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Remember the one about the software CEO, the head of HR and the Jumbotron camera?
Earlier this year, Andy Byron, then CEO of the tech company Astronomer, and its then head of human resources, Kristin Cabot, were spotted cuddling by the stadium’s “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert. Once the baleful light of the Jumbotron alighted upon them, they physically detached from one another with all the grace and subtlety of a scalded cat. It emerged that they were married, but not to one another.
The story is back in the news this week because Cabot has given a series of interviews about the incident, revealing that she was the target of death threats, including letters to her home, that strangers still shout profanities to her on the street and that she is still out of work.
The whole affair is illustrative of the joys and the horror of the modern world. The joy is that what once might have been the subject of funny anecdotes among a handful of people can now be entertainment for the masses. The horror is that large numbers of people are incapable of just laughing and moving on. Social media has created a global village, but the village in question has more in common with the small Salem community in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible than it does with the cosy and forgiving one in the coming-of-age TV drama Gilmore Girls.
The era of social media has seen many defeats for liberalism in the political sphere. But more importantly, and more corrosively, it has seen a retreat for liberalism in the social sphere, as well.
The online and real-life harassment has continued despite the fact that Cabot has said she and Byron were not having an affair, that both were separated from their partners at the time and that it was the potential beginning, not the end, of a relationship.
But even if her husband (who, Cabot says, was himself in the same stadium on a first date of his own, hence her embarrassed reaction) had found out that their marriage was over due to a viral clip of his spouse on Instagram, it still wouldn’t be right for strangers to abuse her online or in person.
Yes, it would be a crushing way to discover that your relationship was over — but there are no good ways to find that out. Many of us will suddenly find that a relationship is over — whether via a vicious shouting match in a tent at a music festival, or coming home to find our partner in bed with someone else — and it is almost always painful and embarrassing.
We can invent ways to make an ending less painful and less difficult, from paid leave for spousal bereavement to the creation of no-fault divorce, but we can rarely avoid the pain and difficulty entirely. Few relationships have happy endings. Yet in no instance does a break-up justify death threats from those directly affected, let alone from people who find out about it by accident online.
It is right that people should disclose their relationships to their employers if it could affect their work, and to relevant stakeholders. But while Byron and Cabot’s relationship may be a matter for Astronomer’s board, customers and staff, none of them would be justified in yelling profanities in the street, or sending angry letters to their homes. I somehow doubt that the people who wrote Cabot letters held Astronomer stock or had a legitimate grievance, nor would their actions be proportionate if they did.
The life-saving essence of liberalism — the innovation that with the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century ended centuries of religious wars, bringing to a close what are still among the bloodiest conflicts per head in most European countries — is this: people have a right to ruin their own lives (or their prospects in the life to come) and it is mostly not your business to stop them doing so.
But the secret of peace and prosperity ever since has been in the widening of that circle of non-responsibility: in declaring that any number of personal or private transgressions are not our business. They may still be of interest to the law or our employers — they are not, and should not be, the subject of vigilante action.
We have not yet mastered the ability to laugh at or to disapprove of something we see on social media without feeling the need to take direct action of one kind or another about its subject.
If we are going to survive in a world in which we are not just economically interconnected but more and more visible to one another, we badly need to recover and strengthen our sense that most of what we see is not our business. That we should keep our feelings about the lives of others to ourselves and our friends — not share them with the subjects of our disapproval.
Read the full article here