Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Experience’ post of the week — posts derived from lived experience. At , Carol Roh Spaulding writes incisively on the book and movie of Passing.
Best,
Sam
ON THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE POLARITY
There’s a curious minefield that awaits any student of political philosophy at the time they reach Kant’s What Is Enlightenment?. Kant addresses the public/private polarity and seems to have it exactly backwards. In his construction the ‘private’ figure is precisely anybody in what would usually be called a ‘public’ post — soldiers, civil servants, taxpayers, etc — and who has narrow obligations imposed on them per their given roles and constraining their behavior. And a ‘public’ figure is someone with no obvious responsibilities but who is able to speak freely and to address, as Kant puts it, “the entire reading public.”
Kant’s construction — which at first blush seems entirely idiosyncratic and speaks, apparently, only to his own experience; the isolated sage who nonetheless is able to reach the ‘entire reading public’ — had an important influence on the development of Enlightenment and Revolutionary thought and is surprisingly resonant when applied to developments in civil society today.
The great divide in discourse at the moment seems to be between those who have jobs and are answerable ultimately to the HR department of their company, which usually, on closer inspection, turns out to be an arm of some enormous corporation, and who tend to be silent in public discourse or mealy-mouthed or defer to the company press release; and then those who are writing/posting/expressing as themselves and have some idea of reaching the widest possible public all at the same time. Where it gets confusing is when the same people have split and competing roles — Elon Musk tweeting off-the-cuff, like he’s everybody’s favorite beatnik uncle, at the same time that he has a separate self with fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of several major corporations; the President of the United States writing insurrection-minded, stick-it-to-the-powers-that-be tweets, as if he were some scrappy outsider and didn’t possess exactly the kind of power that he spent all of his time complaining about; New York Times journalists taking on very different altar egos on Twitter from their sober bylines in the newspaper, so much so that, in the summer of 2020, in the midst of one of the greatest crises in the newspaper’s history, the executive editor Dean Baquet managed to be upset above all that Times employees were writing in their own voice on Twitter.
What all of this bears out is the astuteness of Kant’s counter-intuitive formulation — it simply is more fun to be free, to be ‘public,’ addressing the ‘entire reading public’ (aka Twitter); more fun than doing the work one is supposed to be doing as a distinguished journalist, as President of the United States, as ‘the richest man in the world,’ in all of which roles one is narrowly constrained by the function one serves. Or to put it slightly differently, it’s power itself that serves as a mechanism of constraint. When a person finds themselves holding a degree of power — the civil servant and soldier just as much as the president or ‘the world’s richest man’ — they are, as a zillion proverbs would have it, possessed by power at least as much as they possess it. And anybody in a position of constrained power finds themselves longing for something different — for speaking as themselves and speaking to people who are similarly unconstrained by social roles. The cheat, as developed by Trump, Musk, et al, is try to have the best of both worlds — to have a ‘private,’ privileged position closely connected with power and then to let it all hang out, to be just as free and loose and ‘public’ as anybody else but addressing millions or tens of millions of followers. And this would seem to be an effective strategy — it’s the driving impulse of the hang-loose approach to celebrity, which over the course of the last 75 years, drove out the older models of the born aristocrat and of the humble public servant as the ideal life to aspire to, and is in a real sense the most powerful social force on the planet, and seemed to reach its acme in the Internet age. “I’m going to be the biggest celebrity in the world,” Trump crowed of the possibility of being president — with the premise that the office of the presidency itself was just another building block for even greater celebrity. And Musk seemed to be interested in the purchase of Twitter — potentially an era-defining event — really just as a way to protect himself from being ‘deplatformed,’ from losing his followers. But there was a hitch in this vision of the ideal blending of public-and-private. The ‘public’ figures weren’t really free-and-loose — just regular joes who happened to have millions of followers. Anybody who was interested in them was interested entirely because of their proximity to power, because of their ‘private’ function.
The more I thought in these terms, the more my life seemed to be a constant toggling between ‘public’ and ‘private.’ For the shoots I worked on as a field producer, the functions seemed often to be nested within each other like a Russian doll. My job was to create a connection with the shoot subject, to establish a certain intimacy, to make them feel that they were just speaking as themselves — even though the camera was whirring and there was a boom mic directly over their head pointed straight at their voice box and there were like three PAs or ACs waiting just outside on their cell phones. And then, as soon as the interview would end, I’d usually be on the phone with my executive producer at their desk in New York City and giving them a summary of how the subject was. And then as soon as I was off the phone with the executive and had said my effusive goodbye to the subject, I’d be in the car with the camera operator and that always felt like a car confessional — we could really dish the dirt both on the subject and on the executive and on whether the shoot as a whole had been worth it or not. The feeling in these car confessionals, which I always immensely looked forward to, was of getting to pay dirt, of getting outside an assigned role and getting to a truth that was both personal and objective. But to some extent the car confessional was bullshit as well — the camera operator and I would both be professionals and both playing a certain role of collegiality in the mutual hope that we would recommend one another for future gigs. And when I got to my hotel room and was alone then it finally felt like the last layer of the onion had been peeled and I could only then reflect on the shoot honestly — and, often, I would express that by writing up the shoot on my laptop with some vague idea of sharing that with ‘the entire reading public.’
This whole chain of ever-more honest reflection became completely a matter of course and it was a real surprise to me how many people I met who seemed not to be thinking in these terms at all and to be conflating having more power and being more ‘public’ (in the usual, non-Kantian sense) with greater freedom. That logic seemed straightforward enough — more power plus more exposure must mean more freedom — until it was exposed to greater scrutiny and basically to the understanding that power meant a degree of being ‘private’ and a degree of constraints. And for so many of the people I met that seemed like a sufficient vision for a good life — accrue more power and the rest will follow — and it was just kind of a curiosity for me that that contradicted everything in my experience. The feeling was that there was an incredible freedom in being unconstrained, in addressing the ‘general reading public’ (even if, in the end, it went no further than my laptop), and power and the status game were a sort of costume drama, interesting enough, sometimes necessary from the perspective of sheer survival, but basically just roles to adopt and to shift back out of as soon as possible.
I feel this. It's so freeing to be able to write what I think, but I do still feel a constraint--a self-constraint, maybe--not to deliberately spout falsehoods or whip up people's anger or fear unnecessarily. I think most non-monster people feel a similar self-constraint? It's just a matter of where each person perceives that line to be.
I'm reading the book LikeWar right now, and it's disheartening to learn that sensationalistic false material gets about six times as much attention as true information.
Kant only is the middle term in our thinking where we are imagining this United States experiment rolling on train tracks again. Jeremy Rifkin recommends it in his new book, switching from in general asking science and thought from proudly supplying the c-4 to blow up pipelines to running thought experiments to see if we can share small victories like : the world has changed and we admire people for doing yeoman's work in more than one modality. I feel that way, my celebrated local blues player turns out to be a skilled blogger in the socialist mode of rapprochement everywhere as soon as possible. I am reminding us that in the 70s boomers were staying in their lanes because they made that calculation, that as soon as they did solidified their intimate lives and too, money stream that they would discover the rest of the world. We have to get there faster. Isn't it true that we can walk freely and talk to foreign nationals anywhere that the US has not bombed?
Jaspers is your underwriter. He is for sure that it makes sense in a chaotic world to talk about the unconditional imperative to what? Go to work Monday morning? That is me saying that, saying i will attend a Pride festival event this year. Why not? Viva la Weimar Berlin. But just one thing: in thought experiment, we should solve Newland Archer's problem in Age of Innocence. Is our opinion that he should have hired the Countess as a secretary? Let's lay the ghost of the Clintons for instance. He was a scholar and no gentleman and we accepted his judgement about bombing Bosnia. Done. Beyond that, why would we want a royal family? And then Newland. We want Newland Archer to start a job as a florist or something don't we?