Public intimacy

A lot is made of the distinction between public and private realms in moral philosophy.  The public realm of the agora is where we normally think of constructive dialogue as taking place; the private realm is where family relationships unfold.  At least, that’s the classical notion.  The public realm is also where putative equals interact – while via traditional or contractual relations, hierarchy may be formed, functionally all actors within the public space initiate their dialogue as equals.  That notion of equality within the public sphere is, of course, subject to challenge.  But the contrast is with the private sphere, which has usually been viewed as subject to a more intuitively powered range of personal relationships – parent to child, spouse to spouse and the like.  The model of public versus private spheres in the West has also served to contrast it with non-Western societies which maintain what the West would view as “private” schemes of interaction even in “political” settings; the example that comes to my mind is the ordering of Confucian society whereby the ruler simply maps the private hierarchies and responsibilities of the household to the governance requirements of the state.

Importantly, the public space in classical philosophy is also where such issues as philosophy, belief, morality, and ethics play out.  Within the private sphere, there is not a firm concept of these: there is an assumption that within the closed doors of the family, issues of child rearing, interpersonal relationships, and the like are either simply assumed to take place, or where their relevance to the outward forms of “society” (the state or the polis) is essentially nil.  It’s not a perfect barrier; Plato, of course, in The Republic essentially gives the public sphere full powers over what are normally passed over as private matters, and most post-utilitarian political philosophies also view the destruction of the boundary between public and private as being essential to the creation of whatever better society is imagined.  The power of the public-private analogy, though, remains resilient even as it is being denied.

Recently, though, I’ve been coming across a different distinction, one that posits the realm of civil dialogue against intimate dialogue.  It’s a refinement of the notion of public and private, to embrace the evolution in the West of a space where civil discourse can exist in a sphere of politeness and refinement.  Charles Taylor (I’ve moved on to his A Secular Age now, having finished Sources of the Self) traces it to the long century from 1650 to the dawning of the age of revolutions in the 1770s, and views it as a reaction to the chaotic breakdown of dialogue in the period leading up to and following the Reformation.  To state a very simplistic synopsis of the thesis, religion – previously viewed as an essential element of the public discourse on morality – became internalized, and in so doing the public fora for working out its influence on all facets of human existence fundamentally failed.  As a reaction, European elites – embodied in the Treaty of Westphalia, closing off the Thirty Years War – essentially agreed to disagree and, moreover, agreed to stop talking in the public realm about religion, indeed, viewed any such discussion as in poor taste.  Out of this comes “freedom of conscience: rulers of states could decide on the public expression of religion, but in private, individuals would  evolve to worship or philosophize on their own.  By extension, there would no longer be a permitted public (in the older, public/private notion) space of dialogue in such matters except as determined by the public ruler.

In response to this, learned and monied elites – who continued to debate and discuss in the growing salon and coffeehouse culture of the 17th century – developed a parallel construct of polite society, where discussions could take place on all elements of the public weal but, in essence, no longer in the agora – the fully public and politicized space of court and Parliament.  Instead, you would be admitted to a quasi-public, quasi-private realm where your membership was predicated on (of course) some wealth and power, but also by your knowledge of and willingness to abide by rules of decorum.  This was also a reaction to the expansion of the space of what constituted “equality” among members of the public realm, historically only the landed nobility who could command territory, peasants-as-future-warrior-fodder, and food.  Merchants, artists, and proto-manufacturers such as shipbuilders and smiths – “commoners” – who were not part of the public space increasingly wielded greater economic power, in some cases having a kind of sword of Damocles over the older public sphere.  Also, as society became more technologically complex and the primary activity of the public sphere, war, required greater innovation in economics, weaponry, and strategic thinking, society required a broader cross-section of society to be educated and capable of engaging in intellectual discussion so as to allow states to bring to bear the full force of modern thinking in its activities of conquest or defense.

While Taylor doesn’t really ever hit on the impact of technology on moral philosophical constructions, I think the emergence of mass media in the 16th and 17th century printing revolution also impelled this forward.  With cheap printing, individuals could emerge who could wield outsized intellectual “power” while having no claim to economic or traditional power bases.  Harnessing this capability was critical to all parties, however, as literacy increased and individuals who were not part of any public space became aware of potentially explosive new thoughts.

Over time, this realm of civility would emerge as “the Establishment”, to use the Anglo-American term: a diffuse body of a broad cross-section of the orders of society, in which outward distinctions would be complex – some would be noble and have traditional assertions of power, some would be common but far richer than any noble and thus have a modern assertion of the power of wealth, and some would be neither noble nor rich but able to exercise enormous intellectual influence beyond any merchant or duke.  Because the outward distinctions were so complex, this new virtual body of discourse created its own effective language of politesse and civilite.  This does not mean merely “being polite” and “being civil” – it encompasses a whole language of forms of behavior, open morality versus taboo, body language, you name it, which served to proscribe membership within the new sphere.

Something that struck me in Taylor’s account, however, was an introductory anecdote he crafted to describe how the language of polite society could work:

Your deliciously ironic remark cuts me down to size and ensures that the Countess will focus on you for the rest of the soiree, but this remark was designed to amuse, and perhaps even instruct, and in this is light years away from the rapier thrust I am dreaming of giving you, if I can induce you to meet me at dawn in an early form of agonic conquest.

The language of the Establishment does two things: it levels all participants, regardless of where they had come from, and it elevates (or presumes to elevate) the dialogue above the passions which had become so endemic in the Reformation era public discourse.  There’s great value to this, of course – it is the beginning of a speech form which is inclusive, of essential need in a society which is starting to experiment with republican and democratic forms, and it does so while consciously suppressing the passions which lay under the surface in any human being.

Inevitably, though, this will require a backlash.  Maintaining propriety always does: individuals chafe under the restrictions of decorum, and some will inevitably rebel, or at least attempt to.  In this instance, I think the backlash comes in the emergence of an intimate sphere which is set against the new civil sphere of dialogue.  Intimacy, moreover, forms in opposition to civility in a much more violent way than that which defined the public and private opposition.  Public and private were segregated by traditionally lived and understood notions of hierarchy; while there was plenty of violence within each sphere, between them, there existed a great deal of simple accepted ways of being.  Intimacy emerges as a conscious, subversive response to the rule that civility requires to operate.  By being a conscious construction, and by being subversive (not constructive) in form, intimacy thus becomes a continuing threat to civility.  Moreover, I’d like to argue, intimacy as we’ve constructed it – not as I used the term earlier in a different essay, but as a specific realm of dialogue – is actually a threat to the very concept of jointly organized, collaborative communities in physical space, and is potentially a threat to even the possibility of close relationships between humans living as autonomous internal selves.

Intimate spheres in this form exist to discuss the topics that are taboo under the rules of civil discourse.  Note that civil discourse does have the ability to discuss almost anything, but only under strict formalist rules.  You can, for example, discuss religion – as long as it discussed in the abstract, as something “done” by other people who are clearly not present – but one must not proselytize, or confess one’s own faith, or speak of matters of faith as if they have any essential nature whatsoever.  You can discuss sexuality and sexual matters – just not your own, and certainly not with any indication that you believe sexual acts actually take place among members of civil society except as witticisms which can be readily denied or brushed aside.  You can discuss politics – but only in oblique ways which first affirm that everyone present is essentially in agreement, and which couches the conversation in terms of exploring ephemera of policy or slight nuances on the boundaries of what is generally understood.  To veer off of these rules is to court ostracization – denial of presence in the civil space – or, and I think this is critical, it is to signal to others your desire to leave the civil space.  Suggesting a willingness to leave the rule space is a dog-whistle to others of like mind to create a new intimate space for conspiracy.

Within this intimate sphere, the rules come off – at least for the subject that you have in common with your co-conspirators.  Others who don’t share your view can be reviled without worrying about violating the norms of civility, and the topics can inspire the passions which are held at bay in that other sphere.  Because these are the areas which are most vital to us – they are the once the topics most precious to us and therefore are those which we most wish to protect from public ridicule – we have a desperate need to have a space to share them.  And because civility requires us to be dispassionate, the emergence of a civil society almost requires the subsequent emergence of a shadow in the form of these intimate spheres of discourse.  Also, by being in the intimate sphere – pointedly one further step removed from affairs of the true “public” realm of the state – there is deniability, and the ability to continue to act within both the state and civil realms without suspicion.

This is, fundamentally, different from the older public / private divide.  Public space didn’t need, per se, the private sphere as a means of releasing one’s passions; the private sphere was simply assumed to exist as the world in which the physical acts required to live; it’s why historically it was associated with the “economics” of life, agriculture and basic manufacturing and home life and family.  The Greeks are usually held up as the exemplars of this divide because what occurred publicly was really very broad – it included religion, included sex, included especially politics – while what occurred privately was just those functions which, in their view, were required to perpetuate existence: agriculture and commerce, family raising, the operation of the household.  But that distinction of public is everything, just among equals of status and wealth, and private is everything else persisted.  The distinction of civil versus intimate, however, is new, and, interestingly, in its early development still allowed for the persistence of the older public / private divide.  Its origins, that is to say, was in a division of the public realm into topics of the state against topics of civil discourse, with intimacy arising simply because the state and civil spheres had excluded too many issues which had previously been open to not demand the emergence of a new, separate realm of discourse.

As economics became public – or at least, a combination of state interests and civil interests – and thus became divorced from private life, I would argue that the realm of privacy became too attenuated and narrow to be sustainable.  For example, I’d argue that the rise of the deification of domestic life is a counter-revolutionary response to the extraction of economics from private life.  With the public spheres – or at least, the “open” public spheres of state and civil discourse – expanded to include close examination of private finances, in the sense that what households do in spending money and raising children is now viewed as suitable objects for rational discussion by people not of a given private household, the only areas which are truly “private” are what happens in the actual interpersonal relationships in a given household.  Elevating domesticity to a kind of exalted status artificially preserves the status of the private realm, albeit artificially, and because it is artificial, it quickly eroded in the face of broader pressures.  For while the intimate sphere may have emerged to allow for discussion of passionate topics among individuals in a quasi-public form, one has to recognize that what happens in a private household will engage individuals with no less passion than what the intimate space opened up to discuss.  While it may have been the case that intimate spheres had their start in “secret societies” in which, say, Catholics in England could discuss their faith in a radically anti-papist society, or in which Protestants in France could worship after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the overlap with all other areas of private engagement was too great to leave it at that.

In the intervening three hundred or so years since these spheres first developed, the expansion of literacy, the explosion of media forms, and the radical innovation in political organization has had several effects.  First, the older state sphere of communication has become almost dead.  The state realm has devolved into the empty limbo of bureaucratic speech, now being simply an output of where civil spheres of discourse emerge in consensus (ideally) or where a temporary ruling elite is able to impose a new set of rule-language (more typically).  Civil discourse has risen in parallel to take over nearly all aspects of society.  This happened both because the older ruling elites were largely wiped out in the short twentieth century’s enormously destructive decades of war, and because the rise of literacy and media, initially controlled by the wealthy elites who had created civil society in the first place, reached downwards to co-opt the ranks of “peasantry” into joining in, in some form, of civil dialogue.  The intimate sphere, though, has expanded most perceptibly in the last fifty years or so (although the preponderance of clubs, societies, Freemasons and the like would seem to show that it was always present).  As media allows for greater atomization of bandwidth, and as the civil sphere expanded (more on this in a minute), the intimate sphere gained both a greater ability for members to find one another so as to engage in intimate discourse.  And as members of civil society saw more and more topics become subsumed in the oppressive need not to violate civility by openly stating diverse opinion, the need to exit civility and enter intimacy increased over time.

Much has been made in the press in the last decade or so about the breakdown in civil society, but what hasn’t emerged is an understanding of where that dialogue has shifted to.  Blame is put on internet trolls and the decline of compromise in politics and the reemergence of populism, but I think the seeds of the decline are in the expansion of the civil space itself.  Originally meant to contain a small number of topics within what was still thought of as a “public” realm of elites, the expansion of the footprint – both of topics, to include economics and public health, and of people, to include the mass-educated middle class and beyond – has strained civil society beyond its carrying capacity.  I come back to how Taylor unfolds what “civility” is, which is really a kind of constrained language, a social language for demarcating what can and can’t be discussed and how it can and cannot be stated.  Civil language has had to expand with civil society’s expansion, but it has increasingly come against a boundary where it either has to simply become language, or else it collapses under its own self-defined limitations.

Intimate speech, on the other hand, is not constrained in this way.  Intimate society defines itself in opposition to something external – it is where we discuss and live in the ways in which civil society asks us to avoid.  It also is not monolithic; intimate societies can be exclusive, but we can also choose to live in more than one intimate society at the same time (although I’ll question that as a practical reality in a moment).  Intimate societies can therefore proliferate in a way that civil society cannot.  But just like civil society, they are essentially instrumental – they exist to enable groups of people to do something in concert.  Civil society came about to allow for the emergence of a public dialogue without the (primarily religious and spiritual) passions which had led to the collapse of the Western world in the post-Reformation years.  Intimate society came about to allow for a quasi-public expression of those passions while still reserving a space for collective dialogue.

Importantly as well, the template for intimate dialogue – that is, a dialogue space which defines itself in enabling speech which is precluded in civil society – is readily re-used in destroying the old private space.  This is how most marriages, in my experience (direct and indirect) come to an end.  The old private space didn’t have a particular recognition of understanding whatsoever: it was acknowledged that the space was for acquiring the things needed to survive and hopefully thrive, so as to allow for participation in the public space, and to perpetuate the family (which is itself just an extension of any living creature’s desire to continue the chain of life).  As more and more individuals entered the civil space, and thus almost by definition simultaneously found intimate spaces as well, it would be natural to understand that they would start to imagine their “private” household space as simply a different kind of dialogue space.  And since maintaining harmony in a household seems (wrongly, I’d argue, but nevertheless) to be essential, the same kind of constraints to passionate dialogue that hold the civil space together will seem replicated in the private sphere.  And so, members of the private space – not just wife or husband but also teenagers, anyone with access to civil and intimate sphere forums – will seek out separate intimate spaces.

And, to use a phrase I’ve used before, intimacy – to use the more intuitive sense of the term that I used in my previous essay – dies.  Here, though, what is happening is that formerly “private” relationships – whose dynamics were often left unstated, or else were assumed to be built upon more primitive bonds which could resist rational expression – become transformed into “merely” a version of the template provided by intimate expression in what was formerly thought of as the public sphere.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that family life – or more broadly, personal relationships – are on the decline because of the decline of civil society.  I’m not suggesting anything that linear, and indeed, I think civil society itself is a reason why personal relationships are underexamined.  What I mean by this is that the old distinction between public and private spheres had in it an implicit hierarchy which stated the public – the polis and the state – was where “real” human constructive activity took place; the rest was just bodily functions and the vestiges of us as physical, animal creatures.  Fundamentally, if all we care about really is the public sphere, then what we find in the private sphere is essentially irrelevant: if the private sphere fails, it’s a private tragedy but irrelevant to us.  What we in the public sphere – and I include in this both the modern subsets of it in civil and intimate spaces – care about is the production of new members of the public space.  How they get here is irrelevant; if they don’t get here because the household private space fails, we don’t notice and so don’t care.  If they get to the public spaces and are incapable of participation – because of a refusal to play by the rules – then we simply eject them, via disengagement in some way.

This disengagement, by the way, exists in intimate spheres as well – perhaps even more so, because the reasons for intimate spheres coming together is so, well, passionate.  In intimate spaces, if we feel one of the group is “not playing by the rules”, we will reject them just as violently as if someone in civil society insists on evangelizing Christ or Mohammed or Donald Trump too loudly.  Three hundred years ago this was a kind of social death sentence, and while it was undertaken without pause it was understood to be awful for those involved.  Today, we assume that the ejected member of the civil or intimate society will simply find others with whom they are comfortable.  It carries little of the sense of being terrible, of being irredeemable, that it had before, because the consequences seem lighter.  But disengagement is nevertheless the tool available.

In that way, both civil and intimate society are linked by being very limited, binary expressions of dialogue.  Either you conform to the consensus, or you are ejected.  Civil society has certain minimum requirements – education, elocution, vocabulary, some minimum access to wealth or at least credit; intimate society shares these requirements but then adds a further requirement to agree on one or more passions.  And once you violate those rules, you’re out.  Now, education and elocution and vocabulary are largely retained once obtained, so we don’t usually get kicked out for any of those – although the willingness with which we shunt the elderly, or those with mental illness, or worst of all, the elderly with mental illness (think late stage Alzheimer’s care) into exiles beyond our pale largely demonstrates my point.  But also, the terror with which parents try to get their children educated into the norms of civil society, to the point where they aren’t really demonstrating qualities of compassion, empathy, unconditional love, is one of the diffuse factors that’s making me think about all this.

Raising my son with the ex-wife, I think we’ve been lucky: we’re incredibly focused on bringing him up to know he’s loved, and that he lives in a world of love, and he should feel uninhibited in loving (in the agape sense of love, mind you – he’s a bit young for us to be introducing the complexities of eros).  And oddly, we’ve been lucky because of our divorce.  We’re both all too aware that he could gain a more instrumental view of love if he were to see us as being instrumental with one another in divorce; as such, we actually express to one another far more compassion and dignity now than we did in the latter years of our marriage.  Watching him grow up in this, though, I’m struck that I don’t see his open-ended joy in love in many of his classmates.  Volunteering with his class trips, going to birthday parties, having playdates gives one a window into other families, and while it is just a reflection – and a dim reflection at that – even in kindergarten, too many kids seem tired.

I picked the son up from school on Friday, and parents are invited to come a half hour early to see story time.  I was the first there, and children going to after-school care were being dismissed, lining up to go to the gym for their bus ride.  The remaining thirty or so children gathered round and the oldest teacher started reading.  Parents snuck into class, one or two at first and then five minutes before the bell, about a dozen showed up.  The bell rang and the teacher dismissed the children.  My son ran over to me and, yelling “HUG!!!” jumped into my arms (he’s getting taller and bigger, so it’s getting to be a key part of my weekly workout to do this).  Other kids ran over to their parents and started eagerly describing their day or asking to play with a friend.  But more than a few kids quietly got their backpacks and walked to their parents, who would say something like “Let’s go to the car” or “We have to hurry, your brother is waiting”.  The joy was already drained from their faces.  They’re six.

Now, all of these kids are going to be members of civil society.  They’re going to an amazing public school in one of the wealthier areas of one of the wealthier cities in the wealthiest large country on earth, with great teachers and access to all the things they’ll need to get the education, elocution, vocabulary, and access to wealth necessary to join up.  And I’m sure they’ll evolve their personal passions, so as to be able to find the intimate societies that will give them an outlet that their professional or political lives won’t provide.  And they’ll be attractive and outgoing and I’m sure nearly all of them will find romantic attachments.

On that level, society is working.  But as I’ve said before, civil society – by expanding well beyond its original intent and original operating group – is collapsing under its own weight.  Intimate societies are essentially instrumental, providing us with an outlet for release for those passions which take us beyond the emotional still pond of civil discourse.  Where is the parallel society emerging where we look beyond instrumentality for a discourse of acceptance?

The old private space was also instrumental, but in a physical and thus negative way: it existed to provide the physical means of reproducing the base elements of society.  In that light, I’m not suggesting that rediscovering a public-private distinction is of particular use.  I think the thought that is taking shape in me is that we need to form a space where non-instrumental speech can take place more easily, where we can discuss the act of being – not of being-in-object, but being-in-self – without getting caught up in any idiosyncratic expressions of instrumental need.  I’ve said before that as sentient beings, we have a basic need to reaffirm our own not-aloneness, to reaffirm that others are also sentient and also experience fear of being all that there is in an otherwise materially experienced universe.  The dominance in our world of instrumental realms of discourse doesn’t address this need.  But without such a realm where we can address it – and address it deeply, not by simply discovering other people who like kinky sex or prefer pre-Vatican II Mass or want to vote for Brexit and thus affirm our existence because other people think like we do on a certain surface level – we are dooming ourselves to further deepen the existential malaise which, more than anything else, defines the contours of the modern world.

I’ve tried to live in a way which states, broadly, that being open to everything, loving as much as I can, and asking for acceptance but not affirmation, is a pathway to something else, something where I then have a foundation to not need to hide behind a civil consensus or slip into the shadows of intimate secrecy.  I’m sure there are other approaches as well, and I’d love to know about them – but again, not in some intimate society, which I fear is what this blog is coming to resemble.  Then again, I’m writing here because it is in the open, and I don’t want to be speaking to an echo chamber (that’s a pitch for you readers to forward this link as much as possible, by the way).  The fear I have today, though, is that the sheer power of instrumentalism over all other representations of the world – the temptation inherent in our hyper-technologized world to view others as objects, to increasingly view ourselves as object for accomplishment – is as tight as the power of Kim Jong-Il on North Korea.

This is the sense that bothers me as I write this.  I have a sense that in the drive towards a modern conception of the self, and in particular in the last hundred and fifty years or so since modernism splintered out from its original roots in the Enlightenment, that we have willingly let go of any non-instrumental conceptions of living.  We haven’t necessarily become materialists all – although many people out there are – but we have collectively given up on a dialogue which focuses on, if you will, pointless understanding of what it is to be alive and human.  The older public-private divide at least offered spaces in both realms where that could be considered: public religion and philosophy, and private contemplation of life as a reproducing, growing, dying, and loving individual.  The migration towards civility and intimacy has narrowed that down, albeit at least with a lot more freedom of exploration and offering many more options for “how” one can live beyond the traditional roles offered in the previous version.  But it strikes me as dependent on two very shaky pillars to be a true endpoint for conceptions of society: the idea that human beings are fundamentally good (or, less strongly, not evil), and the idea that the universe in general exists for the purpose of being acted upon by human instrumentality.  Drop those – and I think it’s actually simply impossible to defend them at all – and it becomes clear that for all of the majesty of the creation of a human instrumental sphere unshackled from tradition on the one hand, religion on the other, and all the expressive potential of freedom that the loose-but-essential linkage of a civil space and overlapping shadows of intimate space offer, we’re still trapped in the existentialist dilemma.

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I know this is a bit of a cliffhanger, but I’m going to talk about those shaky pillars in the next essay.  I’m going to post this now.  Also, a brief programming announcement: I’ll be overseas for the next several weeks, in London for one project the week of May 28, then in Albania for another project the week of June 4, then back in London again to finish up work for a few days before heading back to Seattle.  Give a thought to my dog, whom I’ll be missing desperately, and to my parents, who have to take care of the dog.  And hope along with me that the dog doesn’t gain any more weight from all the treats he’ll be getting from the parents.  If any of you happen to be in London or, less likely, Albania during that time, drop me a line and we can grab a beverage.  Note that I prefer public spaces for such things.