In Decency

On Privacy and Power

There is often a moment in meeting someone new where we step beyond mere polite conversation to offer an edgy joke or an unorthodox observation. This is usually done tentatively to test the waters. Is this person cool? Will we remain polite acquaintances, or can I let him in to my inner world? For many of us, a “safe space” is not defined as a place free of contention, but one where we can let down our guard, our public-facing virtue, and say dangerous things. It is a delicious moment when we recognize a kindred soul. Her laughter feels like a secret handshake, and just like that you feel looser, breathe easier, smile more. Forming friendships as an adult is often based on shared antipathy: we become friends when we discover that we both dislike the same things. The codes which govern public officialdom recede as the private world comes to life. It’s a beautiful thing, a feeling of rebellion and freedom and joy.

Hannah Arendt writes of the loneliness that occurs when such a private world is eliminated by “the logicality of ideological thinking.” Under a characteristic tyranny, she explains, “isolation and impotence” frustrate the human capacities for action and power. “But,” she emphasizes, "not all contacts between men are broken and not all human capacities destroyed. The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact.” However, “the iron band of total terror leaves no space for such private life,” she writes, “the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man’s capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action” (my italics). There is no privacy under totalitarian rule, no space for a relaxed laugh among friends; the public codes that govern sanctioned speech acts and behaviours, what Arendt terms “totalitarian logic,” intrude into one’s private world, and ultimately into one’s own inner world. “Thoughtcrimes” are no less criminal for being mere thoughts.

At roughly the same time that Arendt was writing her political masterpiece, George Orwell was writing his dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. For Orwell, too, it is the elimination of the private world by the intrusion of totalitarian logic that is the most horrible to Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist. We first see the insidious intrusion of the Party into the private life when Winston goes to help his neighbour, Mrs. Parsons, unclog her sink. The Party has turned her own children against her, indulging brutalities within them while training them to be snitches against Mom and Dad. “With those children,” Winston thinks, “that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy.” It is a chilling part of the novel, an example of a family operating according to the Party’s codes; correctly, but entirely without love. But it is the sexual relationship that is most private, and therefore the ugliest when it becomes the provenance of the Party.

Winston’s former wife, Katherine, was very beautiful: “a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movement.” But she had, in Winston’s words, “the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had every encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. The ‘human sound-track’ he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet,” and here is the crucial part, “he could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing – sex.” For Orwell, it is in the sexual act where the intrusion of public ideology into the private world is most dehumanizing. “Our duty to the Party,” his former wife had called sex. The intrusion of the Party’s morals into the sexual act made sex not merely unerotic, but the opposite of erotic. Sex became decent. It became what good people did. Winston would dread the act. The decency made him feel shame.

He reclaims his humanity through his desire for Julia, a fellow Party member, but one who has kept her own humanity intact by being radically promiscuous. “Anything that hinted at corruption,” thinks Winston, “had always filled him with a wild hope.” “‘Listen,’” he says to Julia, “‘the more men you’ve had, the more I love you. […] I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.’” Sexual desire thrills him not simply because it is pleasurable, but because Eros itself is, under Party rule, impure, amoral, indecent. That is because desire is private, even if it is promiscuous. “Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.”

But Winston is wrong about desire – or rather, he is not wrong enough. His sexual, animal desire for Julia quickly grows into love, even if he doesn’t quite realize this at first himself. Of course he cares for Julia more than he does for Big Brother. That is not difficult to do since he hates the Party. What is intolerable to the Party is that Winston cares for Julia more than he does for himself; it is love that the Ministry of Love must eliminate, not desire. Love does not merely exist in one’s inner, private world. Love is the proof that one’s private self exists in spite of the suffocating omnipresence of the Party. In this way love is always an act of rebellion and freedom: casting aside one’s own self-regard for that of another. Love is the paradox that power hates. It isn’t self-abnegation that Power cannot tolerate. It is joyful, generous, strong selflessness that destroys power because it creates a private space where power has no access, no influence, no sway. If power has no power, what is it? The answer of course is that power is nothing. The Party is by its very nature dependent, weak, and deficient. It cannot tolerate love because love creates a strong and generous private self, and it is in such a self where power loses its power.

The whole point of Winston and Juliet’s relationship is to be private, to have a space not occupied by the Party of Big Brother. It is Julia’s corruption precisely that Winston loves because it remains the evidence of her integrity, even of her purity. It is not sex but mutual unauthorized sex that gives them their private selves. Sex itself, if done with a prole prostitute, is one infraction that even Big Brother winks at. It is not rebellion because it creates nothing shared, nothing private. Merely transactional and physical, it is coarse, vulgar, and joyless. The prostitute Winston visits seems to feel no transgression about what she is doing; as a matter of course she lies down and lifts up her skirt. There are no selves involved in the transgression, only bodies, so Party control remains intact. Winston’s sex with a prostitute is clandestine, but it is somehow still unsecret because there is no co-conspiratorial bond that is shared between him and her.

Privacy comes from the awareness that some official limit has been surpassed, some unlicensed space shared. It occurs in mutual recognition. The “Oh wow, you too?” response of another is what assures us of our own capacity for a private space of our own. If all we ever encounter is “Yes of course you too,” we are left alienated in what Arendt calls “organized loneliness.” It is organized loneliness that Big Brother demands. Through torture, the Ministry of Love reduces Winston to a shell of his former self: emaciated, bent, partially toothless, frail, and broken. “‘We have beaten you, Winston,’” says O’Brian, his torturer. “‘You have seen what your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. […] Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?’” Winston, weeping, looks up at O’Brian through his tears. “‘I have not betrayed Julia,’” he says. Winston is right. “He had not stopped loving her; his feeling toward her remained the same.” It is not obedience, and it is not death that Big Brother demands. It is the total erasure of a part of oneself that does not belong to the Party. The Ministry of Love demands that one loves Big Brother. It must occupy all private space, which means obliterating private space by making it the territory of the public, of the Party. When Winston gives over his innermost self, his love for Julia, there is no “him” left, but only the “we” of the Party.

If one is at liberty to be free with sex, then one cannot be private. What the sexual revolution produced is superficially the opposite of Big Brother, but thematically it is the same. In both cases the world of privacy, the space for unmediated words and thought, recedes. Big Brother accomplishes this by making nothing permissible; modern culture accomplishes it by making everything permissible. All sex is permitted, but it still must all be ethical, as in” ethical non-monogamy.” One’s privacy is trained to be at all times decent. Sexual unions must be based on the values of respect, equality, and rights. But this may drive one’s private self, the unauthorized and corrupt self, the sinner, inward and underground, without a friend, without a lover. This aloneness is both the precondition for and the result of total terror. Loneliness, writes Arendt, “shows itself most sharply in company with others. […] the lonely man (eremos) finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed.” To have that experience of loneliness – where one is with another but without contact – within the bonds of marriage is to remove privacy from our most intimate relationship. It is this kind of self-hiding that gives Winston Smith, as an act of release as much as of self-sabotage, the “urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice.”

In a really good marriage, there will be no morals, and no decency. My husband and I once hit upon this proposition. It is not a prescription but more like an observation, an acknowledgement of how we feel in one another’s company. The naughtiness and the freedom are at once political and sexual, a tenderness and (at times) a desired brutality that spring directly from sources that remain invisible to doctrine and right-thinking. As Plutarch said in his Dialogue on Love, a woman takes off her shame along with her clothes in the privacy of the marital chamber. In our time, such a complete disrobing would include a shedding of the democratic moralism that lays so heavy upon us. I could say more, but the chamber is calling… and you cannot come in.