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On a recent airing of This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, George Will observed that 100 years ago, the president might walk down the street without being recognized, whereas now he’s in our living room all the time. The implication, presumably, was that this explains our concern over Clinton’s private behavior: if we know about it, we can’t help responding to it, and our response is necessarily one of disapproval. But a bit of historical clarification is needed here. The president has been in our living rooms for more than 50 years now (one recalls President Roosevelt’s "Fireside Chats"). What’s relatively new is this: we’re in the president’s living room–more precisely, in his office, and the hallway outside it. What are we doing there? Why are we learning more about this president’s actions than we’ve ever been told during the term of previous presidents?
One answer is that there’s fame, or notoriety–or at least money–to be gained by revealing all this. That’s the tack taken by Neal Gabler in his "Monica: The Movie" piece in the November issue of George. He argues that the allure of the news and entertainment industry is the driving force behind much of what’s happened, from the investigative reporters who see themselves as Hoffman and Redford in All the President’s Men to the poor little pudgy girl from Beverly Hills who wanted to prove something to those who once shut her out.
The point is compelling, but there’s another factor at work as well: the changing balance between what’s public and what’s private. Public life is withering on the vine. As its loses strength and definition, the stuff of our private life swarms in to take its place. Propelled by our ever-increasing fascination with personality, more and more private dramas are crossing a threshold and becoming public knowledge. There’s always something in the personal life of a public figure for the rest of us to talk about. In the case of President Clinton, there’s a lot. But the fact that we’re hearing about it and talking about it isn’t really the result of reporters and publishers hungry for scoops, interns hungry for fame, possibly victimized women hungry for justice and revenge, or any of the other causes described by Gabler and most other commentators. No–all this is coming out and being churned around because it can’t not happen. Private life is inexorably replacing public life, and the private behavior of every Tom, Dick, and Harry (not to mention every Bill, Paula, and Monica) is going to occupy more, not less, of our public attention in the future.
In The Fall of Public Man, published in 1974, sociologist Richard Sennett explored how public space and public behavior have lost their richness and complexity over the past couple of centuries. His argument is complex and not easily summarized. But it can be suggested by a couple of points, one from his book and one of my own making.
In the declining years of the Roman Empire, Sennett observes, Roman citizens began to shift their energies away from public ceremonies, affairs of the state, and social interactions toward their private lives, where they found a new focus in activities and beliefs that were essentially religious (and ultimately Christian). Public life for the typical Roman became "bloodless," largely a matter of keeping up appearances. The conclusion (though Sennett doesn’t bother to state it) is that this withdrawal of interest in the life of the city and the state contributed more than any moral weakening did to the end of the empire. Modern times have seen a similar shift in the balance between public life and private; it began in the 19th century and is still going on today. The difference is in the object of attention: for the Romans, it had a mystical character, whereas for us (especially in America), it’s psychological–the concern that absorbs us is essentially ourselves, the qualities of our personalities and the ways in which those qualities are revealed.
Another way of getting at the public/private balance is to consider the notion of public figures. People become public figures when they do something (or are something) that stirs our interest. But what’s the object of our interest? In one way or another, it’s their private life–which we think of as constituting their personality. Think of the last article you read about an entertainer. Chances are it said less about that person’s work than about the rest of his or her life. Duh–this is so obvious that it hardly bears pointing out, except that it allows us to ask why it should be so. Why does Cameron Diaz’s performance in There’s Something about Mary make us want to know who accompanied her to the Toronto Film Festival? Why does the success of Ally McBeal make us hungry to learn whether Calista Flockhart has an eating disorder?
Somehow, it’s the private qualities of these people that validate their public position. This is true to an even greater degree for elected officials and candidates for public office. We have, as Sennett observes, "entirely reversed [Joseph] Fielding’s dictum that praise or censure should apply to actions rather than actors." What matters now, especially in the realm of politics, is not what has been done but rather who has done it–what kind of person we see as having performed an act. Consider these two warring descriptions of Bill Clinton: he’s a husband who had an affair and wanted it concealed (in which case lying about it is presumably natural, to be expected); he’s an elected official who is sworn to uphold the laws of the land (in which case not telling the truth is potentially criminal).
Meanwhile, the meaning of "public life" has shrunk almost to nothing. A few decades ago, public displays of affection tended to be discouraged except for special occasions: soldiers returning from war, for instance, or relatives departing on a steamship. There were codes for how to behave in public with people we know and love, and for how to deal with acquaintances, and for how to deal with strangers–there was an understanding, however fluid, about the ground that we share with others. Those codes are not just changing–they’re vanishing.
What we find now is that, in Sennett’s words, "the world outside, the impersonal world, seems to fail us, seems to be stale and empty." Though it’s losing its own content, the public arena is hardly becoming empty–it’s being flooded by material from private life. Unsurprisingly, this has consequences for private life and the much-fretted-about concept of "privacy." The process is leading to a point (if we haven’t already reached it) at which there is no longer any "private": there is only the potentially public which has not yet been made known.
The spilling of the private into the public accounts for much of the appeal of memoirs. And as that example indicates, it’s not only other people’s private experience but one’s own as well that one can profit by revealing. I’ll make a prediction: we’re not far from a time in which people will reveal themselves, not after the fact as current memoir practice has it, but in the middle of things. Can one imagine President Clinton telling all before he leaves the White House? Perhaps not. But the idea isn’t as farfetched as it might sound.
On the night of the first anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, I was one of those (the minority, the ratings later revealed) who watched PBS’s Frontline documentary on Diana. I thought of her as an icon of a peculiar and tragic sort: a public figure whose private life was invaded and eventually destroyed by others. So I was surprised to learn that she had collaborated with a journalist on a book about herself and those closest to her, at the very time when she and others were protesting such revelations. As one commentator remarked, she violated her own privacy. An astonishing thing–but not so surprising after all, I think. The princess was an exponent of many causes, but she was also a participant in a great process, no less large for being hidden: the replacement of the public with the private. |
