Leith on life

Many years ago, something happened to me about which I still feel slightly annoyed. I’d been having a sort of thing with a girl, and left her alone in my student room. I got back to find she’d passed the time by reading the private diary I kept at the time; and in the process deduced that I was—quite unrequitedly—in love with another girl altogether. The usual teenage hell broke loose. She was furious and humiliated. I was still more furious and humiliated. How dared she? But then again, how dared I?

It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that my making secret sheep’s eyes at Girl B was far less an offence than Girl A’s failure to respect my privacy. But was it? Why are we sure we have a right to privacy? As the phoney war about superinjunctions rumbles on, it’s worth considering. Even the most prurient red tops, harping on about role models, at least tip their hats to the idea that citizens are entitled to keep their sex and family lives to themselves.

But what are the arguments for that entitlement? Every instinct tells me that it stands to reason—although anything you think “stands to reason” usually doesn’t. Put it this way. Q: Why shouldn’t I know about X’s sex life? A: Because it’s none of my business. The answer does no more than restate the question in different terms.

The pro-privacy feeling is an instinct, not an argument: you hate the idea of everyone knowing your business, so you universalise the principle that they shouldn’t. But is hating the idea of people knowing your business a moral fundamental?

After all, privacy as we understand it is a recent invention. Of slightly longer pedigree is the idea that your body and its labour belongs to you, and that property rights are a public good; but the idea that you have sovereign rights over your conscience—intellectual property in the original sense—isn’t that long established.

Anthropologists distinguish between guilt and shame societies: that is, societies in which the obligation to behave well is interiorised (you consult your conscience, or your God), and those in which people follow social rules because they do not want to appear bad in the eyes of the group.

All societies are a bit of both. But in the modern west, the theory goes, the Reformation (or, perhaps, the habits of thought that led to it) tipped the balance from shame to guilt. The idea of an unmediated relationship with God, and the habit of private prayer, contributed to a Protestant kind of interiority. At the same time, the spread of literacy—private reading, diary-keeping (ahem) and so forth—and various architectural innovations (such as not sharing a bed with your wife, her parents, all your children, two chickens and a cow) pushed our minds in the same direction.

This is caricature, of course. Privacy isn’t a singular thing: do you calibrate the Catholic ritual of confession, for instance, as one of privacy or its opposite? It appears to be both. But I think the point holds. We haven’t been a guilt society all that long, and there’s not necessarily a special reason to think that ours is a more natural or enlightened way of doing things. More to the point, there’s every reason to think it’s a way of doing things that, thanks to social media, is on its way out: destined to be looked back on as a strange little 500-year blip in millennia of human social history.

Privacy is an individual good, yes. But it doesn’t automatically follow that it’s a social good. Who’s to say that the tribe doesn’t function better when everyone is spying on each other? The tribe itself certainly seems keen on that line of reasoning. Privacy is something that we seek for ourselves but not necessarily for others: somebody, after all, is buying these newspapers.

And why not? On the face of it, it’s perverse to insist that how someone conducts themselves in their sexual life cannot bear on how they might conduct themselves professionally. We regard “character” as important and mistrust liars. If someone lies to secure financial advantage—fiddling his expenses, say—we regard him as untrustworthy. It isn’t an inconceivably huge leap to take the same view of someone who lies to secure sexual advantage.

We all affect to detest the curtain-twitchers, or the bonehead moralists who sneer: “If you don’t want your wife and children embarrassed by reading about your affair in the newspapers, you should learn to keep it in your pants, shouldn’t you?” We think of them as throwbacks to an age of barbaric prurience. But it might be worth acknowledging that not only do they have history on their side but tomorrow, also, belongs to them. And if Ryan Giggs is keeping a diary, I’d advise him to hide it somewhere more secure than the bedside table.