviewee laying their soul bare.
Jenkins’ writing is most compelling when she tackles contemporary issues, such as the case of Cambridge Analytica, which she notes “committed a privacy violation” by mining personal data from millions of Facebook profiles. She argues that claims of its consequences (swinging Brexit and Trump’s 2016 win) are over-reach: “The idea that . . . some digital Svengali tells people how to vote, is highly questionable.” Rather, she argues that it is “just one example in a long history of elite anxieties about the masses being influenced by technology” and reinforces a “cynical view of human nature that portrays individuals as easily influenced [and fuels] a broader distrust of private life itself, suggesting that ordinary people cannot be trusted with their private decisions”.
The private space, she concludes, is valuable and must be defended. Not just because it is a hidden stage for intimate relations, and respite from the world outside, but because it is a place to arrange our ideas, to practise our speech and behaviour, so that we can deliver a more vigorous and thoughtful contribution to the public arena.
Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life by Tiffany Jenkins Picador £20/Pan Macmillan $28.99, 464 pages
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