While it may strike one as perverse that the email travails of Anthony Weiner punctuate one of the great philosophical and moral issues of this election cycle and public life in general, please hear this board out.
You might have heard about those pesky Clinton emails and that rather gauche Trump “Access Hollywood” audio. The two single biggest damaging revelations in this presidential election regard communications that contained some expectation of privacy. Clinton tried both to hide and then to erase the existence of her communications. Trump dismissed his as “locker room talk.” Both acts implicitly assert that the publicly presented face of candidates merits attention, not the one behind closed doors (or passwords).
But what is a reasonable expectation of privacy as a public figure? We as a board talked at some length about what a reasonable expectation of privacy should be for public officials and for citizens running for public office, but almost all of us have skin in this game.
The planted idea that authority can supervise us functions to keep contingently undesirable behavior in check. Email, once sent, can propagate endlessly and nest anywhere. Smartphones might have put a recording device in the hands of more people, and most of us now might have the power to record each other without consent, upload moments of indiscretion and mobilize a viral witnessing and shaming of one another on a global scale.
Smartphones, audio and video recordings might be new, but the use of surveillance to regulate behavior is not, and communication always entails risk of disapproval accruing to both the message and the messenger. While the space for private sayings and acts rapidly continues to shrink, it was never absolute. Many tales of intrigue involve compromised letters or servants overhearing private conversations of the masters. And almost always these acts and the tales that envelope them push the point that those in power often embody hypocrisy in its most naked extreme.
Like it or not, the walls of privacy public officials recently enjoyed may be demolished by the wrecking ball of technologies swung by our peers. If that invasion keeps coming, and the urge to that invasion is historically constant, then perhaps we should not only be talking about ratcheting pressure to maintain integrity, but also a gentle increase of empathy and forgiveness.
The board discussed an old but generationally growing notion that we have observed in student community members: That if you don’t want to be shown doing or saying something embarrassing, maybe you should not perform that action in the first place. Integrity can be defined as doing the right thing even when you know no one is looking. Particularly if one is planning a move into public life, integrity should be an internalized practice.
On the other side, we are all human, and all contain potential for both heroic and despicable acts. Brutal and ethically compromised acts occur, more often than not with internal guilt attached. Compromises to achieve things may as a matter of course need to work out and maintain terms nauseating to each side, whether planned as transparent or not. And to be fair, the generations that are not digital natives did not plan for this collapse of privacy. They, along with younger people who have made mistakes, need to be given some allowance for those things said and done behind reasonably assumed closed doors years ago.
If people honestly and without qualification own and disavow unseemly things in their past, we owe it to ourselves to move past such things. But the sincerity of such disavowals cannot be considered without also considering the motive behind them. Between integrity and begging public forgiveness, we might need to start living constantly by the maxim that it is better to be safe than sorry.
