On privacy – Cordelia Fine in TLS:

‘One evening in 2018, Robert Ivinson, a first-year philosophy student at the University of Exeter, was alone in his designated room in halls of residence, talking on the phone with a friend. Despite the door and windows being closed, his conversation was overheard by another student. Later that night, he was visited by two men from campus night patrol. “It was like the Stasi had come to my door”, he told a journalist. One stuck his boot in the door; “you’ve been saying some very offensive things in here”, he said. Ivinson was formally disciplined by the university and questioned over comments made privately to his friend that veganism is wrong and gender fluidity is stupid. The university declared him guilty of harassment, warning that any further breaches of university rules would result in expulsion.
When the episode came to light last year, Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer in philosophy at Exeter and director of the Committee for Academic Freedom, remarked how “extraordinary” it was “that in 21st-century Britain eavesdroppers can be rewarded, and a student punished for remarks made to a friend in the privacy of his room”.’

(…)

‘As a concept, privacy had inauspicious beginnings. The word comes from the Latin privatus, referring to “deprivation” of public office. For the ancient Athenians, nothing important happened in private – hence the importance of keeping the public and private spheres strictly segregated. In contrast, in medieval Europe, there was no clear delineation between the two, and the very notion of a private life free from scrutiny and judgement by authorities or community was considered suspect for centuries. “The murderer and the adulterer are alike desirous of privacy”, admonished one seventeenth-century English preacher.’

(…)

‘This opened the door to other unauthorized interpretations of God’s will. About a century and a half later, John Locke’s Letter on Toleration, published in 1689, suggested religious tolerance (for some, at least) as an alternative to violent suppression. Arguing that the state must respect its citizens as rational subjects, Locke laid the intellectual foundations for the now taken-for-granted belief in people’s “capacity to lead what we now regard as complete private lives”, Jenkins writes, “in which they can autonomously determine how to worship and conduct themselves”.’

(…)

‘In 1859, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty asserted that the freedom that should serve as a foundational principle of social organization requires a clearly delineated private realm. “There is a circle around every human being which no government, be it that of one, or a few, or of the many, ought to be permitted to overstep”, Mill wrote. Private life, a place undisturbed by public attention, offered a space for individuals to experiment with ideas and ways of life, free from the crushing “tyranny” of majority opinion.
British law at the time was establishing limits to such private “experimentation” in the form of a husband’s physical abuse of his wife and children.In the US, however, privacy was still a trump card even in this regard. In 1868, the Supreme Court of North Carolina determined that, although state law did not recognize a husbandly right to whip his wife, it was not a criminal offence. The view of the presiding justice was that “[t]he costs of invading a married couple’s privacy were … greater than the damage wreaked by beating a spouse”.’

(…)

‘The argument, in other words, is that many cultural, economic, political and social factors were conditioning us decades before the young Mark Zuckerberg, as a Harvard computer science student, was inspired to create a website that enabled normally private judgements as to which fellow students someone found “hot or not” to be made public. He faced charges (all eventually dropped) of breaching security, copyright infringement and violating individual privacy. That none of this quite captures what some might find repellent about the website resonates with the author’s critique of a denuded concept of privacy that is “now more about agreeing to terms of service … than the right to be left alone”.’ (…)

‘We are in a state of “deep confusion” about private life, the author argues, and the stakes are high. All of us, she says – celebrities, politicians, members of the royal family, even scumbags and bigots – need access to what the sociologist Erving Goffman referred to as the backstage areas of life. Here, thank goodness, we can take off the masks we wear in public, collect and restore ourselves, and think through feelings and beliefs in a safe space.’

(…)

‘For anyone who sometimes has unthinkable thoughts or says the unsayable – which is to say everyone – Strangers and Intimates is a magisterial intellectual history of an important and evolving concept, a reminder to cherish the handful of friends and family with whom we can be mask-free, and a timely and compelling call to rebuild the fortress and replate the shield that protects our private life.’

Read the article here.

I don’t think that we can be ever mask-free, but the backstage areas of life should exist and should be protected.

To some people, these areas are the most frightening areas.

What if nobody is watching? That’s hell.