My title alludes to two books that are very important to me: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, in which she discusses "the rise of the social" as a phenomenon of modern (particularly twentieth century) life, and Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination.  These two books are both part of that remarkable era of serious and rigorous thinking in the mid-century that spoke to concerns outside the academy.  I don't want to explore here why they managed this, or what it says about the public sphere, in their day and in our own, though both of those issues are important and deserve our attention.  What I want to explore is how both of those books assume an esteem for private life, and a presumption of its intrinsic value, that may no longer be a common assumption today. 

Both books were written in a time when hardly anyone was a "public figure."  The media was small, and while they definitely created celebrities for us, such creatures were rarer than spacemen, or so they seemed.  By default, most forms of happiness were private forms of happiness, shared with family and friends or in the small civil associations of our localities.  This is the world eulogized by Robert Putnam in his still-disturbing book from the 1990s, Bowling Alone.  The world where there was no Public, but many different, small publics, often dense and rich, in their localities, but only loosely associated to one another by acquaintances and weak ties.  Those "publics" were small enough to look like extensions of private life, and they often functioned more powerfully through the informal etiquette of unspoken customs and local norms than as a small aspirant for a genuine public sphere.

Trilling and Arendt both assumed this background, and in important ways wrote against its dangers.  Arendt's work is centrally a hymn to the importance of true publicity, the real political life, not its parochialized simulacra represented buy the Garden Club, Toastmasters, and the Shriners into which so much of American associational energy was directed in mid-century.  And much of Trilling's cultural criticism was precisely about how those associations themselves, as amplifications of the private sphere, analogously trap us in rituals of bourgeois propriety and forbid us from re-entering the Eden of genuine humanity that a real private life would allow us to have.  (I'm not saying Trilling wasn't a politically-minded writer, for he very definitely was; but he was worried about what politics, mis-participated in, did to our real lives, whose meaning was not finally, fundamentally, reducible to politics, but was what our politics was or should be trying to clear space to enable.)  Arendt saw the civil society of mid-century America and worried about what it did to our public lives; Trilling saw it and worried what it did to our private lives.  Both are not properly understood unless one understands them in the context of that vigorous and voluble civil society.

The world we live in now is very different.  Putnam's worries of a couple decades ago seem to have had little to disconfirm them; civil associational life in the United States at least as suffered a major decline.  People aren't joining bowling leagues, they are "bowling alone."  (Presumably they're bowling on-line now, too.)  The local publics have all suffered some rea l anemia, and are largely fossilized traces of what they once vitally were.  Even these social structures, against which thinkers like Trilling and Arendt in their diverse ways inveighed, have substantially decayed, and not been replaced by anything like them. 

In fact it is at least worth considering whether they have been replaced by what Arendt prophecied was coming, namely, what she called "the rise of the social."  This category is partly a piece of dystopian polemic, for Arendt, but it also (I think) partly captures something important, about the rise of a zone that mashes together private and public, doing damage to both.  The ur-inhabitants of this zone were celebrities, but now we all increasingly inhabit it, and in so inhabiting it we give testimony every day to Andy Warhol's incredibly prophetic, and gnomic, statement, that "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes."  Here I think Arendt was a better theoretical prophet than Trilling, for he didn't try to characterize in any specific way (I think) the problems he foresaw, though perhaps you could say that Sincerity and Authenticity and some of his later, more culturally pessimistic (rather than critical) writings were gesturing in this direction.  Well, anyway, I tend to think that Arendt's "rise of the social" is related to the emergence of social media, and not accidentally.

But I am not sure that Arendt's category is as analytically helpful as it might be, and anyway the only positive alternative she gestures at (and even that, only in a very loose way) is a life lived in public.  Arendt was about defending the public, and the human as a political creature, much in a way that Aristotle might approve of: as a zoon politikon.  But that meant that she didn't really specify much about the rest of life, especially that part that goes under the name of "private" life.  

There, I think, Trilling had her beat; his analyses, both in The Liberal Imagination and then afterwards in The Opposing Self, of the cultural resources we have to equip ourselves to understand and inhabit private life, are unequalled in their time, and really don't have much competition, at least to my mind, even today.  (Writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Wood, maybe Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith: they are all a bit closer to the ground than is Trilling, in some ways to good effect, in other ways, to not-so-good.)  His exploration of our understanding of sex, or desire, or fear, or ambivalence, all seem to me to have outlasted the semi-Freudian baubles which ornaments them.

"Wordsworth and the Rabbis," for instance, from The Opposing Self, remains for me a great moment of aesthetic, religious, and existential criticism: here he explores the quotidian glories of what he calls "the sentiment of Being," of ordinary, non-heroic, non-apocalyptic (indeed anti-apocalyptic) blessedness--the kind of thing that Wordsworth and the Rabbis both valued and cherished and cultivated--and how our resentment-riddled, ambivalence-saturated modern culture dismisses such sources of goodness in the quest for an absolute revolution and revulsion against, and escape from, this world.  Insofar as we cannot appreciate the everyday we are deeply impoverished in that incapacity, and Trilling makes us see something, at least, of what that impoverishment forbids us from enjoying.

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Why am I telling you all this?  Well, this morning there was a very interesting op-ed in the New York Times by Bianca Vivion Brooks, a young writer of whom I had not heard.  She writes a pretty thoughtful piece about giving up social media.  (Though I will say that young people making decisive acts to separate themselves from their adolescent practices is itself a pretty common trope for young people.)

Brooks hypothesizes (well, claims) the following:

"to many millennials, a life without a social media presence is not simply a private life; it is no life at all: We possess a widespread, genuine fear of obscurity."

(We ought to be wary of people speaking for anyone more than themselves, of course; that is one of the virtues of a rich appreciation of private life, and maybe also of the value of the essay, properly executed.  But let that pass for now.)

She suggests that, instead of this false fear of obscurity, what she now, a bit more grown up, fears is deeper, and more real:

"the fear of forgoing the sacred moments of life, of never learning to be completely alone, of not bearing witness to the incredible lives of those who surround me."

I think there's something importantly right about this.  I'm not so sure I would frame this as a matter primarily of being "completely alone," but rather of being completely yourself--of simply being so caught up in the richness of your life that your attention is mediated deeply through your own actual subjective experience of reality, and not either some prefabricated picture of what you have been taught reality is, or through some anxious, hyper-reflective sensitivity to what you perceive other peoples' impressions of reality reveal their experiences, to you, to be.  (Yes, the grammatical obscurity there is intentional.)  

Henry James, one of my heroes, seems to have had such a density of his own impressions, as anyone who reads him may find themselves discovering; so, I suspect, did Hannah Arendt, and so Lionel Trilling.  For them and others this did not mean that they were fundamentally solitary, it just meant that they were fundamentally someone.  The "someone" may have been, in some deep way, inescapably private, at least in this dispensation.

(I say "this dispensation" here because I think there is a counter-tide to what I'm arguing in this post, a counter-tide that would trouble privacy, that would work to transcend it, would seek to bring us to full presence to one another, and in that is something deep about the modern novel; but that transcendence can only happen once people have managed to become themselves, in a way.  The antithesis and the synthesis wait on the thesis, as it were.  I think this is a religious dialectic, by the way, or at least that is how it presents itself to me.  Little old me.)

Brooks frames this as a recovery of what she lost in high school.  But I don't think she lost it there; I don't think she had properly had it.  That's not a knock on her; part of the issue here is that "privacy" is barely a commodity in your high school years--at least, it wasn't for me; "privacy" is something you learn in college, or anyway beyond, outside of, high school.  Most of us gain resources for selfhood in high school, but it takes us a while, say our mid-twenties, to build a durable self out of them, one you can trust will be there in the morning.

But another part is the immediacy of social media itself, its voracious hunger for all of our "nows".  Brooks writes:

My grandfather Charles Shaw — a notable musician whose wisdoms and jazz scene tales I often shared on Twitter — passed away last year. Rather than take adequate time to privately mourn the loss of his giant influence in my life alongside those who loved him most, I quickly posted a lengthy tribute to him to my followers. At the time I thought, “How will they remember him if I don’t acknowledge his passing?”

The bottomlessness of social media is one of the most interesting things about it, though not "interesting" in a good way.  The number of things we are now scripted to say, or affirm about each other, on-line is impressive.  No authentic It's hard not to think this is not having an affect on how we interact with one another and the world off-line, and thus how we exist amidst others and in the world, for real.

Here's the take-away: Brooks's worry is wise, but I wonder if she is mis-describing the fundamental problem, which may be the problem of the absence of privacy, which is the problem of the (marginally greater) difficulty today of developing a rich and durable experience of oneself.  If so, in different ways, Arendt and Trilling (especially Trilling) have something to say here, about what private life is--what privacy truly means--and why it is important to cultivate it.