Publicity versus privacy

A classic type of violator of human privacy is someone who sells the secret lives of famous people they once served. Examples include a show-business star’s secretary, a lord’s valet, a general’s assistant or a public figure’s adviser. In an era shaped by Napoleon’s personality, both a poet such as Goethe—in Elective Affinities—and a philosopher such as Hegel—in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History—referred to this kind of betrayer of confidences. The latter discussed how history views men of Alexander’s or Caesar’s stature and how those same men may be seen by an aide-de-camp or a cook. Historical figures, he says, also have private lives. Those great men have eaten, drunk and lost their tempers; they may have been lustful, jealous or lacking in self-restraint. Hegel recalls the saying “No man is great to his valet” and comments: “I added, and Goethe repeated it two years later: not because the great man is not a hero, but because the valet is the valet. He removes the hero’s boots, helps him to bed, knows that he likes champagne, and so on. For the servant there are no heroes; they exist only for the world, for reality, for history.” But let us leave this thinker here, with his era and his ideas about great men and world history, and turn to events and authors closer to our republican sensibilities. Although many of us may agree that Amarcord is Fellini’s best film, La dolce vita was a striking film in its day. It is difficult to forget that Rome, that Via Veneto, that voluptuous diva, that fountain, that mingling of “beautiful people,” those photographers—known to the world as paparazzi ever since—harassing people like birds of prey.

Almost every day, we have occasion to recall those ravens. Some television news programs revel in showing anguished people subjected to merciless questioning about a dramatic or tragic event that has affected their families or themselves. These bewildered mortals’ only fault is having some connection to the day’s misfortune and feeling intimidated, or being tolerant or shy, before the intruders wielding microphones. Yet nothing is spared them: pursuits and encirclements, flashes, indiscreet or clumsy questions. The height of these invasions of privacy occurs in those fashionable television shows that set traps for other people’s innocence, catching them in ridiculous situations manufactured for the electronic eye.

Perhaps partly because of its curious title, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being—well suited to being carried under the arm by the ostentatious at the Book Fair—became a bestseller everywhere. In this not-so-light novel, set in Czechoslovakia in the period following the crushing of the “Prague Spring” by Soviet tanks, the police secretly record conversations between Jan Procházka, an opponent of the regime, and his friends, who also oppose it. Above all, they record his conversations with Professor Václav Černý, the friend with whom he most enjoyed talking and drinking. Months later, those “services” decide to discredit Procházka by broadcasting the recordings in a radio series. What they had recorded contained everything: obscene language, unkind remarks about friends, dirty jokes, vulgarities, heretical ideas, things that would never be said in public, plenty of rubbish.

Indeed, as the police had intended, the man was immediately discredited and subjected to public ridicule. But as time passed and the radio broadcasts continued, people began to realize—and grew increasingly indignant—that the underlying issue was not Procházka’s foul language, but something else: the violation of a person’s intimate life. They recognized that public and private life are two essentially different worlds, and that respect for this difference is indispensable for a person to live freely. The curtain separating the two worlds is called “modesty” or “shame,” and those who tear it apart are like criminals. And, Kundera says, because those who tore it apart were serving a hated regime, they eventually came to be unanimously regarded as particularly odious criminals. An essay by the Czech author analyzing these matters was published in New York a few days ago.

Shame, personal modesty, has been a key concept of the modern era, an age characterized by the cultivation of individualism. This quality, individualism, is important and may, unfortunately, be receding in our time. “What is modesty?” he asks. It is a visceral instinct to defend our personal lives. It means, for example, refusing to let someone else open a letter addressed to us. It is one of the experiences marking the passage from adolescence to adulthood, one of the first difficulties many children have with their parents: demanding a lockable desk drawer in which to keep what is personal or secret. We enter adulthood through “the rebellion of modesty.” He recounts that when he emigrated to France in 1975 from his communist country, riddled with hidden microphones, he saw a large magazine-cover photograph at a newsstand showing the popular singer Jacques Brel vainly trying to cover his face before photographers stationed at the hospital he was entering for treatment of advanced cancer. Suddenly, realizing what the photograph meant, the writer felt he was facing the same demon he had fled in his homeland: recording a public figure’s private conversations and photographing a dying man against his will belong to the same system. “I told myself that when revealing another person’s private life becomes customary and the rule, we will be entering an era in which the highest stakes will concern the survival or disappearance of the individual.”