Dying Breed Dialogues: Tiffany Jenkins on the Rise and Fall of Private Life

It seems like the default in today’s world is to broadcast all your thoughts and going-ons in your life. To share a lot on social media. To be completely transparent. It wasn’t always like that, though. There used to be a strong demarcation between public and private life.

Why did it dissolve?

Tiffany Jenkins, a cultural historian with a knack for tracking big shifts through the small details of everyday life, spent years researching how the boundary between public and private life formed, hardened, and — more recently — started to fade. In her book, Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life, she traces that story from ancient Athens to Instagram stories, with stops in medieval feudal realms, Puritan diaries, French coffee houses, and the first reality TV experiments of the 1970s.

I talked with Jenkins about how the public/private line was built, why it blurred, and what we lose without a robust private life. We also got into why secrecy is underrated and how recovering a sense of inwardness might make us better citizens . . . and better humans.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book traces how the boundary between public and private life has shifted across centuries in the West. Broadly speaking, how do you define public and private life?

The binary between public and private is the most important binary in our lives. I would apply that to every society, actually. Whether it’s the distinction between taboo and shame or what we show and what we don’t show — that line is present everywhere, but it’s highly variable. I wanted to look at how it rose to a particular form in Europe, really in the early modern period, and how it defined political life for many years. But now you can see how it’s dissolving between the two. It’s a highly changeable thing, but one that has great impact upon our lives.

You start with ancient Greece. What did privacy look like there?

The ideals of democracy were premised on a separation between public and private life. The male citizens, the free men, required basically slaves and women doing the necessary reproduction of life in private so that they could act on the stage, the political stage — go to war, commit great speech acts. The separation was very stark in Athens, and the public world was the one that was venerated. The private world was meaningful and essential, but it wasn’t considered as important. In fact, the idea of privacy — the name comes from being deprived of public office, which gives an indication of the validation of the public world.

Yeah, our word “idiot” comes from the Greek word that meant “private person.” Do we still have this stark distinction between public and private today?

Certainly not. We don’t have a strict separation between public and private. The two kind of bleed together. Another difference is that the public world isn’t valued like it was in Athens. The idea of democracy is something that people are cooling on, but also the idea of great men is something that people are cooling on. We don’t have that kind of respect for the public world.

There’s a story of the cynic Diogenes who went into the Athenian marketplace and did a number of things you were not meant to do at the time, including eating and drinking and masturbating. He was showing his disdain for both that separation between public and private and also the public realm. I think we are more akin to Diogenes today. There’s this constant doing of private things in public and trying to challenge the border between public and private.

You then shift to the medieval era. What did privacy look like then?

I’d say there was no such thing as privacy, really. Both practically — people lived and died jumbled up together — but also conceptually. Power was much more personal. The king or feudal lord were father-like figures. You belonged to them. You would live with the feudal lord, and he would pretty much control your life. There was no sense that you’d be separated from him. So both in terms of the role of authority in life and also physical privacy, it just didn’t exist.

My wife, Kate, wrote an article about how the development of manners during the late medieval era and early Renaissance contributed to a growing sense of a distinction between public and private life. Norbert Elias made this argument in his book The Civilizing Process.

Yes! His argument is that the distinction between public and private did create civilization — the idea of being civilized, that you don’t do something in front of everybody. Manners are a way of living with people you don’t know, strangers. People sort of think of them negatively today, but actually they’re a way of respecting a certain degree of diversity. If you think of them coming about in Europe in the 18th century, the idea of being polished and politeness was very important. It was a way of dealing with people who might have been traveling from afar to sell goods in a rising mercantile society.

Also, after the English Civil Wars in Britain, people needed to know how they might live with each other without descending into argumentation and violence. Manners do that, and there’s something about it which is also developing the public side of ourselves — the one that brushes our hair and dresses a little bit more smartly and presents a better public face.