The Sunday Times of London
PRIVACY IS OUR NEXT GROWTH INDUSTRY
Ferdinand Mount
Is privacy dying? Are we losing our grip on that realm apart where we could put our feet up secluded from the gaze of others? True, privacy has had its obituaries written before. Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto prophesied that global capitalism would tear aside everything that offered the ordinary family shelter in a heartless world. And in Nineteen Eighty-four, nothing sends more of a chill down the spine than the slogan "Big Brother is watching you".
New technology has often been cast as the hired assassin of privacy. Nowhere is safe, nowhere is secret. The spy plane can tell the pattern on your tie from 20,000ft. The x-ray can tell what you had for breakfast. Archeologists can tell what you had for breakfast if you lived in the Stone Age. Wherever you run, you can't escape from your DNA, as Bill Clinton is discovering. As for talking on the mobile phone, Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales might just as well have gone down Fleet Street bawling their intimate messages on a loudspeaker. Never have people talked more about their "personal space". Never, it seems, have they possessed less of it. Yet the latest threats to privacy come, it is said, not from electronic invasion but from ourselves. We are not so much the victims of technological developments beyond our control as willing co-conspirators in the extinction of privacy.
Normal-seeming people invite the cameras in to log their private lives for public delectation. And if the cameras won't come to follow them round the kitchen, then people will happily run along to the studio to bare their traumas to a whooping live audience. Even the reticent British have become an Oprah-atic nation. Princess Diana confided to Panorama that there were three people in her marriage. By the end of the interview there must have been somewhere around 30m people in there, all with their own opinions on the matter. Her life and death make a sad case history of what can happen when a fragile, already wounded personality is stripped of the last shreds of privacy.
Yet it was that same vulnerable, open quality that captivated her admirers. Trend spotters regarded her, even before her death, as the pioneer of a new Britain that would be unashamed to show its feelings. Even today, a year after that eerily sunny day, there are those who still talk about the new era - AD - After Diana. In future, what Sir Edmund Leach famously described as "the family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets" would be transformed into a new kind of free and natural relationship in which the partners would be open not only to one another but to the rest of society. To be uptight or buttoned-up would be uncool.
And it is true, I think, that "mind your own business" does seem a rather old-fashioned response these days. Look how uneasy commentators have been in arguing that even President Clinton has a right to privacy. One of the few exceptions has been Thomas Nagel, a New York philosopher, who boldly asserts: "The machinery of the law is being used to shred every ordinary boundary between matters of public concern and matters that are the business of no one but the parties involved, in the name of the ostensible value to the nation of getting at The Truth." Yet on it all rolls, with Kenneth Starr recalling this witness and that to dish us a little bit more of the dirt.
Clinton's enemies have sought to explain the president's continued popularity (his standing in the polls being unshaken until very recently) by a kind of escapism: the American people just don't want to face up to the fact that their president is a lecherous creep. Surely the explanation may be a little more creditable, namely that the American people remained unconvinced until now that the president's private capers are any of their legitimate business - which doesn't mean they can resist hearing about them. If his carrying-on turns out to be really too disgusting to tolerate, then public opinion may permit or even pressurise Congress to turf him out. But the public's initial instinct was that the prosecution of these matters in its name was improper, or "inappropriate", to use the new weasel word.
I think that instinct was sound. Impeachment or no impeachment, politicians ought to listen out very carefully for a counter-reaction in favour of privacy. In Britain, it has already begun. The revulsion against the paparazzi is only part of a larger search for some better defences against intrusion.
The politicians here did not dare to legislate for a right to privacy. But little by little the judges (who paradoxically are sometimes less out of touch, precisely because they don't have to think about votes all the time) have started to concoct one. It began, I suppose, with the virtual invention of a law of confidence, led by Lord Denning.
An employee, the judges decided, had an implicit duty to keep his employer's secrets. In that case, so perhaps did people in other relationships. Even the victim of a kiss-and-tell memoir might ultimately be able to sue for a breach of confidence. In the same way perhaps the ancient common law of trespass could be extended to cover other forms of physical intrusion, by the press, by government agencies, by prying neighbours. And now to make the path easier along comes Lord Irvine's incorporation of the European convention on human rights into English and Scottish law. For the one important right that the convention imports into both codes is a right to privacy.
Newspapers don't much like the prospect. They will have to guess which stories a jury will accept as being in the public interest and which it will dismiss as vile intrusion. But something of the sort was bound to come sooner or later, because privacy is such a desperately important ingredient of a tolerable life.
Unfortunately, it is also an ingredient we have taken for granted, so that when it seems to be under threat we aren't very good at expressing why it is so important. Professor Nagel has a pretty good shot at it. "Just as social life would be impossible if we expressed all our lustful, aggressive, greedy, anxious or self-obsessed feelings in ordinary public encounters, so would inner life be impossible if we tried to become wholly persons whose thoughts, feelings and private behaviour could be safely exposed to public view."
The boundary between public and private is a shifting one. In intimate relationships the self is most exposed, Nagel argues, but even between spouses or lovers there are limits. It is never easy to agree what those limits are or ought to be. In private life just as in public, there are the usual sticky choices between candour and kindness, between self-expression and self-restraint. Yet some people talk and act as if there were no such conflicts - as if being entirely frank was always a recipe for happiness.
Is open government the be-all-and-end-all of politics? What then becomes of my embarrassing dealings with H M Customs, or my acrimonious correspondence with the Inland Revenue? Ought there to be a right of access to one's medical and educational files? If so, will those files then become so expurgated as to be useless? Should the police be entitled to keep on file a sample of every citizen's DNA? Are identity cards an intrusion or a convenience? Such arguments have scarcely begun, but finding where to draw a reasonable line between the public and the private might contribute quite a lot to that "country at ease with itself".
Far from being on its last legs privacy may be the growth industry of the 21st century. Our leylandii hedges grow higher, our burglar alarms and security codes and computer passwords and anti-hacker devices more elaborate. In all sorts of ways, we spend a fair bit of time attempting to shore up our privacy. And any political party that knows what's good for it will pay attention to that aspiration. After all, as Robert Frost pointed out, good fences make good neighbours.