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The oxygen of privacy
People who cannot have secrets are easily controlled
It is odd that our insistence on individual rights, personal space, personal empowerment, personalised computers and customisation generally should coincide so startlingly with the death of personal privacy. For privacy, if not dead, is certainly moribund, and not, it seems, likely to be much mourned. People seem to have given up on it; we seem to prefer peeping and prurience and self-exposure, and to find privacy only interesting as something to destroy. But how can the individual long survive the death of privacy?
The newly-published diaries of Woodrow Wyatt are only the most recent betrayal of privacy. A great deal of fuss has been made about them, and what they said about whom, including his own daughter. But what is shocking is not what he said, but that he said anything at all about what were understood to be private occasions, with all the freedom and trust that was once involved.
The same goes for Diana, the Princess of Wales's public betrayals of privacy, via Andrew Morton, and for Prince Charles's, via Jonathan Dimbleby. The same goes for the whole culture of confession, revenge and kiss and tell. And the same goes for the disgraceful betrayal of Monica Lewinsky's privacy by Linda Tripp, or of President Clinton's by both of them. And there cannot have been many more revolting spectacles than the obsessive cross-questioning of Monica Lewinsky about every last, intimate, supposedly private detail of her encounters with Clinton. This was the public rape of privacy.
A remarkable film has just opened in London that takes the violation of privacy to its logical extreme. The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir, is about a man whose life, from the moment of his birth, is a carefully directed soap opera, filmed in the most intimate detail round the clock, watched by billions of people, but all unknown to him. Only Truman fails to realise that his entire world is a collection of film sets, and everyone in it an actor, even his wife, and that everything he does is observed. He has no privacy. This is reminiscent of the terrifying gaze of George Orwell's Big Brother who stared from millions of screens into almost every corner of everyone's life, watching every move. What is worse, however, is that no one chooses to switch off. No one in the supposedly free world respects Truman's privacy. His most private moments have become public entertainment.
This is a perfect story for our times. Dazzled by the bright lights shone into the private corners of people's lives, we have been blinded to the central importance of privacy. But privacy is not just an out-of-date convention. It is not just the refuge of people with something shameful to hide, though it may also be that. Privacy is essential to intimacy and trust and also to individual independence and to dissent; privacy is the oxygen of freedom. It is no accident that all totalitarian societies do their best to destroy privacy. They seek to break up intimacy and families, turning children and lovers and neighbours into state spies. People who cannot trust one another, who can never risk a subversive thought, people who cannot have secrets, are people who are easily controlled.
Perhaps it takes someone who has lived in a police state to value privacy more than we do. The Czech exile Milan Kundera has often written about it, particularly clearly in an essay published in the New York Review of Books in 1995, which I kept because it struck me so forcibly. He explains that in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being he describes two well-known and important dissidents who drink and talk together, under heavy surveillance, after the Russian invasion of 1998. All their private conversations are being recorded by the police, who then broadcast them as a radio serial in order to discredit one of them, Prochazka. At first it works. Prochazka is discredited, because in private he says, as people do, all kinds of things he would not dream of saying in public; he swears, badmouths his friends, tempts his companion into laughing at terrible ideas, tells dirty jokes.
Before long, however, the public begin to realise that the scandal is not the way Prochazka talks. It is the rape of his private life. They realise that "the private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain rippers are criminals". But the curtain rippers seem to be everywhere these days, and widely accepted. The general response to Woodrow Wyatt's revelations was to say that everyone ought to know that the rules of discretion were abandoned long ago, and it is daft to imagine otherwise.
When Kundera fled Czechoslovakia and its bristling microphones, almost the first thing he saw in France was a picture of the dying singer Jacques Brel, hiding his face from news cameramen who wanted to intrude into his private confrontation with death. "I felt I was encountering the very same evil that had made me flee my country," he wrote. "When it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person's private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual."
The interesting question is whether people will notice, before it is too late to do anything about it.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 11, 1998
