The Times Literary Supplement
August 14, 1998

Thomas Nagel

The shameful farce now being played out in Washington has many contributing causes: the Supreme Court, which refused to permit the Paula Jones lawsuit to be deferred until the end of President Clinton's term in office; the panel of federal judges in Washington that approved Kenneth Starr's request to extend his Whitewater investigation to the President's sex life; the sinister and obsessionally puritanical Starr himself, and the independent prosecutor statute that created his almost limitless power to persecute the President; the lurid and poisonous Linda Tripp; the fetishistic and infantile Monica Lewinsky; and the President himself, for falling on this land mine disguised as a cream puff.

But it is also the culmination of a disastrous erosion of the precious but fragile conventions of personal privacy in the United States over the past ten or twenty years. If the President and Miss Lewinsky really had sex in the White House, the only decent thing for them to do if anybody asked was to deny it, as they initially did. But they are not going to be permitted this elementary form of privacy, because 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. Not only Republican senators but sanctimonious editorial writers at the New York Times are urging the President to bare his soul to avoid impeachment. No doubt if the FBI finds semen on Monica's dress, the Times will insist that he provide a DNA sample.

It is hard to believe that anyone thinks this condition of total publicity is better for the country than the situation that prevailed a generation ago, when President Kennedy's sexual adventurism was known about but not acknowledged by the press. By 1987, when Gary Hart was staked out and exposed as an adulterer by the Miami Herald and expelled from politics, those habits of discretion had disappeared. From then on, politicians and aspirants to high office had no rights of privacy in the United States, and every sexual irregularity became part of what the press deemed it the public's right to know about such people. Some of them survived the exposure. Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991 in spite of credible charges of lewd and disgraceful behavior towards Anita Hill. (I regret to say that at the time, like many liberals who opposed Thomas's nomination because of his right-wing views, I hoped those charges would sink him.) Clinton himself was nominated and elected in 1992, in spite of the stories about Gennifer Flowers. But whatever their immediate effect, these forms of exposure are in themselves very damaging to public life, and the fact that they have become commonplace shows that American society has lost its grip on a fundamental value, one which cannot be enforced by law alone but without which civilization would not survive.

The distinction between what an individual exposes to public view and what he conceals or exposes only to intimates is essential to permit creatures as complex as ourselves to interact without constant social breakdown. Each of our inner lives is such a jungle of thoughts, feelings, fantasies and impulses that civilization would be impossible if we expressed them all, or if we could all read each other's minds. The formation of a civilized adult requires a learned capacity to limit expression to what is acceptable in the relevant public forum, and development of a distinct inner and private life that can be much more uninhibited, under the protection of the public surface. Sex is an important part of what must be managed in this way, if a civilized human being is to be constructed on the ever-present animal foundation, but aggression, fear, envy, self-absorption and vanity all form part of the task.

The reason for these requirements is simple. Human beings are highly complex and very diverse; the full range of what any number of them feel, want and think would not fit into a common space without generating uncontrollable conflict and offence. The public space of interaction in which these complex individuals meet, on the other hand, is single and limited. What they introduce into it has to be likewise limited to what can be collectively faced and dealt with without generating interpersonal chaos. Of course, there are different public spaces and different levels of acceptable conflict for different groups, but all operate under some form of traffic control, to accommodate multiple individuals whose potential clashes and conflicts are limitless. This is the function of the familiar forms of tact, politeness, reticence, non-acknowledgment of embarrassing lapses, and so forth--none of which is dishonest, because it is generally known how these conventions operate.

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 behavior could be safely exposed to public view. The division of the self protects the limited public space from unmanageable encroachment and the unruly inner life from excessive inhibition. The boundary shifts with the company, and intimacy is the situation where the interior of the self is most exposed; but even between spouses or lovers there are limits.

What has happened in the United States is strange. On the one hand, tolerance with regard to variation in sexual life has increased enormously since the 1960s. We have seen a true sexual revolution, and, of course, the publication of explicitly sexual materials in all media is part of it. On the other hand, the loosening of inhibitions has led to the collapse of protections of privacy for any figure in whose sexual life the public might take a prurient interest. What looked initially like a growth of freedom has culminated in the reinstitution of the public pillory.

The public space of politics is designed for the pursuit and resolution of important public issues. It cannot handle the added infusion of irrelevant and incendiary private matter that results when politicians are denied the right to present a merely public face. The growth of tolerance does not make the collapse of privacy significantly less damaging. First, there are still politically important elements of American society that abhor the new sexual mores. Second, and more important, the exposure of a public figure's private life is damaging, even if most people rationally judge it to be irrelevant to his qualifications for office. It tends to blot out everything else in the dirty mind of the public. And it also constitutes a gross invasion of the individual's personal life, requiring him to respond, both internally and publicly, to the world's inappropriate but relentless attention to it.

One of the truly remarkable things about Clinton is his emotional toughness, even for a politician. Most people exposed to such humiliating treatment would be corroded by rage. But we can't limit the choice of political figures to those whose peculiar inner constitution enables them to withstand outrageous exposure, or those whose sexual lives are simon-pure. And we can't afford to require the families of public figures to put up with this sort of humiliation. We do not and should not know what private understanding Mr. and Mrs. Clinton have about sex, but the present glare on their relations is pitiless. If these are the costs of public office, the range of available candidates will shrink drastically for reasons having nothing to do with the proper demands of public service. The note repeated again and again in the media, about the need for Americans to trust their leaders, and the damage done to that trust by a sexual lie, is simply nauseating.

The broad acceptance of conventions of civility, which determine what may be exposed of acknowledged in what contexts and what would on the contrary be uselessly disruptive or destructive, what is essential and what irrelevant to the performance or evaluation of a social role--this is the mark of maturity in a society. Civilization is a delicate structure that allows wildly different and complex individuals to co-operate peacefully and effectively only if not too much strain is put upon it by the introduction of disruptive private material, to which no collective response is necessary or possible. Americans who recognize this fact can only look on in shame at the destructive spectacle now being acted out by a group of childish and powerful figures who have never understood it.