Saturday, January 23, 2010
who am I?
This week I have variously worked on new comedy science ideas, written content for a motorcycling web site, discussed what voting means in an era when politicians no longer have any politics, and reviewed The Rake's Progress at the Royal Opera House for Culture Wars. Call me Renaissance Woman. Then I hosted (chaired, facilitated, whatever) a discussion about secret lives.
Which was fascinating. The speakers were a private investigator, a Jungian psychoanalyst and a historian specialising in imposters, and the audience questions were even more diverse. But one recurring theme was the difference between secret, private and fake.
Most of us do not lead entirely fake lives, pretending to be the heir to the throne, or the opposite sex to our biological gender. Few of us have an entirely separate, secret second life, (at least not in the real world), with for example a second marriage and family. But most of us have parts of our lives that we don't tell everybody, and maybe a couple of things we don't tell anybody at all.
And is that unhealthy? Surely a life lived entirely in public would be horribly narrowed by social rules, or simply by consideration for others' feelings.
Our private eye was matter-of-fact about how easy it is to find out anything about people, but he also pointed out that it's time-consuming and expensive, and generally not worth the effort. In fact, he's had would-be clients who were simply paranoid. So don't let's get obsessed with hiding the minutiae of our lives from the record numbers of CCTV cameras, electronic tracking and other modern surveillance opportunities.
But don't let's give up our privacy too easily, either. "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear", they say, when they ask us to agree to yet another erosion of our civil liberties.
We should reply "Nothing to hide? You haven't really lived."
Which was fascinating. The speakers were a private investigator, a Jungian psychoanalyst and a historian specialising in imposters, and the audience questions were even more diverse. But one recurring theme was the difference between secret, private and fake.
Most of us do not lead entirely fake lives, pretending to be the heir to the throne, or the opposite sex to our biological gender. Few of us have an entirely separate, secret second life, (at least not in the real world), with for example a second marriage and family. But most of us have parts of our lives that we don't tell everybody, and maybe a couple of things we don't tell anybody at all.
And is that unhealthy? Surely a life lived entirely in public would be horribly narrowed by social rules, or simply by consideration for others' feelings.
Our private eye was matter-of-fact about how easy it is to find out anything about people, but he also pointed out that it's time-consuming and expensive, and generally not worth the effort. In fact, he's had would-be clients who were simply paranoid. So don't let's get obsessed with hiding the minutiae of our lives from the record numbers of CCTV cameras, electronic tracking and other modern surveillance opportunities.
But don't let's give up our privacy too easily, either. "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear", they say, when they ask us to agree to yet another erosion of our civil liberties.
We should reply "Nothing to hide? You haven't really lived."
