| 0:37 | Intro. [Recording date: April 23, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is April 23rd, 2025, and my guest is author Tiffany Jenkins. She was last here in January of 2023 talking about Plunder, Museums, and Marbles. Her latest book, which is our topic for today, is Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. Tiffany, welcome back to EconTalk. Tiffany Jenkins: Glad to be here. Russ Roberts: I want to let listeners know that some of our conversation today may involve adult themes, so if you're listening with young children, you may want to act accordingly. |
| 1:10 | Russ Roberts: I want to start with the title of the book. It's a beautiful title, and when I first got the book, I thought, Strangers< and Intimates/em>--hmmm, an interesting title. And, after I finished the book, just that framing of the topics you discuss, the rise and fall of private life and so much more, it really resonated with me. So, start by talking about why you chose that title and what it means to you. Tiffany Jenkins: Well, I originally wanted to write about private life and privacy. And, as I was thinking about it, I was reading about 19th century Britain. And, this was a time when there was a huge influx of people into cities--Manchester and London in particular--and society. One commentator described it was a society of strangers. And, I had this insight, really, that private life is also defined by public life. The two kind of help shape each other's sense of themselves, if you like. And I was very struck by the sense of all these strangers on the streets and in the bars and in kind of political life, then retreating home to a site of intimacy and domesticity and somewhere away from public life. Hence the couplets. So, what I try and do in the book is look as much at the shaping of public life and how it defines private life as private life itself. Russ Roberts: And of course, the boundary between the two has changed so extraordinarily over the last 500 years. I mean, the thing that--after reading your book, the thought that I had about Strangers and Intimates is that, in some dimension, there's a current in modern culture to break down that distinction. And of course, your book deals with this constantly. But, just thinking about it in this strangers versus intimates, that: there should be no strangers. We should be intimate with everyone. And, in particular, I should have no secrets. I should have no public versus private persona. I should be open to the world and share. And, the very idea of private versus public--the very idea of intimacy versus a stranger--is a barrier to be destroyed. Do you agree that there is a push toward that in our culture? Tiffany Jenkins: Yes. I mean, I think in numerous ways the sense that you might be different in public to how you are in private is demonized, if you like. It's seen as phony. The great kind of mantra of the moment is to be false. In all reality TV programs, the kind of the bad person is always described as false and inauthentic. There is a sense that secrets are baggage to be aired. There is a sense in which that they bring you down. And, I think that does two things. It degrades public life. Because actually when you go out the door and you maybe put on a suit--also relatively unfashionable--you become a kind of manners. You talk about--you don't necessarily--it's really interesting actually the drive towards kissing, social kissing, I don't know if that's a thing where you live, but in Britain you social-kiss everybody--your colleagues. And people--I think we're British, we're quite uncomfortable with that sort of thing. But, it's definitely seen as kind of: if you don't, you're stiff. And, I think the sense that if you are different in public than private, then you are being a hypocrite and it's much healthier and more authentic to let it all out to express yourself. Russ Roberts: Do you socially kiss twice in Britain, left and right cheek, or is it one? Tiffany Jenkins: Well, because I think any type of social etiquette is frowned upon, there's no consensus, which is the bizarre thing. That's the beautiful thing about manners when there's a consensus about how you might behave so that you know how to behave. At the moment here people sort of go for one and then prevaricate over the second, and it's just generally very awkward. But, you have this general kind of surge of intimacy in private life--in public life, rather. People are talking about their family life as a way of showing that they're a good person. It kind of degrades public life. |
| 5:58 | Russ Roberts: I would argue, and I think you do in the book as well, that it also degrades private life. But, I'm going to go back to just that one phrase you used. You said: If you're different in public than you are in private, you're a hypocrite. Of course you are. But, is that good or bad? That's the question. We just assume hypocrisy is a negative. What do you think? Tiffany Jenkins: Well, I think we have different parts of ourselves, and that is, you might be a more professional--if you're a professional person, there are certain ways of behaving, whether you're a laborer or an academic, that you wouldn't behave like that at home. And, the beauty of the home, or the private, is that you can sometimes not be your best self. You can let off steam, you can have a row about whatever it might be, doing the dishes or whatever. It is a place of emotional release where you aren't subject to scrutiny; and, there's a certain form of accountability within intimates, but it's not kind of a public scrutiny. I think that we are in danger of eroding that kind of sanctuary, really. I think we have to accept that we are different in public and in private. They're different facets of our selves and they benefit each other, it's not false or phony. Russ Roberts: This morning I showed my wife a video that I found on social media that I found quite amusing. I'm not going to tell you what it was--because it's embarrassing that I found it amusing. But as you point out, it's kind of a nice thing that I get to enjoy this very immature and silly video that you might judge me for enjoying. My wife probably does, too, but put that to the side. Tiffany Jenkins: That's marriage. Russ Roberts: But that's marriage. Exactly. But, she forgives me tomorrow, and a relative stranger might judge me for a long time for finding it amusing. |
| 8:00 | Russ Roberts:But, I think there's something else going on. But, to get at it, I want to take something you, of course, deal with in the book in different ways, which is: 'Oh, privacy is only necessary if you're a criminal or some kind of pervert,' right? 'If you're a good person, you have nothing to hide.' And so, this obsession we have with surveillance or privacy, that protects bad people. What's your thought on that? Tiffany Jenkins: Well, privacy does protect bad people. It does impede accountability and scrutiny. But it's also necessary, and it's necessary for all good people, too. It is a place of self-development and personal autonomy where we develop our inner life, where we kind of go through a process of self-evaluation, as well as emotional release and messing around and experimenting. But, it's also really essential. I mean, you talked about your wife: it's essential for intimacy. Because she does know you, and she knows parts of you that nobody else knows. When you're embarking in a relationship--it might even be a friendship--at the beginning you do tell somebody else something about yourself that makes you vulnerable, that you don't want anybody else to know. And that's a very precious thing that is eroded if you don't have any privacy. And, everybody needs that. Equally, I think people need it for forms of group privacy, for solidarity. It might be professional colleagues, it might be a community group that you're in. You talk about things that affect you together in private before maybe taking it to your boss or taking it to somebody else. So, it is kind of a testing ground for experimental thoughts and ideas before you go out and say, 'This is what I think, this is what we want.' Everybody needs-- Russ Roberts: I love that. But, I think it's more than that, right? It's a gift we bestow, that we don't bestow on everyone; and that connects us in a way that I don't get connected to other people. And, in many, many ways our social life--and your book stimulates wonderful thinking on these issues--our social life is how we choose which boundaries to breach with how many people. Many people have things they only tell their wife or never tell their wife, their spouse; or only tell their spouse and a few intimate friends, family members; and some people get on podcasts and tell all. And, the question is whether that's a good thing. And, the idea that embarrassment or shame or people judging you could hinder you from doing those things and thereby reduce your ability to explore who you might want to become, I get that. But, I think it's also just my connection to you--my connection to you, versus my connection to my spouse, versus my connection to my listeners. My listeners, we have a certain intimacy because we spend a lot of time together. They spend a lot more time with me than I've spent with them though, which is really a strange and interesting thing in modern life. But, there's always this question of this connection I have with you that's unique or precious or special. And, if I share that with everyone, is something lost? I think there is. It's hard to put into words, though. Tiffany Jenkins: Well, I mean I think something's lost in the relationship. There is a kind of, in the exclusivity of you telling somebody else, this one person something, that exclusivity bonds you. I mean, secrecy is that kind of double-edged sword, so it also can be isolating. But, it's certainly essential for that. But I think, if you follow it through, telling everybody everything, I mean, I think you become shallow, as Hannah Arendt once sort of described it. She described it more like a kind of: privacy is a bedding soil where you are underground and you need that to grow. Without it, you just wouldn't grow; you wouldn't blossom. So, I think there's something about the kind of: you know when you've been in--this is a funny example--you know when you've been in the sun too long and it burns. I think not having privacy is like that. You're constantly exposed. Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, that's a nice image. I don't think we understand it fully until we've lost it. And of course, you chronicle Monica Lewinsky in the book, which is a horrific example of exposure. Unimaginable when you think back on it. And, it was interesting to revisit it, having lived through it. But, we're talking about sharing things, but of course sexual jealousy and marital jealousy and romantic possessiveness, which again is sort of--that seems a bit immature to care about. I mean, why not share the specialness that you have? And, yet our nature does not feel that way. For most of us. Not everybody, but for most of us. Tiffany Jenkins: I think for most of us, that's right. And then, I think maybe for those that experiment a bit more when they're younger, settle down at some point with one person. And, there is the kind of the quotidian pleasure of just sharing the everyday of the domestic life. And, I think also you do go through difficult times together--difficult times that you don't want people to know about. And they may be difficult between you, but it is a bonding exercise that, through a kind of exclusivity and sharing those private moments comes commitment and loyalty and things that are really important sustaining forces for the individual. Russ Roberts: There's a poem by Robert Browning I used to love when I was younger--hadn't read it for years, but your book pushed me back to it--which is: "My Last Duchess." Which is a haunting and quite creepy poem about a duke who resented that his wife smiled at someone other than him. That his 900-year-old name, which brought her pleasure, was no different than the bouquet of flowers that, quote, "Some officious fool" brought her. That, she smiled at everything and he did not like that lack of discrimination. Now, that's a form of jealousy; but surely that is getting at some aspect of human nature that I think is important to us. Tiffany Jenkins: We all want to be chosen, and we want to be chosen for ourselves, not for something--not for the flattery that we've given another person, not for the flowers that we can send easily. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tiffany Jenkins: There's a very nice moment in Sally Rooney's book, Ordinary People--is that the right title? [Normal People--Econlib Ed.]--where Connor talks about how being with his girlfriend--I can't remember her name--but I just remember this passage so vividly: when he says it's like shutting the door to everybody else and he can say anything to her. And, their relationship is not the most functional. But they have this--the book has this tremendous kind of sense of the privacy they have within each other. Which isn't solely physical. It's not because they've gone away from everybody else. It's the relationship that they have: that only they two know each other in the way that they know each other and nobody else does. And, I suppose it's a place of discrimination, really: I choose you. |
| 16:31 | Russ Roberts:Yeah. I want to look at one more aspect of this before we move on: this question of only criminals need to be afraid of surveillance or transparency. And, I think there's a very deep issue here about the imperfection of language. So, you and I are talking about a book: It's about 400 pages. I read it over the last two weeks, and I learned a lot about you. I learned a lot about what you're trying to communicate to me. But of course, the human mind and language is imperfect. And, if you and I having this conversation, if we imagine--we're having it over Zoom, for those of you listening to the audio only. We're having this over Zoom. I can see your face. I can see your raised eyebrow. I can see your smile. I can see your sneer--I haven't seen that yet, but I could if you did. And so, we're communicating in this very complex human way that we have. And, it's remarkably imperfect. And, you can imagine sort of three levels. There's this--four levels. You and I in the same room--which actually is nothing like what we're doing right now over Zoom because it's both more intimate but also less because it could be tense. We could be uncomfortable being in each other's physical presence. I've had that many times with people I've interviewed. It's very--for many people it's easier to be on Zoom. So, you go from the physical face-to-face to Zoom, which is in two dimensions. Then we can think about just the audio; and then we can think about a transcript. And, if you go from each of those levels, something is lost. Sometimes something is gained. But, I think the thing that is hard for us to appreciate is the imperfection of our communication in all those modes. We misunderstand each other, nuance gets missed. You didn't see that I was winking, and you took something that I was making a joke about seriously. And, the person who reads the transcript alone--and this by the way, I think is a huge problem with modern life where we're constantly communicating over WhatsApp and via email, hurriedly--so many mistakes are made in how we connect with each other. And, the danger to me of transparency and of the loss of privacy is that--it's not that I'm going to try something and it might not go well, and at least it's only the two of us, so it's okay. It's that: I actually meant something totally different; and I thought it was totally normal, but you misread it or misunderstood it, or didn't hear the tone in my voice, or only read the words. And, I see that subtlety in human relations is what's lost when we breach these barriers and make snap judgments. Tiffany Jenkins: That's a very interesting point. I'm just thinking about the times in which I've felt most on show--not necessarily doing a talk or something like that where I know what I'm going to say. But, in certain political discussions at the moment, you feel very exposed. And what happens, I think, is there's a tendency to rely on literalness. And so, ambiguity goes out of the window. Comedy goes out of the window. Irony--forget about it. Anything that could be misconstrued. Which is basically everything, because there's so much ambiguity in all our exchanges. And, I think that's what transparency sort of leads to: is kind of false literalness. And it's much reduced as a result. Russ Roberts: It's an interesting example of how people think about translation. They think that the more literal the translation, the more accurate it is. Which is totally false. But it makes sense. It's just wrong. Totally wrong. Tiffany Jenkins: Equally, adaptations of films of books you've loved which follow the plot exactly, all this description. But, they miss something of the heart. They miss--sometimes they miss the kind of oddity of it because they just have to kind of follow the script so rigorously. I suppose it gets rid of the messiness of life. Russ Roberts: Yeah. The only other thing I'd add is that everybody has something to hide. Tiffany Jenkins: Yeah. Hiding is not bad. I think keeping some things for certain people and not showing everybody everything is not a bad thing. We all do have things--there are things I don't want people to know about me, but they're not necessarily bad or illegal. Just, they are private. I mean, there are certain experiences that I would just--love is a curious one because there are certain things we do want at some point to make public about it. And marriage is a public institution. Wedding rings are public. But, there are aspects of love that you would never make public. Equally death. I was really struck when David Bowie died a few years ago, and he hadn't announced that he was going to die, but he had terminal cancer. You can hear it now in his songs. But he made no public declaration. And there was a sense in which his fans felt as if they'd been deprived of something--that they were indignant, that he hadn't let them know. And, I think there are some experiences in life that are just--they're just big and weighty and not that subject to--I mean, you can rationalize them, you can be rational about them, but they are unruly and that's why they should be hidden in a way. Russ Roberts: But, the example of the celebrity who dies and, quote, "betrays" the fan base because they find out afterwards. I mean, that's the way you should feel about your family members. Russ Roberts: And, there's an illusion there. The illusion is, is that you're close to that person. And, we do feel close sometimes to a celebrity, but it's an illusion. We're not close to them. And we're not entitled to witness their dying months or their dying moments unless they choose to share them. And they can; and some do. But, we feel betrayed. And, that's an aspect of modern life that is just so alien to most of human history. Again, I'm not going to judge it. I don't know if it's good or bad. It's definitely a reality. Tiffany Jenkins: Well, I think, yeah, we're treating intimates--we're strangers like intimates. And to a degree with the exposure of private life to scrutiny, we end up treating intimates like strangers, because we can't be fully intimate with them. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Tiffany Jenkins: Because we won't--if you're exposed all the time, you will not be intimate. You look at sort of the accounts of, or sort of the attempt--the accounts of Russia or Nazi Germany--Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. And, you know, people talk about being unable to talk to their children because their children could easily accidentally just report them and then they would be taken off--taken off to prison or worse. So it kind of--their family life and their intimate life was much reduced. |
| 24:11 | Russ Roberts:Yeah, it's a strange and bizarre thing to think about what it would be like. When I was reading your book, I was thinking about a moment. This is 50 years ago, and it was a workshop--it was a presentation of a seminar paper. The speaker was Victor Fuchs. He was a health economist at Stanford University, and he was giving a workshop, presenting a paper at a workshop at the University of Chicago. It was Gary Becker's workshop. And Becker was known for his caustic and really--I hate to say, brutal--but brutal takedowns of the speaker. I've been a speaker in that workshop twice. It's a challenging experience. And, the workshop was on privacy--the paper. And Victor Fuchs, the speaker, said, about halfway through the talk, 'Now imagine a world where all of your thoughts were broadcast onto a screen.' And of course, we're in a world that's something like that right now, where it's not forcible, but we choose often to broadcast many of our thoughts on the screen. And, Gary Becker said, 'Victor, I don't think you'd like to see what you'd see if that screen were here now.' Because the workshop hadn't gone so well up to that point. But, that whole idea of exposing judgment--and again, just transparency, nothing's hidden. Weird world. Tiffany Jenkins: Yes. And as you say, there is a degree in which we are living in that world at the moment. And as you say, it's not forced. Nobody is forcing us to upload our messages and put everything on WhatsApp and send it to loads of people and then leak them. Technology facilitates that, but nobody is being made to do it. It's the culture in which--and people don't seem to think that maybe they should just be quiet. Russ Roberts: Well, it's an interesting question, right? You say they're not forced, but there are strong incentives in our world to share, because you're judged for not sharing. I will sometimes review things on Twitter, on X, and say, 'I loved this book,' or 'I hated this movie,' and my wife will say, 'Why are you sharing that?' It's a good question. I say, 'Well, people like it. They're interested.' Maybe I shouldn't. I don't know. I don't know. Tiffany Jenkins: Well, I think there are a number of things. There is this cultural push that if you don't share--if you don't talk about your feelings--then you are seen as an odd person. And, there is something about it where it's currency. It's currency of social interaction that I think it does make me slightly uncomfortable. And then, I think there's probably other social factors, which is the communities that you might have shared that with have degraded somewhat. And so, rather than talking to people in our lives, near to us--communities of interest--I think we end up talking to strangers and then expect them to behave as if they know us, which is a peculiar thing. I think there's a degree to which, as well, people are seeking different forms of recognition. Recognition that they exist, recognition that they're liked, recognition that they matter. And, doing that with strangers in this climate is likely to make them feel bad because we don't have sort of rules and etiquette for how to behave in that way. That is, we have become sort of uncivil, I think, as a matter of course. |
| 28:12 | Russ Roberts:Have you ever had a stranger confess something deeply personal to you? Tiffany Jenkins: Yes, I do. I mean, I think the thing is about--strangers do tell you things; and because there's no comeback, the stakes are less high. And, it does forge a kind of momentary intimacy, which is fleeting. But, if they knew you--if they knew that they were going to see you again on Monday morning--they probably wouldn't tell you. But, it's probably a release for them. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well, I haven't quoted this in long time on the program, but my great-, I think it's my great-great-grandmother or my great-grandmother used to tell my father: 'If you get depressed about something, go out and tell a rock. Go out and tell a tree.' Get it out to someone who can't judge--to something that can't judge you. And I think that's what those stranger-admissions are about. We need sometimes to tell someone, but we need it to be without judgment because they're not going to see us again, or we hope they won't. But, it's hard to keep that secret. Actually, it's a handful of times in my life and I found it exhilarating. There is an intimacy that is forged, and it's something of an illusion, right? But, it can be very, very powerful. Tiffany Jenkins: Yeah. I think it's real, because I've had that as well. I think it's just not permanent, and that's why it feels like an illusion. But I think you can remember those--you can remember as we're speaking what those occasions are. Russ Roberts: I remember them vividly. And, I'm not going to tell you. |
| 30:03 | Russ Roberts:Let's go to the book directly. Your book opens--to the surprise of this reader--with an account of Martin Luther. What does he have to do with this story? Tiffany Jenkins: Well, and it was a surprise to me, as well. I thought I was going to start in the Victorian Age when you have the Warren and Brandeis infamous article, "The Right to Privacy." There were similar kind-of privacy concerns in Britain. But then, I just thought: Well, how did Victorian society come to value privacy? It's not a natural thing. You go back to the 17th century and people talk about privacy as something that's dangerous--you know: Flee it. If you're in private, you are definitely doing something wrong. The echoes of today. So I tried to think: where does it come from? And, certainly there's a degree in which it comes from property--so, the property being secured and all the rest of it. But how did that happen? Those are ideas about restricting borders, setting up borders between the authority of the day and the individual. And so, I looked for those struggles around, kind of, the border between the individual and authority. And that brought me to battles over conscience and religious liberty. Not conscience as we would understand it today--doing what I want to do, basically following my own true beliefs. But the sense in which to follow the faith, to follow my faith, I would have to go against the authority of the day at great risk to myself. And that's what--I mean, I look at Martin Luther; and I also look at Thomas More. I mean, both followed their conscience. In their mind, for Martin Luther, he was following scripture against the Catholic Church. And, for Thomas More it was the Catholic Church. But in so doing, they both, I think, added to a situation where the gap between public conformity and public devotion and private faith kind of split open and began to extend. And you had, particularly in England with a flip-flopping over religious faith, people following their own faith in private before they were allowed to do so. I think there was a degree to which--with Protestantism as well--the reliance upon the Book and the kind of translation of the Bible into the vernacular--whether it's German from Latin or English--did foster an inward kind-of self, an inward reflection. So, that might have also contributed. And, of course, reading. The printing press, which kind of pushed Luther's messages out, did become quite an internal thing. But, I see it as a kind of, initially, a political thing. How do we restrain the borders or create the border of the state? And then, you have with toleration at the end of the 1670s, 1680 in Britain, in England. You have the sense in which, because there's been so much bloodshed, fighting over which faith, which is the true path to God--thousands and thousands of people died following their own true path to God. There was a sense in which toleration, i.e., you can practice your religious faith at home, the way you see fit within certain parameters, was a way to manage that bloodshed. And, that, for me, that is a kind of--this is private. Religion--you can follow certain tenets this way if you do it in private. That is the sense in which there is somewhere separate from state authority. So, it is a sort of accidental thing. Nobody set out to do it. But, at the end of the 17th century, there was this sense that there is somewhere private away from the reach of the state; and it's written about in Locke and Hobbes to different degrees. I mean, Hobbes writes beautifully about thought being free. And then, Locke talks about the way in which man can only follow his conscience if he is free to do so. And, thus, he is free to do so in private. |
| 34:42 | Russ Roberts: And it's weird we're so obsessed with chronicling our lives through photos. And, I never throw out an email. I hardly ever throw out an email. So I have hundreds of thousands of emails in my Gmail account. And then, you have a fleeting thought--it's yours, it's private--and you don't write it down. And, it's a little bit alarming in today's world to realize you can't get it back. I mean, where's that search for that? Maybe we'll have it someday, right? It's a really scary thought. But, the idea that that's the last bastion of real privacy are my fleeting thoughts, my judgments, the things that make me laugh inside. And so much of what we do now is surveilled in certain ways, either by our own choice or by the technology we choose, or by a government if it's a totalitarian state. And, the skull is kind of the last maybe safe harbor there. I don't know. Tiffany Jenkins: Thought is free. I'm struck by--they've just published Joan Didion's letters or notes to her psychiatrist. And, it was not something that she wanted published. And, if you look at it--I mean, she's a very precise, particular writer. In three words, she can sum up the crisis of human existence, or grief, just brilliantly. And, these are effectively her notebooks. And, they don't do that. They're sloppy and fleeting and all the rest of it. And, it sort of degrades her as a writer, I think. These were not meant for public, but there's this kind of voracious appetite for anything, to expose anything that's been kind of hidden. Russ Roberts: Do you think Max Brod should have burned Kafka's manuscripts? Tiffany Jenkins: No. I'm sorry. I don't. I mean, I think there are occasions--when you're dead, I'm afraid you can pass as many--you can write your will and pass as many laws as you like-- Russ Roberts: All bets are off-- Tiffany Jenkins: Yeah. She should have burned them. She should have burned her own, or left them with--yes. Yes. Russ Roberts: That's just an interesting question. |
| 37:09 | Russ Roberts: I don't want to miss this. I want to come back to the evolution of these issues, but I love that you have made this observation that a hallway in a house was an innovation because it was a way of creating a private space--a room with a door. And, as the economist, I'm thinking at the same time, you're also writing about the rise of the coffee houses in England and the place where people can socialize. So, they can socialize publicly with a group of people in the public space called a coffee house. And at home, they can be alone with either by themselves or with an intimate, a loved one or a friend, in this room with a closed door off a hallway, which is this crazy innovation. And, both of them, I would say, are the results of a rising standard of living--that, you have to be wealthy to imagine creating a hallway. Because a hallway is wasted space and a coffee house is such a luxury. You're going to go to another place? I mean, there's all your own houses. Why do you have to go to another place? Well, when you're wealthy, you can afford to, as a society, to have these little slightly different places for interacting. Tiffany Jenkins: I think that's true to a point. We're talking about the 18th century and two remarkable things happen at the same time. So, you have this burst of public life at the coffee houses that you talk about, where people would go. And it's initially to find out the news: what's happening with the ships in the East India Company? Is there a war? So, they have quite a kind of--they're related to mercantile and capitalism. What's happening where. They become also a place to talk about kind of politics and that they're open at all hours and people kind of just go in. And, I think the first thing you have to say really, 'Is what news have you, sir?' It's primarily a male space. At the same time, in the home, yes, rooms are being kind of created for specific functions, and the corridor is introduced. It takes a while for it to get on because you do--to get kind of integrated into the home--because obviously you do need money to do it. But, by the Victorian Age, it is absolutely essential because every house must have privacy, writes a chap called Robert Kerr who writes about architecture. How related is it to prosperity? That's an interesting question. I mean, but the wealthy beforehand--there were very, very wealthy people in the medieval period--they didn't have corridors. They just would walk from one room into the other, whether you're a traveler or a seamstress. And I think the sense then was that actually the most powerful person in the room did not have privacy because everybody came to show their relationship to them. They weren't private, because being close to the most powerful person in the room meant that you had power. So, I don't think it's entirely prosperity. I think something happens where you get this conception of public life and private life, and that's given form in things like the novel. Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Rousseau's Julie, or even towards the end of the century, Jane Austen's novels. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, talks about domestic life for the first time--you know, just the pot and the kettle, even though he's on an island. So, there's something that's happening, and it's certainly fueled by prosperity, but it's not just prosperity. Something's happening with the idea of domesticity, and romance, and intimacy, and the private spirit. Up until that period, I just don't think people valued it in the way that it came to be valued. And of course, you do have with prosperity the separation of the household from the economy. So, you're not making everything in the home and selling it in a local marketplace. You're going out to work, increasingly. And, that kind of separation--that border--does also carve out it--carve the private sphere out as a kind of special place. Russ Roberts: Yeah. And of course, there's all these different layers of intimacy and stranger-ness in these different public spaces, right? The office is different than the coffee house, which is different than the bowling alley. And, there's certain behaviors that are acceptable to one, not the other. Tiffany Jenkins: But this is when the handshake is invented. So, the handshake is introduced as a way--because you wouldn't know. Previously people would have had a greater sense of who they were dealing with because they would have been a member of the elite. With the bourgeoisie coming in and merchants, there's less of a sense of who is this person? I need to know? I need to have a sense of what their reputation is. But, rather than bowing and curtsying, people start to--kind of, initially to seal deals--shake each other's hands; and then it becomes a kind of way of acting in public life. People start to talk about manners, and how do you behave with these people? Also with the new bourgeoisie who are coming in from the countryside to go to parties for the first time: How do we behave? And, people start talking about manners. Which I think is fascinating. Russ Roberts: Yeah. It starts with a handshake, then it's a kiss, then it's double kiss. And you know what's next? Mixed dancing. Sorry. That's an old joke, which I couldn't help but introduce. |
| 43:09 | Russ Roberts: And, it's a good segue to the next topic, which is: There's an immense amount of sex in this book. Not in a prurient way, but in a very thoughtful and interesting chronicle of how we think about sexual intimacy. And, you can talk about other aspects of it, but what I want to emphasize for the moment is I think there's a tendency in modern life to think that certain social trends began around 1963: sexual liberation, atheism. Right? Essentially, we finally threw off the shackles of tradition and authority, and we finally liberated the human being the way some people would want people to be liberated. When you read your book, you realize that a lot of people had doubts about the existence of God. A lot of people did not think they were going to be punished, or at least didn't act that way if they strayed from the straight and narrow. And, a lot of people had sex outside of marriage. And, I think the way we stylize that experience--or what we think of as that historical experience--is grossly inadequate. And, after you read your book, you realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. That was my take on that. I don't know if you wanted that to come out, but that's the way I felt. Tiffany Jenkins: Well, I feel in general, there's a tremendous kind of arrogance in the present period about the past, which is basically: We do it better. They didn't know what they were doing. They're all stupid and horrible. And, I think to try and understand any of the gains that we appreciate today, we have to go back and look at where did they come from? They weren't just magicked out of the air by young students who knew better in the 1960s. And, you asked the question about Martin Luther, to which I responded that conscience was really important. But, one of the fascinating things for me was the 18th century is when people start talking about conscience in intimate life. And so, yes, they did all sorts of things beforehand in private, but they were heavily regulated and scrutinized. You had these things called the bawdy courts, or the bum courts, which was when local communities had to basically please the morals of their neighbors; and they could legitimately spy through keyholes to do so, and then take them to court where they would be publicly shamed. They would have to walk through the street with a white sheet and confess and recant and all the rest of it. But, the 18th century, you have this tremendous--I would say, quite modern--idea of sex coming through. Which is, as you say: God is deemed to be less interventionist in day-to-day life. So, he's no longer watching everything you do. And, people start talking about how their conscience meant that they thought they could probably have sex with this other person. And that extends to, yes, some quite extraordinary cases of lesbian sex, homosexual sex. This is when you have the development of things like molly-houses where men could meet and dance to each other. And, compared to what went before when that just wasn't possible--and this became quite a public thing--it's an absolutely extraordinary thing that does basically warrant the description of it being the first sexual revolution. Long before the 1960s, in, say, 1811. Russ Roberts: Yeah. You have a quote from Jean Home, a married woman that was having an affair with James Boswell, who I'm sure was a--I don't know anything--his diaries evidently detail a lot of-- Tiffany Jenkins: Oh my goodness, yeah-- Russ Roberts: his activities, which I was not aware of. But, he was clearly a fascinating companion intellectually. And, you write that she was unwilling--Jean, who was married--when Boswell tried to end his relationship with her, she was unwilling to let go of their, quote, "delicious pleasures." She told him that she loved her husband as a husband and Boswell as a lover; that each had a place, and that no one suffered. Quote: 'My conscience does not reproach me, and I'm sure that God cannot be offended by them, those delicious pleasures.' And, this whole idea that this is natural, therefore God did it. It's natural, so therefore it's okay--which again, I think we associated with the 1960s--is a slightly older idea. Tiffany Jenkins: Very much so. And, you had enlightenment ideals and ideas about rationality and what is and isn't natural. There was also the voyages of discovery. And so, people would be traveling and seeing that different communities do things very differently, and therefore, actually maybe there's more variety in human life than was previously thought. But, it's a tremendous change. So, Boswell is writing his diaries. These are quite early diaries of a man about town. He's writing all about the prostitutes he visits and the mistresses he has. He reflects on whether this is a good thing or not, but he gives way--like many, gives way to temptation. But, you wouldn't have had that written on the page a century earlier. The Puritans wrote diaries, but they were all about praying. Come the 18th century, we have this sudden dramatic change where people talk about sex much more openly. Russ Roberts: I would just add that I think writing about one's own religious feelings is also something that ebbs and flows in culture. Gerard Manley Hopkins, it feels somewhat--I feel like a voyeur sometimes when I read his books about how God makes him feel. And most people would say that's a private thing; you shouldn't write about it. And partly because you can't put it into words. And, of course, what an enormous amount of poetry--a popular song is an attempt to put into words something that's fundamentally ineffable: love. But, anyway. Tiffany Jenkins: But, it does so in a way that--there's a tendency sometimes to try and describe love or art in scientific terms. They look at the brain, and it's a very sort of popular thing at the moment, but that's why poetry succeeds and science can't. It may tell you everything about what's happening inside your head, but it can't really sum up the heart. Russ Roberts: Yeah, a mystery. A mystery. |
| 50:02 | Russ Roberts: I want to skip, rather dramatically, to--I mean, in terms of a shift-- Tiffany Jenkins: Time, yeah-- Russ Roberts: Not so much time. But I want to talk about the Mazzini Affair, which I knew nothing about. The importance of a private letter and the gummed envelope. Tiffany Jenkins: So, this is a fascinating privacy panic in Britain in around 1844. Giuseppe Mazzini is a Italian nationalist. He would like to see unified Italy. He's on the run for trying to create that very situation, and he's given political exile in London where he becomes the talk of the town. Good friends with Carlyle, Dickens. Liberals really fall for him. He's continuing to write in his bedsit--his dank bedsit--to different political revolutionaries. And, the Austrian ambassador becomes deeply concerned about this. So he asks for the Tory in charge of the Home Office in Britain to intercept the letters. And they send them off, they do, with no kind of concern for privacy. And he sends them off to the secret office in the post office where people uncover them, read them, and then seal them back and then send them off to Mazzini. And he opens them one day, and he realizes that they've probably been tampered with. This is a time when people are sending, you know, probably five or six letters a day. The post is going almost like email. He then asks his friends--he needs confirmation--he asks his friend to send him some envelopes. Within which are poppy seeds and strands of hair. He receives these envelopes, and the poppy seeds and strands of hair have been kind of dropped by the secret clerks in the post office by accident who don't really know what they're doing. And he knows: He has this confirmation. And it becomes a full-blown argument in the Houses of Parliament and in The Times newspaper. It's a national scandal. And, what's really interesting about it is that people who do not side with him politically--i.e., The Times, and also his friend Thomas Carlyle--rushed to his aid and talk about how his kind-of sacred privacy has been violated by this opening of the letter. And, the scandal reaches far beyond the borders. It comes to the States, as well. It's written about equally in Australia. And, I think what it reveals at the time is this deep value that privacy has acquired in British society: It is seen as a kind of a violation of the sacred space, a man's private letters. And, it is finally resolved by the invention of the gummed envelope. Which means that the letter can be kind of properly secured--where, although it was secured by a stamp that was easily fiddled with and reapplied. So, Victorian society came up with a typically brilliant invention. But, it did show that privacy was--in the way that it just isn't now--you couldn't imagine the same sort of scandal. Liberals in the House of Commons in particular were absolutely outraged, and it was just kind of the scandal of the day. |
| 53:43 | Russ Roberts: You write at a little bit of length about John Stuart Mill. He is such a fascinating character. I don't know of a movie that's been made of his life. There should be. And, I don't know of a great biography--there probably is one that I'm just unaware of because I'm an ignoramus. But, why is he in this book? And, I enjoyed every word of that chapter, by the way, because he's a very interesting person. Tiffany Jenkins: I always liked what he said about--and I think it was he and Harriet Taylor who talked about the need for experiments in living. That--for two reasons, for society and for the individual--that there needed to be this space where people could try different ways of being, thinking, and doing. And, it might be something that they wouldn't approve of, and it probably wasn't. But, they thought it was necessary for the individual because if the individual didn't have this--the ability to test things out for themselves--they couldn't become a moral person. Everything would effectively be handed down to them. It would create a kind of passive individual. So, they were both very interested in self-development and working on the self to become a better moral actor. But, he also thought that unless you have that kind of private space for experiments and living--unless you have a kind of space for freedom, effectively--society couldn't progress because we couldn't kind of test things out. So, I really like Mill. I think he's a very complicated writer, but one that fundamentally respects the private sphere, not to never be interfered with, but generally to have a kind of a private sphere for the individual. And, as for a good biography, Richard Reeves, I would recommend his, yeah. Russ Roberts: Great. And, you write about the "right," quote, "to be left alone," which is a beautiful idea. And, that's related to that, obviously. Tiffany Jenkins: It is. It's the same sort of very similar sort of period, 19th century: that is the Warren and Brandeis kind of American conception of the right to be let alone. And, they talk about privacy. Again, it's not so much property, which is recognized in the Constitution--that's more of an earlier idea. But they talk about the modern individual just needs that kind of space, primarily for a kind of emotional release where they can be off. And that's a very 19th-century idea. Is now, I think you have that--if I look at that kind of phrase, 'the right to be left alone,' now, I think really from the 1970s onwards, it's the odd person that wants to be left alone in that same way. Not the Marlene Dietrich, but the kind of strange man who lives on his own that can't be trusted. Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, that's a lot of what we've been talking about in the first half of our conversation, is about extroverts. And we live in an extrovert's culture; and introverts are judged. And I think they often want to be left alone. And then: Well, what's wrong with them? Why would they want to be left alone? And, I want to make sure I give introverts their due because the default is: join in, and not stay home. Come out, don't stay inside. Share and don't conceal. And, that's tough on people who are constitutionally made to be more private. Tiffany Jenkins: Yes, there's a great--I don't know if you've ever read The Circle, but--I can't remember who it's by--David Eggers. Russ Roberts: I haven't read it. I'm a big fan of his first book, which I think is how he became an orphan. It's a memoir. I think it's the funniest book I've ever read, which is awkward. I remember reading it in a hotel, in the lobby, and I'm laughing out loud, and I'm wondering whether people who are watching me or who come up to say, 'Oh, wow, what's so funny?' 'Oh, it's a book about a man who lost both of his parents in a very short period of time.' That book, which is called-- Tiffany Jenkins: Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius. Russ Roberts: Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius. But, I did not read The Circle, which is evidently a thinly veiled portrait of, is it Apple or Facebook? A tech company. Tiffany Jenkins: A tech company. It's not as profound as Staggering Work, or as funny, but it's got some very nice observations in it. Number one is the sort of the desire from the bottom up to expose oneself and be transparent rather than the top down. So, although it's about a tech company, he's not really saying tech is forcing you to be like this. But, he's got a very nice line, which is, I think it's after Mae, the central character, goes paddling in a kayak on her own. And, this is deemed as just really strange. Why would you do that? And, they say something along the lines of: Sharing is caring; secrets are theft. And, the sense is like that if you haven't shared it, you've stolen it from other people. Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's a horrible--just horrible. |
| 59:32 | Russ Roberts: I want to skip forward a few--a century or so. You write very thoughtfully about a moment in entertainment that I think was an incredible watershed, which was the Loud and Wilkins families. The Louds were in America, and the Wilkins were in the United Kingdom. In 1979, Albert Brooks created a mockumentary called "Real Life." I'm seeing it now on the Internet. It was his directorial debut. It's quite funny. But, the reality show, An American Family, which was 1973, about the Louds--four[?] people--I was alive. I don't think I ever saw it. Because I'm a snob. And, if I did see it, I would not admit it. But, tell us what that show was. It's hard to--and what it did. It's quite extraordinary. Tiffany Jenkins: I think the idea was to make a sitcom about a family like the Brady Bunch, or a well-known American family, but for real. And to get behind the veneer--I think that's the word the producer used himself--to get behind the veneer and show what real life was like. This was a family living in Santa Barbara, relatively prosperous. And, inevitably, as the cameras turned on and kept rolling, the messiness of life became evident and discussed in the public arena. So, at one point, Pat told her womanizing husband to leave. Their son was gay and lived quite an openly--quite a hedonistic lifestyle in Chelsea. And, the newspaper columnists couldn't get enough of it. They ate it up. Because, once you put your life out there, people judge it. They judged the daughter for not caring enough about politics. They were really horrible about Lance, the son, calling him a Goya-esque dwarf leeching about. And, I think the thing about it is that their lives were then transformed. Because they felt, once they'd become public property, they had to constantly perform. Whether it was on the Dick Cavett Show or posing for a magazine, their lives were changed. I mean, remarkably, Pat Loud, who wrote an autobiography about it--about her life--sort of prefiguring that kind of boom for a kind of the confessional type of life story. Although Betty Ford would also do that around the same period. But, she still advocated that opening up the doors and showing people your dirty linen was the way to save marriages. But it didn't save hers. Russ Roberts: And, what happened when the United Kingdom copied it? Tiffany Jenkins: It was very similar. It was a family called the Wilkinson's family. And, it was--the same sort of thing happened, really, inasmuch as you had a complicated situation, like every family. The woman's--Margaret Wilkinson's--son wasn't her son by marriage. It was by an affair. He had been accepted into the family as his own by Margaret's husband. But, it just kind of exposed the difficulties in front of everybody. And they talked to the camera as if they were a friend. You know, as if there was nothing--I'm trying not to say nothing to hide, but as if everything was fine to show, your dirty laundry was fine to show. And, they again, couldn't escape the cameras from there on. And, what's remarkable about both families is that, again, they invited the camera in. And, I don't think a family, certainly in Britain, would have done that 10 years, 20 years earlier. But, there was a sense that what was usually on television was not real. And, we had to show real life. And, unless it's kind of exposed, it's not real. There was, I suppose, a kind of, almost a quest for recognition. Russ Roberts: Yeah, I guess transparency is the nice way to say it. Exhibitionism is the not-as-nice way. And, some of that's-- Tiffany Jenkins: Yeah. I mean, I think it might begin as openness, but it does end up being exhibitionism because--you can already see it. You can see it in the development of reality television. At first, people don't really know what it's going to be like, but now everything's done for the camera. So, it becomes exhibitionism. And, it's almost as if people feel they don't exist unless somebody's liking them on TikTok or watching them on some sort of reality television program. Russ Roberts: Kind of a paradox there that you're only real when you're inauthentic. When you're posing. That would be the right way to say it, I think, right? Russ Roberts: A selfie--chronicling your life via selfies--is a contradiction if you're thinking of it as being a way of capturing real life. Because, what you're really doing is capturing what you think your real life is supposed to look like. And, it's always fascinating being older, watching younger people strike poses when you're on a vacation in a place where a lot of people are taking pictures; and it's comical to watch from the outside. They think they're doing something glamorous or elegant, and it looks like a circus. It's a farce, actually. Tiffany Jenkins: I find it unnerving, I think-- Russ Roberts: Well, you're British, Tiffany. Russ Roberts: Sorry, it was a cheap shot. That was a cheap shot. I apologize. Tiffany Jenkins: It happens here. Russ Roberts: I'm an Anglophile. Tiffany Jenkins: But what strikes me about it is that there isn't a public self there. So, there is that kind of pushing out of the intimate and what you're taking--where you are in terms of the photograph is just a backdrop for you, rather than--it's actually this: The Taj Mahal, I went to recently. And it's this astonishing building. And everybody is taking selfies of themselves in front of it. Which I'm not saying it's a terrible thing to do, but there is something very me-focused and very, very self-focused. And, what's striking about the reality TV programs--later on, not initially--is that people are isolated from the world. So, when the planes threw into the Twin Towers, the people on the celebrity television reality TV program in the States were not told about it. And, you just think: because all they're valued for is how they are in private. So, it's a peculiar thing. In a strange way, they're more public and they're more exposed, but it's not being as public actors. It's being as private selves. So, the only part of them that is sort of deemed important is the private nature rather than the public nature. Russ Roberts: But, they're on camera. So, I just mention in passing that when I visited the memorial at the World Trade Center, to see someone taking a selfie there is somehow profane. I'm sure they take them at Auschwitz. I'm sure people take selfies in lots of places that I would deem inappropriate. But, it is a fascinating thing to think about your observation, that it's a way of saying: Me, me, me. And yet, in theory, when you post it, you're sharing. You're trying to interact with the world, but only as: Me, me, me. Which is a little bit, again, of a paradox. Tiffany Jenkins: And, I also wonder, I mean, I have thousands and thousands of photographs on my phone. What happens to those photographs? I mean, yes, sometimes they are shared. But, it is as if the act of taking the photograph of you somewhere means that you were there rather than the fact that you were there and you had a kind of, in the cases of Auschwitz or the Twin Towers, you had an experience with others who were also there, and what the actual site means. So, there's a kind of very peculiar sense in which we can only be real if we've had some sort of record of it. |
| 1:09:03 | Russ Roberts: And even more pitiful, because I thought this was the direction you were going, is: Well, after you die, those have to be preserved because they are the record of my life. And, I don't think it's--we're going to see some extraordinary things in the next 50 years or 10 years where our lives are--where we get some measure of immortality through the maintaining--I'm sure it's already out there; please don't send me an email--immortality through our preservation of our digital life. And, I get it. A lot of this goes back to my favorite Adam Smith quote, "Man actually desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely." And, we desperately want to be loved. And, by that he did not mean romantic love. He meant admired, respected, praised. And there are many ways to become loved. He writes about it at great length in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. But posing in front of Auschwitz is one way to get people to pay attention to you in your circle of Instagram followers or Twitter fans, or Facebook, etc. And, what a strange world that is. And, it really brings us back full circle to how the book starts and what we talked about earlier of public versus private. In many ways, civilization advances through the exhortation of our culture to do something important that's positive. Invent something. Build a business. Create a family. And, increasingly we don't find our meaning that way. Some people find it through mass murder, serial killing. It's the way they get attention. We do it through taking pictures of ourselves in iconic places. I wonder if there'll be a rebellion against it. It feels like we're moving ever further toward more exposure exhibitionism. But I just suspect there may be a movement in the other direction. What do you think? Tiffany Jenkins: I think you can see it. You had a podcast recently about Christianity. And certainly there's a discussion at the moment about potential rising interest from younger generations. I think that is a search for something beyond the self-- Russ Roberts: Yep-- Tiffany Jenkins: I don't know if religion is going to solve that, but I think there's a desire to go beyond the self, for things that are meaningful beyond you, and for some recognition of history, actually. And, that is also about kind of not just being this tiny little individual in a timeless space. I think some of the things--like, you were talking about, what happens when we die and what kind of--what we preserve. And, I think there's a crisis of meaning, really a crisis of what is important. Historically, it might have been art, or poetry, or bridges, or physical monuments, which kind of were monuments to the nation or artistic achievement. And, that is also about developing kind of a public life that credits what people do when they're their best selves--when they are not just sitting at home washing the dishes, when they are achieving things. And that requires, in some strange way, a greater valuation of human beings. So, although we live in quite narcissistic times, we also live in quite misanthropic times, where human beings are seen as--I mean, you get this in discussions around the private sphere--they are seen as abusive or just kind of, yeah, bullying. There's a kind of obsession with the worst side of human beings. So, not only do we need to kind of be less me-obsessed, I think we also need to be a bit more confident about what human beings can achieve beyond their individual selves, maybe when they're working together on a project that they think is important. Russ Roberts: That's lovely. |
| 1:13:40 | Russ Roberts: You mentioned at one point the Truman Show. Maybe twice. It's one of my favorite movies; also a very prescient film about what was coming. I want to contrast it a little bit with the Louds and the Wilkins, and maybe we'll close with this. In the Truman Show--no spoilers--but it's a man whose entire life is on display. Unlike the Louds, he is unaware of it. And, that's what makes the movie so poignant. And it has many other themes that are really, I think, very thought-provoking. But, what's interesting is that what feels like real-life to him, to the audience is a sitcom or a drama. And, they root for him the way they would the main character in a book or a movie. But it's not a book or a movie. It's his real life. And, I'm not going to spoil the ending, but the ending is a very harsh judgment of how the rest of us look at exhibitionists and, while willingly or not--when I say the ending, I mean the last 10 seconds--I think it's a great, great movie. But, what's interesting is that you're talking about the Louds and the Wilkins, these families that were destroyed by their invitation to the cameras. Of course, correlation is not causation. They might have pulled themselves apart without being observed 24/7. I was tempted to say they weren't normal, but of course they were. And, the interesting question is whether the healthiest of families would be able to sustain those cameras' all-seeing eye. But what I was going to make--the observation--is that everybody judged them. Truman, they don't judge. They actually root for him. But--and there are probably some people who rooted for the Louds--but the loudest people, if I may make a bad pun, the loudest people are the ones who revel in ignoring anything redeeming, failing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and reveling in looking down on someone else; and enjoying it, and looking forward to it every week. Not saying, 'Oh, I wonder if they'll be able to patch their marriage together,' but rather to say, 'Well, of course they're breaking up. He's horrible to her.' And, 'She's whatever.' And, it's just an interesting thing, that anonymity it unleashed--which is what social media has to some extent become--is just another example, for me, of the dangers of this kind of violation of privacy and the costs of it. Reflect on that. Tiffany Jenkins: Well, the thing that struck me as you were talking was an extension of what we were saying about people needing some type of visual sense of themselves in the picture to feel real. And, I just wonder whether what you see online, and the way in which people now just tear into each other without any sense that these people are real, you are condemning their life, they've made a mistake, have a little bit of sympathy, or at least empathy. There's almost a sense in which our society tends to not believe anything anymore as real because it's all seen as a performance rather than reality. So, I don't know if that quite answers your provocation, but there's this real peculiar sense of everything being a performance and nothing being real that reflects, I suppose, also a kind of an alienation from agency and possibility. |
| 1:17:56 | Russ Roberts: But it's striking to me how unforgiving we are. And, coming back to Adam Smith: Smith argued that if you weren't lovely, people judged you; and the fact that you want to be judged positively encourages loveliness; and that's a built-in feedback loop to good behavior. Bad behavior is judged. If bad behavior is forgiven always and never condemned, that has a terrible cost, in my view, as well. But this, to me--and this is, I think, doesn't seem to happen in real life--but to me, there should be a good difference between how the state and the law treats you versus how your neighbor and your brother treat you. And, you should forgive your brother. Whether the government should forgive, or the police should forgive your brother for doing something untoward is a legitimate question. But, you know what's in your own heart; you know your own weaknesses. Although maybe it's just you and me, Tiffany. Maybe everybody else doesn't have these impulses. But, when I think of these--of judging the Loud family, for example, because we can, because we see a lot. Not all, because we don't get all their thoughts, but as we strip them bare and judge their moral flabbiness or their intellectual ugliness, it's a bad comment on the human species, at least in the realm of anonymity. Tiffany Jenkins: Well, I think the public realm is the realm of judgment, whether it's the law saying you've transgressed, this is our common sense of what is right and wrong, you've transgressed that, therefore off you go to prison. That's a kind of common realm of judgment. Equally, taste and criticism of books--that's a realm of where we have this sort of--or we should have this realm of--this sense of rules, standards that we agree on. Russ Roberts: Manners. Tiffany Jenkins: Manners. And, that's where we come together beyond our own private selves and our predilections and all the rest of it as a sort of public, and kind of work out how we get along and what we find important. I think that's sort of shoved out of the way at the moment, and instead we kind of apply that kind of critical judgment to people's private lives. See, they're deemed to be more important and valuable and all the rest of it. You see that in the discussions over the artists who behave badly, and sometimes they really do behave badly. But, there's more of a discussion in society about their behavior than there is their work. And so, we've applied the critical gaze to the wrong place. Because we all behave slightly badly and oddly and strangely in private, and that's on the basis on which we're judging people we don't know. We're judging strangers on the basis of their intimate life. And, that's something that nobody can kind of survive. Because, the people who judge you in your private life should be your intimates and your friends and all the rest of it because you have a slightly different form of accountability. And, only you can forgive your partner in a way that somebody watching your partner on television can't forgive them. They can only judge them as if they are a cartoon character. Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's not just that they're your intimate, it's that because they're your intimate, you know their foibles, but you know their strengths. And, we forgive our lovers and spouses and family because we know them so well. I hope. Tiffany Jenkins: Yeah. And, love is--there's an unconditionality about those bonds. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Tiffany Jenkins. Tiffany, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Tiffany Jenkins: Thank you. |
A paradox of our time is our willingness to bare all to strangers while worrying about who exactly is watching us online and anywhere else. Listen as author Tiffany Jenkins discusses her book, Strangers and Intimates, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. In this wide-ranging conversation, they explore the role of Martin Luther, J.S. Mill, reality TV, and social media, among other factors, in creating the norms of the public and private spheres over time and today.
READER COMMENTS
neil21
May 12 2025 at 1:57pm
Regarding English social kissing, I remember from this excellent book two decades ago, that the only correctly English way to do it was awkwardly. Easy confidence in social kissing immediately marks one as a continental.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watching_the_English
Luke J
May 17 2025 at 10:43pm
I’d like to ++ the mention of social currency.
The occasional Econlib comment is the height of my online presence, and so I can attest to the real costs of refraining from an online, public persona. Such costs lead me to question whether I am virtuous or foolish. And I frequently second guess my parenting: am I setting up my kids for success or for failure?
Thank you for the thoughtful conversation.
Comments are closed.